> Asians eat carbs with almost every meal (rice, noodles). They are thinner than us. End of story.
Have you been into the Asian countries? First of all, the portions of carb-rich food are much smaller in those countries than they are here... we eat carbs to excess. Second, Asians walk one hell of a lot more than we do. Their cities are all built around walking, ours are built around cars. We drive everywhere; they walk.
My experiences, having lived in a number of countries in my life is that even in Western Europe where they share many of the same diet trends as the US, obesity is much lower simply because they don't drive nearly as much. When I lived in East London I owned a car that I maybe drove 3-5,000 miles in a year. Here in the US I have to drive 20,000 miles a year simply because everything is built around cars, the public transport in most US cities is worthless and even once within the cities there's rarely an area really built around walking.
Yes, diets are different in other cultures, but to say that cutting carbs doesn't cause people to lose weight is patently and obviously false. I myself cut carbs and lost weight, even before I started exercising more. Our lifestyle requires us to eat differently than Asian cultures because we are more sedentary. To compare our diets is incongruous without having all the facts. If we walked as much as Asian cultures do, we would require more carbs to power that walking. As it is, we don't... and we don't.
I have to say I concur, and had a similar experience to you. I had been overweight for some time, though I was not what I considered morbidly obese. I actually went on a low-carb diet simply because I liked the way it made me feel; I found that keeping the carbs low at lunch actually meant that I didn't get sleepy or tired in the afternoon like I had been doing... I had more energy... and as I started paying more attention to what I ate I found that I needed to eat less in order to feel full.
At the same time I started a moderate exercise program... a couple of times a week I'd go to a gym and do some basic cardio, do some light weight training... maybe go swimming... whatever I felt like doing that day. Pretty rapidly, I lost about 60 pounds in probably 7 or 8 months... the first 30 I lost in the first 90 days and it actually freaked me out a little so I started tempering my diet more.
Now I'm at the same weight I was when I was 18, and though I can't claim my body is in the same good shape (I'm in my mid 30's... a little slack around the middle is REALLY tough to move) but I still eat reasonably healthy, I exercise two or three times a week and I've never felt better. In fact, I found I even think better and can concentrate more easily.
Note that I also eat the foods I LIKE to eat. Cutting the carbs meant cutting out a lot of sugary and starchy stuff, but nothing I miss. Sometimes I crave bread, and the smell of baking bread will make my mouth water... but nothing a little self control can't fix. Instead I eat meat and non-starchy vegetables... and I love it. And I don't eat pre-prepared frozen meals... ever. I either cook at home or I go to halfway decent restaurants where I know they don't use frozen foods... where they take the time to prepare the food. Yes, sometimes a quick lunch from Taco Bell sounds tempting, and would be cheaper... but I'd rather walk a little further (yes, walk!) and pay a little more now rather than paying a fortune for healthcare as I get older.
The interesting irony is that I pay significantly less in healthcare than most of my peers, I rarely get sick for more than a day... and hell, out of all my peers I seem to be one of the few with all my own hair! To me, taking care of oneself now is making an investment in your own future. Now all I've got to do is worry about the 401K I didn't care about in my 20's because I didn't honestly think I'd survive even this long:)
Ah, but I'm not. I'm drawing your "magical line" between things considered as a convenience and a sop to the requirements of human beings as a whole, and a tool that allows you to do your job.
Let's presume for an example that you work in a factory or warehouse driving a forklift. Said forklift is your corporate-owned tool... it is not your personal toy to go careening around the parking lot at a moment's notice because you're bored.
The fact is that the things you cite are precisely those things required to ensure that employees continue to work in a particular environment, they are environmental concerns... not job concerns. The laptop or desktop computer is a tool to get the job done, nothing more and should be treated as such. You know what I do when I want to use a computer for games? I have my own laptop. Sometimes my boss is cool if I have it sitting on my desk at work... sometimes I take it to a local Panera at lunchtime and surf the web while I eat. I save that for my personal stuff, and I do business on my work laptop.
Is it a pain carrying two laptops around? Not really. The furthest I ever carry them is between my office and my car, and then my car to my house. Even then, my work laptop normally sits right inside the door of my house until I head to work the next day unless I have a need to dial in (maybe one week in six).
I didn't draw your "magical line", the law draws that line for you. The work provided laptop is a tool to get a job done. If you don't need it, you don't get it. If you don't need to play games for a living, then the corporation doesn't need to let you do so.
Besides, with a game you're talking about uncontrolled and un-certified software that may cause issues with the software on your laptop that's required to actually get your job done. It may even cause enough problems that it would require a rebuild of your machine... that's a cost to the corporation that you work for and one that is a cost directly attributable to your usage of the machine. That's why I feel corporations should not allow this arbitrary software on their desktops or laptops.
If you happen to work for a company that allows you to use their assets for your own personal enjoyment, power to you. This is an example of small company thinking that becomes a liability rapidly as a company grows. Of course, if you're spending all your time playing games, you're not exactly contributing to the bottom line, are you? Me, I'd rather work in a place where the focus during the work day is on getting the job done... thereby increasing the income or efficiency of the corporation as a whole and perhaps increasing my odds of still having a job by the end of the day. Don't kid yourself; there's no job security these days, and the best way you can ensure you might still have a job by tomorrow is to just focus on doing your job today.
I sound old... I'm not. I just have priorities and feel that except in very narrowly defined circumstances, a Corporate-owned tool should be used only for Corporate business. Of course, this is a double-edged sword and perhaps encourages people using these tools to work a 40-hour week or whatever... that's actually a bargain a corporation is happy to deal with simply because working more than a 40 hour week is only hurting you (presuming you're salaried)... it doesn't really make a difference to the corporation as a whole unless you happen to be a one-man team. Again, small company thinking.
How about you not use Corporate owned tools for your games... maybe... I don't know... buy a portable game box?
I have a backpack I carry my laptop in. In one of the pockets of said backpack is a Nintendo DS with about a dozen games. If I feel the need to release a little stress, I just open the DS which then resumes wherever I was last time I played it... voila... I have games.
My boss doesn't mind this so long as I (a) don't disturb my colleagues and (b) don't do it to the detriment of my job.
You don't need AoE or any other game on your corporate-provided and owned tools. You need to do your job with them... anything beyond that is your own personal stuff and therefore should be RUN on your own personal stuff.
Ergo, if you have to manage laptops, do not allow the user to install software and they can't install VMWare.
This isn't rocket science, really. You just have to prioritize what you want to do, and provide the tools your users need without giving them the keys to the kingdom.
I personally do not manage PC's any more... I moved on to the server side of the house but let me relate to you how things work where I work.
I have a laptop, and I use it since I'm on-call one week in 6. I do not have admin rights to my laptop... in fact I'm as locked down a user as everyone else is. However, despite my initial bad feeling about this, I have had few if any problems. Quite simply, our desktop support team uses SMS to distribute updates and software to the end user in a packaged form. That way, we can control who has what software simply because some of them require passwords to install which are requested on an ad-hoc basis. Every piece of software I need to do my job including software like Putty is out there under "Run Advertised Programs". I just click the software I need, click install and within a minute or two my software's installed even if I'm on a VPN.
What about tools like VMWare Server? Well, we have that in RAP as well... but that's strictly limited to people who sign an agreement with the desktop group about responsible behavior, and we don't build arbitrary XP boxes. VM's built on our systems are audited by a script pushed by group policy, so the desktop group can spot an arbitrary XP desktop a mile off. Yes, they have alerts... yes, those logs are put in a database... yes, in the event that I put arbitrary OSs on my system I could be disciplined by HR by the terms of the agreement I signed with my desktop folks.
So what about admin tools I need? OK... ever used Citrix? We have a section of our farm dedicated to our UNIX, SQL and Windows admins that provides all those tools for us to use in an admin job; Windows admin tools and so forth. This also has the advantage that our performance of admin tasks even on a slow VPN can be similar to working at the office.
Sure, I'm not totally locked down... and I have a different account in the Active Directory that I use to authenticate to servers; a so-called Admin account. If I want to connect to a share with admin privileges all I need is a command prompt and a "net use \\server/user:adminaccount" and I can connect to the shares with my admin privileges. My desktop group grants me that because of my job... all it took was for me to sign that "privileged operations" agreement that also allowed me VMware Server on my laptop.
Sound like a bit of a pain, but trust me... I don't want to be troubleshooting desktop problems all the time. I want to focus on my job; keeping the lights on in the datacenter. If my laptop shoots crap, I want to be able to pick up the phone and have someone else responsible for my not being able to do my job... or provide me an alternate way to get my job done. If I had admin rights to my laptop, I'd probably fix it myself... and the one time I've had problems with my laptop I actually had a good idea of the problem. But you know what? Because of that I was able to pick up the phone, call our desktop folks, explain precisely what the problem was and they were able to fix it within minutes because no troubleshooting was required... and they trust me since I'm also a professional Windows guy.
