It's not, really. Something like 95% of the visitors of google, a fairly cool search engine that attracts all sorts of people, use windows. About 2.5 use a MacOS, and half of that use Linux.
Doesn't sound like use is so "widespread" when less than 5% of the net community use alternative OSs. It sounds like people are trapped. And can you blame them? Windows OSs are different looks of the same idea, MacOS shoots itself in its foot and Linux has such a huge menu of choices it's impossible for a newbie to pick the right one.
And don't blame complexity for the shittiness of computer operating systems. If you make a simple interface, you can add what you need to it. That was the whole idea of the Linux kernel -- at least, until everybody & their mother decided to force feature x or feature y into the most common releases.
your misinformed about your grammatical misinformation. furthermore, misinforming my misinformation misinforms the misinformed.
Roget makes this killer book called "Thesaurus." It's about a gregarious brigand and the cacophonous gentry of his prefecture. I highly suggest you pick it up.
I think a lot of software is released buggy as hell simply because investers and customers expect development houses to show results very quickly. Many contract jobs are six months or shorter, barely enough time to come up with a dog & pony slideshow of great software, let alone develop a secure product. Most developers depend on tools from other companies to cover the gaps in the process -- tools like IIS and apache.
The problem lies with the fallacy of internet time -- that software advances can keep up with hardware advances. The difficulty here is that Moore's law is based on years of research -- an advance in memory that doubles the speed next year will have begun five years or more ago with tons of R&D. Software doesn't really have that luxury -- it's all about the now.
One might say that this sort of demand is a requirement in business -- but in many ways, it's a self maintaining fad. Look at biotech -- a biotech company might do research for dozens of years before they can release a new drug or procedure. They have amazingly tedious checks and balances. Why? Because human lives are at stake. Because a single slip up will cost them millions in malpractice.
Holding software companies liable for security failures is a great idea in the respect that it will force dev houses to make better software. But in the process something will have to be done about the expectation that software is a need it now sort of deal.
As a side note: this sort of legislature would be a godsend for contract programmers. If company X has to wait years for a secure product to come out of Microsoft or hire somebody now to do the work cheap and sign off on the liability, they'll probably choose the latter. It'll also decrease on the feature blitz of new products that is leading to the increased need for pay for play software licensing.
I sit about six feet from my speakers...any further away, and you start to lose what little soundstage you have left after MP3. A web interface for a stereo component is totally worthless -- my stereo does not have anything to do with the web, and for most users of home audio the web is another kludgey interface.
My Adcom has about eight functions: Play, Pause, Stop, Eject, Skip Track (up and down) and Scan FF/Rwnd. For many home audio enthusiasts, simple is better. For components like this to sell, they have to be all inclusive, have a simple interface, and yet not be critically crippled. It is possible to perform all three of these with good design, and I feel SonicBlue has done this.
I'm not buying it or anything, but I respect the unit. This is exactly what I'd be looking for if I hadn't sworn off MP3s for good when I sold my Rio Volt.
For a new component? Hell no. Think about it: you're paying as much for the service and the software as you are for the box itself. And though you can say very easily that you could find quality ripping, encoding and navigation software and add that to your $800 box, the fact is it still won't have the correct footprint, decent enough optical out, clean enough analogue out, a nice resolution mini monitor or a decent controller.
What a lot of people don't understand is that any idiot can toss together a cheap computer. Making a cheap computer into a great machine takes good software and an eye for detail -- what will cause a problem where, what will be unreliable and unsupportable in three months, what will cause dependencies that aren't intuitive. Shit, when I went Athlon I found out after installing the mobo and chip that both my NIC and my sound card were incompatible...meaning three hours of downtime while I shlepped to the local hardware emporium. That's why people buy boxes from Apple, SGI, Sun Cobalt, Snap, F5 and RADware...you don't have to hack anything to get them to work.
I figure the software that went into this machine took at least as much care as my Sun Cobalt webserver ($1900 for similar power), plus it's got that sweet little display. $1500 may be a lot for a computer -- but for this device, it's worth it and when the price drops in two or three months it'll be even more worth it.
