You just had to kill a good market with your trendy IPods.
That's great. There WAS NO substantial market for this stuff before Apple came along and did it in a consumer-friendly way that made it easy for non-geeks to download and buy music. They practically created the market that you're accusing them of ruining. That makes sense. I guess.
I'd rather use a player where I am not limited to closed formats like aac.
Silly troll. I have 1000+ songs on my iPod and it has no AACs on it. I have all mp3s that I've ripped from my own CDs or bought from (gasp!) non-Apple music stores. Try knowing what you're talking about before posting. It makes these forums a little more useful.
This can't be true. You mean turning over something like this to large corporations and reducing government influence so as to use the lure of profits to drive better technology and wider availability and therefore serve the public better doesn't really work???
Oh dear god, please say it ain't true! Please don't tell me that big corporations don't care deeply about me and my family. My dreams, my world view, my whole life has just come crashing down like a house of cards.
(Sobbing quietly, if not sarcastically, to myself.)
I can't possibly reply to everyone here, but this...
our leaders, (Senators and Representatives) were elected to protect our freedoms, not to further the interests of any one particular group (parents in this case).
That's precisely the problem. We'd be well off if that were the case, but let's face the fact that most elected officials do further the interests of one particular group: corporations. Both Republicans and Democrats have spent the last two decades siphoning off more and more power for the wealthiest class at the expense of those in the middle and lower. That means less pay, less benefits, less everything all around. That has helped create a very parenting-hostile environment.
I just don't see the point in making scapegoats of parents. If you really want to get at the root of the issue, not just bash parents, then you have to ask yourself why these basic parenting issues didn't didn't seem so difficult 30+ years ago.
Did parents just get really bad or has the environment for parenting changed?
As usual, I see the standard-issue "parents are to blame" response. Let's not be so judgmental. Scapegoating parents isn't going to do any good.
If our leaders (both Republicans and Democrats) did what they were elected to do, maybe most families wouldn't be burdened with multiple jobs and working parents and they could actually have time to monitor what their kids are playing. You know, when having a stay-at-home parent is a luxury in our society, that's a sign that we're heading down the wrong path. Pointing the finger at parents not only doesn't do any good, but also focuses on a symptom, not the cause.
If you're one of those people jumping to this "blame the parents" bandwagon, I hope you will stop and consider the big picture. If we have societal conditions that are hostile to parenting, how can we expect effective parenting to take place?
That's not hard to fake either, with enough patience and enough takes. The film I watched however does not show him actually using the machine at any point. All I've seen is a boot up process and a shot of the desktop. If there are films of it being used, I haven't seen links to them.
I'm still not sure I'd be convinced anyway. There are other ways to fake this kind of thing too. Can a PC laptop be set up to mirror a Mac's display? Can the PC's keyboard and touchpad be set up to control the Mac? VNC can do that and at full-screen too. So let's see... how could we do this? Run VNC client on the PC and the server on the Mac. Connect to the Mac from the PC. Use any number of Mac freebies out there that will present a movie starting with a black screen. Then, on the Mac, start a full screen movie of the PC bootup that changes to a Mac bootup. Use an Applescript to make the bootup movie vanish. Make sure the desktop is set up just like the end of the movie so we can control the OS X desktop right before your very eyes. Voila! OS X on a PC laptop.
Next, I will saw my lovely assistant in half.
Sorry, but after the iWalk hoax, I will be eternally skeptical about these things.
Actually, this story is pretty well-established: hard-to-fake handheld videos of systems cold-booting into OS X
It certainly is not. Edit together a full-screen film that appears to be the bootup process then run the film through the laptop's screen and film away. That's not hard at all.
Isn't this reminiscent of what was said about the British and the Argentinians fighting over the Falkland Islands: It was like watching two bald men fight over a comb?
At almost every step since he's taken over at Apple, Steve Jobs has had his judgment questioned by Mac users and every armchair CEO on the planet and yet, the company keeps growing and doing great things.
