I missed this yesterday so probably no one will read thus but anyway...
It's always amusing to see a story like this on Slashdot because it just drives the crowd on here fucking nuts. A largely superior form of listening to music exists and yet people are buying more and more music on an ancient medium.
I'm sure there are people who believe vinyl sounds absolutely better. I used to be one of them. Over the many years since I've been in high school and had that belief I've learned a lot about technology, sound engineering (just a pinch), music mastering, and so forth to realize that the notion that vinyl is better is not an absolute thing at all. It has the potential to sound better in certain circumstances, usually involving an expensive turntable, but overall it mostly just potentially sounds different, not necessarily better.
But for most people, I don't think that's the reason they're buying vinyl. Today, if you're buying physical music in any format you're basically buying a souvenir.
Consider a CD. What's the difference between buying a CD in the store and burning one from MP3 files? Cover art, liner notes, silk screening on the disc and some amount of added audio fidelity. The fidelity is not insignificant but really when you're buying a CD you're buying something you could almost make yourself from downloaded files (regardless of how you got the files).
And that's before you consider the fact that if you're buying a CD you probably also want it on MP3 and you'll have to rip it yourself with an optical drive you're increasingly unlikely to have.
A vinyl record, on the other hand, is not something you can make yourself. And there's a decent chance it comes with an MP3 download code. And even if it doesn't, it's a big, huge tangible thing that done correctly can be a work of art. The vinyl can be colored, or using funky patterns, or translucent. It can have things like etched holograms in it, or weird tricks like the ones Jack White pulls where he has alternate intro tracks based on where your needle falls or hidden songs in the space on the label. It's just neat.
Plus digital music has done lots of great things but it's true, digital music devalues music. An album comes out, you listen to it once, you say "cool" and then you hit shuffle on your whole collection and you listen to the songs as they occasionally pop up. Listening to CDs was more atomic - you would tend to listen to one CD in your car over and over, or however many your home or car disc changer could handle. A vinyl record though, that's a commitment. You have to decide you want to listen to pretty much the entire side of an album. If you want to listen to a double album you have to get up and flip or change the record three times. If you want to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack you have to get up or flip the record seven times. This is why a lot of the vinyl that sells well to this day are things like Dark Side of the Moon where it's more album oriented than song/single oriented. And a lot of you reading this probably think this is stupid but a lot of us think it's neat. If vinyl continues to grow in popularity we might see a return to the album oriented rock it popularized.
But yeah if you're buying physical music you're buying a souvenir. And it looks like more and more people figure if they're going to buy music, might as well buy a souvenir. Something with big, cool album art and a tangible experience. The rest of the public is fine with music services like Spotify and Apple Music. So the CDs are leaving stores, the vinyl isn't, and although a small handful of people with breathlessly fight to the death to argue that vinyl is superior in some form or fashion the simple reality is that digital music and streaming services aren't going anywhere.
Here's the thing. When a real problem is being solved, the tech that addresses it is used DESPITE its issues. Like Word Perfect embedded formatting characters you had to manage yourself because WYSIWYG tech didn't actually quite work yet. But office secretaries everywhere were forced to learn that crap because the value of editing a doc and reprinting it was too valuable to pass up.
VR is not like this. No one really uses it to solve a real problem, in any form. And so instead of the tech naturally moving forward by necessity and use, it moves forward by marketing and for research purposes. When it does finally work, it will be used in a few places, but it will never really go mainstream because it isn't solving a mainstream problem. If it were, we'd already be using it and tolerating its issues instead of saying they have to be fixed first.
I would say another example are the original BlackBerry pager devices. They're a sad joke compared to what the mobile phone industry would become after the iPhone and Android phones hit the market but the use case - sending email from anywhere - was so compelling that people used them despite the fact that they were primitive. Heck they got the nick name CrackBerries as a result. Now we have an entire world of people staring at their phones sending messages with any number of devices when they're not playing Fortnite.
The tech maturity argument is valid. The cost concerns are valid. The logistical concerns are valid. But I think the real thing is that at the end of the day, most people don't care a damn thing about VR and even if all of those things get sorted out the number of people who want to strap a thing to their face and be in that world for anything more than a few minutes a couple of times to see what's the big deal is nowhere near where it would need to be to make something like that viable.
And I'm saying this as someone who got a Virtual Boy Emulator using Google Cardboard VR running on the iPhone.
Hope it didn't Vita itself with high development costs.
Reports are that Switch Dev Kits are $500 or less. This is why there's so many indie games on it, like Axiom Verge or Celeste. A bunch of AAA devs took a wait-and-see attitude and when sales took off they started working on Switch games. Meanwhile the indies could afford $500 dev kits and got their less complicated games running on it quickly.
Never had to install a special package to log into my bank.
I have. Back in college if you wanted to access Bank of America you went there and they handed you a handful of floppy diskettes to install software. Seriously. It wasn't too much longer after that that online banking through websites became a thing but up until a certain point in time you were seriously having to physically acquire software
I agree that part of their plan was tracking their users, especially since the CEO bragged about it, but then they had to shut down that part of it when people complained, later calling it a glitch or something.
The other part of it, and I think this is the real key, is that MoviePass got tired of being a small fish in a nonexistent pond and decided to go huge in the hopes of being bought by someone else and having it be their problem. YouTube, for example, was hemorrhaging money because their bandwidth costs were doubling every single month. And then Google bought them and that became Google's problem (which wasn't a problem because Google has no problem getting the bandwidth it wants). I think MoviePass was hoping someone would buy them, either for the data part or to shut them down, and either way the founders cash out and leave.
I do have to say that the thing I despised about MoviePass was that anyone with half a brain could see either they were up to something or they were going to go out of business fast. This would be like paying a $20/month fee and getting a card that will pay for all the gas your car ever needs. Something doesn't add up here. But whenever you'd tell anyone they'd treat you like you were some asshole who wanted to ruin everything. And reading all these people who experienced surge pricing or who couldn't get their app or card to work or who had to photograph ticket stubs like they were submitting some corporate expense report... I'm glad I never signed up or bothered with it. They're going to be dead by the end of the week at this rate.
