Re:mac problem
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
What moron modded this up? This troll has been around forever!
Well, if you're going to be stupid and waste mod points, at least be consistent-- save two more of your mod points for the two "gay" letters, they're sure to be posted in another few minutes, probably by this same fuckwit.
Last I heard, Unix, Linux, and Sun based servers are on top of the market....most of which is cheaper and, again, runs circles around Apple and offers greater scalability and compatility with Windows clients. You do know that Windows rules the corporate desktop, right?? What good is an Apple server on a network of nothing but Windows clients? Hmm...beats me!
First of all, an Apple server IS a Unix server-- It's got a nice GUI for management and configuration, but that GUI just asks you for the settings for Sendmail and Apache.
An Apple server on a network of all Windows clients is great, especially for smaller companies that don't want to be extorted for the high licensing costs just to do filesharing and e-mail. Also, smaller companies that don't have a lot of money to spend on IT support people find Xserves and Mac OS X Server to be a Godsend-- especially when you don't have to worry about when the next Nimda or Code Red (which are still around in large numbers, according to my firewall logs) hits.
And as for compatibility, you must be on crack. Out of the box, workstation Macs have been able to read and write DOS/Windows files and read and write to DOS/Windows disks/volumes for over a decade, for one thing. Why would their servers reverse a 10+ year trend of being good network citizens? Apple makes the most standards-compliant stuff around. Really standards-compliant, not "we took the standard and added our own proprietary shit to it to dissuade you from using non-Windows clients." If you care to dispute that Microsoft does that, I've got one word for you: Java.
First off, just forget the friggin' pipe dream of ever running OS X on your home-built x86 shitbox. Apple's hardware and software businesses have a symbiotic relationship. Apple's software is what sells their hardware, the proceeds of which go towards the software development. remove one side of that equation and the whole thing collapses. Furthermore, even if Apple did move to x86, they would prevent OS X from running on commodity, non-Apple hardware, so you'd still be whining about it. They'd do it for two reasons: First, because the sanctioned Mac clones almost killed Apple back in the late 90's. Second, because what makes Macs work so well is that their software has ultra-tight integration with a limited spread of hardware.
If Apple is to compete at all, they really need to venture more into the business market.
And get this...512 megs of DDR333 memory cost $250 on Apple's website! That's insane!
Yes, it is. Luckily, Mac users with a clue buy their RAM elsewhere and install it themselves. For the rest, buying Apple RAM is like buying aspirin at 7 Eleven... it's unnaturally expensive because you're paying for the convenience.
It doesn't matter how fast a machine is, it's not more productive if the faster machine is always needing maintenance like Windows boxes. At my last job they were an all-Mac shop when I started. Not long after I started, my boss quit, and I was able to singlehandedly take care of over 100 users at three different locations while the company looked for a replacement for him. Mostly, I sat in my office all day reading and browsing the web, because other than people needing help with the Office documents sent to us by our Windows using clients (damn Microsoft and their ever-changing file formats), there was seldom a problem. Later the company decided to convert all but the production studio to Windows machines. Can you say expensive? Me, my new boss, and a summer intern could not keep up with all the shit that went wrong, hardware (Dell) and software-wise. Did I mention viruses? ILOVEYOU crippled us for most of the day it debuted. You can have an accident with a running chainsaw and still have enough fingers and toes to count the number of malicious Mac viruses that ever existed, and most if not all of them are extinct and have been for years. Security holes? The last one in Mac OS X, major or minor, was patched on March 24, a month and a half ago. There have only been FOUR since Jaguar was released (I just checked my Software Update log). How many for Microsoft? Four since March 24, and nineteen since XP SP1 was released in August (according to the Installed Updates list on my XP Pro box.)
