Wow, such a bright idea. Ban something useful because of a few instances of malicious use.
Blind and pointless cries like, "Stop all attachments!" mean nothing because it's never going to come to pass.
If your systems are being compromised in any way, it's the job of sysadmins and techs to ensure that potential holes are taken care of.
Banning something and affecting productivity is not the answer.
Goodluck trying, though. In most corporations, everything is done via email, and for folks that have WFH scenarios, that's their only way to do any work.
If you want to protect confidential information, introduce encryption.
And oh, most people in corporations aren't geeks. They don't care -- all they want to do something is to get their work done, not jump through hoops.
They're 'unlawful combatants', a new classification invented by the Americans which is roughly synonymous with 'unpersons'.
Umm, you'd be a PoW only if you fought in uniform.
These were non-uniformed combatants who were fighting - they definitely wanted our soldiers dead, and they did not belong to any one side. What the hell would you do with them?
Hence the term unlawful combatants. The Geneva Convention only applies to uniformed combatants, and only those would get treated as PoWs.
Islamic fundamentalism has brought a new kind of war, so we came up with a new way of handling new kinds of militant idiots.
Dude, what the fuck are you talking about man!? Can't you recognize it when you see it? It's called S-T-U-P-I-D-I-T-Y.
Those that equate flushing down a Koran with torture have no freakin' idea what the hell torture is all about.
These are folks who would have killed our soldiers and we're treating them so well - like someone once said, a PoW is someone who tries to kill you and fails, and asks you to treat him fairly in turn.
I think we're being stupid - screw Gitmo, just shoot each of these bastards on sight. Shoot on sight and be done with it. There, no prison, no complaints. Just a lot of dead bastards.
Well i would look it up on the Internet. There is bound to be a post on some obscure forum by some guy named "Tank-H4xor" that gives direction on how to exploit a bug in the system by duct-taping a banana on the missile or a fluffy bunny something:)
I don't think McGuyver would appreciate you calling him that very much.:p
Didn't you know? For every article on technology, there has to be at least a handful of trolls and idiots who have to come up with the usual, "What a waste of money! Use this on water, food and medicine" reaction.
Sadly, they never learn and worse yet, they still get modded up.
Sometimes, I wish Slashdot had a -1, Retard mod. Note to moderators - the grandparent is trolling, for cryin' out loud.
Money can always be spent on a lot of other things, but teaching a man to fish _does_ work better in the long run.
On a serious note - I started off with Slackware 3.3, and 3.5 was such a big upgrade. This was circa 1997-1998.
And then, of course, RH was out. I started off with RH 5.1 because the install was easier, and it actually had drivers. I was hoping it would recognize an old SiS card (SiS 6215C, for the curious), but I still had to manually play with the XF86 config & setup to get it to work. And then 6.2 was out, which was cooler and way better, and I could actually play *music* on it.
All this while, I was using Solaris and FreeBSD at work, and Linux was a pleasure in comparison.
By then, I'd moved on to Debian. Potato at first, and I'd heard about RH 7.2, which seemed much later, but by then I was hooked to Debian. I think Woody came out about that time, and been using it since.
Eventually, I got around upgrading to Sarge. Tried other RH installs, but it wasn't quite the same. RH was big and bloated, but it did eventually get around having P&P and recognizing my hardware, for the most part.
The bright side? For technical users, Linux today is quite close enough to a good desktop install (not quite there, yet, but it's almost there). But that's come at a cost, and that is bloat.
I think user-friendliness and bloat go hand in hand, because you can't have one without the other. So, Linux's bloat is a function of where it is headed.
If you're looking for purely server-only environment, there are plenty of lean and mean *nix (including Linux) distros. OTOH, desktop is a whole another story.
Personally, having seen Linux grow and mature over the years, I'd rather have usability and features than bloat. It's not like we've reached a hardware peak (yet) or something.
A simple cost-benefit analysis shows that the costs outweigh the benefits: I'd rather lie in bed for two hours thinking and trying to sleep than exercise and suffer for 20 minutes.
Really? Funny, I've always felt that spending too much time in bed and not eating healthy and not exercising made me feel like a sloth and a slob.
On the other hand, spending 30 minutes a day to work out and do some exercise helps me sleep better and more than makes up for the 30 minutes of sleep that I'd be missing out on.