See, in my opinion the people who cry about not having admin rights to their machines are the same people who sit in the basement and refuse to talk to anyone else. Me, I'd rather have my rights taken away to my laptop so I can just focus on MY job... not someone else's. It makes me more productive, and allows me to defer responsibility when stuff goes wrong with my laptop. Hell, even when I ordered upgraded RAM I let the desktop folks do it... I put components in servers every other day, but I figured that I have better things to do with my time than figure out where all the screws are to get to
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=295444 was the link I used. Be aware this is specifically for the GSM Hermes... the CDMA version (can't remember the name) will need a different ROM I believe. Search around on the site and you should find it.
Seconded on the switching out of the ROM. I did that on my HTC TyTN (original) and never looked back. The so-called "Vanilla cooked WM6 ROM" did away with the crap, and did away with my problems that I'd had with the device (bar the hardware issues I still have). It gave the device a new lease of life and has actually become an extremely productive device for me.
Well, stock WM6 contains a lot of crud. The problem is the carrier's implementations of WM6 that really suck. Even HTC puts a bunch of crud in the system that makes it craptastic in a hurry.
I have an HTC TyTN. It's actually a Cingular 8525 as that was the lowest cost variant I could buy unlocked at the time... and it's been great. Of course, it doesn't run Cingular's (or AT&T's) craptastic WM6 variant with all their crud installed. I ran the WM5 that came with it for all of two months, then got tired of constantly rebooting my phone, dealing with the same memory issues that you have and so forth... then I downloaded a "cooked" WM6 from xda-developers.com and installed. Since then, my problems all vanished. The ROM I downloaded is referred to as the "vanilla" cooked WM6 ROM. It freed up local storage, sped up my system and made it an incredibly reliable platform.
Is it without flaws? No, but neither is my best friend's iPhone... and his is as vanilla a they come... no hacks or cracks. However, I can honestly say that today my problems are hardware related, not software. I have the dreaded "white screen" so common to the TyTN... which is fixed by turning the screen off and pressing on a few areas of the case. I hate doing it, but it works. Software-wise I only have issues with how long the Pictures and Videos app takes to thumbnail all the pictures on my micro-SD card (I wish it would just store the damn thumbnails instead of generating them every time). Other than that, no more memory issues, no more problems.
No, this isn't a good solution; to be honest I almost hate the fact that I had to get so down and dirty geeky with the device before I could make it truly usable. However, the problem I don't ascribe to WM6... I ascribe the problems I had to Cingular (now AT&T) putting too much crap on the device and making the OS extremely unstable.
And FYI, I'm not a Microsoft apologist either. I hate Windows (although it pays my bills)... my choice of personal machine is a Macbook Pro which has only seen Windows Vista once in a virtual machine for about an hour before I got tired of it running my CPU hot. I think WM6 can be a decent platform without the crud that third parties fill it with.
I waited over the weekend to upgrade my Macbook Pro (first gen 15") to Leopard. And you know what? I'm happy I did it.
I did the upgrade on Monday night after using Carbon Copy Cloner to take a snapshot of my machine. And yes, to Windows folks that was a bootable image; I could reboot to my external USB drive if I wanted and CCC my machine back again... but I didn't have to.
So how did the upgrade process itself go? I inserted the Leopard DVD, clicked the icon to upgrade, waited for the reboot, clicked once and walked away to watch Mythbusters with my kids. By the time I came back upstairs to my laptop, I had a Leopard logon screen.
So I logged on to "survey the damage". You know what? I was impressed. Here are my first impressions:
1. 3rd Party Applications: The Missing Sync is broken. I knew that and expected that since they are notorious for lacking behind Apple updates. No worries, I don't really NEED it... sure it's nice, but it's not a requirement. Parallels worked, but networking was broken. A quick reinstall fixed that. Yahoo Messenger was busted out of the box, but I had Version 3 Beta 1... upgraded to the latest and voila, we're chatting with friends. My ancient copy of Photoshop 7 gave it up for the team. Even a reinstall wouldn't fix it. No problem, I have Aperture as well and rarely use Photoshop any more. Uninstalled, no worries. So out of all my apps, I had one casualty and a few "non-life threatening injuries". That's much better than my Vista experience.
2. Apple Applications: My first launch of Mail resulted in a "database upgrade" follwed by an immediate failure and Mail disappeared without so much as an error message. I launched it again and it's been fine since. I might delete my account and re-sync it... I love IMAP. Address Book and iCal are both greatly improved (as is Mail) and are actually useful tools now instead of toys. I see huge improvements here. Finder is significantly better, and though I do find the "embossed icons" to be a step backward in readability, the general improvements vastly improve the experience. Besides, I have faith this will be fixed either with a patch or a third-party hack. Everything else I've not really played with much.
3. General Usability: Wow. That's all I can say. The improvements over even the latest Tiger release are impressive. Although synthetic benchmarks show a very slight speed decrease on this platform, the general "feel" of the OS is significantly improved. Application launch times, app switching and generally USING the operating system make it feel like the system's actually been significantly improved. It's noticeable, and I have not really noticed any speed decreases at all apart from still seeming slow when I have my XP VM running in Parallels (rarely). At the end of the day, I get the impression that Leopard is faster, even if that's not backed up by the benchmarks. If the operating itself feels better, who cares what the benchmarks say anyway?
4. Other Notes: Wake from sleep is significantly improved. It used to be that I would open the lid of my laptop and I'd end up waiting for up to 15 seconds for a logon prompt. Now, the prompt is there within moments of me opening the lid. This significantly improves usefulness for me. Also, I thought that the "Coverflow" browsing would be a toy I'd bore of quickly. Quite the opposite... I've found it incredibly useful for going through busy and full folders so I can locate documents incredibly quickly. A+ on that feature!
5. The Bad: So far as I said, the only things I'll take issue with are the icons (embossed instead of clear icons) and a few things that I think need a little more work. The Stacks function... yuck. I don't like Stacks... I thought I would find it useful but it's just ugly. Not impressed, but I removed the default Documents and Application stacks from my dock... I'll use Quicksilver TYVM. Also, I've had one "grey curtains" failure (Mac owners know what I'm talking about) just a day after installation, but nothing since. It could well ha
I'd say it's more akin to Windows Vista dropping support for Windows NT 4 for PowerPC.
Quite simply put, OS9 and before were written for a non-primary architecture for Apple; they've already stated that their way forward is going to be x86 architecture. As a result, they're dropping support for an environment that ran on a completely different architecture and are moving forward with their plans to move completely to the x86 architecture.
Sure, Rosetta's still in there for the few PPC only apps left under OSX, but running OS9 under Rosetta was really never even an option (a) for performance reasons and (b) because Apple really wanted to get rid of that ancient legacy.
OS9 was OK as an OS, but it was really only a stopgap until OSX was ready. OS8 was awful, buggy and crash prone. A totally new OS should've come out of Apple much sooner than OSX, but the problem was a simple lack of management at Apple.
The problem with cellular data technologies is that a lot depends on the implementation. There are so many factors involved in the reliability, latency and bandwidth available (not least of which is interference on particular wavelengths) that unless you're doing a controlled laboratory test with your own controlled equipment, then quite frankly the results you get are going to be incredibly varied.
My suspicion is that the author of the article tested in a location where interference on the EDGE "channels" is low, and 3G channels suffered a much higher error rate because of interference. I've seen the same thing myself... though I'm lucky to live in an area where the 3G coverage is excellent and error rates are relatively low.
While there is a latency difference even in the lab between the two, it's not nearly so great as to cause serious pain. I have used my laptop tethered to my 3G phone often, and have no problems using it... but then there are other times when it's almost painful. EDGE on the other hand is slightly less painful than 3G at its worst, but EDGE is at least CONSISTENTLY painful across the entire usage spectrum. If you like your pain to be predictable, use EDGE:D
Seriously, though; my experience with 3G is really good. Perhaps that's partly due to the TYPE of traffic I use; mostly IMAP for my mail, and some light web browsing. The only time I really browse the web on my 3G device is really when I'm bored, waiting for something and reading news articles. Even then, when I do so I'm typically on "device-optimized" sites rather than the "full blown page". Mostly my news comes from Google News and the BBC... both of which work fantastically on my 3G device.
Only when I'm using my laptop tethered to my device do I really notice that 3G is slow relative to a good broadband connection... but even then I rarely use it much because I've normally got access to a WiFi connection in most of the places I use my laptop. Even if I don't, in the US we do have the advantage that there's usually a coffee shop relatively close that has free WiFi for their customers. As a result, I don't really use the tethering much, but it's nice when I need it. And when I need it, 3G beats EDGE every time.
I tend to agree with you. I've already pointed out around here that Apple have amply demonstrated their ability to create a very difficult to crack code (witness: iTunes video). The fact that it was so lightly encrypted leads me to the conclusion that it was probably just as you say; a hash to ensure database integrity.