Your problem is, you're in denial about the Mac advantages. The Mac is more secure, period. Viruses are practically a non-issue. Same with spyware. No worries about my Mac getting owned by some script kiddie or being used as a spam proxy. My G4 has never crashed since I got it in October. It doesn't try to thwart me at every turn when I'm trying to get work done. It's got a damn nice UNIX base lurking underneath a
I don't know the name, but I did see it-- that guy does more than copy the official currency. (Note to non-USian readers: it is not illegal to duplicate US currency if you alter the size by a certain amount so as to make it unusable as money to anyone with two brain cells to rub together). Anyway, the artist who does that stuff also makes his own U.S. currency designs and tries to 'spend' them as well.
You might also remember the tale of Emperor Norton of San Francisco, which it would seem from this page was part of the same show. That guy made up his own currency, and freely spent it-- it was accepted by the shopkeepers as though it were the real thing. Apparently authentic Emperor Norton money that has survived to modern times is worth really big bucks these days to collectors.
I don't know about the photocopiers sold in Oz, but the high-quality color copiers sold in the USA have built in currency detection. They do stuff to make the copied bills unusable, like make a perfect copy of a bill but make the entire page hot pink. Other copiers make the copy, but insert a code number somewhere on the bill. When the bill makes its way to the Secret Service, they find the code, contact the company, and find out where that copier is located, which speeds up the investigation quite a bit. IIRC, a few years back they nailed some idiot Cornell students this way. Unfortunately I can't find the story on Google, and I don't quite remember where I heard it-- possibly from one of the Discovery Channel or History Channel documentaries concerning the U.S. Mint or the Secret Service or counterfeiting.
Don't even try to indicate that Apple isn't raping their customers as bad, if not worse, than Microsoft.
If you don't think Microsoft is reaming their customers, then I've got four words for you, jerky: Licensing Six Point Oh. A hefty price increase in the middle of a recession. THAT is raping your customers.
Let's look at server licensing. How much for an unlimited Microsoft CAL on that Windows server? How much you got? By the way, that doesn't include the licensing for Exchange server.
How much does Apple charge for unlimited licenses for filesharing and mail? $1000. Raping their customers, indeed.
Here's another question for you-- does Microsoft make any of their older OSes available, for free? No. Does Apple? You bet! Anything prior to Mac OS 8.0 is a free download for anyone who might need it. Microsoft won't even give away copies of DOS 1.x, ~20 years after it ceased to be a shipping product.
I think he's referring to Safari Enhancer, which basically enables the hidden Debug menu built into Safari that has the 'change user agent' feature in it, among other things.
And what is that thing hanging off the left side? And why on Earth would it be there?
It's the handset for the integrated telephone. It does look stupid there, it (along with the camera sticking out on the otherside) ruins whatever sleek appearance the computer might otherwise have.
This is a perfect example of Microsoft's true innovation-- they do really stupid shit when they're not copying someone else outright <cough>MS Bob<cough>. If you're going to integrate a fucking phone with a computer, do it in a way that leaves people's hands free to operate the computer while they talk! What next, are they gonna hang a memo pad and a pencil on a string off the side of this thing, so you can jot down ideas while you're using the computer?
If I were designing this thing, I'd build in Bluetooth, and use a rechargable wireless headset for the phone. Hide the recharge bay on the rear edge of the display. Let the headset's mic also be used for speech-to-text and giving verbal commands to the computer. And build in a good mic and speakers so you can use a speakerphone if you don't want to wear the headset or so you don't have to fumble for it if you're not wearing it when there's an incoming call.
/me runs off to the Patent Office with a hard copy of this post, just in case anyone from Microsoft reads it.
as well as the musical advertisements from cheese manufacturers'
You wouldn't be talking about that yellow ballish looking thing with legs and a big top hat and cane, singing "I hanker for a hunk o' cheese," are you?:-)
I'd love to buy a DVD of those old PSAs, they really take me back-- I've already got the Schoolhouse Rock stuff.
...the question is, will they mix them together and try to whip up an Outlook/Exchange killer? I think so.