His judgment was questioned for killing the clones, for killing the Newton, for adding colors to the Macs, for removing the floppy drives, for abandoning OS 9 and much of its interface conventions, for opening stores, for jumping to Intel, for entering the music industry, etc., etc., and I'm sure I've left out about two dozen other gripes. It would seem to me that one only needs to look at the Apple of 1997 and compare it to the Apple of 2005 before it becomes readily apparent any living creature on the planet with half a brain that Apple knows what the hell they're doing already.
How sad a state is American journalism in when a CNN story consists of reports of what has been written up on two popular rumor sites and a sentence about Apple's "no comment?" That's just pathetic.
I think any objective, unrevised view of American history would lead most people to understand that liberalism played a minimal (at most) role in the mess we're in right now. It has traditionally been the political right that has expanded government's reach into personal lives and privacy--and not just in America. I can think of very few instances where liberals advocated more government power over personal freedoms and privacy. It's not liberals who try to outlaw certain sexual practices between consenting adults. It's not liberals who try to ban music and books. It's not liberals who make the argument that the Constitution doesn't say anything about personal privacy (and yes, I've heard my rightie friends make that argument many times.) It's not liberals who advocate federals bans on marijuana, abortion, and gay marriage--all private, personal decisions.
Bear in mind too that I don't consider Bill Clinton and Janet Reno and the politically correct whiners we saw emerge in the last two decade to be liberals. That's not liberalism. The fact that the OP equates them with liberalism tells me that he's just towing some line of propaganda that appeals to him for some unknown reason.
This is why G. W. Bush was able to win the last election. The "if you don't agree with everything we say you are only worthy of our disgust" attitude alienates everyone but the "true-believers".
You have got to be kidding me. The irony of that statement is hilarious. I think I'll print that out and hang it on my fridge.
You should have done a point-by-point rebuttal. I would have liked to hear someone on the left say something other than "you just don't understand, do you?"
Why? The simple fact is that you don't understand. And you can take that personally if you want, but it's not intended that way. I can deduce that you don't understand what you're talking about by what you've written. A passing familiarity with American history would debunk many of the premises you have already clearly accepted as fact on some leap of faith. Why on earth would I bother? When you accept some premise on faith, you cannot be argued with. It's like arguing with Christians about whether God exists or not. It's pointless.
I've heard your rant before over the last two decades, from right-wingers trying to demonize liberals and hoping that those hearing them out don't have an understanding of history (and sadly, most people don't.) Your point of view is nothing new and that tells me that you're just parrotting someone else.
Also... please be clear that you are not a liberal. You sound more like what has been recently termed a "South Park conservative." If you really want to understand liberalism, if you really care to know the truth, read up on history and get the propagandists out of your ear. At that time, you can critically discuss history without a lot of political slanting.
I was mentally working up a point-by-point rebuttal as I read your rant, but I'm not going to bother because I don't think you want to hear it anyway. You have such a skewed perspective on history (particularly, it seems, as it pertains to liberalism and what liberalism is all about) that the best I can really do is tell you to read up on history a little more thoroughly and drop this pretense that you're fair-minded. You exhibit an almost irrational hatred of liberalism that has allowed you to accept some very shaky premises about its history as well as making some laughable--if not embarrassing--leaps in logic.
My guess is that you're in your early 20s or late teens, and you don't realize that there are many here who recognize the way you've run down the standard-issue litany of right-wing accuastions and revisions of history intended to demonize liberals. Well, on that you're wrong. I've heard this diatribe time and time again from others, and it never fails to come off looking more like a desperate search for a scapegoat instead of the knowledgeable perspective on history that it pretends to be.
This writer is sort of insulting in his rationale and ignores basic ideas behind some of the Mac design. His answer about the control key vs. command key is simply wrong, and it has nothing to do with "zealotry." It is physically easier to use one hand with the command key than it is to use the control key--unless you plan to use both hands which sort of defeats the purpose of shortcut keys like this. Your fingers have to stretch too far for the control key. Try it. Which is easier? Control+G or Command+G. Try H. Try Y. Try 5. Logically, a shortcut key should work quickly and efficiently with one hand and using the meta key furthest from the letter keys is classic Microsoft bad design. I don't buy this point and the Mac did not lose, insulting comments notwithstanding.