Yeah, I'll agree with that. I would argue that to be a geek, you must fully embrace the geek lifestyle.
Umm, you mean complete and utter disregard for your health, gain 40lb in two months and be socially awkward, suffering from social isolation and loneliness while I spend all my time on IM?
Otherwise, you're just a person who knows alot about computers (or math, or whatever type of geek you are). Being fit isn't really so much "beneath" us so much as unnecessary and unpleasant.
See, you're missing the point of being a geek - the point of being a geek is not what else you do, it's how much you like the things you do. You can be a geek of physics, of math, of technology, of art, of music, of astronomy - so, why not a geek of working out, too?
Just because I'm smart and am good at technology does not necessarily preclude my being good at other things like sports and physical activities.
Ever strike you that some of us may not necessarily find it unpleasant or unnecessary, and may actually enjoy it?
Upon my discharge, I quickly reverted to my natural slime state and disspelled all notions of exercise and healthy food. I haven't eaten a vegitable in years (Exceptions can be made for Chinese (when combined with lots of meat)), I drink 9 to 12 cans of Mountain Dew a day, and I smoke 3 packs of full-flavor Menthols a day. The point I want to emphasize here is that I feel ten times better now than I did when I was physically fit.
I feel sad for you.
Oh, when I was in grad school, I had my moments of utter disregard for things I ate and did. But guess what? Being a vegetarian, staying away from soda and caffeine (well, I do treat myself to one Cappucino on most days, two if I really need it, which is very occasionally), smoking and drinking only on social occasions (maybe a couple of times a month, at most) and working out 5 days a week has made me much better.
I do better, work better, think better and *feel* better - and healthy.
If I do not work out for a week, I do not sleep as well. Too much caffeine does the same thing, and my productivity hits rock bottom. On the other hand, getting a good night's sleep and rising early and going for a jog before I shower and go to work just makes my day that much better. And at nights, coming back from a workout, taking a shower and just falling asleep after doing some reading makes me have a good night's sleep.
Am I a geek? Oh yes, I've degrees in EE CS and Physics (well, am still working on the last one), have worked at places like the Los Alamos National Labs, built my first Tesla Coil in eighth grade, own over a thousand sci-fi and fantasy books, love anime (and even frequent Dragon*Con every year) and most definitely love technology. I'm even had advisory role in several standards committees and have enough and more publications in everything from DSP, AI and Robotics to Archaeology.
But I also climb mountains, do adventure sports, play soccer and have climbed some of the more challenging mountains in the US. Incidentally, I also happen to work out and be in good shape - and oh, sadly, I'm not particularly socially deficient, and even have a social life and a girlfriend.
I just do not think being a geek and doing the latter things I mentioned are mutually exclusive - if anything, it adds balance and color to your life.
I used to work at Los Alamos with some folks from Colorado (and one of them was from Mech in Mines.edu in fact), and we all used to go rock climbing and hiking the fourteeners ever so often.
I'm quite fit and in shape, but those guys made me look slow. I guess that's what you get for spending time around such splendid mountains.
It's a matter of mindset; athletic people - even if they are tied up and forced to learn java - would still go out and play sports and be in good shape and geeks don't have the drive. We're lazy.
Umm, what about athleticgeeks?
Some of us are geeks, but also love being in good shape - the two need not be mutually exclusive as you make it out to be, you know?
While I'm definitely a geek, both me and my girlfriend (who happens to be a geek and in the military) run an average of 5-10 miles a week and work out quite regularly. I also do a lot of other stuff (particularly rock climbing and kendo), and I'd say that I'm in very good shape.
And there are days when I've run 5 miles at a stretch. I might have to take a break or two (or three), but I do finish the run.
There are several other geeks that I know who fall under this category. Of course, I also know several geeks who look down upon working out and being fit as "beneath them" and if you prefer rock-climbing over playing WoW, well, you aren't really a geek - didn't you know?
Good health makes you feel better in every way - regular work out sessions and good food (and oh, cut down on that caffeine and sugar) makes you feel a lot better and a lot more awake than 4 doubleshot espressos would.
Well, we're getting to the point where we're talking past each other, so I suppose it's time to bring this dialog to an end.
Indeed.