They've got iCal, web enabled calendaring. They've got Mail, a pretty decent mail client. And they've got Address Book, pretty decent contact management. These three apps already work together fairly well.
It probably wouldn't take much to bolt "on-steroids" versions of these three apps (and hell, maybe even iChat) together into a way cool facsimilie of Outlook. I don't know how hard it would be for them to make a version that would interoperate with Exchange servers in a Windows-centric company, but they could quite easily sew up the all-Mac shops.
For the server end of things, they'd probably have just as easy a time whipping something up-- people are already making faux-.Mac servers with what's built into OS X, so the capabilities are there.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all that if Apple were already working on this, given their recent shots across the Bill's bow with Keynote and Safari, and the fact the the Mac is still getting short shrift from Microsoft (STILL no OS X-native Exchange client, Goddammit). Apple, IMHO, is quietly working hard toward a day in the fairly near future when they can publicly tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves, or worse.
If Apple does anything, they'll most likely just limit the library-sharing feature to local machines via Rendezvous.
Apple is on the right track, though-- any technical means to protect the music will simply be cracked, so the only alternative is to provide music of guaranteed sound quality (relative to some of the rather dodgy rips you find on KaZaa) for a decent price. If they make it more convenient for people to pay for the music than to steal it, people will pay for it. Well, 30% (as I write this) of them, anyway, according to the latest poll at CNN.com. The rest are just cheap, thieving fucks.
Get the sharing url for a song using ctrl-click. Type "curl url > my_faviorite.mp3" at the command line. Voila, you have the file.
Great, except the "Get Sharing URL" feature is not available for remote music libraries your machine is connected to. And when a sharing URL looks like this:
Contrary to what the headline says this is NOT P2P, it's basically a client-server connection via iTunes-- so how the hell ELSE do you expect people to connect to a server if they don't have the IP or domain name, brainiac? This service is basically a message board for people to say, "Hey, check out my music library, it's at [address]."
You're also forgetting that these are all Macs running OS X we're talking about-- this is not the 'major security hole found every week' Windows crowd putting their boxes on a "Soon to be 0wn3d" list.
Sure, but then you have to find out when a show you like are on, find a blank tape or one with something you don't mind taping over, program the VCR, and (in my case, at least) make sure the cable box is set to the right channel before leaving for work/going to sleep for the night/whatever.
On a TiVo: Browse through the menu to find one occurrence of the show you like, and about four clicks later the TiVo will be set to record every occurrence of that show that it finds in the downloaded listings, and it'll change the channel on the cable box by itself-- and no futzing with tapes or coming home to discover that I forgot to switch the cable box to the correct channel and the VCR recorded an hour of some crap I don't want.
And there's plenty good on TV if you know where to look. Older classic stuff on SciFi, interesting documentaries on Discovery, TLC, and History, and daily doses of The Simpsons on FOX,and Family Guy and Futurama on Cartoon Network.
Apple charging high prices for RAM is like 7 Eleven charging ~$20 for the smallest bottle of Tylenol made-- it's all about convenience.
People in the know buy the bare minimum RAM from Apple, and max out their machines with third-party RAM from a trusted source. Personally I swear by Other World Computing's "store-brand" RAM. I buy it for myself and recommend it to clients, and I've never had a problem with any of it.
If Apple is "good" for bundling applications and not giving consumers the choice (for example, the music purchasing ONLY works with iTunes), then why is Microsoft "bad" for including IE and Windows Media Player with the OS?
Okay, let's look at the browser example. Say I don't like Safari (which most likely will be bundled with OS X 10.3 instead of IE). I am free to trash it and go back to using IE. Can you get rid of the bundled browser in Windows so easily? Nope.
Apple rolls their own software and bundles it with the OS to empower their users-- nobody was gonna buy Adobe Premiere to do home videos, but plenty of people will use iMovie since it comes with the Mac. And the Mac was losing mindshare over browsing speed, because IE on OS X is utter crap and hasn't been updated in forever-- to fix that problem, Apple whipped up Safari, which blazes.