Response to above: Europeans invented the world-wide web, HTTP, etc.
Which is actually inaccurate. Tim Berners-Lee created a specific implementation, but the concepts driving it were mostly created by Americans. There are prior examples as well.
BTW, yes, I'm an American, but I'm not saying this out of a sense of nationalism. I couldn't give a rip either way. I'm interested in accuracy. It annoys me slightly when Berners-Lee is given more credit than is due. He took ideas conceived by others and made a specific implementation of it. Yes, he was very smart and visionary in doing that, but it's a little like giving Steve Jobs credit for inventing the GUI. Jobs took ideas that others had created and put together a specific implementation of it. Praise is appropriate for both of these guys, but neither of them invented the concepts they used.
It's funny that people were so freaked out by the idea that a consumer machine might ship without a floppy drive back then. I set up a parody web page of the iMac when it came out (showed the iMac with toaster slots in the top.) A writer from AP contacted me via email and interviewed me as part of a "Mac user reaction" to the iMac. I loved the iMac when it came out and I gave her mostly positive comments with one minor negative ("Not sure how people are going to react to the lack of floppy...") and she quoted only that part and put a really negative spin on the whole article making it sound like I was more concerned than I really was. At the time, it was annoying and she ignored my emails to fix that. In retrospect, it's sort of funny--the overreaction to the inevitable.
I've encountered this limitation in my site designs, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. You don't always have to work within the limits of "official" methods. You can do lots of things with graphics and a more traditional approach to programming these elements yourself. Here's an example from a Pink Floyd webzine I help publish. Scroll to the bottom and play with the check box. It's just a graphic being swapped in and out and I keep track of its on/off value with a global variable in the Javascript. It's that easy. You just have to be willing to manage all aspects of the thing in your own code.
The indicator "lights" next to each question also probably looks like some kind of control to most users and it "lights up" when you answer correctly and turns red when it's wrong. Again, it's all managed in the code.
Nothing personal, but what a load shit. If the state of Windows software proves anything, it's that quantity does not mean quality. I've used both Mac and Windows extensively and Windows software in general is horribly designed.
I am a long-time Mac user (but not a Mac worshipper) and when I first had to use Windows professionally in 1999, I was absolutely appalled at how clunky a lot of programs were (including stuff from Microsoft) and how badly written many of them were. I experienced far more application crashes on Windows, far more memory leaks and far, far more instances of not having the slightest clue how to use a piece of software because it was designed with a user interface that only a mother could love.
At that time, NT had many theoretical technical advantages over the current Mac OS (OS 9), but because software for NT was so badly written in general, it pretty much leveled things. Until that point, I had been considering switching from Macs to PCs, but my experiences on the platform put a stop to those plans.
So no offense, but it's hard to figure out where you're coming from. Have you used other platforms extensively? You come off like some kind of Windows apologist.
Exploit Apple's failures in that they build a clique of zealots that promote isolation and self-reinforcing evangelism.
The idea that you would try to brand 70%+ of the mp3 player market as a "clique" is curious. Sounds like you still think the iPod-era Apple is the same as the 1984-era Apple. There are almost no similarities between those eras, and Apple clearly isn't treating the iPod as a precious, too-good-to-compete boutique product the way they (stupidly) treated the Mac. They're aggressive nowadays in ways they never were before.
Where Apple was sort of the ivory tower, we were going to be the dark rebel. Where Apple was very geometric, we were going to be smooth and curvy.
Everyone accuses Apple of being obsessed with looks, but it's always other companies and critics of Apple who focus on that. And ironically, that's only part of the picture. Apple really does understand design is a way that other tech companies just don't... and design goes way beyond looks. If that's all Apple had, they would be a lost cause. But as evidenced by the products Apple produces and the interviews with him I've read, Jobs really understands that design is how something works--looks being a side-effect of that.
I'll admit that I didn't RTFA, but it sounds like the same story yet again. Until these companies figure out that it's the combination of the iPod and iTunes and the iTunes Store that have all been designed to work seamlessly together and in a way that makes sense to people, competitors won't stand a fighting chance. It's not the looks. It's not the price. It's not the file format. It's the way it was designed with the user in mind. That's what Apple does best.