Yeah, I got that based on the Georgia Tech email address and the HCI degree - I wasn't trying to imply that you were a non-techie, I was referring to people like my mother, my sister, my clients, etc
Just making sure. Kinda got tired of the j00 1d10t! comments for bringing up genuine issues that I have, that's all.
And that was the point that I was trying to address! You think iTunes sucks because it doesn't work for you because it lacks certain features (network reliability, etc) or you think the interface is bad - fine, I can (and do) respect that. I'm just pointing out that iTunes can let you sort within playlists and download ID3 info from CDDB - both for your edification and for others who might otherwise read your posts and think "oh, I didn't know iTunes can't use CDDB."
See, you're missing the whole point.
iTunes is supposed to do Foo and Bar.
iTunes does not do Foo for me, but turns out Bar can be done, although doing Bar is absolutely non-intuitive (hence my accusation that iTunes is unusable).
iTunes also breaks, and does strange things and does not work the way it's "supposed" to.
Solutions to this vary from me jumping through hoops, giving my soul and my first born etc etc.
So, while iTunes is *supposed* to do Foo and Bar, I can barely get Bar to work and Foo does not work at all.
Ergo, in my opinion, iTunes sucks. Why? Because I don't care what it does for someone else. I care about what it does for *me*.
You don't really expect me to say that iTunes washes my dishes when I can't even get the bloody thing to reinstall itself, do you? How can you expect me to say the CDDB works when I can't get it to work?
I don't care that you don't like it, I'm just pointing out that it does have certain capabilities that you didn't think it had.
And how does it matter to me when they don't work for me anyway? Effectively, it's as good as those capabilities not existing, so I think I'm quite at liberty to talk about what I experience, not what I'm supposed to experience.
I know I didn't say that because I don't believe that MS Viewer sucks, I just said I was having problems with it - there's a difference. With the one exception, it does everything I expect it to do.
Now I *do* believe that MS Word sucks, but that's a different topic altogether.
Heh. I stand corrected. MS Word sucks, MS Viewer does not. Hope that cheers your day up. =)
Despite your repetitions of it, I'm afraid I can't explain why you're the only person in the world for whom itunes does not offer cddb support.
I can't either - and since I can neither explain nor find a reason, I'd have to just go ahead and say that iTunes does not do what it's supposed to, for me. And since it does not, obviously I'd think that it's a lousy piece of software - hey, it's my opinion, you don't have to like it.
Perhaps it doesn't like you; I have to admit that I'm kind of starting to not.
Heh. Wow, bring up an issue and you get attacked personally for bringing it up. Nice attitude.
Okay, so even if you have the world's only copy of itunes that mysteriously does not act as a cddb client, enter the artist and album tags into the id3 tags (via itunes or any other tool you like), and it'll propagate that to filenames and directory structure for you.
Yup, which would be work for me - which I'd rather not do and use another tool.
Or, as many other people have suggested, if you've already made the odd choice to manually enter this data as filenames and directory structure but not id3 tags, you can use either your own or someone else's tools to propagate that information in the other direction.
Like I said - WORK! More *work* from the user. Me, user - being asked to jump through hoops to get a stupid program to work. It might be fine by you, but I'd usually imagine that the *program* would do this for me, you know? Usability and all that?
Why bother when there are other softwares out there that do this? A much better job of it, if I might add.
Besides, every iTunes install has been broken in some way. 5.x crashed over the network and I could not even reinstall it at home. 6.x broke a lot of my existing podcast feeds, even though they were in quite valid XML etc etc.
So, I'll use other pieces of software that *work* as they're supposed to (rather than asking the user to do things, you know?), cuss at Apple for their lousy iTunes (think different, indeed - here's an idea! - let's make the *user* work rather than us developing something that works), and twiddle my thumbs and wait for someone else to release an alternative to copy music to my iPod. Or, maybe I'll just say screw this and get a Creative Nomad with something nice like Nomad Explorer. Or maybe I'll even shell out some bucks and get something by these guys that actually is nice and works.
That's what you get for not being a fanboy, I guess.
Besides, you have to also admit that you're not the typical user. Who the heck organizes their music by folder while leaving the filenames and ID3 tags blank? That's goofy as hell.
*shrug*
For one, a lot of my music is non-English, and due to character-set limitations, were ripped as plain tracks. Given this, I found it easier to just sort them by file-names.