Microsoft bundles free apps to destroy their competition or to take over a market. IE was given away to torpedo Netscape, which it successfully did. Windows Media Player is given away free so Microsoft can point to a significant [pre]installed base when they make arguments as to why their (Microsoft's) proprietary file formats should be The Standard.
Today I found a "New Music Tuesday" mailing in my inbox, from Apple, highlighting almost 20 recent (complete album) additions to the Music Store that are available as of today.
If they do that many every week, that is seriously gonna bolster their catalog.
That's a pretty shitty API then, considering on a Mac I can make a dialog box with custom button labels with one line of AppleScript, and have been able to do so for years:
display dialog "Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.\r\rProcess ID=0x5a4 (1444), Thread ID=0x5c0 (1472).\rDo you want to terminate the application, or debug it?" buttons {"Debug", "Terminate"} default button "Debug"
If something end-user-accessible like AppleScript can do it, it's for damn sure usable everywhere else. You'd think they'd fix this after all these years. I mean, half the entries in that GUI Hall of Shame site deal with Windows dialog boxes where it's hard or impossible to decide which button is the appropriate response for the given situation.
Another classic. The most heart-pounding moments were the one car chase, after which you have to follow police procedure to the letter to complete the arrest, or you're dead-- killed by the perp. I beat that game in 8th grade, and 16 years later I can still clearly remember the adrenaline that was pouring through me during that one part of it-- you had to type stuff quickly and carefully, because timing was crucial and you wouldn't get a second chance if you screwed up the commands and the computer didn't understand what you wanted to do. It's amazing how immersive it was for a 3rd-person viewpoint, and how caught up in it I got.
The one thing I remember most about Resident Evil was that one part where it's basically dead quiet, and when you're halfway down the hallway those mutated dogs or whatever the hell they are crash through the windows and come after you.
The first time that happened when I was playing it, it scared the shit out of me-- much to the amusement of my friend whose game it was.
Not long after the DOOM phenomenon began, I had to sleep in my basement during the period after I gutted my bedroom and before my new furniture for it arrived. The basement has wood-paneled walls, and a lot of stuff hanging on them. One night as I was sleeping down there, one corner of a "frameless" picture frame decided to let go of the nail upon which it was hanging at about 3am one morning. It began swinging back and forth on the remaining nail, scraping against the paneling. It made a noise that was practically indistinguishable from the tearing noise you heard when one of the baddies in DOOM (the guy on the right side in this screenshot) got too close to you and started inflicting damage by clawing at you.
That noise immediately triggered said DOOM character's appearance in a dream, and about 10 seconds later I bolted upright, wide awake and feeling around for my gun, any gun-- what woke me up was the feeling panic that I was taking damage from that guy, and I couldn't see where he was to shoot him. Then I realized it was a dream. THEN I realized I still heard the sound, even though I was awake. Finally, I noticed the swinging picture frame, laughed sheepishly and pulled it off the wall before going back to sleep.
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What moron modded this up? This troll has been around forever!
Well, if you're going to be stupid and waste mod points, at least be consistent-- save two more of your mod points for the two "gay" letters, they're sure to be posted in another few minutes, probably by this same fuckwit.
Last I heard, Unix, Linux, and Sun based servers are on top of the market....most of which is cheaper and, again, runs circles around Apple and offers greater scalability and compatility with Windows clients. You do know that Windows rules the corporate desktop, right?? What good is an Apple server on a network of nothing but Windows clients? Hmm...beats me!
First of all, an Apple server IS a Unix server-- It's got a nice GUI for management and configuration, but that GUI just asks you for the settings for Sendmail and Apache.