I'm a fan of Apple's products so I couldn't give a rip either way, but it's amazing to me that so many companies just can't figure this basic concept out.
The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default, a DoubleClick executive has warned.
God what a shortsighted dumb-ass thing to say.
If the end of free Internet content ever comes, it will be because online marketing morons (like the idiot quoted above) declared war on Internet users and decided it was apparently okay to seize control of browsers to put a client's logos in our faces nonstop. And when you declare war on your own audience, you lose, especially when the people who write the browsers and software that you rely on to deliver your messages are not on your side.
Back when the Web was newborn, before pop-up ads, I used to click ads on web sites that interested me. I knew that advertising supported this free stuff and I needed to do something to reciprocate. But after all the obnoxious, disrespectful and downright fucked-up stuff devised by marketing idiots for the Web, I've gone 180-degrees the opposite now and do everything in my power to remove ads.
So honestly... the end of free content. Whose fault is it really? Anyone saying it's the fault of users is clueless and only working out of their own self-interest.
It the one that actually SHOWS us the story we wanted to see.
Speak for yourself. I think Lucas nailed it beautifully with all three prequels. The first laid it all out, the second showed the political atmosphere that led to the Clone Wars and the earliest hints of an empire, and the third showed us how Anakin became Vader.
I'm a hardcore fan and grew up on Star Wars as they were originally released and I think the prequels are fantastic, and all of them show me what I've always wanted to see. True, Sith is the episode that contains about 90% of what Lucas let out of the bag back in the 80s, but the other two films give you a very rich groundwork for all of that, shows you how Lucas envisioned the entire galaxy functioning, how the Republic worked (or didn't) and how the Jedi were a part of that (as well as allowing some subtle nods at their growing weaknesses and complacency.) Far too often, the prequels are used as cultural bashing fodder for those who are desperate to show how cool they are and how "far above" this popular phenomenon they are, but I think Lucas did a stunning job with it all.
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That's great. There WAS NO substantial market for this stuff before Apple came along and did it in a consumer-friendly way that made it easy for non-geeks to download and buy music. They practically created the market that you're accusing them of ruining. That makes sense. I guess.
I'd rather use a player where I am not limited to closed formats like aac.
Silly troll. I have 1000+ songs on my iPod and it has no AACs on it. I have all mp3s that I've ripped from my own CDs or bought from (gasp!) non-Apple music stores. Try knowing what you're talking about before posting. It makes these forums a little more useful.
Oh dear god, please say it ain't true! Please don't tell me that big corporations don't care deeply about me and my family. My dreams, my world view, my whole life has just come crashing down like a house of cards.
(Sobbing quietly, if not sarcastically, to myself.)
our leaders, (Senators and Representatives) were elected to protect our freedoms, not to further the interests of any one particular group (parents in this case).
That's precisely the problem. We'd be well off if that were the case, but let's face the fact that most elected officials do further the interests of one particular group: corporations. Both Republicans and Democrats have spent the last two decades siphoning off more and more power for the wealthiest class at the expense of those in the middle and lower. That means less pay, less benefits, less everything all around. That has helped create a very parenting-hostile environment.
I just don't see the point in making scapegoats of parents. If you really want to get at the root of the issue, not just bash parents, then you have to ask yourself why these basic parenting issues didn't didn't seem so difficult 30+ years ago.
Did parents just get really bad or has the environment for parenting changed?
If our leaders (both Republicans and Democrats) did what they were elected to do, maybe most families wouldn't be burdened with multiple jobs and working parents and they could actually have time to monitor what their kids are playing. You know, when having a stay-at-home parent is a luxury in our society, that's a sign that we're heading down the wrong path. Pointing the finger at parents not only doesn't do any good, but also focuses on a symptom, not the cause.
If you're one of those people jumping to this "blame the parents" bandwagon, I hope you will stop and consider the big picture. If we have societal conditions that are hostile to parenting, how can we expect effective parenting to take place?