I mean come on... no technical reason for this? Well, how about the number of times I've hosed and restored my iPod because I trashed the database through some stupid act (disconnecting without ejecting)? A database hash wouldn't fix these problems necessarily, but might make it a little less likely.
Hate to sound like an advertisement... but I installed iTerm (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/) and never looked back.
Of course, I never really had a problem with Terminal.app except that I like antialiased fonts and could never get it to work properly... and it lacked some features I liked from Gnome Terminal on my Linux boxes. With iTerm I get some nice looking windows that have proper color support in Bash (hey, I like my color-coded LS's) and work like a champ with everything I've thrown at them. The only thing I lack is X redirection, but if I have X up anyway I just use Gnome Terminal:)
Note that my comment about "engineered-in obsolescence" was targeted at Wintel machines... the W denoting "Windows". By citing Linux (which I would point out is not an option for many users because of their applications or support requirements) then you've shown you do not really understand the consumer laptop market. We're talking about a consumer laptop here.
I note that in your NewEgg link you've got a good list of machines. OK... but then drill down a little to get the same specs as the Macbook. Intel Core 2 Duo? OK... 3 laptops. Out of the three, you've got one recertified... since we're pricing a NEW Apple I'm afraid I have to discount that from the list. That leaves us with a Gateway with half the hard drive space (40Gb as opposed to 80), and a slower CPU... oh and no Bluetooth, and an Asus with a slower CPU... though many of the options are quite similar. Out of the two, I'd discount the Gateway immediately because it's... well... crap.
If we look at the Asus up against the Macbook then they do look quite similar... except for the 20% slower CPU which might be a big deal to some people. So OK... looking at the specs I see that's a Windows XP box. Oh dear... no modern operating system? OK, I jest a little; XP is a damn good OS but the simple fact remains that despite all its warts Vista is MORE capable. In order to match OSX with Vista you'd need to spend $300 OEM to upgrade to an equivalent Vista platform... then you've spent the same as you would on the laptop and you STILL have a 20% slower CPU.
If I exactly match the specs on the Macbook with what's on NewEgg today, I get this list which has some pretty nice laptops in it that cost 40% MORE than the Macbook. That was just going down through the laptop list and selecting Intel Core 2 Duo, 80Gb drive, 13.3" screen. I can do it a different way and get this list which lists some damned fine machines, but only one of them comes in cheaper than the Macbook. One. It's ALSO got a slower CPU and no Bluetooth... though it does have a nice big 160Gb drive and Vista Home Premium. This at least puts it in the running unless (like me) you use Bluetooth a LOT! I have mice, keyboards, phones... I'm sort of a Bluetooth freak.
Desktops I won't argue with. Apple doesn't really do the desktop market. Their forte is laptops, pro systems and media boxes. They got out of the desktop business years ago... closest they get to the desktop market is the iMac, but even that I would consider a laptop in a rather odd format rather than a true desktop.
I will concede that point, but the point remains that these days your average joe is much more likely to buy a laptop than a desktop even if it never leaves the house. I see this a lot; most of my friends and colleagues are buying laptops. When you look at that market, Apple is right there in the middle of that market making some damn good product at damned competitive prices. They're not the cheapest, but the last cheap laptop I bought has taught me a lesson in buying quality over price any day of the week. Sure, quality is probably relative... and may even be a perception thing rather than an analytical thing, but I can say from my colleagues and friends that those that own Apple computers tend to (a) be a lot happier with them and (b) tend to keep them a lot longer because they don't obsolete at the next service pack. How many people upgraded their computer when the memory minimum doubled with XP SP2?
Me, I'll continue to spend a little more and (in my opinion) get more for my buck. That's why I own a Volvo and a BMW. Sure, a Chevy Cobalt could do the same job, but since I don't want to replace my car every five years I'll buy something that's going to cost a little more but last longer. Plus, I prefer something that can do the job I want in some style:) Yes, I'm an Apple owner... and unless Apple really do something stupid with their product line I'll probably stay an Apple owner.
Because Apple doesn't produce a low-end laptop. At least, not a $500 laptop. The $500 is not equivalent to the Macbook; the Macbook is instead much more comparable to a low-end professional grade laptop rather than a consumer-grade device. It comes down to quality of components and construction.
Trust me, I've run the gamut of laptops in the last few years... from the Acer I bought my wife, through Dells, HPs and Apples. The Macbook in terms of components and construction quality rates right there with the Dell Latitude series. Now, if you price out a Dell Latitude with the exact options you'll get with the Macbook, then it comes out a wash... or even more than the Macbook. Oh and be careful, apparently if you select Vista then it gives you a warning about not being compatible with the Bluetooth module... I mean WTF? As a consumer I shouldn't have to deal with that kind of crap.
BTW, the iBook has been out of production for years. I know, pedantic point but if you spec out the exact same hardware in a Macbook as you would get in a COMPARABLE machine, then you'll find the price differential to be minimal.
And no, I don't consider Acer's $500 laptops to be comparable. Even besides my problems (which you'd think would be unlikely after THREE KEYBOARDS and TWO SYSTEM BOARDS) just a brief rundown of the components and construction quality show a lot of cut corners and a lot of cost reduction. Realistically, even if you're lucky enough to get an Acer that lasts well enough then I would say you'll get 1, maybe 2 years of use out of it before you need to replace it. The Macbook and Macbook Pro... if the older laptops are anything to go by you'll get at least 4 to 5 years out of it before you need to upgrade it. Hell, there are friends of mine with 4 year old iBooks that are happily running Tiger (the latest released OSX) and see no need to upgrade any time soon. Sure, they're not perfect and are showing their age (try doing some Photoshop work on those beasties!) but the don't have the same "engineered-in obsolescence" that Wintel manufacturers seem to love.
You're entitled to your opinion, as am I... but when I say I did a lot of research and a lot of study before I bought my Macbook Pro, that included price comparisons. This is my first Apple laptop and I will tell you that despite also having a nice pro-grade HP Laptop from work (NC6320), it's still my personal favorite... and will also not be my last Mac laptop.
I bought an Acer laptop for my wife, and bought myself a Macbook Pro (first generation) about two months later. Guess which one's lasting better despite being lugged around a lot more, used a lot more and generally abused a lot more. The Acer has been through three keyboards and two system boards in its short life, and already the power connector is going bad. This despite the fact that the Acer rarely leaves the house and my wife takes very good care of it.
Despite what I had hoped when I bought it, you DO get what you pay for with laptops. Her next laptop in the new year will be a Macbook; I ain't doing that "cheap laptop" thing again.
If you're looking at desktops, then the problem is a lack of a midrange box. It's either the iMac/Mac Mini (both of which I consider similar in terms of market, just the iMac has a monitor installed) or the Mac Pro. The first is rather limited in expandability and performance, the latter is overkill. Even the high-end iMacs don't appeal to many because they have an integrated monitor that (a) may not be needed by people who already have a monitor and (b) go obsolete with the system.
Now, if you're pricing laptops (which is a market in which Apple excels), then the prices are VERY comparable with an identical machine from Dell or HP. Acer? I bought one of those and won't again. With laptops from Apple you also get a great quality and supported product. I have a Macbook Pro that I think is just about the best laptop I've ever owned. Even if I were to run Vista on it (which it does great with, by the way) I would've bought this laptop over a Dell or HP simply because of the quality of construction, the quality of materials and the general grace with which the system itself works (goodbye, BIOS!!!)
Now, YMMV... but to me my next laptop purchase will be a Mac as well simply because I've become sold on the product line. Some of my friends have also bought Macs since I did and they had a chance to check it out... not a single one of them wants to go back to an HP or Dell.
Heh... probably should've been a bit more specific in my instructions, but my kids were yelling at one another an I got distracted:)
Anyway, with iTunes even, once you have the iPod_Control folder visible, you can then just do an "import from folder", select that folder and let it do its thing. When it's done, all your songs are neatly arranged in folders by artist on your PC's hard drive and voila. It makes these folders using the ID3 tag info.
I know what you mean though about this not going down with open source (been a Linux geek since early 1.0 days... actually pre that...) but I DO understand Apple's motivations as well.
Contrary to the beliefs of some here though, I find myself doubting this is a move to exclude third party tools, but rather a safeguard against database corruption on large 160Gb libraries. A self-check hash makes a lot of sense when your database gets that large, particularly in a portable device where corruption is quite likely. I think it was just some engineer's idea for something in the database that didn't extend to thinking about the impact on others. Software engineers do that often; I know, I used to be one:D
I won't try to justify it; I think it sucks, too... but there are other reasons than "lockout" to add a database hash. Apple has already demonstrated that it can put ridiculous levels of protection on data (iTunes Video is a prime example), but in this case they chose to add a simple hash. Just because they didn't document and release the algorithm doesn't mean it was done with the intent of locking out competing tools. It could have just as easily been for database consistency checks, which is quite valuable on a database of the size required to support 160Gb and greater of music.