At Internet World 2000 there were close to thirty companies offering new search engines, everything from voice controlled searching to variations on a miningco theme.
They're all dead. Not necessarily because their ideas weren't good...the best of these were eaten by google and altavista and lycos and are still around. They're dead because they offered nothing new to the searching public -- no better results, no improved searching. Nothing but good ideas listing no pages with a buggy interface. The searching public has no tolerance for buggy code or crummy results. This tool WILL be a nest of crummy links until they figure out a clever way to omit them...and by that time, we'll have already given up
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
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Andreesen "Grows Up"
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· Score: 2
name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet.
MP3. Think about it: would DRM or the DMCA ever have become mandatory were it not the restrictions on the flow of large datamasses lifted by the internet?
Only so many people you can connect via parcel post, telephone and sneakernet. It's controllable because it's a hassle. The internet offered this great solution to abetting content "theft," and people have taken it. That's the internet's real major social change: it's allowed us an opportunity to share the art of our lives with each other, and now that we've done so we have become criminals.
Shit, I wonder what it must have been like in the sixties, trading records and not being reprimanded for it. I'll bet it was amazingly freeing...a secret club, just like the original incarnation of Napster, only much more personal and localized.
Well, no. Cookies are commonly used to track you -- but only within a single domain. And who cares, really? This data is used by companies and designers to tell what areas of the site attract the most attention and to create patterns of usage. This data is then used by good web crews to streamline the process, eliminate confusing links and add new features based on what you want.
Sure, we can mine some of this data from the logs, but using cookies has the offshoot of opting out of our tracking: turn off your damn cookies.
Problem with this: "most" websites do not link to sites with similar content. Most websites link to "partner" sites that have nothing in common with them -- after all, who links to a competitor?
Good websites link to similar sites -- academic websites link to simialr sites and sources. This type of search engine would be killer on Internet 2. But on our wonderful, chaotic, porn and paid link filled Internet 1, it's useless. Spider MSN and you'll get a circular web leading to homestore, ms.com, Freedom To Onnovate, ZDNet and Slate. Spider Sun and never find a single page in common with their close competitors like IBM.
What happens when sites get associated with their ads? Search on Microsoft Windows and grab a lot of casino and porn links...because a "security" site covered in porn banners was spidered and came up with top relevancy.
Now, combined with a click-to-rate-usefulness engine like Google, this could be an interesting novelty. But it'll never be the simple hands off site hunter the big Goo has become.
Seems like the perfect time for BSD to enter the 21st century.
Seriously, ACPI is the wave of three years ago. It's a better interface in many ways, especially since (in theory) it eliminates the painful IRQ merrygoround we all rode back in 1997.
The choices here appear to be adapt, abort or avoid. I'd choose the latter. But then again, I'm running OSX anyway so it's a moot point:)
Oh, how very geek -- a my-computer-was-shittier-than-thine post.
Well, I'll bite. My first computer had a monochrome display, 40 character columns and 8k memory. We upgraded it with a hard drive for close to $3000; the hard drive was 4 meg.
That machine is less than a tenth of the power of my cellular phone. I emulate it on my Pocket PC while playing A Flock of Seagulls MP3s in the background. Ahh memories...
Seriously though, 640k WAS enough for most programs when they knew how to manage the top ram. They just had to treat it the same way we deal with swap files today -- stick memory up there if you don't want to get rid of it but don't actively need it. There are plenty of devices, programs and utilities that run with command stacks under 128k (the size of the biggest x86 command cache i'm aware of) that swap miscellaneous data (ie pictures, sounds, even text) out of the larger ram. The problem was that sloppy compilers (MS is not the only one to blame; if I remember Borland was the biggest player in the compilation game back when 640k was 'nuff) DIDN'T do the swapping for you.
Windows has spoiled us all by doing such things under the scenes -- to the point that code optimizers are hot commodities that are prized for their savant abilities. In short: the same practices that create the code bloat we all cringe at were responsible for the streamlining of some very sticky swap processes. Resource files, i hate you and I could kiss you.