I'm no expert but this quote from Distrowatch has always stuck with me:
There is a saying in the Linux community that if you learn Red Hat, you'll know Red Hat, but if you learn Slackware, you'll know Linux. This is particularly true today when many other Linux distributions keep developing heavily customised products to meet the needs of less technical Linux users.
It seems to me that if you want to get into using Linux, use Ubuntu or Mint or something. If you want to get into Linux the hard way and really get your hands dirty then Slackware is up to the challenge.
Again you're getting this wrong. They said they were going to bring UIKit to macOS. That's all. The press is reporting on this like it's going to be some sort of magic thing that lets your iOS apps run on the Mac, oe that they're merging the operating systems, or that the Mac is going to have at touch interface. It's not that.
There's two UI libraries in the Apple world. The Mac uses AppKit and iOS uses UIKit. They have similarities but they're different enough to be a challenge. The big overall thing is that AppKit is much older than UIKit which makes sense as the Mac is older than the iPhone. It's been said that to some extent UIKit is what AppKit would be if they started over on it today and were able to use all of the stuff they've learned over the years, which is basically exactly the situation they were in when making the iPhone.
So for example, let's say you have an iOS app and you have a screen where you need a text view. Like, it's a box with text in it and if it needs to, it can scroll if you have too much text in it. You can make it read-only or editable. So you drag a UITextView onto the screen and you're most of the way there. It has a text property and you set that to be what the text is, either in the designer or in the code. You can specify if it's editable, scrollable, etc. in the same way.
Now let's say you want to do that same thing on the Mac. You have a form and you drag an NSTextView control onto it. It has the same name except for the first two letters because Apple's naming convention (at least in the Objective-C era) is to have the first 2-3 letters be uppercase and the rest be descriptive. UI stands for UIKit. The NS? That stands for NEXTSTEP (that's really the name in all caps like that), because macOS is derived from what used to be NEXTSTEP, which was the OS from the company Steve Jobs started when Apple gave him the boot. Yeah.
OK so UITextView vs. NSTextView. Simple enough, right? Well not quite. See, when you drag that onto the form you'll notice that it's an NSTextView embedded in an NSClipView, and then that's embedded in an NSScrollView along with two NSScroller objects for the scrollbars. So everything involved in this equation gets its own separate object and so you have to remember to specify the text in the NSTextView but the scrolling in the NSScrollView. And I'm not sure what the NSClipView does other than just provide a window into whatever part of the view the NSTextView is visible.
Basically at some point they realized everyone wanted to work with the one object and have it handle all the stuff like scrolling and scrollbars itself. And this is one simple example. But it means that it's not quite as simple as writing some library that says "if Mac then NSTextView else UITextView", although some have tried. In fact apparently Apple has a library of their own called UXKit that basically does that but it's not available for use yet.
This is like a 2-for-1, it invokes Betteridge's Law of Headlines as well as the knee-jerk reaction of the Slashdot crowd to any sort of design change Apple makes at all. If only we could rope in Bitcoin somehow it would be like the holy trinity of triggers.
Man, people here on Slashdot are not understanding this report at all.
According to this report, Apple is planning on replacing the processor in the Mac with an ARM-based processor. That is all. This is something they have done, successfully, twice before. The original Macintosh from 1984 ran on the Motorola 68k architecture. In 1994 they switched to PowerPC and in 2005 they switched to x86. Now they're considering switching again to their own ARM-based chips like the ones they use in the iPad Pro. One would assume that the processors for the Mac would be more powerful than the ones they use in mobile devices and less concerned with things like heat since you can actually use fans and the user can be OK with a shorter battery life.
When they did this with the x86 switchover they told everyone in 2003 to start using Xcode and if they weren't, switch to it. When the switch occurred in 2005, everyone who was using Xcode could just do a recompile and their app was good to go. The version of Mac OS X that ran on Intel processors for years had a software layer called Rosetta which would allow you to continue to run your PowerPC-based apps for a while. In 2011 when they released Mac OS X 10.7 they removed it but that was a five year stretch where people could upgrade their apps. Some apps never got upgraded but that was part of the gamble Apple took.
However, nothing else about this announcement even begins to imply that anything else is going on. They're not trying to turn macOS into iOS. They're not adding a touch screen to the Mac. They're not looking to lock down the Mac and make it a walled off platform like iOS. They're not looking to make fundamental shifts in how the Mac operates. They're just looking to switch out the processor. And we know basically how they'll do it because they done it before. Twice.
Apple's roadmap on the Mac is beholden to Intel's roadmap and when Intel's roadmap gets delayed, Apple's roadmap gets delayed. This is not something they would be able to tolerate on the iPhone where they want to put a new one out every year. Switching from Intel to an Apple-made ARM processor will make one more item that they're not dependent on an outside company for.
I know, reading is hard, but the LPs sold on iTunes are the extra content, liner notes, etc. Not iTunes itself.
To expand on this slightly, there's a couple of similarly named concepts people get tripped up on.
iTunes was and is the name of the music player and organization app on Mac and Windows. It's also what Apple uses to sell people content via the iTunes Store.
Apple has been selling full albums from day one of the iTunes Music Store. They also sell the songs individually for varying amounts - usually $0.99/pop, though after some label finagling they also have $0.69 and $1.29 price points.
The record industry has used the term "LP" for many years to refer to a full length album to be sold at full price. The term comes from "Long Play" and it's a holdover from the early phonograph days. The record industry also uses the term "EP", for "Extended Play" and despite the naming it's the term they use for a smaller, shorter album that sells at a reduced price (the etymology comes from the fact that it's extended compared to a single).
Some artists don't like their albums to be purchased song-by-song and notable examples like Pink Floyd were slow to adapt for that reason.
"iTunes LP" was a format idea Apple came up with. The idea was to both provide incentive to purchase full albums as well as recreate some of the look/feel of albums with liner notes, etc. They borrowed the term "LP" to invoke the notion of it being a more substantial thing than just buying the album. I believe it was designed to help you envision buying an LP record (i.e., gatefold cover, lyric sheet, etc.)
Like a number of half baked Apple ideas it never really got the attention it needed and it never really got used much. So they're phasing it out.
But so everyone is clear:
iTunes, the application, is not going anywhere.
The iTunes Store is not going anywhere.