An Apple server on a network of all Windows clients is great, especially for smaller companies that don't want to be extorted for the high licensing costs just to do filesharing and e-mail. Also, smaller companies that don't have a lot of money to spend on IT support people find Xserves and Mac OS X Server to be a Godsend-- especially when you don't have to worry about when the next Nimda or Code Red (which are still around in large numbers, according to my firewall logs) hits.
And as for compatibility, you must be on crack. Out of the box, workstation Macs have been able to read and write DOS/Windows files and read and write to DOS/Windows disks/volumes for over a decade, for one thing. Why would their servers reverse a 10+ year trend of being good network citizens? Apple makes the most standards-compliant stuff around. Really standards-compliant, not "we took the standard and added our own proprietary shit to it to dissuade you from using non-Windows clients." If you care to dispute that Microsoft does that, I've got one word for you: Java.
But don't take my word for it. Mac OS X Server was just named the Server OS of the Year by Network Magazine.
~Philly
First off, just forget the friggin' pipe dream of ever running OS X on your home-built x86 shitbox. Apple's hardware and software businesses have a symbiotic relationship. Apple's software is what sells their hardware, the proceeds of which go towards the software development. remove one side of that equation and the whole thing collapses. Furthermore, even if Apple did move to x86, they would prevent OS X from running on commodity, non-Apple hardware, so you'd still be whining about it. They'd do it for two reasons: First, because the sanctioned Mac clones almost killed Apple back in the late 90's. Second, because what makes Macs work so well is that their software has ultra-tight integration with a limited spread of hardware.
If Apple is to compete at all, they really need to venture more into the business market.
Last I checked, consumers weren't the target market of rack-mountable servers or rack-mountable RAID units. And Apple destroys Microsoft on server software pricing. Apple charges $1000 for an unlimited client license for mail and filesharing. The last client of mine who got a unlimited CAL for Windows 2000 Server paid five figures, and I'm pretty sure that didn't cover Exchange Server.
Adobe has made it very clear that they prefer Intel over Apple for raw performance...and performance tests have proven it!
You mean those performance tests that were proven to be flawed because Adobe is too lazy to write their After Effects software to take full advantage of the Mac's dual processors?
And get this...512 megs of DDR333 memory cost $250 on Apple's website! That's insane!
Yes, it is. Luckily, Mac users with a clue buy their RAM elsewhere and install it themselves. For the rest, buying Apple RAM is like buying aspirin at 7 Eleven... it's unnaturally expensive because you're paying for the convenience.
It doesn't matter how fast a machine is, it's not more productive if the faster machine is always needing maintenance like Windows boxes. At my last job they were an all-Mac shop when I started. Not long after I started, my boss quit, and I was able to singlehandedly take care of over 100 users at three different locations while the company looked for a replacement for him. Mostly, I sat in my office all day reading and browsing the web, because other than people needing help with the Office documents sent to us by our Windows using clients (damn Microsoft and their ever-changing file formats), there was seldom a problem. Later the company decided to convert all but the production studio to Windows machines. Can you say expensive? Me, my new boss, and a summer intern could not keep up with all the shit that went wrong, hardware (Dell) and software-wise. Did I mention viruses? ILOVEYOU crippled us for most of the day it debuted. You can have an accident with a running chainsaw and still have enough fingers and toes to count the number of malicious Mac viruses that ever existed, and most if not all of them are extinct and have been for years. Security holes? The last one in Mac OS X, major or minor, was patched on March 24, a month and a half ago. There have only been FOUR since Jaguar was released (I just checked my Software Update log). How many for Microsoft? Four since March 24, and nineteen since XP SP1 was released in August (according to the Installed Updates list on my XP Pro box.)
Your problem is, you're in denial about the Mac advantages. The Mac is more secure, period. Viruses are practically a non-issue. Same with spyware. No worries about my Mac getting owned by some script kiddie or being used as a spam proxy. My G4 has never crashed since I got it in October. It doesn't try to thwart me at every turn when I'm trying to get work done. It's got a damn nice UNIX base lurking underneath a
I don't know the name, but I did see it-- that guy does more than copy the official currency. (Note to non-USian readers: it is not illegal to duplicate US currency if you alter the size by a certain amount so as to make it unusable as money to anyone with two brain cells to rub together). Anyway, the artist who does that stuff also makes his own U.S. currency designs and tries to 'spend' them as well.