Remember, Apple controls the product end-to-end. They produce a tool that's designed to work with a particular device. They have no reason to support the attempts of third parties to replace that tool, but this hash doesn't seem like a particularly harsh way to lock out these attempts. It just seems to me to be a rather thoughtless change to a database format made by an engineer who thought it would be a good idea but didn't really think through the ramifications upon third party tools, simply because it never occurred to him/her.
Apple don't claim compatibility with third party tools for the iPod, they have no moral or legal right to do so. However, if they REALLY wanted to lock out the iPod from third parties I have to imagine that they easily could given their history with media. However, even with this hash, the iPod itself is still relatively open (as near as we can tell so far). The hash will be cracked; I have faith in that. Or Apple will actually release the algorithm to developers. I think the former's more likely.
To paraphrase; don't ascribe to malice what may just as easily be ascribed to ignorance.
All of which is precisely why iTunes (and Apple products in general) are not for you. They're for people who don't know what cdparanoia or LAME are, don't want to care about the difference between and MMC and SD card, and don't really want to worry about switching cards in and out of a multi-card reader or writer. I am happy doing all these myself, but my wife (for example) just wants to plug her iPod into her computer and have it worry about the fine details of getting her music from her PC to her iPod. When she wants to rip a CD, she wants to put a CD in and either have a dialog box pop up and say "Do you want to rip this to your iTunes library?" or go to a menu option to accomplish the same.
The number of tech support questions my wife asks me have dropped precipitously since I bought her a Nano and moved her to iTunes. Sure, iTunes for Windows sucks, but it'll do until we can justify the cost of buying her a Macbook...
Oh yeah, and in reference to the cost of Apple equipment:
When I went shopping for a new laptop, I had a set of requirements that I needed to fill. My choices came down to a Macbook Pro, a Dell or an HP. I wanted a pro-grade laptop, not consumer grade because I've had plenty of issues with consumer grade laptops in my laptop backpack (Acers last me a year...). Anyway, when I spec'd out precisely what I needed, the cost differential between a Macbook Pro and an equivalent Dell was less than $100. On a > $2000 investment, $100 is a drop in the ocean. The equivalent HP was actually MORE expensive than the MBP.
To me, the $100 premium over the Dell was worth it to have one more OS to play with. I've been an OS geek for years, running the gamut of OS/2, BEOS, Linux and others as well as Windows and I figured that since this was an Intel-based laptop I could have the flexibility. I decided I would pay that premium to have OSX to play with, and if I didn't like it or couldn't use it then there was nothing stopping me from putting Linux or Windows on the same hardware (or both). As it turned out, OSX worked for me. I added Parallels for virtualization and now there's no way I'd consider returning to a solely Linux or solely Windows environment to get real work done.
The reality is that Apple just doesn't produce a mid range Mac that the average geek might like. They sell great laptops, but their desktop line has a huge hole in it. I know many people who would happily buy a Mac if there was one available that sat between the iMac and the Mac Pro. The iMac is just not expandable or flexible, and its all-in-one design means that you have a huge investment in a monitor as well as a computer that will be disposed of when obsolete. The Mac Pro is really expandable and flexible, but is also really expensive. There's no mid-range computer that will work with existing monitors and existing hardware... not really. And the Mac Mini? That's WAY too low end for most people... but is actually a damned good little computer in my opinion.
I do Windows and Linux for a living. I'm an MCSE and a VCP (VMWare) and have a number of certifications that have long since lapsed (Cisco, etc.). Sure, certs don't mean much really, but they are a sign that I am a professional technical person and have been for some time.
I use a Mac. At least, for my own PC I use a Mac. Why? Because it does just exactly what I need it to do, and I don't have to think about *how* to do it before I start unless I want to. Typically, my working set of applications includes a web browser, email, Pages and Numbers, iTunes (to keep my Podcasts synced) and iRatchet for my own business invoicing. I rarely need to worry about how I need to get something done, it's all extremely intuitive. If I want, I can crank up iTerm (I much prefer it to Terminal.app), get into a UNIX shell and use normal UNIX tools to get something done like parsing a text file, SSHing to a server or whatever.
Add in Quicksilver and I've got a desktop that really works the way I think. That's ONE third party shell app to make it work the way I want it to work, not a dozen disparate apps with several overlaps in functionality to do the same.
I have used many Linux desktops, though most Linux boxes I work with don't have GUIs installed... and while I do like them I find them a little too "geeky" for my taste. Yeah, ironic coming from a self-professed geek. However, I find that I spend a lot more time thinking about how to solve a particular problem instead of just getting my work done. In my Mac OS, my major apps start when I boot. I sleep the laptop, I never shut it down unless a system update has occurred. When I open my laptop, I jump to the app I need and start working. I don't have to think about it, I don't have to worry about it... just get my stuff done and get it over and done with.
Don't even get me started on the hell that is Windows Vista. My work laptop has had that for 8 months now and I still hate it.
Macs aren't for everyone though. OSX obfuscates almost all of the internals in such a way that many technical people who are by nature control freaks are going to be annoyed that they can't see what's happening "under the hood". This is just like the problem most tech people have with iTunes: Forget the way you want it to work, just focus on the job at hand (managing music and playlists) and don't sweat the small stuff. That's a paradigm shift away from either Linux or Windows. Linux makes it great for the person who wants fine control over everything their computer does, and Windows tries to fall somewhere between Linux and OSX.
When I first shifted to OSX it took a shift in my thinking before I stopped getting frustrated with it. However, now that I've been using it for a while I find that my workflow is massively improved, and I spend a lot less time tinkering with it than getting real work done.
Of course, I still have XP in a Parallels box on my Macbook Pro; there are still one or two Windows apps that I need to use on occasion that have no Mac alternative (I do a lot of music in Modplug Tracker and can't find anything comparable in OSX), but with the recent Coherence improvements in Parallels it's like it's really a Mac application that has XP-style window decoration. No worse than running a KDE app on a Gnome desktop or vice versa.
You're probably right. If they wanted to encrypt it, Apple has already demonstrated that they can encrypt a file with ridiculously secure codecs (iTMS video, anyone?). I suspect that either this hash will be cracked within a couple of weeks or it'll become available from an "unofficial" internal source within days.
I hate to sound like a fanboy here (yes, I own a Mac and an iPod), but you can copy your files off an iPod. I've done it a number of times. It's not trivial and sort of relies on your ID3 tags being up to date and accurate but it can be done.
Basically, you've got to set your iPod to disk usage (which I do anyway since I also use my iPod to hold a copy of my important documents) then set your file management utility to show hidden files. The files have odd names, but once you can see them then you can use whatever tool you like to import them. That's how I recovered my 50Gb music library after my old Windows laptop was stolen. My only copy; go figure. I still had my iPod so I did this using Finder and (I'm sorry to say) iTunes to reimport all my music to a new library on my Macbook Pro. I then reformatted my iPod, set to sync with the new library and I was good to go. I had a handful of songs that had screwed up names because of crappy ID3 tagging (my fault!) but that was easily and quickly remedied.
Of course, I've since changed things up a little more to store the library on an external drive instead of on my rapidly filling laptop hard drive (100Gb doesn't go near as far as it used to thanks to GarageBand:D ) which I keep safe and "consolidate iTunes Library" periodically when I've added tunes to the laptop.
Now, back on topic I do find this move rather onerous. I definitely see why people might dislike iTunes even though I myself find it works just great for me and my music management requirements. The locking out of Linux users (I'm also one; I have a number of Linux boxes at home, too) I find extremely distasteful and even I as the Mac owner in my house have to admit that I think iTunes for Windows blows (though my wife uses it for managing her iPod Nano; it's easier than her asking me for support on a third party application). I really hope that people figure out the hash scheme, I for one prefer a device that's open. If the hash isn't figured out and Apple don't give on this new action of theirs then I for one will not be buying an iPod when my 80Gb 5G dies.
Why did I buy an iPod in the first place? Because at the time it had the best interface for managing music on a small screen in a portable device. The click-wheel was an inspired piece of engineering and the interface is incredibly simple and intuitive. I appreciated that, particularly in a device I didn't necessarily want to have to hold, click buttons and watch the screen all the time. However, in the time since the iPod's release, others have created great devices with good interfaces. While I often find them to be overwhelming because of too many "cutesy" additions and animations that become distracting... but looking at the new iPod interface it looks like Apple's starting to fall into the same trap of making the interface "shiny" instead of improving things. In fact, when I played with an iPod Classic the other day at the Apple Store I was not impressed; the interface is noticeably slower than my 5G. Sure, the 160Gb drive would be nice, but at the cost of losing some of my interface "flow" that I have become accustomed to I'm not happy about it.
Maybe the next gen devices will be better... but I fear that the iPod Touch is the route of the future. As cute as that is, it's FAR too much "shiny" for my tastes, particularly in a device I rarely actually look at (most of the time my iPod is strapped to my arm while I work out on "shuffle" mode).
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> Asians eat carbs with almost every meal (rice, noodles). They are thinner than us. End of story.
