I got that information from deductive reasoning, because it's the logical thing for Amazon to do in this situation.
Prominently labeling the Kindle titles that have TTS shut off will prevent a flood of complaints from customers who bought those titles expecting to use the feature, only to find out after their purchase that it was disabled.
If Amazon doesn't think to do this immediately, I'm betting they will eventually do it as a reactive measure after receiving the aforementioned flood of complaints.
Amazon should not have caved to this ridiculous request. The final choice is with consumers, who should refuse to buy any book that they can't run through text-to-speech or any other device that enables them to use their purchase.
While I agree that Amazon should have told these guys to go fuck themselves, what they have actually done is a brilliant "carrot and stick" maneuver that will ultimately get them what they want:
1. Amazon gives in to the Guild's demand (the carrot), and will conveniently label those books on their site which prohibit TTS. 2. People who think the Authors Guild is a bunch of dicks can boycott the clearly-marked titles and purchase others. 3. Sales of TTS-prohibited books plummet (the stick). 4. Authors Guild realizes that their greed has actually cost them money, and reverses their decision.
"Each executive had his own idea of what openness means and how if Apple adopted its own vision of openness it could be more successful."
These are the same executives who are so terrified of the success of the iPhone and App Store that they can't copy them quickly enough ("Look at us! WE suddenly have touch-screen phones and online application stores now, too! Look! LOOK!!!!").
Frankly, they look pretty foolish offering ANY criticism of how Apple does things.
Seeing as the zune and ipod are the same price, why WOULDN'T you pick the zune?
Because there are a lot more accessories and add-ons available for the iPod.
The iPod got off to a good start in terms of market share, which led to more accessories being made for it, which no doubt influenced more people to buy it.... classic positive feedback loop. It's like the OS market back in the 90s, in reverse-- there, Windows ruled the roost and the Mac was a tiny, shrinking niche. Walk into a CompUSA back then, and nearly everything on the shelves was for Windows. The Mac section was three shelves in literally the farthest corner of the store from the entrance.
With the Zune, instead of being the 800-pound gorilla in a given market, Microsoft is finding out how much fun it is to have to compete against that gorilla.
Macs never had the OS in ROM, with one exception. The Mac Classic, released in 1990. It had System 6 in ROM, and you could boot into it by holding down Cmd-Opt-X-O at boot time.
He was never the tech-industry visionary he wanted everyone to think he was with those grand pronouncements about the future. He always waited to see where everyone else was going, changed course to follow them, and then steamrolled them. Remember, he's the same guy who initially blew off the internet because he thought everyone would flock to MSN. Miss Cleo's predictions carried more weight.
They're stopping because they're tired of having to have something to show off two weeks after Christmas when the alternative is getting hammered for not announcing anything exciting-- without the Expo, they are free to work on stuff until they feel it's ready to be announced; they don't have to rush to conform to the timing of the show.
Plus, the timing of the show (which IDG is has apparently never been willing to reschedule) puts a dent in Apple's holiday sales... people who want to buy will hold off to see what new stuff gets announced at the Expo.
Finally, Apple now has sufficient mindshare with the general public that they don't really need a big trade show presence anymore to garner publicity. I see headlines on CNN.com frequently when Apple introduces new/updated products, and not just during the Expo-- Dell and HP don't have that kind of coverage when they announce new stuff, and most of Microsoft's press is stuff they'd rather not see on the main page of CNN.com, like yesterday's Zune coma epidemic.
Amen. I just watched a movie on tape that I haven't re-bought on DVD yet. While I was amazed at how bad the picture quality was compared to the DVDs I'm used to now, the one thing that was very nice was being able to just fast-forward through all that bullshit at the beginning that I'm now used to having to sit through.
I used to have a DVD player that let me do what I want... it was GE-branded but my understanding was it had Apex guts. Some Apex players had a 'secret' menu that let you set them to ignore 'no skip' flags and other stuff, and also let you set the player to be whatever region you wanted or shut the region crap off entirely. When this was discovered, Apex players got yanked off store shelves in the US. Do some googling, I'm sure you can still get your hands on one somehow. Mine died about a year ago, and I just bought a run-of-the-mill Sony to replace it.
The same will happen with OS X (except when you drag a CD to the trashcan:P that one is counter intuitive).
When you click and drag a removable disc on OS X, the trash can in the dock turns into an eject symbol. But most people just hit the Eject key on the keyboard these days.