I'm still not sure I'd be convinced anyway. There are other ways to fake this kind of thing too. Can a PC laptop be set up to mirror a Mac's display? Can the PC's keyboard and touchpad be set up to control the Mac? VNC can do that and at full-screen too. So let's see... how could we do this? Run VNC client on the PC and the server on the Mac. Connect to the Mac from the PC. Use any number of Mac freebies out there that will present a movie starting with a black screen. Then, on the Mac, start a full screen movie of the PC bootup that changes to a Mac bootup. Use an Applescript to make the bootup movie vanish. Make sure the desktop is set up just like the end of the movie so we can control the OS X desktop right before your very eyes. Voila! OS X on a PC laptop.
Next, I will saw my lovely assistant in half.
Sorry, but after the iWalk hoax, I will be eternally skeptical about these things.
Actually, this story is pretty well-established: hard-to-fake handheld videos of systems cold-booting into OS X
It certainly is not. Edit together a full-screen film that appears to be the bootup process then run the film through the laptop's screen and film away. That's not hard at all.
His judgment was questioned for killing the clones, for killing the Newton, for adding colors to the Macs, for removing the floppy drives, for abandoning OS 9 and much of its interface conventions, for opening stores, for jumping to Intel, for entering the music industry, etc., etc., and I'm sure I've left out about two dozen other gripes. It would seem to me that one only needs to look at the Apple of 1997 and compare it to the Apple of 2005 before it becomes readily apparent any living creature on the planet with half a brain that Apple knows what the hell they're doing already.
And a slogan with that cloyingly trendy "so" thrown in.
"You are so going to love this version!"
"Where do you so want to go today?"
"You so won't see the blue screen anymore."
Bear in mind too that I don't consider Bill Clinton and Janet Reno and the politically correct whiners we saw emerge in the last two decade to be liberals. That's not liberalism. The fact that the OP equates them with liberalism tells me that he's just towing some line of propaganda that appeals to him for some unknown reason.
You have got to be kidding me. The irony of that statement is hilarious. I think I'll print that out and hang it on my fridge.
Just curious: how old are you?
Why? The simple fact is that you don't understand. And you can take that personally if you want, but it's not intended that way. I can deduce that you don't understand what you're talking about by what you've written. A passing familiarity with American history would debunk many of the premises you have already clearly accepted as fact on some leap of faith. Why on earth would I bother? When you accept some premise on faith, you cannot be argued with. It's like arguing with Christians about whether God exists or not. It's pointless.
I've heard your rant before over the last two decades, from right-wingers trying to demonize liberals and hoping that those hearing them out don't have an understanding of history (and sadly, most people don't.) Your point of view is nothing new and that tells me that you're just parrotting someone else.
Also... please be clear that you are not a liberal. You sound more like what has been recently termed a "South Park conservative." If you really want to understand liberalism, if you really care to know the truth, read up on history and get the propagandists out of your ear. At that time, you can critically discuss history without a lot of political slanting.
Then maybe I will engage you in real debate.
My guess is that you're in your early 20s or late teens, and you don't realize that there are many here who recognize the way you've run down the standard-issue litany of right-wing accuastions and revisions of history intended to demonize liberals. Well, on that you're wrong. I've heard this diatribe time and time again from others, and it never fails to come off looking more like a desperate search for a scapegoat instead of the knowledgeable perspective on history that it pretends to be.
Which is actually inaccurate. Tim Berners-Lee created a specific implementation, but the concepts driving it were mostly created by Americans. There are prior examples as well.
BTW, yes, I'm an American, but I'm not saying this out of a sense of nationalism. I couldn't give a rip either way. I'm interested in accuracy. It annoys me slightly when Berners-Lee is given more credit than is due. He took ideas conceived by others and made a specific implementation of it. Yes, he was very smart and visionary in doing that, but it's a little like giving Steve Jobs credit for inventing the GUI. Jobs took ideas that others had created and put together a specific implementation of it. Praise is appropriate for both of these guys, but neither of them invented the concepts they used.
The indicator "lights" next to each question also probably looks like some kind of control to most users and it "lights up" when you answer correctly and turns red when it's wrong. Again, it's all managed in the code.
Nothing personal, but what a load shit. If the state of Windows software proves anything, it's that quantity does not mean quality. I've used both Mac and Windows extensively and Windows software in general is horribly designed.