You might also remember the tale of Emperor Norton of San Francisco, which it would seem from this page was part of the same show. That guy made up his own currency, and freely spent it-- it was accepted by the shopkeepers as though it were the real thing. Apparently authentic Emperor Norton money that has survived to modern times is worth really big bucks these days to collectors.
~Philly
I don't know about the photocopiers sold in Oz, but the high-quality color copiers sold in the USA have built in currency detection. They do stuff to make the copied bills unusable, like make a perfect copy of a bill but make the entire page hot pink. Other copiers make the copy, but insert a code number somewhere on the bill. When the bill makes its way to the Secret Service, they find the code, contact the company, and find out where that copier is located, which speeds up the investigation quite a bit. IIRC, a few years back they nailed some idiot Cornell students this way. Unfortunately I can't find the story on Google, and I don't quite remember where I heard it-- possibly from one of the Discovery Channel or History Channel documentaries concerning the U.S. Mint or the Secret Service or counterfeiting.
~Philly
"Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001."
Too bad OS X will always be too fucking slow.
Quoth the bumper sticker:
Don't even try to indicate that Apple isn't raping their customers as bad, if not worse, than Microsoft.
If you don't think Microsoft is reaming their customers, then I've got four words for you, jerky: Licensing Six Point Oh. A hefty price increase in the middle of a recession. THAT is raping your customers.
Let's look at server licensing. How much for an unlimited Microsoft CAL on that Windows server? How much you got? By the way, that doesn't include the licensing for Exchange server.
How much does Apple charge for unlimited licenses for filesharing and mail? $1000. Raping their customers, indeed.
Here's another question for you-- does Microsoft make any of their older OSes available, for free? No. Does Apple? You bet! Anything prior to Mac OS 8.0 is a free download for anyone who might need it. Microsoft won't even give away copies of DOS 1.x, ~20 years after it ceased to be a shipping product.
~Philly
I think he's referring to Safari Enhancer, which basically enables the hidden Debug menu built into Safari that has the 'change user agent' feature in it, among other things.
~Philly
And what is that thing hanging off the left side? And why on Earth would it be there?
It's the handset for the integrated telephone. It does look stupid there, it (along with the camera sticking out on the otherside) ruins whatever sleek appearance the computer might otherwise have.
This is a perfect example of Microsoft's true innovation-- they do really stupid shit when they're not copying someone else outright <cough>MS Bob<cough>. If you're going to integrate a fucking phone with a computer, do it in a way that leaves people's hands free to operate the computer while they talk! What next, are they gonna hang a memo pad and a pencil on a string off the side of this thing, so you can jot down ideas while you're using the computer?
If I were designing this thing, I'd build in Bluetooth, and use a rechargable wireless headset for the phone. Hide the recharge bay on the rear edge of the display. Let the headset's mic also be used for speech-to-text and giving verbal commands to the computer. And build in a good mic and speakers so you can use a speakerphone if you don't want to wear the headset or so you don't have to fumble for it if you're not wearing it when there's an incoming call.
/me runs off to the Patent Office with a hard copy of this post, just in case anyone from Microsoft reads it.
~Philly
as well as the musical advertisements from cheese manufacturers'
:-)
You wouldn't be talking about that yellow ballish looking thing with legs and a big top hat and cane, singing "I hanker for a hunk o' cheese," are you?
I'd love to buy a DVD of those old PSAs, they really take me back-- I've already got the Schoolhouse Rock stuff.
~Philly
...the question is, will they mix them together and try to whip up an Outlook/Exchange killer? I think so.