Have you been into the Asian countries? First of all, the portions of carb-rich food are much smaller in those countries than they are here... we eat carbs to excess. Second, Asians walk one hell of a lot more than we do. Their cities are all built around walking, ours are built around cars. We drive everywhere; they walk.
My experiences, having lived in a number of countries in my life is that even in Western Europe where they share many of the same diet trends as the US, obesity is much lower simply because they don't drive nearly as much. When I lived in East London I owned a car that I maybe drove 3-5,000 miles in a year. Here in the US I have to drive 20,000 miles a year simply because everything is built around cars, the public transport in most US cities is worthless and even once within the cities there's rarely an area really built around walking.
Yes, diets are different in other cultures, but to say that cutting carbs doesn't cause people to lose weight is patently and obviously false. I myself cut carbs and lost weight, even before I started exercising more. Our lifestyle requires us to eat differently than Asian cultures because we are more sedentary. To compare our diets is incongruous without having all the facts. If we walked as much as Asian cultures do, we would require more carbs to power that walking. As it is, we don't... and we don't.
I have to say I concur, and had a similar experience to you. I had been overweight for some time, though I was not what I considered morbidly obese. I actually went on a low-carb diet simply because I liked the way it made me feel; I found that keeping the carbs low at lunch actually meant that I didn't get sleepy or tired in the afternoon like I had been doing... I had more energy... and as I started paying more attention to what I ate I found that I needed to eat less in order to feel full.
:)
At the same time I started a moderate exercise program... a couple of times a week I'd go to a gym and do some basic cardio, do some light weight training... maybe go swimming... whatever I felt like doing that day. Pretty rapidly, I lost about 60 pounds in probably 7 or 8 months... the first 30 I lost in the first 90 days and it actually freaked me out a little so I started tempering my diet more.
Now I'm at the same weight I was when I was 18, and though I can't claim my body is in the same good shape (I'm in my mid 30's... a little slack around the middle is REALLY tough to move) but I still eat reasonably healthy, I exercise two or three times a week and I've never felt better. In fact, I found I even think better and can concentrate more easily.
Note that I also eat the foods I LIKE to eat. Cutting the carbs meant cutting out a lot of sugary and starchy stuff, but nothing I miss. Sometimes I crave bread, and the smell of baking bread will make my mouth water... but nothing a little self control can't fix. Instead I eat meat and non-starchy vegetables... and I love it. And I don't eat pre-prepared frozen meals... ever. I either cook at home or I go to halfway decent restaurants where I know they don't use frozen foods... where they take the time to prepare the food. Yes, sometimes a quick lunch from Taco Bell sounds tempting, and would be cheaper... but I'd rather walk a little further (yes, walk!) and pay a little more now rather than paying a fortune for healthcare as I get older.
The interesting irony is that I pay significantly less in healthcare than most of my peers, I rarely get sick for more than a day... and hell, out of all my peers I seem to be one of the few with all my own hair! To me, taking care of oneself now is making an investment in your own future. Now all I've got to do is worry about the 401K I didn't care about in my 20's because I didn't honestly think I'd survive even this long
Ah, but I'm not. I'm drawing your "magical line" between things considered as a convenience and a sop to the requirements of human beings as a whole, and a tool that allows you to do your job.
Let's presume for an example that you work in a factory or warehouse driving a forklift. Said forklift is your corporate-owned tool... it is not your personal toy to go careening around the parking lot at a moment's notice because you're bored.
The fact is that the things you cite are precisely those things required to ensure that employees continue to work in a particular environment, they are environmental concerns... not job concerns. The laptop or desktop computer is a tool to get the job done, nothing more and should be treated as such. You know what I do when I want to use a computer for games? I have my own laptop. Sometimes my boss is cool if I have it sitting on my desk at work... sometimes I take it to a local Panera at lunchtime and surf the web while I eat. I save that for my personal stuff, and I do business on my work laptop.
Is it a pain carrying two laptops around? Not really. The furthest I ever carry them is between my office and my car, and then my car to my house. Even then, my work laptop normally sits right inside the door of my house until I head to work the next day unless I have a need to dial in (maybe one week in six).
I didn't draw your "magical line", the law draws that line for you. The work provided laptop is a tool to get a job done. If you don't need it, you don't get it. If you don't need to play games for a living, then the corporation doesn't need to let you do so.
Besides, with a game you're talking about uncontrolled and un-certified software that may cause issues with the software on your laptop that's required to actually get your job done. It may even cause enough problems that it would require a rebuild of your machine... that's a cost to the corporation that you work for and one that is a cost directly attributable to your usage of the machine. That's why I feel corporations should not allow this arbitrary software on their desktops or laptops.
If you happen to work for a company that allows you to use their assets for your own personal enjoyment, power to you. This is an example of small company thinking that becomes a liability rapidly as a company grows. Of course, if you're spending all your time playing games, you're not exactly contributing to the bottom line, are you? Me, I'd rather work in a place where the focus during the work day is on getting the job done... thereby increasing the income or efficiency of the corporation as a whole and perhaps increasing my odds of still having a job by the end of the day. Don't kid yourself; there's no job security these days, and the best way you can ensure you might still have a job by tomorrow is to just focus on doing your job today.
I sound old... I'm not. I just have priorities and feel that except in very narrowly defined circumstances, a Corporate-owned tool should be used only for Corporate business. Of course, this is a double-edged sword and perhaps encourages people using these tools to work a 40-hour week or whatever... that's actually a bargain a corporation is happy to deal with simply because working more than a 40 hour week is only hurting you (presuming you're salaried)... it doesn't really make a difference to the corporation as a whole unless you happen to be a one-man team. Again, small company thinking.
How about you not use Corporate owned tools for your games... maybe... I don't know... buy a portable game box?
I have a backpack I carry my laptop in. In one of the pockets of said backpack is a Nintendo DS with about a dozen games. If I feel the need to release a little stress, I just open the DS which then resumes wherever I was last time I played it... voila... I have games.
My boss doesn't mind this so long as I (a) don't disturb my colleagues and (b) don't do it to the detriment of my job.
You don't need AoE or any other game on your corporate-provided and owned tools. You need to do your job with them... anything beyond that is your own personal stuff and therefore should be RUN on your own personal stuff.
Ergo, if you have to manage laptops, do not allow the user to install software and they can't install VMWare.
/user:adminaccount" and I can connect to the shares with my admin privileges. My desktop group grants me that because of my job... all it took was for me to sign that "privileged operations" agreement that also allowed me VMware Server on my laptop.
This isn't rocket science, really. You just have to prioritize what you want to do, and provide the tools your users need without giving them the keys to the kingdom.
I personally do not manage PC's any more... I moved on to the server side of the house but let me relate to you how things work where I work.
I have a laptop, and I use it since I'm on-call one week in 6. I do not have admin rights to my laptop... in fact I'm as locked down a user as everyone else is. However, despite my initial bad feeling about this, I have had few if any problems. Quite simply, our desktop support team uses SMS to distribute updates and software to the end user in a packaged form. That way, we can control who has what software simply because some of them require passwords to install which are requested on an ad-hoc basis. Every piece of software I need to do my job including software like Putty is out there under "Run Advertised Programs". I just click the software I need, click install and within a minute or two my software's installed even if I'm on a VPN.
What about tools like VMWare Server? Well, we have that in RAP as well... but that's strictly limited to people who sign an agreement with the desktop group about responsible behavior, and we don't build arbitrary XP boxes. VM's built on our systems are audited by a script pushed by group policy, so the desktop group can spot an arbitrary XP desktop a mile off. Yes, they have alerts... yes, those logs are put in a database... yes, in the event that I put arbitrary OSs on my system I could be disciplined by HR by the terms of the agreement I signed with my desktop folks.
So what about admin tools I need? OK... ever used Citrix? We have a section of our farm dedicated to our UNIX, SQL and Windows admins that provides all those tools for us to use in an admin job; Windows admin tools and so forth. This also has the advantage that our performance of admin tasks even on a slow VPN can be similar to working at the office.
Sure, I'm not totally locked down... and I have a different account in the Active Directory that I use to authenticate to servers; a so-called Admin account. If I want to connect to a share with admin privileges all I need is a command prompt and a "net use \\server
Sound like a bit of a pain, but trust me... I don't want to be troubleshooting desktop problems all the time. I want to focus on my job; keeping the lights on in the datacenter. If my laptop shoots crap, I want to be able to pick up the phone and have someone else responsible for my not being able to do my job... or provide me an alternate way to get my job done. If I had admin rights to my laptop, I'd probably fix it myself... and the one time I've had problems with my laptop I actually had a good idea of the problem. But you know what? Because of that I was able to pick up the phone, call our desktop folks, explain precisely what the problem was and they were able to fix it within minutes because no troubleshooting was required... and they trust me since I'm also a professional Windows guy.