The iTunes Store is still going to sell whole albums just like it always has
Even if Apple did want everyone to be an Apple Music subscriber, they still use iTunes the application and the iTunes Store sell tons of other things like movies and TV shows.
iTunes LP, a technique and format for packaging certain albums with extra digital materials, is being phased out. That's what the memo is about. That's what the story got wrong.
It is true that Apple does name things somewhat confusingly, with most product offerings having some combination of "iTunes", "iCloud" or other words and it can be tricky to make sure you're referring to the right thing. But the notion that someone could take a memo about the iTunes LP digital music format being phased out and extrapolate it to Apple is finally killing off the main program they have all their users tied in to is just comical.
I'm sure he didn't mean that exchanging files was impossible prior to the Internet but you can't seriously compare the concept of mailing floppy disks or dialing up with AOL to the era where suddenly everyone was online all the time.
The author, Joel Spolsky, was a Program Manager on Excel back in the day, so this article is based in part on his experiences working on Excel, it's not just some blogger spitballing.
Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office.
No, the reason Office document interoperability is so difficult is because Microsoft designed these formats for themselves, for their own programs, with no thought to interoperability in either direction, and with other concessions in mind like how the early versions of Word and Excel needed to run on really old computers.
Pretty much exactly ten years ago Microsoft released documents to satisfy the EU that detailed exactly how the Word and Excel file formats worked, and they were PDF files that were 400 and 450 pages long. People like yourself speculated that perhaps they had been purposely obfuscated to thwart developers but the truth of the matter is that these things were designed over the course of decades and had a whole lot of stuff in them as a result of the increased complexity of the requirements.
To some extent, Office applications have the contents of the document loaded into memory and the document file itself is basically a memory dump of the contents of the memory serialized to disk. Loading the document deserializes it into memory. People complain about this but again, when your perspective is you need to have this application you're programming write out files and then read them in later, it makes perfect sense as a plan of action. It also explains why occasionally Office breaks compatibility with itself on upgrades which is unacceptable but it happens.
In that vein, LibreOffice has had the specs for the Office documents for a decade now, so I think the "what is the excuse?" question is still pretty valid. But the issue is not that Microsoft deliberately sabotages efforts. They're not that smart and they're not that dumb.
...until they stop doing pretty well, at which point they'll likely change to subscription pricing. After hiking up the prices for the perpetual licenses to no avail. aka the Paint Shop Pro path.
I believe the Stitcher app does insert ads, possibly the feeds themselves come from Stitcher where they've gone in and edited the podcasts. If that's the case perhaps it's possible you have one or more Stitcher-modified RSS feeds in your Apple Podcasts app.
But yeah the Apple Podcasts app doesn't insert ads.
Part of me thinks this is a bad idea - a guy known for his over the top stylistic violence and profanity epics handling the next entry in a popular pop sci-fi franchise just seems like a bad fit.
However, part of me thinks this would be great because Tarantino's strength is making solid movies with interesting and compelling plots while at the same time paying homage to old movie styles and in the process coming up with a great example of the same.
For example Kill Bill is a really great movie in the style of old kung fu flicks. Death Proof has maybe the best car chase scene ever filmed. Jackie Brown is a great homage to blaxploitation films.
Everyone agrees Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn is the best entry in the series. They tried to remake it twice (Nemesis and STID), with the second time even using a rebooted Kahn, and they both missed the mark. I don't think WoK needs to be attempted again but if Tarantino could pull off a new movie with an original plot that brought back the elements we loved about the old movies, it could be pretty interesting.
The one thing I hope though is this doesn't count as one of his ten films. He's said his thought process is that after he's done ten films he's retiring. Pretty much just for the fuck of it. He counts the two Kill Bill movies as one entry, so The Hateful Eight is his eighth film (it's even in the title). That means he has two more to go. I would hope his entry in a sci-fi anthology movie series wouldn't count against the ten. He's said he wouldn't completely rule out another film outside the ten if he felt like it so maybe he wouldn't count this one. Who knows.
...though not really Slashdot's fault as they're just passing the message along.
Microsoft Office is available on all Chromebooks that support running the Google Play Store and whatever Android apps it has in it
If you have a Chromebook not on the supported list and/or running the wrong kind of processor (though mostly just old Chromebooks) then you can't run the Google Play Store and therefore you can't run Office in the manner described here.
What the article was really trying to say is that for some period of time only selected Chromebooks that ran the Google Play Store could run it, artificially limited due to testing purposes. That's done now. But if you're like me and you still have some ancient Acer Chromebook you're not getting it. I know, I tried last night thinking this was an "app" in the way that most ChromeOS "apps" are (i.e., just web pages pretending to be apps)
How to use new technology to reproduce old, obsolete technology. It's interesting in an engineering, logistical, historical and technical sense while at the same time it's the sort of thing that's going to drive a lot of the people on Slashdot fucking insane because it's a ton of effort to solve a problem that the forward thinking engineer believes should not exist.
I guess in a way it's the same way I feel every time there's some new JavaScript framework designed to help further pretend that you're making an app instead of a webpage.
The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.
And then Record Store Day came along and was actually successful in the long run. Sure, the Independent Record Store is still an endangered species but the long term effect was that people started wanting to buy records again in mainstream numbers. Now you can buy vinyl records everywhere from Best Buy to Target. We had a story just like this one a while back about how the last vinyl record presses were made back in the 80's and how we were just now seeing enough demand to create new technology to replicate something for old technology.
To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it (a new CD costs like $11.99, the same album on vinyl can go for over $35 or more) so they keep getting made.
And to some extent if you buy an album on CD you're buying something you can make yourself or you have to turn into the version you want (digital) yourself. If you're going to spend money might as well buy something you can't make yourself, plus as a bonus they tend to come with download codes for the format you really want. Today if you buy physical music to some extent you're buying a souvenir.
But if you're a hipster, the vinyl record becoming mainstream is a problem for you since the whole point is to not be mainstream. So, the next frontier in differentness is cassettes. The pioneer of this for the most part was Urban Outfitters, they've wound up being the exclusive retailer of a number of albums on cassette, like the Run The Jewels album or the Hamilton Mixtape.
So naturally we're now seeing the same problem the vinyl industry faced.