They've got iCal, web enabled calendaring. They've got Mail, a pretty decent mail client. And they've got Address Book, pretty decent contact management. These three apps already work together fairly well.
It probably wouldn't take much to bolt "on-steroids" versions of these three apps (and hell, maybe even iChat) together into a way cool facsimilie of Outlook. I don't know how hard it would be for them to make a version that would interoperate with Exchange servers in a Windows-centric company, but they could quite easily sew up the all-Mac shops.
For the server end of things, they'd probably have just as easy a time whipping something up-- people are already making faux-.Mac servers with what's built into OS X, so the capabilities are there.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all that if Apple were already working on this, given their recent shots across the Bill's bow with Keynote and Safari, and the fact the the Mac is still getting short shrift from Microsoft (STILL no OS X-native Exchange client, Goddammit). Apple, IMHO, is quietly working hard toward a day in the fairly near future when they can publicly tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves, or worse.
~Philly
If Apple does anything, they'll most likely just limit the library-sharing feature to local machines via Rendezvous.
Apple is on the right track, though-- any technical means to protect the music will simply be cracked, so the only alternative is to provide music of guaranteed sound quality (relative to some of the rather dodgy rips you find on KaZaa) for a decent price. If they make it more convenient for people to pay for the music than to steal it, people will pay for it. Well, 30% (as I write this) of them, anyway, according to the latest poll at CNN.com. The rest are just cheap, thieving fucks.
~Philly
Get the sharing url for a song using ctrl-click. Type "curl url > my_faviorite.mp3" at the command line. Voila, you have the file.
. persistentid:0xd63645b768148d91'&playlist-spec='dm ap.persistentid:0xaa10915c0a85380b'&song-spec='dma p.persistentid:0x3e1050bf41fb7c8e'
Great, except the "Get Sharing URL" feature is not available for remote music libraries your machine is connected to. And when a sharing URL looks like this:
daap://[computername]/resolve?database-spec='dmap
I doubt you're gonna be doing any educated guessing as to what the exact URL is for the song you want.
~Philly
Contrary to what the headline says this is NOT P2P, it's basically a client-server connection via iTunes-- so how the hell ELSE do you expect people to connect to a server if they don't have the IP or domain name, brainiac? This service is basically a message board for people to say, "Hey, check out my music library, it's at [address]."
You're also forgetting that these are all Macs running OS X we're talking about-- this is not the 'major security hole found every week' Windows crowd putting their boxes on a "Soon to be 0wn3d" list.
~Philly
I submitted this also, and I got it directly from CNN. I almost never look at Fark.
What there is is easily programmed into a VCR.
Sure, but then you have to find out when a show you like are on, find a blank tape or one with something you don't mind taping over, program the VCR, and (in my case, at least) make sure the cable box is set to the right channel before leaving for work/going to sleep for the night/whatever.
On a TiVo: Browse through the menu to find one occurrence of the show you like, and about four clicks later the TiVo will be set to record every occurrence of that show that it finds in the downloaded listings, and it'll change the channel on the cable box by itself-- and no futzing with tapes or coming home to discover that I forgot to switch the cable box to the correct channel and the VCR recorded an hour of some crap I don't want.
And there's plenty good on TV if you know where to look. Older classic stuff on SciFi, interesting documentaries on Discovery, TLC, and History, and daily doses of The Simpsons on FOX,and Family Guy and Futurama on Cartoon Network.
Apple charging high prices for RAM is like 7 Eleven charging ~$20 for the smallest bottle of Tylenol made-- it's all about convenience.
People in the know buy the bare minimum RAM from Apple, and max out their machines with third-party RAM from a trusted source. Personally I swear by Other World Computing's "store-brand" RAM. I buy it for myself and recommend it to clients, and I've never had a problem with any of it.
~Philly
Aw, come on... the third one was pretty good: "Indiana Jones is back... and this time, he's bringing his father!"