For another, a lot of those are that way because *iTunes* did not get the CDDB data, and I had to manually enter the artist and album tags.
Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree. FWIW, I just checked with WMP9, and it allows you do drag around tracks even with a sorted column - of course, the column header still indicates that it's sorted, even though it's not. That's usable? Most non-techies I know would say otherwise.
Like I said, the usability of another piece of software isn't in question. The usability of iTunes is in question.
(and just so you know, I'm not a non-techie)
Well yes, it does - if you don't like iTunes because of it's interface, or Apple's copy-protection decisions, that's one thing. If you're going to make public postings that iTunes doesn't do something, when in fact it *does*, that's different.
Hold on - my original argument was that iTunes was unusable, and ergo, it sucked. Well, turns out that it still can do a lot of things I thought it could not, but only because it was so unusable that I could not figure out how the hell to make it work. Well, so my original argument still stands.
I still haven't found out how to do a lot of the things I originally told you about, and I still can't sort my folders the way I want to, or get CDDB to work, or get iTunes back up and running or make it grok several podcasts.
It does not matter which works in some experimental "ideal" Apple's utopian setup because it does not work for me. It's like arguing that a car works fine in a race track but can't scale on real roads. It doesn't help that a bunch of people driving on Autobahn say that it works for them, too, because for every user that iTunes works for, I know several others who just hate it.
That was my point - does it matter what works for you? It does not work for me, and for a lot of others, and we've no solution in sight. So, that makes it as good as that it does not work at all.
*shrug*
So, it was a different metlin (258108) who wrote this?
That was sarcasm - you effectively said that MS Viewer sucked, just not in as many words. I explicitly stated that iTunes sucked. But there wasn't really any difference between our opinions on those pieces of software, hence my comment.
Hmmm, I've never come across that, interesting. At the risk of sounding like a fanboi however, I'll say that the behavior *does* make sense: if I click the column heading to sort it by "Name" (for example), then presumably I don't want to sort it in some random order since I already told it to sort by "Name." The danger is if I tell it to sort by Name, then I accidentally drag-and-drop a track to a new position, then it's no longer sorted the way I told it do. Of course this logic could fall apart for sorting by "Album" but presumably iTunes would use the ID3 tags to determine the track order within the album listings.
As someone who holds a graduate degree in HCI, I can quite honestly tell you that that kind of behavior is far from "usable". Oh, it might make sense to you, but I know about 5 people that I asked who had no idea how to do that.
You do realize that your logic sounds absolutely convoluted and made up, right?
Again, I feel your pain, but then again, we all have stories with installing software on all platforms (for example MS Word Viewer on my Tablet PC refuses to print, even though other programs have no problems).
As I recall, my argument was that iTunes was unusable - not that Microsoft Word install is not unusable.
Of course, the fact that software X is unusable does not change the fact that I find iTunes to be a painful and sloppy piece of work, but hey.
And I never said different, just trying to get the facts straight: some of your criticisms are valid (autosync with only one computer, issues with libraries on remote volumes) and some are not (iTunes does use CDDB, you can reorder tracks).
Well, does it matter which are valid and which are not? The bottom line is that they do not work for me, and I do not care about what features someone else has - just those that I have (or don't, in this case).
As was iTunes (ok, 3 developers:)
Yes, but iTunes was picked up by Apple - and it's part of a product that I paid *money* to buy. Winamp is freeware. iTunes is part of Apple's business, and it's a crappy piece of work.
And I looked at your link - iTunes 1.0 was released in 2001. It's been 5 years - and it's still unusable. And supposedly one of the flagship products of a company like Apple.
Well, you'll note that I haven't posted anywhere that "MS Word Viewer 2003 sucks";)
True. Hey, I never said iTunes sucks, either, so we're even.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I'm John Titor, you insensitive clod! x-(
Now, offtopic!
I demand to have serif fonts again here on slashdot. I also demand to put the scores near the comment title.
Agreed!
And also making the number of comments link under each story on the home page bold, so that you don't have to find that tiny little spot to click on.
That ought to have been, "Admit it... You read LOTR last night didn't you!"
Wow, such a bright idea. Ban something useful because of a few instances of malicious use.
