I've used iTunes on the mac for several months now so I was quite interested to see how the windows version measures up. Overall, my opinions concur with those in the slashdot review, but there are some points I'd like to add:
- It should be storing metadata in its own DB as opposed to relying on ID3 or other types of tags. I don't want it rewriting my ID3 tags in order to be able to organise the music. This is something that the arstechnica article complains about as well.
- There's no OGG or FLAC support! I rip a lot of my tracks to FLAC beacuse it's 100% lossless. If not FLAC, then I rip to OGG because it still sounds damn good and it's totally open/Free. Furthermore, if they had kept the metadata in the DB as opposed to the tags of the files, there would be no problem including FLAC files which don't really support embedded metadata as much as OGG or MP3.
- No unicode support. That means that songs with foreign charactersets in their metadata show up as random garbage text in iTunes for windows when they actually do show up properly on the mac. Not that other windows audio player applications have handled this very nicely either.
Because of these restrictions, I'm gonna stick to WinAMP for now.
"I think you can safely assume that all the restrictions are there at the demand of the studios. The 10 burn thing is pretty moronic, but there you go..."
Just delete and re-create the playlist. Burn 10X again.
I'm not entirely sure if this is what you're looking for, but here goes:
Check out some Netgear Print Servers that are priced for the home user market. Basically you connect your parallel port printer into the little box and that box connects to the network via WiFi or standard cabling. It runs a standard LPD service (i.e. unix printer daemon) and you can easily print to it from linux, OS X, windows and probably a bunch of others as well. No SMB sharing required.
As to whether or not these will handle your queuing constraint, I'm not really sure. I do know they have some sort of manageable queue, but I'm not familiar with the details of it.
" It asked if I wanted to sort my music library (or something like that) and I said OK. Now all of my MP3s are sorted into a million subdirectories based on artist and album information, all files are renamed to just the track number and the song title. "
So you said yes to the prompt before you completely read and understood it. And then you complain about undesired results. Really.
Next thing you know, people won't read their EULAs either.
Re:Been saying it for years
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
"There may be a far-less-nefarious reason why it won't let you create a FAT32 partition of size >32GB, namely that the FAT table would be ridiculously large and inefficient.
Now, you could argue that the Master File Table for NTFS is also large and inefficient, but at least you have some control there over cluster sizes."
This is a limitation of Microsoft's format.exe utility. Maxtor drives tend to ship with their own utility and you can specify a nice 4K cluster size for your monster size drive.
Re:Been saying it for years
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
"Case in point: Windows 2000 and above has no problem reading FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB in size. But it refuses to create FAT32 partitions > 32GB in size. Why? Because at that size, Microsoft knows better, Microsoft knows you should be uses NTFS and get the benefits of meta-data and journaling."
"So use FDISK. It's still free if you own Windows."
No, don't use FDISK. There are too many bugs, particularly when you're handling logical drives in extended partitions of and the last partition is of a type that it does not recognise (i.e. linux partitions.)
FDISK has 'accidentally' destroyed partitions of my own data due to this bug. Instead, I suggest you check out the excellent and GPL partition manager called ranish partition manager which does a much better job than microsoft's FDISK.
But FAT32 is becoming less and less useful compared to NTFS. I don't even need it anymore on my win32/linux machine because Mandrake 9.1 reads the NTFS partitions right out of the box. No configuration was needed.
IMO the last remaining legitimate use of fat32 is on mobile drives that you have to use in a variety of machines. My iBook won't read the NTFS and the Win2k won't read the OS X file system. Gotta use FAT32.
"Lawmakers tend to have this belief that simply by passing legislation, technology can be made to do everything they want it to, and nothing they don't want it to. Somebody will point out to them that it would be impossible to enforce a law like this, and it will be the last we hear of it."
I say that that 'somebody' should keep their mouth shut so the system gets implemented with rediculously weak protections. This way, anyone who wants can still use it as they please while the lawmakers still believe that things went their way. This way, everybody's happy.
"I also like the headline on Apple's homepage - "Hell Froze Over!""
Those apple marketing people are pretty smart. Think about how this phrase would be intepreted by Apple fans versus curious windows users. It's very very smart;-)
Here's a story of computer mayhem along that vein.