See, in my opinion the people who cry about not having admin rights to their machines are the same people who sit in the basement and refuse to talk to anyone else. Me, I'd rather have my rights taken away to my laptop so I can just focus on MY job... not someone else's. It makes me more productive, and allows me to defer responsibility when stuff goes wrong with my laptop. Hell, even when I ordered upgraded RAM I let the desktop folks do it... I put components in servers every other day, but I figured that I have better things to do with my time than figure out where all the screws are to get to
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=295444 was the link I used. Be aware this is specifically for the GSM Hermes... the CDMA version (can't remember the name) will need a different ROM I believe. Search around on the site and you should find it.
HTH.
Seconded on the switching out of the ROM. I did that on my HTC TyTN (original) and never looked back. The so-called "Vanilla cooked WM6 ROM" did away with the crap, and did away with my problems that I'd had with the device (bar the hardware issues I still have). It gave the device a new lease of life and has actually become an extremely productive device for me.
Well, stock WM6 contains a lot of crud. The problem is the carrier's implementations of WM6 that really suck. Even HTC puts a bunch of crud in the system that makes it craptastic in a hurry.
I have an HTC TyTN. It's actually a Cingular 8525 as that was the lowest cost variant I could buy unlocked at the time... and it's been great. Of course, it doesn't run Cingular's (or AT&T's) craptastic WM6 variant with all their crud installed. I ran the WM5 that came with it for all of two months, then got tired of constantly rebooting my phone, dealing with the same memory issues that you have and so forth... then I downloaded a "cooked" WM6 from xda-developers.com and installed. Since then, my problems all vanished. The ROM I downloaded is referred to as the "vanilla" cooked WM6 ROM. It freed up local storage, sped up my system and made it an incredibly reliable platform.
Is it without flaws? No, but neither is my best friend's iPhone... and his is as vanilla a they come... no hacks or cracks. However, I can honestly say that today my problems are hardware related, not software. I have the dreaded "white screen" so common to the TyTN... which is fixed by turning the screen off and pressing on a few areas of the case. I hate doing it, but it works. Software-wise I only have issues with how long the Pictures and Videos app takes to thumbnail all the pictures on my micro-SD card (I wish it would just store the damn thumbnails instead of generating them every time). Other than that, no more memory issues, no more problems.
No, this isn't a good solution; to be honest I almost hate the fact that I had to get so down and dirty geeky with the device before I could make it truly usable. However, the problem I don't ascribe to WM6... I ascribe the problems I had to Cingular (now AT&T) putting too much crap on the device and making the OS extremely unstable.
And FYI, I'm not a Microsoft apologist either. I hate Windows (although it pays my bills)... my choice of personal machine is a Macbook Pro which has only seen Windows Vista once in a virtual machine for about an hour before I got tired of it running my CPU hot. I think WM6 can be a decent platform without the crud that third parties fill it with.
I waited over the weekend to upgrade my Macbook Pro (first gen 15") to Leopard. And you know what? I'm happy I did it.
I did the upgrade on Monday night after using Carbon Copy Cloner to take a snapshot of my machine. And yes, to Windows folks that was a bootable image; I could reboot to my external USB drive if I wanted and CCC my machine back again... but I didn't have to.
So how did the upgrade process itself go? I inserted the Leopard DVD, clicked the icon to upgrade, waited for the reboot, clicked once and walked away to watch Mythbusters with my kids. By the time I came back upstairs to my laptop, I had a Leopard logon screen.
So I logged on to "survey the damage". You know what? I was impressed. Here are my first impressions:
1. 3rd Party Applications: The Missing Sync is broken. I knew that and expected that since they are notorious for lacking behind Apple updates. No worries, I don't really NEED it... sure it's nice, but it's not a requirement. Parallels worked, but networking was broken. A quick reinstall fixed that. Yahoo Messenger was busted out of the box, but I had Version 3 Beta 1... upgraded to the latest and voila, we're chatting with friends. My ancient copy of Photoshop 7 gave it up for the team. Even a reinstall wouldn't fix it. No problem, I have Aperture as well and rarely use Photoshop any more. Uninstalled, no worries. So out of all my apps, I had one casualty and a few "non-life threatening injuries". That's much better than my Vista experience.
2. Apple Applications: My first launch of Mail resulted in a "database upgrade" follwed by an immediate failure and Mail disappeared without so much as an error message. I launched it again and it's been fine since. I might delete my account and re-sync it... I love IMAP. Address Book and iCal are both greatly improved (as is Mail) and are actually useful tools now instead of toys. I see huge improvements here. Finder is significantly better, and though I do find the "embossed icons" to be a step backward in readability, the general improvements vastly improve the experience. Besides, I have faith this will be fixed either with a patch or a third-party hack. Everything else I've not really played with much.
3. General Usability: Wow. That's all I can say. The improvements over even the latest Tiger release are impressive. Although synthetic benchmarks show a very slight speed decrease on this platform, the general "feel" of the OS is significantly improved. Application launch times, app switching and generally USING the operating system make it feel like the system's actually been significantly improved. It's noticeable, and I have not really noticed any speed decreases at all apart from still seeming slow when I have my XP VM running in Parallels (rarely). At the end of the day, I get the impression that Leopard is faster, even if that's not backed up by the benchmarks. If the operating itself feels better, who cares what the benchmarks say anyway?
4. Other Notes: Wake from sleep is significantly improved. It used to be that I would open the lid of my laptop and I'd end up waiting for up to 15 seconds for a logon prompt. Now, the prompt is there within moments of me opening the lid. This significantly improves usefulness for me. Also, I thought that the "Coverflow" browsing would be a toy I'd bore of quickly. Quite the opposite... I've found it incredibly useful for going through busy and full folders so I can locate documents incredibly quickly. A+ on that feature!
5. The Bad: So far as I said, the only things I'll take issue with are the icons (embossed instead of clear icons) and a few things that I think need a little more work. The Stacks function... yuck. I don't like Stacks... I thought I would find it useful but it's just ugly. Not impressed, but I removed the default Documents and Application stacks from my dock... I'll use Quicksilver TYVM. Also, I've had one "grey curtains" failure (Mac owners know what I'm talking about) just a day after installation, but nothing since. It could well ha
I'd say it's more akin to Windows Vista dropping support for Windows NT 4 for PowerPC.
Quite simply put, OS9 and before were written for a non-primary architecture for Apple; they've already stated that their way forward is going to be x86 architecture. As a result, they're dropping support for an environment that ran on a completely different architecture and are moving forward with their plans to move completely to the x86 architecture.
Sure, Rosetta's still in there for the few PPC only apps left under OSX, but running OS9 under Rosetta was really never even an option (a) for performance reasons and (b) because Apple really wanted to get rid of that ancient legacy.
OS9 was OK as an OS, but it was really only a stopgap until OSX was ready. OS8 was awful, buggy and crash prone. A totally new OS should've come out of Apple much sooner than OSX, but the problem was a simple lack of management at Apple.
The problem with cellular data technologies is that a lot depends on the implementation. There are so many factors involved in the reliability, latency and bandwidth available (not least of which is interference on particular wavelengths) that unless you're doing a controlled laboratory test with your own controlled equipment, then quite frankly the results you get are going to be incredibly varied.
:D
My suspicion is that the author of the article tested in a location where interference on the EDGE "channels" is low, and 3G channels suffered a much higher error rate because of interference. I've seen the same thing myself... though I'm lucky to live in an area where the 3G coverage is excellent and error rates are relatively low.
While there is a latency difference even in the lab between the two, it's not nearly so great as to cause serious pain. I have used my laptop tethered to my 3G phone often, and have no problems using it... but then there are other times when it's almost painful. EDGE on the other hand is slightly less painful than 3G at its worst, but EDGE is at least CONSISTENTLY painful across the entire usage spectrum. If you like your pain to be predictable, use EDGE
Seriously, though; my experience with 3G is really good. Perhaps that's partly due to the TYPE of traffic I use; mostly IMAP for my mail, and some light web browsing. The only time I really browse the web on my 3G device is really when I'm bored, waiting for something and reading news articles. Even then, when I do so I'm typically on "device-optimized" sites rather than the "full blown page". Mostly my news comes from Google News and the BBC... both of which work fantastically on my 3G device.
Only when I'm using my laptop tethered to my device do I really notice that 3G is slow relative to a good broadband connection... but even then I rarely use it much because I've normally got access to a WiFi connection in most of the places I use my laptop. Even if I don't, in the US we do have the advantage that there's usually a coffee shop relatively close that has free WiFi for their customers. As a result, I don't really use the tethering much, but it's nice when I need it. And when I need it, 3G beats EDGE every time.
The whole digestive system is run by Microsoft in general; it takes in some great "food", strips out all the good stuff and produces only shit.
I tend to agree with you. I've already pointed out around here that Apple have amply demonstrated their ability to create a very difficult to crack code (witness: iTunes video). The fact that it was so lightly encrypted leads me to the conclusion that it was probably just as you say; a hash to ensure database integrity.