But the sort version to your question is: it's the latest way to be hip and different.
Just a little correction here. AT&T wasn't desperate. Cingular Wireless was desperate. They made the deal with Apple, but didn't happen fast enough to save them, and they were acquired by AT&T between the time that the iPhone was announced and the time it was released. I believe that Apple went to AT&T after being rebuffed by Verizon, only to get the same response.
So while the iPhone launched on AT&Ts network, it was only because AT&T bought Cingular and was forced to honor its contract, not because of negotiations between Apple ant AT&T.
Technically you're both incorrect and correct.
The short version is that when AT&T was declared a monopoly back in the day they were broken up into a bunch of smaller companies (the "Baby Bells", with the former AT&T being the "Ma Bell"). Cingular was formed by two of the Baby Bells (SBC and BellSouth) and through a series of mergers and acquisitions, AT&T acquired most of the Baby Bells back and effectively re-formed. In particular the Cingular merger/acquisition occurred before the iPhone launch.
So it's true that I've thought of AT&T as this one blob of a company when really for a while there they were separate companies and the whole web of who acquired who is enough to make your head spin.
My wife actually worked at Cingular corporate during some of this and the amount of work that went into rebranding AT&T Wireless locations into Cingular locations and then back to just AT&T locations was tremendous. It would be good to be in the businesses that benefited from rebranding at that time (sign creation, business card printing, etc.) because they had to go back to them twice within about six months.
i don't get it, if AT&T wasn't desperate wouldn't Apple have moved onto to the next national carrier that was desperate?
Yeah I should have clarified - AT&T was the only one desperate at the time. I mean, the wireless market was and is competitive but AT&T was the main one hurting.
It's true they would have gone on to the next desperate national carrier except I don't think there was one. But if all four major national carriers (in the USA anyway) were comfortable to the point of saying no like Verizon did then the iPhone as we know it wouldn't have happened - it would have ether never seen the light of day or it would have been watered down with logos on it or it would be a niche product only Apple sold. Kinda like how for a few years the iPod was just the MP3 player you used if you had a Mac (there were ways to run it on Windows but few people bothered)
There was a guy who used to work at RIM (BlackBerry) R&D who posted on a game forum I frequent. He had some good insight on the mobile market.
He said the real issue is not that the phone industry couldn't have come up with something like the iPhone before Apple did (though apparently RIM had a "explain why it can't be done" culture instead of a "figure out how it can be done" culture). The real problem was the carriers. If the carriers didn't carry your phone you were toast.
If you think back on it, prior to the iPhone and Apple selling phones in their stores, probably 99% of cell phone purchases were made by people at the carrier stores (as in, you went to the local AT&T store). And so if the carrier wouldn't carry or sell your phone, you were toast (and I think there's actually been some law changes since then, could be that in 2007 you couldn't just carry any network-compatible phone into a store and have them put it on their network, they may have forced you to buy a phone from them).
The carriers wanted cheap feature phones, preferably ones that lasted about a year before needing to be replaced. They liked deals where people could come in and they'd sell them a cheap phone or four and so they weren't interested in expensive phones with useful features.
Apple went to Verizon first with the iPhone. When they told Verizon that Apple would control the phone, the updates, the eventual App Store, and they wouldn't be able to put their logos on it, Verizon told them to go fuck themselves.
AT&T though, they were desperate. They were losing land line subscribers left and right and their two different cell phone companies were flailing. So they let Apple do its thing.
If AT&T hadn't been desperate we may have never seen the iPhone. And cell phones today would likely not resemble what they do today. Your Prada phone there gives no mention as to what network it was on. It may not have been carried by a carrier for that reason (too expensive). There's a reason almost no one has ever heard of it.
Apple really did change everything, or at the very least move things forward much quicker than they would have ordinarily.
The web browsers on iOS like Firefox and Chrome are actually using the WebKit rendering engine. Chrome brings the material design look and feel and both of them let you just keep the bookmarks and whatever other niceties but the actual renderer is no different than Safari on iOS.
Opera, however, was different - they would render the page server-side as an image and then send that image to your phone. This let them ship a browser on iOS as well as get around Apple's no-rendering-engines rule.
But you can see the issue with this, right? Is Opera caching the images on their servers? Probably not but you can't know. For all you know, JPEGs of your bank website are on their servers. SSL doesn't matter as much anymore because the rendering isn't being done on your device.
So this is different than if they were abandoning an iOS web browser that was a WebKit wrapper like the others, this is Opera saying they no longer want to deal with this render-on-the-server mess.
To say nothing about the fact that Opera as a company has to be struggling right now, they've got less desktop market share than Edge, which no one uses on purpose. They have less market share than Safari which is only on the Mac. I think their switch from Presto to Blink was less that they agreed with Google's standards and more that they just couldn't afford to keep developing Presto anymore. It must be so weird to work for a company that makes a product so few people use.
is Device limited to mobile phone & purchasing apps? Because we sure as hell have 'Devices' in the house older than 2013 that came with those titles for free. On desktops & laptops. That's why OP's original question is still valid.
Do you mean the mobile apps are now finally free too? (know yer history son).
There's a few different things going on here with regards to the Mac versions.
Versions of iWork prior to 2011 were traditional boxed commercial products - as in, you went to the store and bought a disc. The Mac App Store had been introduced in 2010 and in 2011 Apple released iWork '09, the then most recent version, on the Mac App Store as three separate apps at $19.99 a piece (which meant that the three together were cheaper than the $79 they had been charging for the iWork DVD-ROM).
In October 2013 they released new versions of all three, now just called "iWork" with no particular year or version designation, and now exclusively on the Mac App Store. They also made this version a free upgrade for iWork '09 users both to reward existing owners but also because this allowed them to transition to using the Mac App Store as their central software update platform. At this time, however, they were still three $19.99 applications.
The way the free upgrade worked was that the Mac App Store looked to see if you had iWork '09 installed and if so it would install the newer iWork (leaving the old one intact) and associate your Apple ID account in the Mac App Store as having owned the apps. At the time there was a trick people discovered - by accident or design the Mac App Store was incapable of determining whether or not your copy of iWork '09 was the full version or the 30-day trial, which Apple had rescinded from their website but which was still floating around. If you installed iWork '09's trial and rebooted, the Mac App Store would start installing the new version of iWork and your account would now own the latest iWork even though you had not purchased iWork '09. In a statement, Apple acknowledged that this was possible but that they thought the convenience of upgrading and Mac App Store association was worth the potential loss in sales they might suffer as a result.