I am a long-time Mac user (but not a Mac worshipper) and when I first had to use Windows professionally in 1999, I was absolutely appalled at how clunky a lot of programs were (including stuff from Microsoft) and how badly written many of them were. I experienced far more application crashes on Windows, far more memory leaks and far, far more instances of not having the slightest clue how to use a piece of software because it was designed with a user interface that only a mother could love.
At that time, NT had many theoretical technical advantages over the current Mac OS (OS 9), but because software for NT was so badly written in general, it pretty much leveled things. Until that point, I had been considering switching from Macs to PCs, but my experiences on the platform put a stop to those plans.
So no offense, but it's hard to figure out where you're coming from. Have you used other platforms extensively? You come off like some kind of Windows apologist.
The idea that you would try to brand 70%+ of the mp3 player market as a "clique" is curious. Sounds like you still think the iPod-era Apple is the same as the 1984-era Apple. There are almost no similarities between those eras, and Apple clearly isn't treating the iPod as a precious, too-good-to-compete boutique product the way they (stupidly) treated the Mac. They're aggressive nowadays in ways they never were before.
Everyone accuses Apple of being obsessed with looks, but it's always other companies and critics of Apple who focus on that. And ironically, that's only part of the picture. Apple really does understand design is a way that other tech companies just don't... and design goes way beyond looks. If that's all Apple had, they would be a lost cause. But as evidenced by the products Apple produces and the interviews with him I've read, Jobs really understands that design is how something works--looks being a side-effect of that.
I'll admit that I didn't RTFA, but it sounds like the same story yet again. Until these companies figure out that it's the combination of the iPod and iTunes and the iTunes Store that have all been designed to work seamlessly together and in a way that makes sense to people, competitors won't stand a fighting chance. It's not the looks. It's not the price. It's not the file format. It's the way it was designed with the user in mind. That's what Apple does best.
I'm a fan of Apple's products so I couldn't give a rip either way, but it's amazing to me that so many companies just can't figure this basic concept out.
God what a shortsighted dumb-ass thing to say.
If the end of free Internet content ever comes, it will be because online marketing morons (like the idiot quoted above) declared war on Internet users and decided it was apparently okay to seize control of browsers to put a client's logos in our faces nonstop. And when you declare war on your own audience, you lose, especially when the people who write the browsers and software that you rely on to deliver your messages are not on your side.
Back when the Web was newborn, before pop-up ads, I used to click ads on web sites that interested me. I knew that advertising supported this free stuff and I needed to do something to reciprocate. But after all the obnoxious, disrespectful and downright fucked-up stuff devised by marketing idiots for the Web, I've gone 180-degrees the opposite now and do everything in my power to remove ads.
So honestly... the end of free content. Whose fault is it really? Anyone saying it's the fault of users is clueless and only working out of their own self-interest.
Speak for yourself. I think Lucas nailed it beautifully with all three prequels. The first laid it all out, the second showed the political atmosphere that led to the Clone Wars and the earliest hints of an empire, and the third showed us how Anakin became Vader.
I'm a hardcore fan and grew up on Star Wars as they were originally released and I think the prequels are fantastic, and all of them show me what I've always wanted to see. True, Sith is the episode that contains about 90% of what Lucas let out of the bag back in the 80s, but the other two films give you a very rich groundwork for all of that, shows you how Lucas envisioned the entire galaxy functioning, how the Republic worked (or didn't) and how the Jedi were a part of that (as well as allowing some subtle nods at their growing weaknesses and complacency.) Far too often, the prequels are used as cultural bashing fodder for those who are desperate to show how cool they are and how "far above" this popular phenomenon they are, but I think Lucas did a stunning job with it all.
10. The One Where Luke Loses his Virginity
9. The One Where Biggs Totally Freaks
8. The One With the Droids
7. The One Where Aunt Beru Gets Drunk
6. The One With the Rabid Bantha
5. The One Where Luke Goes to Toshe's Station
4. The One With the Gay Jawa
3. The One Where Luke Asks about his Father
2. The One About the Moisture Evaporators
1. The One With the Blue Milk