I mean come on... no technical reason for this? Well, how about the number of times I've hosed and restored my iPod because I trashed the database through some stupid act (disconnecting without ejecting)? A database hash wouldn't fix these problems necessarily, but might make it a little less likely.
Hate to sound like an advertisement... but I installed iTerm (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/) and never looked back.
:)
Of course, I never really had a problem with Terminal.app except that I like antialiased fonts and could never get it to work properly... and it lacked some features I liked from Gnome Terminal on my Linux boxes. With iTerm I get some nice looking windows that have proper color support in Bash (hey, I like my color-coded LS's) and work like a champ with everything I've thrown at them. The only thing I lack is X redirection, but if I have X up anyway I just use Gnome Terminal
Note that my comment about "engineered-in obsolescence" was targeted at Wintel machines... the W denoting "Windows". By citing Linux (which I would point out is not an option for many users because of their applications or support requirements) then you've shown you do not really understand the consumer laptop market. We're talking about a consumer laptop here.
:) Yes, I'm an Apple owner... and unless Apple really do something stupid with their product line I'll probably stay an Apple owner.
I note that in your NewEgg link you've got a good list of machines. OK... but then drill down a little to get the same specs as the Macbook. Intel Core 2 Duo? OK... 3 laptops. Out of the three, you've got one recertified... since we're pricing a NEW Apple I'm afraid I have to discount that from the list. That leaves us with a Gateway with half the hard drive space (40Gb as opposed to 80), and a slower CPU... oh and no Bluetooth, and an Asus with a slower CPU... though many of the options are quite similar. Out of the two, I'd discount the Gateway immediately because it's... well... crap.
If we look at the Asus up against the Macbook then they do look quite similar... except for the 20% slower CPU which might be a big deal to some people. So OK... looking at the specs I see that's a Windows XP box. Oh dear... no modern operating system? OK, I jest a little; XP is a damn good OS but the simple fact remains that despite all its warts Vista is MORE capable. In order to match OSX with Vista you'd need to spend $300 OEM to upgrade to an equivalent Vista platform... then you've spent the same as you would on the laptop and you STILL have a 20% slower CPU.
If I exactly match the specs on the Macbook with what's on NewEgg today, I get this list which has some pretty nice laptops in it that cost 40% MORE than the Macbook. That was just going down through the laptop list and selecting Intel Core 2 Duo, 80Gb drive, 13.3" screen. I can do it a different way and get this list which lists some damned fine machines, but only one of them comes in cheaper than the Macbook. One. It's ALSO got a slower CPU and no Bluetooth... though it does have a nice big 160Gb drive and Vista Home Premium. This at least puts it in the running unless (like me) you use Bluetooth a LOT! I have mice, keyboards, phones... I'm sort of a Bluetooth freak.
Desktops I won't argue with. Apple doesn't really do the desktop market. Their forte is laptops, pro systems and media boxes. They got out of the desktop business years ago... closest they get to the desktop market is the iMac, but even that I would consider a laptop in a rather odd format rather than a true desktop.
I will concede that point, but the point remains that these days your average joe is much more likely to buy a laptop than a desktop even if it never leaves the house. I see this a lot; most of my friends and colleagues are buying laptops. When you look at that market, Apple is right there in the middle of that market making some damn good product at damned competitive prices. They're not the cheapest, but the last cheap laptop I bought has taught me a lesson in buying quality over price any day of the week. Sure, quality is probably relative... and may even be a perception thing rather than an analytical thing, but I can say from my colleagues and friends that those that own Apple computers tend to (a) be a lot happier with them and (b) tend to keep them a lot longer because they don't obsolete at the next service pack. How many people upgraded their computer when the memory minimum doubled with XP SP2?
Me, I'll continue to spend a little more and (in my opinion) get more for my buck. That's why I own a Volvo and a BMW. Sure, a Chevy Cobalt could do the same job, but since I don't want to replace my car every five years I'll buy something that's going to cost a little more but last longer. Plus, I prefer something that can do the job I want in some style
Because Apple doesn't produce a low-end laptop. At least, not a $500 laptop. The $500 is not equivalent to the Macbook; the Macbook is instead much more comparable to a low-end professional grade laptop rather than a consumer-grade device. It comes down to quality of components and construction.
Trust me, I've run the gamut of laptops in the last few years... from the Acer I bought my wife, through Dells, HPs and Apples. The Macbook in terms of components and construction quality rates right there with the Dell Latitude series. Now, if you price out a Dell Latitude with the exact options you'll get with the Macbook, then it comes out a wash... or even more than the Macbook. Oh and be careful, apparently if you select Vista then it gives you a warning about not being compatible with the Bluetooth module... I mean WTF? As a consumer I shouldn't have to deal with that kind of crap.
BTW, the iBook has been out of production for years. I know, pedantic point but if you spec out the exact same hardware in a Macbook as you would get in a COMPARABLE machine, then you'll find the price differential to be minimal.
And no, I don't consider Acer's $500 laptops to be comparable. Even besides my problems (which you'd think would be unlikely after THREE KEYBOARDS and TWO SYSTEM BOARDS) just a brief rundown of the components and construction quality show a lot of cut corners and a lot of cost reduction. Realistically, even if you're lucky enough to get an Acer that lasts well enough then I would say you'll get 1, maybe 2 years of use out of it before you need to replace it. The Macbook and Macbook Pro... if the older laptops are anything to go by you'll get at least 4 to 5 years out of it before you need to upgrade it. Hell, there are friends of mine with 4 year old iBooks that are happily running Tiger (the latest released OSX) and see no need to upgrade any time soon. Sure, they're not perfect and are showing their age (try doing some Photoshop work on those beasties!) but the don't have the same "engineered-in obsolescence" that Wintel manufacturers seem to love.
You're entitled to your opinion, as am I... but when I say I did a lot of research and a lot of study before I bought my Macbook Pro, that included price comparisons. This is my first Apple laptop and I will tell you that despite also having a nice pro-grade HP Laptop from work (NC6320), it's still my personal favorite... and will also not be my last Mac laptop.
And how long will you be using those two Acers?
I bought an Acer laptop for my wife, and bought myself a Macbook Pro (first generation) about two months later. Guess which one's lasting better despite being lugged around a lot more, used a lot more and generally abused a lot more. The Acer has been through three keyboards and two system boards in its short life, and already the power connector is going bad. This despite the fact that the Acer rarely leaves the house and my wife takes very good care of it.
Despite what I had hoped when I bought it, you DO get what you pay for with laptops. Her next laptop in the new year will be a Macbook; I ain't doing that "cheap laptop" thing again.
If you're looking at desktops, then the problem is a lack of a midrange box. It's either the iMac/Mac Mini (both of which I consider similar in terms of market, just the iMac has a monitor installed) or the Mac Pro. The first is rather limited in expandability and performance, the latter is overkill. Even the high-end iMacs don't appeal to many because they have an integrated monitor that (a) may not be needed by people who already have a monitor and (b) go obsolete with the system.
Now, if you're pricing laptops (which is a market in which Apple excels), then the prices are VERY comparable with an identical machine from Dell or HP. Acer? I bought one of those and won't again. With laptops from Apple you also get a great quality and supported product. I have a Macbook Pro that I think is just about the best laptop I've ever owned. Even if I were to run Vista on it (which it does great with, by the way) I would've bought this laptop over a Dell or HP simply because of the quality of construction, the quality of materials and the general grace with which the system itself works (goodbye, BIOS!!!)
Now, YMMV... but to me my next laptop purchase will be a Mac as well simply because I've become sold on the product line. Some of my friends have also bought Macs since I did and they had a chance to check it out... not a single one of them wants to go back to an HP or Dell.
Heh... probably should've been a bit more specific in my instructions, but my kids were yelling at one another an I got distracted :)
:D
Anyway, with iTunes even, once you have the iPod_Control folder visible, you can then just do an "import from folder", select that folder and let it do its thing. When it's done, all your songs are neatly arranged in folders by artist on your PC's hard drive and voila. It makes these folders using the ID3 tag info.
I know what you mean though about this not going down with open source (been a Linux geek since early 1.0 days... actually pre that...) but I DO understand Apple's motivations as well.
Contrary to the beliefs of some here though, I find myself doubting this is a move to exclude third party tools, but rather a safeguard against database corruption on large 160Gb libraries. A self-check hash makes a lot of sense when your database gets that large, particularly in a portable device where corruption is quite likely. I think it was just some engineer's idea for something in the database that didn't extend to thinking about the impact on others. Software engineers do that often; I know, I used to be one
I won't try to justify it; I think it sucks, too... but there are other reasons than "lockout" to add a database hash. Apple has already demonstrated that it can put ridiculous levels of protection on data (iTunes Video is a prime example), but in this case they chose to add a simple hash. Just because they didn't document and release the algorithm doesn't mean it was done with the intent of locking out competing tools. It could have just as easily been for database consistency checks, which is quite valuable on a database of the size required to support 160Gb and greater of music.