Blind and pointless cries like, "Stop all attachments!" mean nothing because it's never going to come to pass.
If your systems are being compromised in any way, it's the job of sysadmins and techs to ensure that potential holes are taken care of.
Banning something and affecting productivity is not the answer.
Goodluck trying, though. In most corporations, everything is done via email, and for folks that have WFH scenarios, that's their only way to do any work.
If you want to protect confidential information, introduce encryption.
And oh, most people in corporations aren't geeks. They don't care -- all they want to do something is to get their work done, not jump through hoops.
Actually, other than Vegas or Atlantic City, most casinos have older people, rather than younger.
Take any smaller casino in and around your state and go visit - you'd be surprised at the number of older people you'd find.
And most of the women are actually female! And attractive!
And old. Very, very old .
Sure, would love to! But sadly, they all seem to have boyfriends.
>Did you know Hu Jintao got his degree in hydraulic engineering? Why can't we
>have an engineer presient?
Because we elect ours. Sad but true.
Umm, India is the world's largest democracy and has a rocket scientist and engineer for a President and an economist/professor of economics for a Prime Minister.
Your point?
They're 'unlawful combatants', a new classification invented by the Americans which is roughly synonymous with 'unpersons'.
Umm, you'd be a PoW only if you fought in uniform.
These were non-uniformed combatants who were fighting - they definitely wanted our soldiers dead, and they did not belong to any one side. What the hell would you do with them?
Hence the term unlawful combatants. The Geneva Convention only applies to uniformed combatants, and only those would get treated as PoWs.
Islamic fundamentalism has brought a new kind of war, so we came up with a new way of handling new kinds of militant idiots.
Cause and effect.
Dude, what the fuck are you talking about man!? Can't you recognize it when you see it? It's called S-T-U-P-I-D-I-T-Y.
Those that equate flushing down a Koran with torture have no freakin' idea what the hell torture is all about.
These are folks who would have killed our soldiers and we're treating them so well - like someone once said, a PoW is someone who tries to kill you and fails, and asks you to treat him fairly in turn.
I think we're being stupid - screw Gitmo, just shoot each of these bastards on sight. Shoot on sight and be done with it. There, no prison, no complaints. Just a lot of dead bastards.
Well i would look it up on the Internet. There is bound to be a post on some obscure forum by some guy named "Tank-H4xor" that gives direction on how to exploit a bug in the system by duct-taping a banana on the missile or a fluffy bunny something :)
:p
I don't think McGuyver would appreciate you calling him that very much.
Oh no, he does not.
Didn't you know? For every article on technology, there has to be at least a handful of trolls and idiots who have to come up with the usual, "What a waste of money! Use this on water, food and medicine" reaction.
Sadly, they never learn and worse yet, they still get modded up.
Sometimes, I wish Slashdot had a -1, Retard mod. Note to moderators - the grandparent is trolling, for cryin' out loud.
Money can always be spent on a lot of other things, but teaching a man to fish _does_ work better in the long run.
I vote for capitalization, do you? ;)
On a serious note - I started off with Slackware 3.3, and 3.5 was such a big upgrade. This was circa 1997-1998.
And then, of course, RH was out. I started off with RH 5.1 because the install was easier, and it actually had drivers. I was hoping it would recognize an old SiS card (SiS 6215C, for the curious), but I still had to manually play with the XF86 config & setup to get it to work. And then 6.2 was out, which was cooler and way better, and I could actually play *music* on it.
All this while, I was using Solaris and FreeBSD at work, and Linux was a pleasure in comparison.
By then, I'd moved on to Debian. Potato at first, and I'd heard about RH 7.2, which seemed much later, but by then I was hooked to Debian. I think Woody came out about that time, and been using it since.
Eventually, I got around upgrading to Sarge. Tried other RH installs, but it wasn't quite the same. RH was big and bloated, but it did eventually get around having P&P and recognizing my hardware, for the most part.
The bright side? For technical users, Linux today is quite close enough to a good desktop install (not quite there, yet, but it's almost there). But that's come at a cost, and that is bloat.
I think user-friendliness and bloat go hand in hand, because you can't have one without the other. So, Linux's bloat is a function of where it is headed.
If you're looking for purely server-only environment, there are plenty of lean and mean *nix (including Linux) distros. OTOH, desktop is a whole another story.