Many seasons ago when I was but a mite in high school, I found out about this cool new software. Something I had never heard about called ICQ. (Yes, this is when ICQ was still relatively new and most people had not heard of it.)
So after a while my friend convinced me to install it on my own machine. There I was, installing this new and strange piece of software... and all of a sudden, the monitor goes totally black. No warning, no error message, no nothing. Just totally black. I tried all the standard keypresses and nothing worked.
I hit the reset button and the machine sounded like it was resetting, but the screen was just black and nothing was happenning. A total power cycle gave the same results. I was pretty sure that this mysterious ICQ program had thoroughly hosed my machine it was doubltful if I would get my data back.
And then I realised... the monitor cable had come loose and it had fallen off of the back of the monitor. Whoops.
"But If I tell this to 90% of my friends, then they'll say that I shoud talk normal and don't use all this difficult computer science speak."
I've actually seen a FAQ that informed users that they can still unzip files even though they haven't purchased a zip drive. Apparently it was a common question (!!).
" A lot of web sites are speaking of iTunes 5, that should be released tomorrow (Thursdag)..." (emphasis mine)
So they're opening up iTMS for Deutschland now? I had no idea!
(Note: If you don't think this joke is funny then mod it down. I have an unpredictable sense of humour and I can't tell right now if it's working normally right now.)
I looked at this site a few days ago but immediately closed it as soon as I realised that it was only windows media audio. (IMO, having a paid WMA is worse than not having this music to begin with.) Their server also runs on IIS. Obviously they're "M$ Whore$."
For what it's worth, I'll mention that it looked like a knock-off of the iTunes Music Store. The layout was completely the same. They even had the same listing style on the front page for showing the most popular albums.
FWIW, I'm just going to wait until the iTMS is available in Canada is this puretunes thing is, IMO, certainly not the solution.
"Canada has the same local service plan style system and yet is 3rd in the world in terms of broadband deployment, behind Japan and I forget which European country."
Incorrect. Canada is third in the world for broadband deployment after Hong Kong (2) and South Korea (1). Japan is number 5.
Of course if you want to talk about speed as opposed to deployment, then Japan is at the top of the heap.
"The best argument I've heard for why the US is behind in broadband is the infrastructure cost because the US population is spread out compared to Japan (or even Canada, given that the bulk of the population is in a relatively narrow strip along the south of Canada)"
The other factor is federal money. A lot of federal money in Canada is used to enhance the availability of broadband access. This has not happenned in the USA. As a result, corporations who pay for deploying the networks do not want to enhance access at all as they prefer to have monopolies as opposed to having to dealing with actual competition.
"FYI I'm getting an average of about 20KB/sec with bittorrent. Certainly not lighting fast. Peak has been about 140KB/sec, low around 5KB/sec. Estimated total time about 17 hours."
Never trust a torrent's estimated download time. Bittorrent is always looking for a better host to download from. I've seen a torrent jump from 5 K/s to 320 K/s in the space of 30 seconds. And I've seen the reverse happen as well (probably because the person with a huge connection dropped from the torrent.)
Add that to the fact that more people will be joining the torrent and the fact that more people = faster downloads, I expec that your transfer will take much less than 17h.
"Print three sheets of paper that contain the message in large obnoxious print:
Stop Faxing Me At 555-(myphonenumberhere)!
(or whatever you'd like to say) "
I once did something similar for e-mail price list spam. Some company kept spamming my business address with their latest hardware price lists. Reasonable methods to contact them and request removal had failed.
So I created a 700K image with nothing but the word REMOVE in it and sent it to them. I never received another e-mail from them after that.
"You say that like aluminum is a bad thing. I gladly pay a premium for an aluminum case because it's lighter and stays cooler."
The idea that aluminium stays cooler is a myth perpetuated by aluminium case manufacturers. Sure, heat moves more easily through aluminium than steel, but in real word comparisons, the effect on actual CPU temperature is negligible.
Now I still like the aluminium Lian Li PC-6070 that is under my desk right now very much. The workmanship on the this is amazing and the case is very light. It's got a 'silver monolith' kind of look and the rubber lining does dampen noise from it quite a bit.
You can get high quality cases that are very sturdy both in steel and alimunium. You just have to shell out the money to get them. Steel tends to be cheaper as cases are made in higher volume than aluminium.