I use Quicken as nothing more than a glorified check register where I enter everything manually, so none of their sunsetting-features-to-force-upgrades shenanigans ever bit me. Having said that, it still pisses me off what a half-assed product Mac Quicken has always been, and it *really* grinds my gears that Bill Campbell sits on their board *and* Apple's board and *still* the Mac gets short shrift. I don't know how Jobs hasn't broken his foot off in someone's ass about it-- especially since people have their lives in Quicken, and the fact that it's a HUGE pain in the ass to migrate from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac has probably dissuaded more than a few people from switching to Mac. I don't know what's so fucking hard about using cross-platform data file formats and providing 100% feature parity with the Windows version, I really don't.
I wish Apple would roll their own financial iApp as a shot across Intuit's bow, to get them to straighten up and fly right.
I don't get the double standard of why Compaq's cloning of the PC was good while Psystar's cloning of the Mac is bad
Not good cloning versus bad cloning-- legal cloning versus illegal cloning.
IBM wanted to get a machine on store shelves quickly back in 1981, so they built an open system that was easily copied. The only proprietary thing about the IBM PC was the BIOS, which had to be clean-roomed. The Compaq BIOS was designed from scratch to mimic the genuine, copyrighted IBM BIOS in function, but other than that was an entirely original product. IBM sued over it and lost.*
Today's Macintosh is, from a hardware standpoint, an more or less open system that is easily copied. The only proprietary thing about a Mac is OS X. But Psystar isn't designing their own duplicate of OS X that does the same thing, which would be legal (ignoring patented aspects of Mac OS X for the sake of the argument). They are illegally altering an existing, copyrighted product. That's the difference.
~Philly
* Later, in an attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle, they developed the proprietary Micro Channel Architecture to make their hardware a closed system to kill the cloners. The plan flopped-- the companies that were making clones banded together and standardized on a new open architecture (the ISA bus, IIRC) themselves, and from that point on IBM no longer dictated the direction the development of the x86-base personal computer would take.
if you're taking the time to right a piece of malicious code you generally want it to have the greatest impact possible
Yes, and being the first person to come up with a true Mac OS X self-replicating malware wouldn't have any impact at all, would it?
Please just stop with the stupid 'market share' argument. Not everyone who writes malware wants to run a Windows botnet for fun and profit. There are also a lot of people out there who would looooooooove the notoriety that would be attached to being the first guy to do it on Mac OS X. They've been working at it for nearly eight years and haven't succeeded yet. And Apple is working hard to ensure they don't succeed.
Doubt it. RJ45 and 6-pin Firewire connectors are hardly proprietary. Cheap cables would be available in no time from 3rd-party vendors. Apple probably wouldn't even bother making one.
Would have been nice if Apple put that into the new MacBook, since they were so tight on space for ports. Though it wouldn't surprise me if it did have that capability in hardware but it hasn't been worked out in software yet and will appear later as an update. Believe me, I'd happily cough up the $2 for that enabler.
I have never trusted baggage handlers. The only stuff that has ever gone in my checked bag is clothes and toiletries, and I still put a TSA lock on it (and a zip tie, so I'll know at a glance if it's been opened).
Anything of any value at all gets carried on with me, especially small electronic items. I just don't understand these people who will put valuables in checked bags-- especially items small enough to be carried on.
Available as an add-on option for $19. They stopped including it a while ago, to reduce costs. Most people use them once or twice and then they go in a drawer, never to be touched again. I only carry one to demo Front Row to clients, but I don't actually -use- it. This way, only the people who want them get them.
The politicians aren't fighting over the deck chairs, they're lined up calmly at the lifeboats and telling us to all go back down to steerage, because there's nothing to worry about.
Are you kidding? Every time I read about a car plowing into a restaurant, or a bus stop full of people, or a crowded street market, it always turns out to be some old man or woman at the wheel, and it's always because they hit the wrong pedal.
Google "+elderly confused gas brake": 13,200 results. Google "+teen confused gas brake": 8,810 results. Restricting the search to Google News and choosing "all dates" results in 270 results for old people, 171 for teens.
Slashdot Mirror
...that's 96.8 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively.
~Philly
The only winning move is not to play.
~Philly
You know, I could have joined the NSA, but they found out my parents were married.
~Philly
I got that information from deductive reasoning, because it's the logical thing for Amazon to do in this situation.
Prominently labeling the Kindle titles that have TTS shut off will prevent a flood of complaints from customers who bought those titles expecting to use the feature, only to find out after their purchase that it was disabled.