Personally, having seen Linux grow and mature over the years, I'd rather have usability and features than bloat. It's not like we've reached a hardware peak (yet) or something.
If you're into their leftist propaganda, then, yes.
Personally, I'd take the beeb anyday.
A simple cost-benefit analysis shows that the costs outweigh the benefits: I'd rather lie in bed for two hours thinking and trying to sleep than exercise and suffer for 20 minutes.
Really? Funny, I've always felt that spending too much time in bed and not eating healthy and not exercising made me feel like a sloth and a slob.
On the other hand, spending 30 minutes a day to work out and do some exercise helps me sleep better and more than makes up for the 30 minutes of sleep that I'd be missing out on.
Yeah, I'll agree with that. I would argue that to be a geek, you must fully embrace the geek lifestyle.
Umm, you mean complete and utter disregard for your health, gain 40lb in two months and be socially awkward, suffering from social isolation and loneliness while I spend all my time on IM?
Otherwise, you're just a person who knows alot about computers (or math, or whatever type of geek you are). Being fit isn't really so much "beneath" us so much as unnecessary and unpleasant.
See, you're missing the point of being a geek - the point of being a geek is not what else you do, it's how much you like the things you do. You can be a geek of physics, of math, of technology, of art, of music, of astronomy - so, why not a geek of working out, too?
Just because I'm smart and am good at technology does not necessarily preclude my being good at other things like sports and physical activities.
Ever strike you that some of us may not necessarily find it unpleasant or unnecessary, and may actually enjoy it?
Upon my discharge, I quickly reverted to my natural slime state and disspelled all notions of exercise and healthy food. I haven't eaten a vegitable in years (Exceptions can be made for Chinese (when combined with lots of meat)), I drink 9 to 12 cans of Mountain Dew a day, and I smoke 3 packs of full-flavor Menthols a day. The point I want to emphasize here is that I feel ten times better now than I did when I was physically fit.
I feel sad for you.
Oh, when I was in grad school, I had my moments of utter disregard for things I ate and did. But guess what? Being a vegetarian, staying away from soda and caffeine (well, I do treat myself to one Cappucino on most days, two if I really need it, which is very occasionally), smoking and drinking only on social occasions (maybe a couple of times a month, at most) and working out 5 days a week has made me much better.
I do better, work better, think better and *feel* better - and healthy.
If I do not work out for a week, I do not sleep as well. Too much caffeine does the same thing, and my productivity hits rock bottom. On the other hand, getting a good night's sleep and rising early and going for a jog before I shower and go to work just makes my day that much better. And at nights, coming back from a workout, taking a shower and just falling asleep after doing some reading makes me have a good night's sleep.
Am I a geek? Oh yes, I've degrees in EE CS and Physics (well, am still working on the last one), have worked at places like the Los Alamos National Labs, built my first Tesla Coil in eighth grade, own over a thousand sci-fi and fantasy books, love anime (and even frequent Dragon*Con every year) and most definitely love technology. I'm even had advisory role in several standards committees and have enough and more publications in everything from DSP, AI and Robotics to Archaeology.
But I also climb mountains, do adventure sports, play soccer and have climbed some of the more challenging mountains in the US. Incidentally, I also happen to work out and be in good shape - and oh, sadly, I'm not particularly socially deficient, and even have a social life and a girlfriend.
I just do not think being a geek and doing the latter things I mentioned are mutually exclusive - if anything, it adds balance and color to your life.
And oh, I'm 25, too.
It's all those mountains! :-)
I used to work at Los Alamos with some folks from Colorado (and one of them was from Mech in Mines.edu in fact), and we all used to go rock climbing and hiking the fourteeners ever so often.
I'm quite fit and in shape, but those guys made me look slow. I guess that's what you get for spending time around such splendid mountains.
God, I miss that part of the country.
It's a matter of mindset; athletic people - even if they are tied up and forced to learn java - would still go out and play sports and be in good shape and geeks don't have the drive. We're lazy.
Umm, what about athletic geeks?
Some of us are geeks, but also love being in good shape - the two need not be mutually exclusive as you make it out to be, you know?
Don't you love stereotypes?
While I'm definitely a geek, both me and my girlfriend (who happens to be a geek and in the military) run an average of 5-10 miles a week and work out quite regularly. I also do a lot of other stuff (particularly rock climbing and kendo), and I'd say that I'm in very good shape.