So are aluminium cases a good thing? Yes, but just not any better than steel from a cooling perspective.
"What I've never gotten a satisfactory answer on is: Why is it that a program that silently installs itself and is written by j.random is quickly added to the antivirus program updates, but yet if a coprpoation writes something similar, it never makes the list. Politics anyone?"
Instructions on how to circumvent anti-copying technology on Suncomm discs.
1. Insert disc into Macintosh computer. (I highly doubt the "mediamax driver" trash will autorun and load up on the mac. Especially since MacOS doesn't have an autorun feature, and even if it did, it would be quite unlikely to succesfully load a windows driver.)
If some people cheat, you bring it to the Dean attention and they get kicked out of the school. I'm told this happenned in first year CS at my university in the year before I started. A whole third of the class handed in the same assignment (complete with the other person's name in the comments and everything.)
Another way to deter cheating is to have a series of quizzes that are worth say 2% in the course each. Make the quiz content obviously directly related to the content of the latest assignment. If you've actually done the work then the quiz will be done easily in 30 seconds. The people who copied the assignment will lose points in the quiz.
Slashdot Mirror
- It should be storing metadata in its own DB as opposed to relying on ID3 or other types of tags. I don't want it rewriting my ID3 tags in order to be able to organise the music. This is something that the arstechnica article complains about as well.
- There's no OGG or FLAC support! I rip a lot of my tracks to FLAC beacuse it's 100% lossless. If not FLAC, then I rip to OGG because it still sounds damn good and it's totally open/Free. Furthermore, if they had kept the metadata in the DB as opposed to the tags of the files, there would be no problem including FLAC files which don't really support embedded metadata as much as OGG or MP3.
- No unicode support. That means that songs with foreign charactersets in their metadata show up as random garbage text in iTunes for windows when they actually do show up properly on the mac. Not that other windows audio player applications have handled this very nicely either.
Because of these restrictions, I'm gonna stick to WinAMP for now.
Just delete and re-create the playlist. Burn 10X again.
Check out some Netgear Print Servers that are priced for the home user market. Basically you connect your parallel port printer into the little box and that box connects to the network via WiFi or standard cabling. It runs a standard LPD service (i.e. unix printer daemon) and you can easily print to it from linux, OS X, windows and probably a bunch of others as well. No SMB sharing required.
As to whether or not these will handle your queuing constraint, I'm not really sure. I do know they have some sort of manageable queue, but I'm not familiar with the details of it.
Hah. Winamp 3 took this crown years ago ;-)
So you said yes to the prompt before you completely read and understood it. And then you complain about undesired results. Really.
Next thing you know, people won't read their EULAs either.
This is a limitation of Microsoft's format.exe utility. Maxtor drives tend to ship with their own utility and you can specify a nice 4K cluster size for your monster size drive.
"So use FDISK. It's still free if you own Windows."
No, don't use FDISK. There are too many bugs, particularly when you're handling logical drives in extended partitions of and the last partition is of a type that it does not recognise (i.e. linux partitions.)
FDISK has 'accidentally' destroyed partitions of my own data due to this bug. Instead, I suggest you check out the excellent and GPL partition manager called ranish partition manager which does a much better job than microsoft's FDISK.
But FAT32 is becoming less and less useful compared to NTFS. I don't even need it anymore on my win32/linux machine because Mandrake 9.1 reads the NTFS partitions right out of the box. No configuration was needed.
IMO the last remaining legitimate use of fat32 is on mobile drives that you have to use in a variety of machines. My iBook won't read the NTFS and the Win2k won't read the OS X file system. Gotta use FAT32.
I say that that 'somebody' should keep their mouth shut so the system gets implemented with rediculously weak protections. This way, anyone who wants can still use it as they please while the lawmakers still believe that things went their way. This way, everybody's happy.
Those apple marketing people are pretty smart. Think about how this phrase would be intepreted by Apple fans versus curious windows users. It's very very smart ;-)
They're in league with those price-gougers that sell the rediculously overpriced RAM at the Apple Online store.
Oh, wait...
Many seasons ago when I was but a mite in high school, I found out about this cool new software. Something I had never heard about called ICQ. (Yes, this is when ICQ was still relatively new and most people had not heard of it.)