I never found the second one particularly watchable after about the first 10-15 minutes, but I love the first and third.
~Philly
If Apple is "good" for bundling applications and not giving consumers the choice (for example, the music purchasing ONLY works with iTunes), then why is Microsoft "bad" for including IE and Windows Media Player with the OS?
Okay, let's look at the browser example. Say I don't like Safari (which most likely will be bundled with OS X 10.3 instead of IE). I am free to trash it and go back to using IE. Can you get rid of the bundled browser in Windows so easily? Nope.
Apple rolls their own software and bundles it with the OS to empower their users-- nobody was gonna buy Adobe Premiere to do home videos, but plenty of people will use iMovie since it comes with the Mac. And the Mac was losing mindshare over browsing speed, because IE on OS X is utter crap and hasn't been updated in forever-- to fix that problem, Apple whipped up Safari, which blazes.
Microsoft bundles free apps to destroy their competition or to take over a market. IE was given away to torpedo Netscape, which it successfully did. Windows Media Player is given away free so Microsoft can point to a significant [pre]installed base when they make arguments as to why their (Microsoft's) proprietary file formats should be The Standard.
~Philly
Today I found a "New Music Tuesday" mailing in my inbox, from Apple, highlighting almost 20 recent (complete album) additions to the Music Store that are available as of today.
If they do that many every week, that is seriously gonna bolster their catalog.
~Philly
That's a pretty shitty API then, considering on a Mac I can make a dialog box with custom button labels with one line of AppleScript, and have been able to do so for years:
display dialog "Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.\r\rProcess ID=0x5a4 (1444), Thread ID=0x5c0 (1472).\rDo you want to terminate the application, or debug it?" buttons {"Debug", "Terminate"} default button "Debug"
If something end-user-accessible like AppleScript can do it, it's for damn sure usable everywhere else. You'd think they'd fix this after all these years. I mean, half the entries in that GUI Hall of Shame site deal with Windows dialog boxes where it's hard or impossible to decide which button is the appropriate response for the given situation.
~Philly
You lose that bet. That basement was party central on weekends during high school and college.
Another classic. The most heart-pounding moments were the one car chase, after which you have to follow police procedure to the letter to complete the arrest, or you're dead-- killed by the perp. I beat that game in 8th grade, and 16 years later I can still clearly remember the adrenaline that was pouring through me during that one part of it-- you had to type stuff quickly and carefully, because timing was crucial and you wouldn't get a second chance if you screwed up the commands and the computer didn't understand what you wanted to do. It's amazing how immersive it was for a 3rd-person viewpoint, and how caught up in it I got.
The one thing I remember most about Resident Evil was that one part where it's basically dead quiet, and when you're halfway down the hallway those mutated dogs or whatever the hell they are crash through the windows and come after you.
The first time that happened when I was playing it, it scared the shit out of me-- much to the amusement of my friend whose game it was.
~Philly
Not long after the DOOM phenomenon began, I had to sleep in my basement during the period after I gutted my bedroom and before my new furniture for it arrived. The basement has wood-paneled walls, and a lot of stuff hanging on them. One night as I was sleeping down there, one corner of a "frameless" picture frame decided to let go of the nail upon which it was hanging at about 3am one morning. It began swinging back and forth on the remaining nail, scraping against the paneling. It made a noise that was practically indistinguishable from the tearing noise you heard when one of the baddies in DOOM (the guy on the right side in this screenshot) got too close to you and started inflicting damage by clawing at you.
That noise immediately triggered said DOOM character's appearance in a dream, and about 10 seconds later I bolted upright, wide awake and feeling around for my gun, any gun-- what woke me up was the feeling panic that I was taking damage from that guy, and I couldn't see where he was to shoot him. Then I realized it was a dream. THEN I realized I still heard the sound, even though I was awake. Finally, I noticed the swinging picture frame, laughed sheepishly and pulled it off the wall before going back to sleep.