And there are days when I've run 5 miles at a stretch. I might have to take a break or two (or three), but I do finish the run.
There are several other geeks that I know who fall under this category. Of course, I also know several geeks who look down upon working out and being fit as "beneath them" and if you prefer rock-climbing over playing WoW, well, you aren't really a geek - didn't you know?
Good health makes you feel better in every way - regular work out sessions and good food (and oh, cut down on that caffeine and sugar) makes you feel a lot better and a lot more awake than 4 doubleshot espressos would.
Stereotypes, stereotypes.
*shakes head*
Like I've mentioned elsewhere, without it organizing your music without the CDDB information is a pain.
And not to mention that iTunes hogs memory like crazy. Ah, well.
We all have our reasons. I've mine.
I've always had to make the changes manually, for whatever reason the CDDB functionality seems kaput.
Ah, well.
Indeed.
Yeah, I got that based on the Georgia Tech email address and the HCI degree - I wasn't trying to imply that you were a non-techie, I was referring to people like my mother, my sister, my clients, etc
Just making sure. Kinda got tired of the j00 1d10t! comments for bringing up genuine issues that I have, that's all.
And that was the point that I was trying to address! You think iTunes sucks because it doesn't work for you because it lacks certain features (network reliability, etc) or you think the interface is bad - fine, I can (and do) respect that. I'm just pointing out that iTunes can let you sort within playlists and download ID3 info from CDDB - both for your edification and for others who might otherwise read your posts and think "oh, I didn't know iTunes can't use CDDB."
See, you're missing the whole point.
You don't really expect me to say that iTunes washes my dishes when I can't even get the bloody thing to reinstall itself, do you? How can you expect me to say the CDDB works when I can't get it to work?
I don't care that you don't like it, I'm just pointing out that it does have certain capabilities that you didn't think it had.
And how does it matter to me when they don't work for me anyway? Effectively, it's as good as those capabilities not existing, so I think I'm quite at liberty to talk about what I experience, not what I'm supposed to experience.
I know I didn't say that because I don't believe that MS Viewer sucks, I just said I was having problems with it - there's a difference. With the one exception, it does everything I expect it to do.
Now I *do* believe that MS Word sucks, but that's a different topic altogether.
Heh. I stand corrected. MS Word sucks, MS Viewer does not. Hope that cheers your day up. =)
Despite your repetitions of it, I'm afraid I can't explain why you're the only person in the world for whom itunes does not offer cddb support.
I can't either - and since I can neither explain nor find a reason, I'd have to just go ahead and say that iTunes does not do what it's supposed to, for me. And since it does not, obviously I'd think that it's a lousy piece of software - hey, it's my opinion, you don't have to like it.
Perhaps it doesn't like you; I have to admit that I'm kind of starting to not.
Heh. Wow, bring up an issue and you get attacked personally for bringing it up. Nice attitude.
Okay, so even if you have the world's only copy of itunes that mysteriously does not act as a cddb client, enter the artist and album tags into the id3 tags (via itunes or any other tool you like), and it'll propagate that to filenames and directory structure for you.
Yup, which would be work for me - which I'd rather not do and use another tool.
Or, as many other people have suggested, if you've already made the odd choice to manually enter this data as filenames and directory structure but not id3 tags, you can use either your own or someone else's tools to propagate that information in the other direction.
Like I said - WORK! More *work* from the user. Me, user - being asked to jump through hoops to get a stupid program to work. It might be fine by you, but I'd usually imagine that the *program* would do this for me, you know? Usability and all that?
Why bother when there are other softwares out there that do this? A much better job of it, if I might add.
Besides, every iTunes install has been broken in some way. 5.x crashed over the network and I could not even reinstall it at home. 6.x broke a lot of my existing podcast feeds, even though they were in quite valid XML etc etc.
So, I'll use other pieces of software that *work* as they're supposed to (rather than asking the user to do things, you know?), cuss at Apple for their lousy iTunes (think different, indeed - here's an idea! - let's make the *user* work rather than us developing something that works), and twiddle my thumbs and wait for someone else to release an alternative to copy music to my iPod. Or, maybe I'll just say screw this and get a Creative Nomad with something nice like Nomad Explorer. Or maybe I'll even shell out some bucks and get something by these guys that actually is nice and works.