How does it all work for the consumer? Suppose your 13-year-old daughter bought the latest CD by *NSYNC, a popular boy band. When the band's next release is available, Tsutaya Online (TOL), Tsutaya's wireless i-Mode site, will e-mail you a digital music clip. Similarly, fans of movie star Nicole Kidman can be sent a review of her new movie, "Birthday Girl,'' and then track its availability on video via the Web or mobile phone.
And now, the problems with this, for those not following it close enough:
1) If I bought the n*sync album, and liked it, I'd already know a new one was coming out. Informing me it of this would embarrass you and creep me the hell out.
2) If I bought said album and didn't like it, your informing me that there is a new one would probably not entice me to buy it. Getting a free "clip," which would no doubt be identical to the songs played on mtv, the radio, and cars parked next to mine at Target, would not entice me to buy it. So again, it embarrasses you and creeps me the hell out.
3) If you let me know there's a new Nicole Kidman flick out, and tell me where I can see it, you assume that I had nothing to do that evening but what you tell me. Basically, you're suggesting that I do what you say and forcefully providing me with a suggestion. And since nobody goes to a film alone, I'd have to admit to my friends that we're going to see this damn butterfly movie because a cell-phone provider told me to. When they were done laughing, we wouldn't go. Again, you are embarrassed and I am shamed.
There is no way for this technology not to be obnoxious. It is not passive advertising, like a magazine or banner ad, which I act on if that's what I am searching for. It is active advertising, singling me out, and unlike telemarketing which has a (slightly) human factor to it increasing the probability of success. So we have obnoxious technology on expensive devices. Result? Devices become marginalized to only people who are themselves obnoxious, deleting the street appeal (one of the largest sellers of cell phones). Companies realise this and don't use the service. The service dies, and CIOs fire ad sellers like it's their fault.
Jesus, people, how hard is it to build a company through great customer service, useful products and quality goods? It seems that everybody's looking to force junk down our throats for loads and loads of money, claiming it's "free." Is it any wonder OSS has such trouble in this market?
Re:wait a minute, what's the story here?
on
iWarez
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· Score: 2
No, you couldn't. Can't do it on a PC because you'd have to first install the device's drivers, wait for it to autodetect, have security permissions to use it, have to grab the files and the files in common folders and the system folder and dump the registry. If a CompUSA employee left you alone long enough to do that...well, you'd also have your coat lined with copies of Medal of Honor and some mouse cozies.
Can't do it on a linux machine because once you had good enough access to grab software, you'd just use the box to spam people. Plus, what's worth stealing? Anything in the linux world that isn't already free is worthless without the service that goes with it. The price of freedom is eternal documentation.
The point here is Apple's new click & drag isntall paradigm. Click & drag to your palmtop is actually something I'm sure they intended you to do. That's how you do network installs, anyway. They just didn't intend for a random kid to do it.
Like it matters anyway. He can't even run the stuff without a serial number, and if he's not bright enough to have a better bead on Mac Warez than CompUSA, he won't know where to get one.
CompUSA eh? I'm surprised they even knew it WAS a Macintosh. Honestly, I've gone into that store to look for accessories for my mac and had them try and sell me a Compaq. Hello? Dumbass? I *HAVE* a mac, and I'm trying to purchase accesories for it. I don't want to buy a third rate PC with an updated "model number."
Incidentally, I'd like to point out that the ease with which you can pirate software from a Macintosh raises an interesting point with Apple's vision. You install OfficeX by copying it where you want it...similar to the way you installed software on PCs before the invention of the "install wizard." Somebody realised that a single motion (drag program to applications) was easier than clicking through a dozen confusing menus. Somebody realized the time to ask for a serial number was when you tried to run a program, not while the install CD was in the drive.
Oh, and I'd like to mention in this anonymous forum that I steal bandwidth from the Apple store all the time. That lovely open (well, i consider 128bit WEP pretty open) Airport network is perfect for chilling in the mall with my palmtop, comparing online prices to b&m.