In October 2014 Apple announced that the three iWork apps would be free with new hardware purchases. Prior to this point you had to either qualify for the free iWork '09 upgrade or purchase the apps, and anyone who didn't do the trick above would still need to buy the apps.
What's changed today is that now the three iWork apps are outright free to everyone, not just people who bought a Mac after 2014 or were willing to perform the iWork '09 trial trick. If you had them on devices prior to 2013 for "free" then either you had taken advantage of some promotion or some bundling, or you may have gotten the upgrade as a result of the 2013 rollout.
The iOS versions of iWork followed a similar trajectory, though skipping the part about being on DVD prior to 2013 and any upgrade tricks - they were released as three $9.99 apps, free with hardware purchases past 2014, and now just free to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I missed this yesterday so probably no one will read thus but anyway...
It's always amusing to see a story like this on Slashdot because it just drives the crowd on here fucking nuts. A largely superior form of listening to music exists and yet people are buying more and more music on an ancient medium.
I'm sure there are people who believe vinyl sounds absolutely better. I used to be one of them. Over the many years since I've been in high school and had that belief I've learned a lot about technology, sound engineering (just a pinch), music mastering, and so forth to realize that the notion that vinyl is better is not an absolute thing at all. It has the potential to sound better in certain circumstances, usually involving an expensive turntable, but overall it mostly just potentially sounds different, not necessarily better.
But for most people, I don't think that's the reason they're buying vinyl. Today, if you're buying physical music in any format you're basically buying a souvenir.
Consider a CD. What's the difference between buying a CD in the store and burning one from MP3 files? Cover art, liner notes, silk screening on the disc and some amount of added audio fidelity. The fidelity is not insignificant but really when you're buying a CD you're buying something you could almost make yourself from downloaded files (regardless of how you got the files).
And that's before you consider the fact that if you're buying a CD you probably also want it on MP3 and you'll have to rip it yourself with an optical drive you're increasingly unlikely to have.
A vinyl record, on the other hand, is not something you can make yourself. And there's a decent chance it comes with an MP3 download code. And even if it doesn't, it's a big, huge tangible thing that done correctly can be a work of art. The vinyl can be colored, or using funky patterns, or translucent. It can have things like etched holograms in it, or weird tricks like the ones Jack White pulls where he has alternate intro tracks based on where your needle falls or hidden songs in the space on the label. It's just neat.
Plus digital music has done lots of great things but it's true, digital music devalues music. An album comes out, you listen to it once, you say "cool" and then you hit shuffle on your whole collection and you listen to the songs as they occasionally pop up. Listening to CDs was more atomic - you would tend to listen to one CD in your car over and over, or however many your home or car disc changer could handle. A vinyl record though, that's a commitment. You have to decide you want to listen to pretty much the entire side of an album. If you want to listen to a double album you have to get up and flip or change the record three times. If you want to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack you have to get up or flip the record seven times. This is why a lot of the vinyl that sells well to this day are things like Dark Side of the Moon where it's more album oriented than song/single oriented. And a lot of you reading this probably think this is stupid but a lot of us think it's neat. If vinyl continues to grow in popularity we might see a return to the album oriented rock it popularized.
But yeah if you're buying physical music you're buying a souvenir. And it looks like more and more people figure if they're going to buy music, might as well buy a souvenir. Something with big, cool album art and a tangible experience. The rest of the public is fine with music services like Spotify and Apple Music. So the CDs are leaving stores, the vinyl isn't, and although a small handful of people with breathlessly fight to the death to argue that vinyl is superior in some form or fashion the simple reality is that digital music and streaming services aren't going anywhere.
So let the vinyl weirdos like me have our fun.
I would say another example are the original BlackBerry pager devices. They're a sad joke compared to what the mobile phone industry would become after the iPhone and Android phones hit the market but the use case - sending email from anywhere - was so compelling that people used them despite the fact that they were primitive. Heck they got the nick name CrackBerries as a result. Now we have an entire world of people staring at their phones sending messages with any number of devices when they're not playing Fortnite.
The tech maturity argument is valid. The cost concerns are valid. The logistical concerns are valid. But I think the real thing is that at the end of the day, most people don't care a damn thing about VR and even if all of those things get sorted out the number of people who want to strap a thing to their face and be in that world for anything more than a few minutes a couple of times to see what's the big deal is nowhere near where it would need to be to make something like that viable.
And I'm saying this as someone who got a Virtual Boy Emulator using Google Cardboard VR running on the iPhone.
Reports are that Switch Dev Kits are $500 or less. This is why there's so many indie games on it, like Axiom Verge or Celeste. A bunch of AAA devs took a wait-and-see attitude and when sales took off they started working on Switch games. Meanwhile the indies could afford $500 dev kits and got their less complicated games running on it quickly.
I have. Back in college if you wanted to access Bank of America you went there and they handed you a handful of floppy diskettes to install software. Seriously. It wasn't too much longer after that that online banking through websites became a thing but up until a certain point in time you were seriously having to physically acquire software
I agree that part of their plan was tracking their users, especially since the CEO bragged about it, but then they had to shut down that part of it when people complained, later calling it a glitch or something.
The other part of it, and I think this is the real key, is that MoviePass got tired of being a small fish in a nonexistent pond and decided to go huge in the hopes of being bought by someone else and having it be their problem. YouTube, for example, was hemorrhaging money because their bandwidth costs were doubling every single month. And then Google bought them and that became Google's problem (which wasn't a problem because Google has no problem getting the bandwidth it wants). I think MoviePass was hoping someone would buy them, either for the data part or to shut them down, and either way the founders cash out and leave.