That's what you get for not being a fanboy, I guess.
Besides, you have to also admit that you're not the typical user. Who the heck organizes their music by folder while leaving the filenames and ID3 tags blank? That's goofy as hell.
*shrug*
For one, a lot of my music is non-English, and due to character-set limitations, were ripped as plain tracks. Given this, I found it easier to just sort them by file-names.
For another, a lot of those are that way because *iTunes* did not get the CDDB data, and I had to manually enter the artist and album tags.
Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree. FWIW, I just checked with WMP9, and it allows you do drag around tracks even with a sorted column - of course, the column header still indicates that it's sorted, even though it's not. That's usable? Most non-techies I know would say otherwise.
Like I said, the usability of another piece of software isn't in question. The usability of iTunes is in question.
(and just so you know, I'm not a non-techie)
Well yes, it does - if you don't like iTunes because of it's interface, or Apple's copy-protection decisions, that's one thing. If you're going to make public postings that iTunes doesn't do something, when in fact it *does*, that's different.
Hold on - my original argument was that iTunes was unusable, and ergo, it sucked. Well, turns out that it still can do a lot of things I thought it could not, but only because it was so unusable that I could not figure out how the hell to make it work. Well, so my original argument still stands.
I still haven't found out how to do a lot of the things I originally told you about, and I still can't sort my folders the way I want to, or get CDDB to work, or get iTunes back up and running or make it grok several podcasts.
It does not matter which works in some experimental "ideal" Apple's utopian setup because it does not work for me. It's like arguing that a car works fine in a race track but can't scale on real roads. It doesn't help that a bunch of people driving on Autobahn say that it works for them, too, because for every user that iTunes works for, I know several others who just hate it.
That was my point - does it matter what works for you? It does not work for me, and for a lot of others, and we've no solution in sight. So, that makes it as good as that it does not work at all.
*shrug*
So, it was a different metlin (258108) who wrote this?
That was sarcasm - you effectively said that MS Viewer sucked, just not in as many words. I explicitly stated that iTunes sucked. But there wasn't really any difference between our opinions on those pieces of software, hence my comment.
Cheers.
Hmmm, I've never come across that, interesting. At the risk of sounding like a fanboi however, I'll say that the behavior *does* make sense: if I click the column heading to sort it by "Name" (for example), then presumably I don't want to sort it in some random order since I already told it to sort by "Name." The danger is if I tell it to sort by Name, then I accidentally drag-and-drop a track to a new position, then it's no longer sorted the way I told it do. Of course this logic could fall apart for sorting by "Album" but presumably iTunes would use the ID3 tags to determine the track order within the album listings.
:)
;)
;)
As someone who holds a graduate degree in HCI, I can quite honestly tell you that that kind of behavior is far from "usable". Oh, it might make sense to you, but I know about 5 people that I asked who had no idea how to do that.
You do realize that your logic sounds absolutely convoluted and made up, right?
Again, I feel your pain, but then again, we all have stories with installing software on all platforms (for example MS Word Viewer on my Tablet PC refuses to print, even though other programs have no problems).
As I recall, my argument was that iTunes was unusable - not that Microsoft Word install is not unusable.
Of course, the fact that software X is unusable does not change the fact that I find iTunes to be a painful and sloppy piece of work, but hey.
And I never said different, just trying to get the facts straight: some of your criticisms are valid (autosync with only one computer, issues with libraries on remote volumes) and some are not (iTunes does use CDDB, you can reorder tracks).
Well, does it matter which are valid and which are not? The bottom line is that they do not work for me, and I do not care about what features someone else has - just those that I have (or don't, in this case).
As was iTunes (ok, 3 developers
Yes, but iTunes was picked up by Apple - and it's part of a product that I paid *money* to buy. Winamp is freeware. iTunes is part of Apple's business, and it's a crappy piece of work.
And I looked at your link - iTunes 1.0 was released in 2001. It's been 5 years - and it's still unusable. And supposedly one of the flagship products of a company like Apple.
Well, you'll note that I haven't posted anywhere that "MS Word Viewer 2003 sucks"
True. Hey, I never said iTunes sucks, either, so we're even.