How is listening to the radio (indepedent radio...ups to WEQX) any different from Napster's evils?
Back before radio became the bastion of independent producers and huge coglomerates, it was THE place to steal music. Long before napster, long before CDs, there was a device known as the tape recorder. Quality wasn't great, and like Margaret Cho all my old music has my mom yelling at me in the background from when I held the Sharp handheld tape recorder up to the old crystal radio my dad built in high school. But it's how we got it. My friends would trade copies of Wierd Al on 90 minute tapes, selling them on the schoolyard. One friend spent all week making "ultimate mixes" for field trips.
And we had access to every great song ever. Our network was sneakernet, but through it you could get anything. Springstein? Matt Bonaparte's sister's best friend's dad has the whole collection. Dylan? That wierd kid whose family never mows the lawn has a complete set on vinyl and will trade it for a pudding cup.
Before tapes, people would trade records at parties. Before records, people taught each other songs. Jesus, music is *ABOUT* trading, it's about making friends. My wife and I used to make out to stoner rock, we met at a coffehouse folk show. Our first date was to a midnight Beatles Anthology party. Most of my friends were met at concerts and shows.
Somebody mentioned something about the best acts nowadays not being marketed, or certainly overshadowed by handsome total crap bands willing to trade their integrity for a pay day. Music trading is the only way most bands will get any exposure. Have you heard of the Atomic Numbers? MC Paul Barman? Queens of the Stone Age and Dream Theatre have great new albums out, did you know about them? I found all of these acts through music trading, through my 13 exobyte, 100,000 user WinMX network set. I've met good friends there.
Sun did think of it. They're pushing Linux like crazy, with machines starting as low as $1000 and great software support. The dozen Cobalt machines I admin attest to that. It's the reason why there's a sun released JVM for Linux, promoting it to the lofty standards of NT x86, NT alpha and Solaris, whereas us BSD and Mac users need to wait until Apple, IBM or the Kaffe boys to get off their humps.
"Lady, I'm not 'wasting time and money on funny books,' I'm conducting an analysis of social interaction through the medium of networked vigilantism. Now pass that new issue of X-Force and refresh my strawberry sprite."
the universe has brought suit against the estate of Albert Einstein, claiming that fission is illegal under the DMCA, and that fair use of elementary particles applies only to cold fusion.
They'll fidn out all I watch on WMP is internet porno. Which is an interesting metric. Until now, Redmond's stayed out of the pr0nline gig, and I feel the industry has been waiting for a true killer app for a while.
The time is now for Open Source porno to combat this future menace!
True. Apple is a "marginal player, selling to a fan club."
But why does it need to be anything more?
Apple, unlike "bigger" companies such as Dell or Micron, always makes a profit and has a much higher margin per machine sale than anybody else. This is because there's no other player in their market -- who knows what the cost of a "clone" apple would be nowadays?
Now, Apple stock is a different thing. It's currently worth next to butkiss, and even though Apple the company is run more solidly that any other computer manufacturer, it's still hovering low. Why? Because Apple's practices aren't going to make shareholders rich. They'll never post a fifty dollar per share profit year, because most profits go back into R&D.
In short: Apple is a failure because they research and develop. Apple is also a success because they research and develop. If you can't stand the dichotomy, well, place your funds in Microsoft.
"The human society is against closing pets because of the dangers of overpopulation."
Why? This is the smartest idea for pets ever. Think about it -- the Human Society encourages everybody to spay or neuter their pets to discourage overpopulation. Now what if we engineered pets that are genetically incapable of breeding? There's no danger of "accidents," no need to be cruel to unwanted pets. There's a much better means of discovering the nature of a pet. Want a dog that's good with children? Don't pay for a "breed" that's good with children, only to get a monster like my parents adopted(a stubborn 95 pound Airedale terrier). Pay for exactly the dog you want. Get exactly the size and colour animal that will fit your lifestyle, and don't worry about "cloned" personalities as personalities are developed through training.