Remember, Apple controls the product end-to-end. They produce a tool that's designed to work with a particular device. They have no reason to support the attempts of third parties to replace that tool, but this hash doesn't seem like a particularly harsh way to lock out these attempts. It just seems to me to be a rather thoughtless change to a database format made by an engineer who thought it would be a good idea but didn't really think through the ramifications upon third party tools, simply because it never occurred to him/her.
Apple don't claim compatibility with third party tools for the iPod, they have no moral or legal right to do so. However, if they REALLY wanted to lock out the iPod from third parties I have to imagine that they easily could given their history with media. However, even with this hash, the iPod itself is still relatively open (as near as we can tell so far). The hash will be cracked; I have faith in that. Or Apple will actually release the algorithm to developers. I think the former's more likely.
To paraphrase; don't ascribe to malice what may just as easily be ascribed to ignorance.
All of which is precisely why iTunes (and Apple products in general) are not for you. They're for people who don't know what cdparanoia or LAME are, don't want to care about the difference between and MMC and SD card, and don't really want to worry about switching cards in and out of a multi-card reader or writer. I am happy doing all these myself, but my wife (for example) just wants to plug her iPod into her computer and have it worry about the fine details of getting her music from her PC to her iPod. When she wants to rip a CD, she wants to put a CD in and either have a dialog box pop up and say "Do you want to rip this to your iTunes library?" or go to a menu option to accomplish the same.
The number of tech support questions my wife asks me have dropped precipitously since I bought her a Nano and moved her to iTunes. Sure, iTunes for Windows sucks, but it'll do until we can justify the cost of buying her a Macbook...
Oh yeah, and in reference to the cost of Apple equipment:
When I went shopping for a new laptop, I had a set of requirements that I needed to fill. My choices came down to a Macbook Pro, a Dell or an HP. I wanted a pro-grade laptop, not consumer grade because I've had plenty of issues with consumer grade laptops in my laptop backpack (Acers last me a year...). Anyway, when I spec'd out precisely what I needed, the cost differential between a Macbook Pro and an equivalent Dell was less than $100. On a > $2000 investment, $100 is a drop in the ocean. The equivalent HP was actually MORE expensive than the MBP.
To me, the $100 premium over the Dell was worth it to have one more OS to play with. I've been an OS geek for years, running the gamut of OS/2, BEOS, Linux and others as well as Windows and I figured that since this was an Intel-based laptop I could have the flexibility. I decided I would pay that premium to have OSX to play with, and if I didn't like it or couldn't use it then there was nothing stopping me from putting Linux or Windows on the same hardware (or both). As it turned out, OSX worked for me. I added Parallels for virtualization and now there's no way I'd consider returning to a solely Linux or solely Windows environment to get real work done.
The reality is that Apple just doesn't produce a mid range Mac that the average geek might like. They sell great laptops, but their desktop line has a huge hole in it. I know many people who would happily buy a Mac if there was one available that sat between the iMac and the Mac Pro. The iMac is just not expandable or flexible, and its all-in-one design means that you have a huge investment in a monitor as well as a computer that will be disposed of when obsolete. The Mac Pro is really expandable and flexible, but is also really expensive. There's no mid-range computer that will work with existing monitors and existing hardware... not really. And the Mac Mini? That's WAY too low end for most people... but is actually a damned good little computer in my opinion.
One word; usability.
I do Windows and Linux for a living. I'm an MCSE and a VCP (VMWare) and have a number of certifications that have long since lapsed (Cisco, etc.). Sure, certs don't mean much really, but they are a sign that I am a professional technical person and have been for some time.
I use a Mac. At least, for my own PC I use a Mac. Why? Because it does just exactly what I need it to do, and I don't have to think about *how* to do it before I start unless I want to. Typically, my working set of applications includes a web browser, email, Pages and Numbers, iTunes (to keep my Podcasts synced) and iRatchet for my own business invoicing. I rarely need to worry about how I need to get something done, it's all extremely intuitive. If I want, I can crank up iTerm (I much prefer it to Terminal.app), get into a UNIX shell and use normal UNIX tools to get something done like parsing a text file, SSHing to a server or whatever.
Add in Quicksilver and I've got a desktop that really works the way I think. That's ONE third party shell app to make it work the way I want it to work, not a dozen disparate apps with several overlaps in functionality to do the same.
I have used many Linux desktops, though most Linux boxes I work with don't have GUIs installed... and while I do like them I find them a little too "geeky" for my taste. Yeah, ironic coming from a self-professed geek. However, I find that I spend a lot more time thinking about how to solve a particular problem instead of just getting my work done. In my Mac OS, my major apps start when I boot. I sleep the laptop, I never shut it down unless a system update has occurred. When I open my laptop, I jump to the app I need and start working. I don't have to think about it, I don't have to worry about it... just get my stuff done and get it over and done with.
Don't even get me started on the hell that is Windows Vista. My work laptop has had that for 8 months now and I still hate it.
Macs aren't for everyone though. OSX obfuscates almost all of the internals in such a way that many technical people who are by nature control freaks are going to be annoyed that they can't see what's happening "under the hood". This is just like the problem most tech people have with iTunes: Forget the way you want it to work, just focus on the job at hand (managing music and playlists) and don't sweat the small stuff. That's a paradigm shift away from either Linux or Windows. Linux makes it great for the person who wants fine control over everything their computer does, and Windows tries to fall somewhere between Linux and OSX.
When I first shifted to OSX it took a shift in my thinking before I stopped getting frustrated with it. However, now that I've been using it for a while I find that my workflow is massively improved, and I spend a lot less time tinkering with it than getting real work done.
Of course, I still have XP in a Parallels box on my Macbook Pro; there are still one or two Windows apps that I need to use on occasion that have no Mac alternative (I do a lot of music in Modplug Tracker and can't find anything comparable in OSX), but with the recent Coherence improvements in Parallels it's like it's really a Mac application that has XP-style window decoration. No worse than running a KDE app on a Gnome desktop or vice versa.
God, I'm posting like a fanboy today.
You're probably right. If they wanted to encrypt it, Apple has already demonstrated that they can encrypt a file with ridiculously secure codecs (iTMS video, anyone?). I suspect that either this hash will be cracked within a couple of weeks or it'll become available from an "unofficial" internal source within days.
I hate to sound like a fanboy here (yes, I own a Mac and an iPod), but you can copy your files off an iPod. I've done it a number of times. It's not trivial and sort of relies on your ID3 tags being up to date and accurate but it can be done.
:D ) which I keep safe and "consolidate iTunes Library" periodically when I've added tunes to the laptop.
Basically, you've got to set your iPod to disk usage (which I do anyway since I also use my iPod to hold a copy of my important documents) then set your file management utility to show hidden files. The files have odd names, but once you can see them then you can use whatever tool you like to import them. That's how I recovered my 50Gb music library after my old Windows laptop was stolen. My only copy; go figure. I still had my iPod so I did this using Finder and (I'm sorry to say) iTunes to reimport all my music to a new library on my Macbook Pro. I then reformatted my iPod, set to sync with the new library and I was good to go. I had a handful of songs that had screwed up names because of crappy ID3 tagging (my fault!) but that was easily and quickly remedied.
Of course, I've since changed things up a little more to store the library on an external drive instead of on my rapidly filling laptop hard drive (100Gb doesn't go near as far as it used to thanks to GarageBand
Now, back on topic I do find this move rather onerous. I definitely see why people might dislike iTunes even though I myself find it works just great for me and my music management requirements. The locking out of Linux users (I'm also one; I have a number of Linux boxes at home, too) I find extremely distasteful and even I as the Mac owner in my house have to admit that I think iTunes for Windows blows (though my wife uses it for managing her iPod Nano; it's easier than her asking me for support on a third party application). I really hope that people figure out the hash scheme, I for one prefer a device that's open. If the hash isn't figured out and Apple don't give on this new action of theirs then I for one will not be buying an iPod when my 80Gb 5G dies.
Why did I buy an iPod in the first place? Because at the time it had the best interface for managing music on a small screen in a portable device. The click-wheel was an inspired piece of engineering and the interface is incredibly simple and intuitive. I appreciated that, particularly in a device I didn't necessarily want to have to hold, click buttons and watch the screen all the time. However, in the time since the iPod's release, others have created great devices with good interfaces. While I often find them to be overwhelming because of too many "cutesy" additions and animations that become distracting... but looking at the new iPod interface it looks like Apple's starting to fall into the same trap of making the interface "shiny" instead of improving things. In fact, when I played with an iPod Classic the other day at the Apple Store I was not impressed; the interface is noticeably slower than my 5G. Sure, the 160Gb drive would be nice, but at the cost of losing some of my interface "flow" that I have become accustomed to I'm not happy about it.
Maybe the next gen devices will be better... but I fear that the iPod Touch is the route of the future. As cute as that is, it's FAR too much "shiny" for my tastes, particularly in a device I rarely actually look at (most of the time my iPod is strapped to my arm while I work out on "shuffle" mode).