I do have to say that the thing I despised about MoviePass was that anyone with half a brain could see either they were up to something or they were going to go out of business fast. This would be like paying a $20/month fee and getting a card that will pay for all the gas your car ever needs. Something doesn't add up here. But whenever you'd tell anyone they'd treat you like you were some asshole who wanted to ruin everything. And reading all these people who experienced surge pricing or who couldn't get their app or card to work or who had to photograph ticket stubs like they were submitting some corporate expense report... I'm glad I never signed up or bothered with it. They're going to be dead by the end of the week at this rate.
https://distrowatch.com/dwres....
It seems to me that if you want to get into using Linux, use Ubuntu or Mint or something. If you want to get into Linux the hard way and really get your hands dirty then Slackware is up to the challenge.
Again you're getting this wrong. They said they were going to bring UIKit to macOS. That's all. The press is reporting on this like it's going to be some sort of magic thing that lets your iOS apps run on the Mac, oe that they're merging the operating systems, or that the Mac is going to have at touch interface. It's not that.
There's two UI libraries in the Apple world. The Mac uses AppKit and iOS uses UIKit. They have similarities but they're different enough to be a challenge. The big overall thing is that AppKit is much older than UIKit which makes sense as the Mac is older than the iPhone. It's been said that to some extent UIKit is what AppKit would be if they started over on it today and were able to use all of the stuff they've learned over the years, which is basically exactly the situation they were in when making the iPhone.
So for example, let's say you have an iOS app and you have a screen where you need a text view. Like, it's a box with text in it and if it needs to, it can scroll if you have too much text in it. You can make it read-only or editable. So you drag a UITextView onto the screen and you're most of the way there. It has a text property and you set that to be what the text is, either in the designer or in the code. You can specify if it's editable, scrollable, etc. in the same way.
Now let's say you want to do that same thing on the Mac. You have a form and you drag an NSTextView control onto it. It has the same name except for the first two letters because Apple's naming convention (at least in the Objective-C era) is to have the first 2-3 letters be uppercase and the rest be descriptive. UI stands for UIKit. The NS? That stands for NEXTSTEP (that's really the name in all caps like that), because macOS is derived from what used to be NEXTSTEP, which was the OS from the company Steve Jobs started when Apple gave him the boot. Yeah.
OK so UITextView vs. NSTextView. Simple enough, right? Well not quite. See, when you drag that onto the form you'll notice that it's an NSTextView embedded in an NSClipView, and then that's embedded in an NSScrollView along with two NSScroller objects for the scrollbars. So everything involved in this equation gets its own separate object and so you have to remember to specify the text in the NSTextView but the scrolling in the NSScrollView. And I'm not sure what the NSClipView does other than just provide a window into whatever part of the view the NSTextView is visible.
Basically at some point they realized everyone wanted to work with the one object and have it handle all the stuff like scrolling and scrollbars itself. And this is one simple example. But it means that it's not quite as simple as writing some library that says "if Mac then NSTextView else UITextView", although some have tried. In fact apparently Apple has a library of their own called UXKit that basically does that but it's not available for use yet.
This is like a 2-for-1, it invokes Betteridge's Law of Headlines as well as the knee-jerk reaction of the Slashdot crowd to any sort of design change Apple makes at all. If only we could rope in Bitcoin somehow it would be like the holy trinity of triggers.
Man, people here on Slashdot are not understanding this report at all.
According to this report, Apple is planning on replacing the processor in the Mac with an ARM-based processor. That is all. This is something they have done, successfully, twice before. The original Macintosh from 1984 ran on the Motorola 68k architecture. In 1994 they switched to PowerPC and in 2005 they switched to x86. Now they're considering switching again to their own ARM-based chips like the ones they use in the iPad Pro. One would assume that the processors for the Mac would be more powerful than the ones they use in mobile devices and less concerned with things like heat since you can actually use fans and the user can be OK with a shorter battery life.
When they did this with the x86 switchover they told everyone in 2003 to start using Xcode and if they weren't, switch to it. When the switch occurred in 2005, everyone who was using Xcode could just do a recompile and their app was good to go. The version of Mac OS X that ran on Intel processors for years had a software layer called Rosetta which would allow you to continue to run your PowerPC-based apps for a while. In 2011 when they released Mac OS X 10.7 they removed it but that was a five year stretch where people could upgrade their apps. Some apps never got upgraded but that was part of the gamble Apple took.
However, nothing else about this announcement even begins to imply that anything else is going on. They're not trying to turn macOS into iOS. They're not adding a touch screen to the Mac. They're not looking to lock down the Mac and make it a walled off platform like iOS. They're not looking to make fundamental shifts in how the Mac operates. They're just looking to switch out the processor. And we know basically how they'll do it because they done it before. Twice.
Apple's roadmap on the Mac is beholden to Intel's roadmap and when Intel's roadmap gets delayed, Apple's roadmap gets delayed. This is not something they would be able to tolerate on the iPhone where they want to put a new one out every year. Switching from Intel to an Apple-made ARM processor will make one more item that they're not dependent on an outside company for.
To expand on this slightly, there's a couple of similarly named concepts people get tripped up on.
iTunes was and is the name of the music player and organization app on Mac and Windows. It's also what Apple uses to sell people content via the iTunes Store.
Apple has been selling full albums from day one of the iTunes Music Store. They also sell the songs individually for varying amounts - usually $0.99/pop, though after some label finagling they also have $0.69 and $1.29 price points.
The record industry has used the term "LP" for many years to refer to a full length album to be sold at full price. The term comes from "Long Play" and it's a holdover from the early phonograph days. The record industry also uses the term "EP", for "Extended Play" and despite the naming it's the term they use for a smaller, shorter album that sells at a reduced price (the etymology comes from the fact that it's extended compared to a single).
Some artists don't like their albums to be purchased song-by-song and notable examples like Pink Floyd were slow to adapt for that reason.
"iTunes LP" was a format idea Apple came up with. The idea was to both provide incentive to purchase full albums as well as recreate some of the look/feel of albums with liner notes, etc. They borrowed the term "LP" to invoke the notion of it being a more substantial thing than just buying the album. I believe it was designed to help you envision buying an LP record (i.e., gatefold cover, lyric sheet, etc.)
Like a number of half baked Apple ideas it never really got the attention it needed and it never really got used much. So they're phasing it out.