If Amazon doesn't think to do this immediately, I'm betting they will eventually do it as a reactive measure after receiving the aforementioned flood of complaints.
~Philly
Amazon should not have caved to this ridiculous request. The final choice is with consumers, who should refuse to buy any book that they can't run through text-to-speech or any other device that enables them to use their purchase.
While I agree that Amazon should have told these guys to go fuck themselves, what they have actually done is a brilliant "carrot and stick" maneuver that will ultimately get them what they want:
1. Amazon gives in to the Guild's demand (the carrot), and will conveniently label those books on their site which prohibit TTS.
2. People who think the Authors Guild is a bunch of dicks can boycott the clearly-marked titles and purchase others.
3. Sales of TTS-prohibited books plummet (the stick).
4. Authors Guild realizes that their greed has actually cost them money, and reverses their decision.
~Philly
"Each executive had his own idea of what openness means and how if Apple adopted its own vision of openness it could be more successful."
These are the same executives who are so terrified of the success of the iPhone and App Store that they can't copy them quickly enough ("Look at us! WE suddenly have touch-screen phones and online application stores now, too! Look! LOOK!!!!").
Frankly, they look pretty foolish offering ANY criticism of how Apple does things.
~Philly
Seeing as the zune and ipod are the same price, why WOULDN'T you pick the zune?
Because there are a lot more accessories and add-ons available for the iPod.
The iPod got off to a good start in terms of market share, which led to more accessories being made for it, which no doubt influenced more people to buy it.... classic positive feedback loop. It's like the OS market back in the 90s, in reverse-- there, Windows ruled the roost and the Mac was a tiny, shrinking niche. Walk into a CompUSA back then, and nearly everything on the shelves was for Windows. The Mac section was three shelves in literally the farthest corner of the store from the entrance.
With the Zune, instead of being the 800-pound gorilla in a given market, Microsoft is finding out how much fun it is to have to compete against that gorilla.
~Philly
Macs never had the OS in ROM, with one exception. The Mac Classic, released in 1990. It had System 6 in ROM, and you could boot into it by holding down Cmd-Opt-X-O at boot time.
~Philly
I'm shocked!!!
He was never the tech-industry visionary he wanted everyone to think he was with those grand pronouncements about the future. He always waited to see where everyone else was going, changed course to follow them, and then steamrolled them. Remember, he's the same guy who initially blew off the internet because he thought everyone would flock to MSN. Miss Cleo's predictions carried more weight.
~Philly
Now Hershey's can spin this nasty incident as test marketing of their new Space Brownies!
~Philly
They're stopping because they're tired of having to have something to show off two weeks after Christmas when the alternative is getting hammered for not announcing anything exciting-- without the Expo, they are free to work on stuff until they feel it's ready to be announced; they don't have to rush to conform to the timing of the show.
Plus, the timing of the show (which IDG is has apparently never been willing to reschedule) puts a dent in Apple's holiday sales... people who want to buy will hold off to see what new stuff gets announced at the Expo.
Finally, Apple now has sufficient mindshare with the general public that they don't really need a big trade show presence anymore to garner publicity. I see headlines on CNN.com frequently when Apple introduces new/updated products, and not just during the Expo-- Dell and HP don't have that kind of coverage when they announce new stuff, and most of Microsoft's press is stuff they'd rather not see on the main page of CNN.com, like yesterday's Zune coma epidemic.
~Philly
Amen. I just watched a movie on tape that I haven't re-bought on DVD yet. While I was amazed at how bad the picture quality was compared to the DVDs I'm used to now, the one thing that was very nice was being able to just fast-forward through all that bullshit at the beginning that I'm now used to having to sit through.
I used to have a DVD player that let me do what I want... it was GE-branded but my understanding was it had Apex guts. Some Apex players had a 'secret' menu that let you set them to ignore 'no skip' flags and other stuff, and also let you set the player to be whatever region you wanted or shut the region crap off entirely. When this was discovered, Apex players got yanked off store shelves in the US. Do some googling, I'm sure you can still get your hands on one somehow. Mine died about a year ago, and I just bought a run-of-the-mill Sony to replace it.
~Philly
The same will happen with OS X (except when you drag a CD to the trashcan :P that one is counter intuitive).
When you click and drag a removable disc on OS X, the trash can in the dock turns into an eject symbol. But most people just hit the Eject key on the keyboard these days.