So after a while my friend convinced me to install it on my own machine. There I was, installing this new and strange piece of software ... and all of a sudden, the monitor goes totally black. No warning, no error message, no nothing. Just totally black. I tried all the standard keypresses and nothing worked.
I hit the reset button and the machine sounded like it was resetting, but the screen was just black and nothing was happenning. A total power cycle gave the same results. I was pretty sure that this mysterious ICQ program had thoroughly hosed my machine it was doubltful if I would get my data back.
And then I realised ... the monitor cable had come loose and it had fallen off of the back of the monitor. Whoops.
That's happenned to me several times in the last 2 weeks ... a reload usually cured it.
The RIAA's new business model should be a legal services company specialising in intellectual property litigation.
I've actually seen a FAQ that informed users that they can still unzip files even though they haven't purchased a zip drive. Apparently it was a common question (!!).
So they're opening up iTMS for Deutschland now? I had no idea!
(Note: If you don't think this joke is funny then mod it down. I have an unpredictable sense of humour and I can't tell right now if it's working normally right now.)
For what it's worth, I'll mention that it looked like a knock-off of the iTunes Music Store. The layout was completely the same. They even had the same listing style on the front page for showing the most popular albums.
FWIW, I'm just going to wait until the iTMS is available in Canada is this puretunes thing is, IMO, certainly not the solution.
Incorrect. Canada is third in the world for broadband deployment after Hong Kong (2) and South Korea (1). Japan is number 5.
Of course if you want to talk about speed as opposed to deployment, then Japan is at the top of the heap.
"The best argument I've heard for why the US is behind in broadband is the infrastructure cost because the US population is spread out compared to Japan (or even Canada, given that the bulk of the population is in a relatively narrow strip along the south of Canada)"
The other factor is federal money. A lot of federal money in Canada is used to enhance the availability of broadband access. This has not happenned in the USA. As a result, corporations who pay for deploying the networks do not want to enhance access at all as they prefer to have monopolies as opposed to having to dealing with actual competition.
Never trust a torrent's estimated download time. Bittorrent is always looking for a better host to download from. I've seen a torrent jump from 5 K/s to 320 K/s in the space of 30 seconds. And I've seen the reverse happen as well (probably because the person with a huge connection dropped from the torrent.)
Add that to the fact that more people will be joining the torrent and the fact that more people = faster downloads, I expec that your transfer will take much less than 17h.
I once did something similar for e-mail price list spam. Some company kept spamming my business address with their latest hardware price lists. Reasonable methods to contact them and request removal had failed.
So I created a 700K image with nothing but the word REMOVE in it and sent it to them. I never received another e-mail from them after that.
The idea that aluminium stays cooler is a myth perpetuated by aluminium case manufacturers. Sure, heat moves more easily through aluminium than steel, but in real word comparisons, the effect on actual CPU temperature is negligible.
Now I still like the aluminium Lian Li PC-6070 that is under my desk right now very much. The workmanship on the this is amazing and the case is very light. It's got a 'silver monolith' kind of look and the rubber lining does dampen noise from it quite a bit.
You can get high quality cases that are very sturdy both in steel and alimunium. You just have to shell out the money to get them. Steel tends to be cheaper as cases are made in higher volume than aluminium.
So are aluminium cases a good thing? Yes, but just not any better than steel from a cooling perspective.
Viruses don't have EULAs.
1. Insert disc into Macintosh computer. (I highly doubt the "mediamax driver" trash will autorun and load up on the mac. Especially since MacOS doesn't have an autorun feature, and even if it did, it would be quite unlikely to succesfully load a windows driver.)
2. Rip as usual.
1. Sue Customers
2. GO TO 4
3. Profit!
4. Bankruptcy
If some people cheat, you bring it to the Dean attention and they get kicked out of the school. I'm told this happenned in first year CS at my university in the year before I started. A whole third of the class handed in the same assignment (complete with the other person's name in the comments and everything.)
Another way to deter cheating is to have a series of quizzes that are worth say 2% in the course each. Make the quiz content obviously directly related to the content of the latest assignment. If you've actually done the work then the quiz will be done easily in 30 seconds. The people who copied the assignment will lose points in the quiz.
I used to think like that until I looked at this site. [link not safe for work]