But so everyone is clear:
It is true that Apple does name things somewhat confusingly, with most product offerings having some combination of "iTunes", "iCloud" or other words and it can be tricky to make sure you're referring to the right thing. But the notion that someone could take a memo about the iTunes LP digital music format being phased out and extrapolate it to Apple is finally killing off the main program they have all their users tied in to is just comical.
I'm sure he didn't mean that exchanging files was impossible prior to the Internet but you can't seriously compare the concept of mailing floppy disks or dialing up with AOL to the era where suddenly everyone was online all the time.
The author, Joel Spolsky, was a Program Manager on Excel back in the day, so this article is based in part on his experiences working on Excel, it's not just some blogger spitballing.
No, the reason Office document interoperability is so difficult is because Microsoft designed these formats for themselves, for their own programs, with no thought to interoperability in either direction, and with other concessions in mind like how the early versions of Word and Excel needed to run on really old computers.
Pretty much exactly ten years ago Microsoft released documents to satisfy the EU that detailed exactly how the Word and Excel file formats worked, and they were PDF files that were 400 and 450 pages long. People like yourself speculated that perhaps they had been purposely obfuscated to thwart developers but the truth of the matter is that these things were designed over the course of decades and had a whole lot of stuff in them as a result of the increased complexity of the requirements.
To some extent, Office applications have the contents of the document loaded into memory and the document file itself is basically a memory dump of the contents of the memory serialized to disk. Loading the document deserializes it into memory. People complain about this but again, when your perspective is you need to have this application you're programming write out files and then read them in later, it makes perfect sense as a plan of action. It also explains why occasionally Office breaks compatibility with itself on upgrades which is unacceptable but it happens.
In that vein, LibreOffice has had the specs for the Office documents for a decade now, so I think the "what is the excuse?" question is still pretty valid. But the issue is not that Microsoft deliberately sabotages efforts. They're not that smart and they're not that dumb.
...until they stop doing pretty well, at which point they'll likely change to subscription pricing. After hiking up the prices for the perpetual licenses to no avail. aka the Paint Shop Pro path.
I believe the Stitcher app does insert ads, possibly the feeds themselves come from Stitcher where they've gone in and edited the podcasts. If that's the case perhaps it's possible you have one or more Stitcher-modified RSS feeds in your Apple Podcasts app.
But yeah the Apple Podcasts app doesn't insert ads.
Part of me thinks this is a bad idea - a guy known for his over the top stylistic violence and profanity epics handling the next entry in a popular pop sci-fi franchise just seems like a bad fit.
However, part of me thinks this would be great because Tarantino's strength is making solid movies with interesting and compelling plots while at the same time paying homage to old movie styles and in the process coming up with a great example of the same.
For example Kill Bill is a really great movie in the style of old kung fu flicks. Death Proof has maybe the best car chase scene ever filmed. Jackie Brown is a great homage to blaxploitation films.
Everyone agrees Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn is the best entry in the series. They tried to remake it twice (Nemesis and STID), with the second time even using a rebooted Kahn, and they both missed the mark. I don't think WoK needs to be attempted again but if Tarantino could pull off a new movie with an original plot that brought back the elements we loved about the old movies, it could be pretty interesting.
The one thing I hope though is this doesn't count as one of his ten films. He's said his thought process is that after he's done ten films he's retiring. Pretty much just for the fuck of it. He counts the two Kill Bill movies as one entry, so The Hateful Eight is his eighth film (it's even in the title). That means he has two more to go. I would hope his entry in a sci-fi anthology movie series wouldn't count against the ten. He's said he wouldn't completely rule out another film outside the ten if he felt like it so maybe he wouldn't count this one. Who knows.
...though not really Slashdot's fault as they're just passing the message along.
Microsoft Office is available on all Chromebooks that support running the Google Play Store and whatever Android apps it has in it
If you have a Chromebook not on the supported list and/or running the wrong kind of processor (though mostly just old Chromebooks) then you can't run the Google Play Store and therefore you can't run Office in the manner described here.
What the article was really trying to say is that for some period of time only selected Chromebooks that ran the Google Play Store could run it, artificially limited due to testing purposes. That's done now. But if you're like me and you still have some ancient Acer Chromebook you're not getting it. I know, I tried last night thinking this was an "app" in the way that most ChromeOS "apps" are (i.e., just web pages pretending to be apps)
The iPhone X is the entire reason why they did that.
Not a player piano but Beck did release an entire album once in the form of piano sheet music. At the time it was deemed pretty pretty damned hipster
How to use new technology to reproduce old, obsolete technology. It's interesting in an engineering, logistical, historical and technical sense while at the same time it's the sort of thing that's going to drive a lot of the people on Slashdot fucking insane because it's a ton of effort to solve a problem that the forward thinking engineer believes should not exist.
I guess in a way it's the same way I feel every time there's some new JavaScript framework designed to help further pretend that you're making an app instead of a webpage.
The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.
And then Record Store Day came along and was actually successful in the long run. Sure, the Independent Record Store is still an endangered species but the long term effect was that people started wanting to buy records again in mainstream numbers. Now you can buy vinyl records everywhere from Best Buy to Target. We had a story just like this one a while back about how the last vinyl record presses were made back in the 80's and how we were just now seeing enough demand to create new technology to replicate something for old technology.
To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it (a new CD costs like $11.99, the same album on vinyl can go for over $35 or more) so they keep getting made.
And to some extent if you buy an album on CD you're buying something you can make yourself or you have to turn into the version you want (digital) yourself. If you're going to spend money might as well buy something you can't make yourself, plus as a bonus they tend to come with download codes for the format you really want. Today if you buy physical music to some extent you're buying a souvenir.
But if you're a hipster, the vinyl record becoming mainstream is a problem for you since the whole point is to not be mainstream. So, the next frontier in differentness is cassettes. The pioneer of this for the most part was Urban Outfitters, they've wound up being the exclusive retailer of a number of albums on cassette, like the Run The Jewels album or the Hamilton Mixtape.
So naturally we're now seeing the same problem the vinyl industry faced.
But the sort version to your question is: it's the latest way to be hip and different.
Technically you're both incorrect and correct.