~Philly
I use Quicken as nothing more than a glorified check register where I enter everything manually, so none of their sunsetting-features-to-force-upgrades shenanigans ever bit me. Having said that, it still pisses me off what a half-assed product Mac Quicken has always been, and it *really* grinds my gears that Bill Campbell sits on their board *and* Apple's board and *still* the Mac gets short shrift. I don't know how Jobs hasn't broken his foot off in someone's ass about it-- especially since people have their lives in Quicken, and the fact that it's a HUGE pain in the ass to migrate from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac has probably dissuaded more than a few people from switching to Mac. I don't know what's so fucking hard about using cross-platform data file formats and providing 100% feature parity with the Windows version, I really don't.
I wish Apple would roll their own financial iApp as a shot across Intuit's bow, to get them to straighten up and fly right.
~Philly
I don't get the double standard of why Compaq's cloning of the PC was good while Psystar's cloning of the Mac is bad
Not good cloning versus bad cloning-- legal cloning versus illegal cloning.
IBM wanted to get a machine on store shelves quickly back in 1981, so they built an open system that was easily copied. The only proprietary thing about the IBM PC was the BIOS, which had to be clean-roomed. The Compaq BIOS was designed from scratch to mimic the genuine, copyrighted IBM BIOS in function, but other than that was an entirely original product. IBM sued over it and lost.*
Today's Macintosh is, from a hardware standpoint, an more or less open system that is easily copied. The only proprietary thing about a Mac is OS X. But Psystar isn't designing their own duplicate of OS X that does the same thing, which would be legal (ignoring patented aspects of Mac OS X for the sake of the argument). They are illegally altering an existing, copyrighted product. That's the difference.
~Philly
* Later, in an attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle, they developed the proprietary Micro Channel Architecture to make their hardware a closed system to kill the cloners. The plan flopped-- the companies that were making clones banded together and standardized on a new open architecture (the ISA bus, IIRC) themselves, and from that point on IBM no longer dictated the direction the development of the x86-base personal computer would take.
if you're taking the time to right a piece of malicious code you generally want it to have the greatest impact possible
Yes, and being the first person to come up with a true Mac OS X self-replicating malware wouldn't have any impact at all, would it?
Please just stop with the stupid 'market share' argument. Not everyone who writes malware wants to run a Windows botnet for fun and profit. There are also a lot of people out there who would looooooooove the notoriety that would be attached to being the first guy to do it on Mac OS X. They've been working at it for nearly eight years and haven't succeeded yet. And Apple is working hard to ensure they don't succeed.
~Philly
Probably something like their Braille edition.
~Philly
...nothing about tunneling protocols!
~Philly
Doubt it. RJ45 and 6-pin Firewire connectors are hardly proprietary. Cheap cables would be available in no time from 3rd-party vendors. Apple probably wouldn't even bother making one.
~Philly
Would have been nice if Apple put that into the new MacBook, since they were so tight on space for ports. Though it wouldn't surprise me if it did have that capability in hardware but it hasn't been worked out in software yet and will appear later as an update. Believe me, I'd happily cough up the $2 for that enabler.
~Philly
I have never trusted baggage handlers. The only stuff that has ever gone in my checked bag is clothes and toiletries, and I still put a TSA lock on it (and a zip tie, so I'll know at a glance if it's been opened).
Anything of any value at all gets carried on with me, especially small electronic items. I just don't understand these people who will put valuables in checked bags-- especially items small enough to be carried on.
~Philly
Now when someone figures out the "instant green" gadget to make red lights turn green so you are never stuck at an intersection I will pay any amount!
It's already been done, and use of one of those gadgets by civilians was made a federal crime over three years ago. Sorry.
~Philly
Available as an add-on option for $19. They stopped including it a while ago, to reduce costs. Most people use them once or twice and then they go in a drawer, never to be touched again. I only carry one to demo Front Row to clients, but I don't actually -use- it. This way, only the people who want them get them.
~Philly
The politicians aren't fighting over the deck chairs, they're lined up calmly at the lifeboats and telling us to all go back down to steerage, because there's nothing to worry about.
Are you kidding? Every time I read about a car plowing into a restaurant, or a bus stop full of people, or a crowded street market, it always turns out to be some old man or woman at the wheel, and it's always because they hit the wrong pedal.
Google "+elderly confused gas brake": 13,200 results.
Google "+teen confused gas brake": 8,810 results.
Restricting the search to Google News and choosing "all dates" results in 270 results for old people, 171 for teens.
I rest my case.
~Philly