The short version is that when AT&T was declared a monopoly back in the day they were broken up into a bunch of smaller companies (the "Baby Bells", with the former AT&T being the "Ma Bell"). Cingular was formed by two of the Baby Bells (SBC and BellSouth) and through a series of mergers and acquisitions, AT&T acquired most of the Baby Bells back and effectively re-formed. In particular the Cingular merger/acquisition occurred before the iPhone launch.
So it's true that I've thought of AT&T as this one blob of a company when really for a while there they were separate companies and the whole web of who acquired who is enough to make your head spin.
My wife actually worked at Cingular corporate during some of this and the amount of work that went into rebranding AT&T Wireless locations into Cingular locations and then back to just AT&T locations was tremendous. It would be good to be in the businesses that benefited from rebranding at that time (sign creation, business card printing, etc.) because they had to go back to them twice within about six months.
Yeah I should have clarified - AT&T was the only one desperate at the time. I mean, the wireless market was and is competitive but AT&T was the main one hurting.
It's true they would have gone on to the next desperate national carrier except I don't think there was one. But if all four major national carriers (in the USA anyway) were comfortable to the point of saying no like Verizon did then the iPhone as we know it wouldn't have happened - it would have ether never seen the light of day or it would have been watered down with logos on it or it would be a niche product only Apple sold. Kinda like how for a few years the iPod was just the MP3 player you used if you had a Mac (there were ways to run it on Windows but few people bothered)
There was a guy who used to work at RIM (BlackBerry) R&D who posted on a game forum I frequent. He had some good insight on the mobile market.
He said the real issue is not that the phone industry couldn't have come up with something like the iPhone before Apple did (though apparently RIM had a "explain why it can't be done" culture instead of a "figure out how it can be done" culture). The real problem was the carriers. If the carriers didn't carry your phone you were toast.
If you think back on it, prior to the iPhone and Apple selling phones in their stores, probably 99% of cell phone purchases were made by people at the carrier stores (as in, you went to the local AT&T store). And so if the carrier wouldn't carry or sell your phone, you were toast (and I think there's actually been some law changes since then, could be that in 2007 you couldn't just carry any network-compatible phone into a store and have them put it on their network, they may have forced you to buy a phone from them).
The carriers wanted cheap feature phones, preferably ones that lasted about a year before needing to be replaced. They liked deals where people could come in and they'd sell them a cheap phone or four and so they weren't interested in expensive phones with useful features.
Apple went to Verizon first with the iPhone. When they told Verizon that Apple would control the phone, the updates, the eventual App Store, and they wouldn't be able to put their logos on it, Verizon told them to go fuck themselves.
AT&T though, they were desperate. They were losing land line subscribers left and right and their two different cell phone companies were flailing. So they let Apple do its thing.
If AT&T hadn't been desperate we may have never seen the iPhone. And cell phones today would likely not resemble what they do today. Your Prada phone there gives no mention as to what network it was on. It may not have been carried by a carrier for that reason (too expensive). There's a reason almost no one has ever heard of it.
Apple really did change everything, or at the very least move things forward much quicker than they would have ordinarily.
The web browsers on iOS like Firefox and Chrome are actually using the WebKit rendering engine. Chrome brings the material design look and feel and both of them let you just keep the bookmarks and whatever other niceties but the actual renderer is no different than Safari on iOS.
Opera, however, was different - they would render the page server-side as an image and then send that image to your phone. This let them ship a browser on iOS as well as get around Apple's no-rendering-engines rule.
But you can see the issue with this, right? Is Opera caching the images on their servers? Probably not but you can't know. For all you know, JPEGs of your bank website are on their servers. SSL doesn't matter as much anymore because the rendering isn't being done on your device.
So this is different than if they were abandoning an iOS web browser that was a WebKit wrapper like the others, this is Opera saying they no longer want to deal with this render-on-the-server mess.
To say nothing about the fact that Opera as a company has to be struggling right now, they've got less desktop market share than Edge, which no one uses on purpose. They have less market share than Safari which is only on the Mac. I think their switch from Presto to Blink was less that they agreed with Google's standards and more that they just couldn't afford to keep developing Presto anymore. It must be so weird to work for a company that makes a product so few people use.
There's a few different things going on here with regards to the Mac versions.
Versions of iWork prior to 2011 were traditional boxed commercial products - as in, you went to the store and bought a disc. The Mac App Store had been introduced in 2010 and in 2011 Apple released iWork '09, the then most recent version, on the Mac App Store as three separate apps at $19.99 a piece (which meant that the three together were cheaper than the $79 they had been charging for the iWork DVD-ROM).
In October 2013 they released new versions of all three, now just called "iWork" with no particular year or version designation, and now exclusively on the Mac App Store. They also made this version a free upgrade for iWork '09 users both to reward existing owners but also because this allowed them to transition to using the Mac App Store as their central software update platform. At this time, however, they were still three $19.99 applications.
The way the free upgrade worked was that the Mac App Store looked to see if you had iWork '09 installed and if so it would install the newer iWork (leaving the old one intact) and associate your Apple ID account in the Mac App Store as having owned the apps. At the time there was a trick people discovered - by accident or design the Mac App Store was incapable of determining whether or not your copy of iWork '09 was the full version or the 30-day trial, which Apple had rescinded from their website but which was still floating around. If you installed iWork '09's trial and rebooted, the Mac App Store would start installing the new version of iWork and your account would now own the latest iWork even though you had not purchased iWork '09. In a statement, Apple acknowledged that this was possible but that they thought the convenience of upgrading and Mac App Store association was worth the potential loss in sales they might suffer as a result.
In October 2014 Apple announced that the three iWork apps would be free with new hardware purchases. Prior to this point you had to either qualify for the free iWork '09 upgrade or purchase the apps, and anyone who didn't do the trick above would still need to buy the apps.
What's changed today is that now the three iWork apps are outright free to everyone, not just people who bought a Mac after 2014 or were willing to perform the iWork '09 trial trick. If you had them on devices prior to 2013 for "free" then either you had taken advantage of some promotion or some bundling, or you may have gotten the upgrade as a result of the 2013 rollout.
The iOS versions of iWork followed a similar trajectory, though skipping the part about being on DVD prior to 2013 and any upgrade tricks - they were released as three $9.99 apps, free with hardware purchases past 2014, and now just free to anyone.