Sound sickening? It shouldn't. Cloned pets are a direct extension of breeding. It's not the orwellian nightmare that cloning humans is. And if all the cloned pets are cloned sterile (which, I might add, is a great deal for both the cloners and the pet loving public), there's no danger of overpopulation. It's not like a cloning machine can meet another cloning machine under the hedge and make whoopy.
I have no problem with porn. In fact, I state that clearly on the host's front page. But I get my bandwidth from other providers, buying racks and rackspace at whatever the most valuable deal is. And many of my providers (well, most of them) say out and out "no porn." The providers that do allow porn, because they're so few in number, can charge an arm and a leg so they're not really worth pursuing.
Plus porn -- even shitty porn -- is a huge bandwidth draw. We don't have unlimited bandwidth but we don't charge for overbandwidth unless our providers start bitching. Confused? Basically it means we charge users what we get charged, and we only get charged if we push a certain lebel of bandwidth. Porn is very very popular shit, and good porn has very large file sizes. And since users aren't likely to save it to their hard drive, it gets downloaded again and again and again. Even a small porn site pushes more bandwidth than our larger 10k hit sites.
So, more bandwidth usage, more expensive bandwidth and the possibility of getting disconnected from our provider? I don't think so. In this case, it's feasibility, not morality, that forces censorship upon us.
I read the first four Harry Potter books on my palmtop. I bought the originals in hardcover, and found myself downloading them in illicit ebook format anyway. Why? Becaus the books were huge and wouldn't stay open when placed atop the elliptical climber, which is the best place to get some good reading done (whilst ignoring the burn). The palmtop is bright, has adjustable fonts for when my glasses get too fogged with sweat to read, and easily switches between books (i was reading "Hills of Killimanjaro" in parellel at one point).
Being able to grab the new potter book on ebook would just legalise the sort of content repurposing i'm doing already. And I'd probably still buy the hardcover for the wife and others who don't dig the digital.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not, really. Something like 95% of the visitors of google, a fairly cool search engine that attracts all sorts of people, use windows. About 2.5 use a MacOS, and half of that use Linux.
Doesn't sound like use is so "widespread" when less than 5% of the net community use alternative OSs. It sounds like people are trapped. And can you blame them? Windows OSs are different looks of the same idea, MacOS shoots itself in its foot and Linux has such a huge menu of choices it's impossible for a newbie to pick the right one.
And don't blame complexity for the shittiness of computer operating systems. If you make a simple interface, you can add what you need to it. That was the whole idea of the Linux kernel -- at least, until everybody & their mother decided to force feature x or feature y into the most common releases.
your misinformed about your grammatical misinformation. furthermore, misinforming my misinformation misinforms the misinformed.
Roget makes this killer book called "Thesaurus." It's about a gregarious brigand and the cacophonous gentry of his prefecture. I highly suggest you pick it up.
I think a lot of software is released buggy as hell simply because investers and customers expect development houses to show results very quickly. Many contract jobs are six months or shorter, barely enough time to come up with a dog & pony slideshow of great software, let alone develop a secure product. Most developers depend on tools from other companies to cover the gaps in the process -- tools like IIS and apache.
The problem lies with the fallacy of internet time -- that software advances can keep up with hardware advances. The difficulty here is that Moore's law is based on years of research -- an advance in memory that doubles the speed next year will have begun five years or more ago with tons of R&D. Software doesn't really have that luxury -- it's all about the now.
One might say that this sort of demand is a requirement in business -- but in many ways, it's a self maintaining fad. Look at biotech -- a biotech company might do research for dozens of years before they can release a new drug or procedure. They have amazingly tedious checks and balances. Why? Because human lives are at stake. Because a single slip up will cost them millions in malpractice.
Holding software companies liable for security failures is a great idea in the respect that it will force dev houses to make better software. But in the process something will have to be done about the expectation that software is a need it now sort of deal.
As a side note: this sort of legislature would be a godsend for contract programmers. If company X has to wait years for a secure product to come out of Microsoft or hire somebody now to do the work cheap and sign off on the liability, they'll probably choose the latter. It'll also decrease on the feature blitz of new products that is leading to the increased need for pay for play software licensing.
I wonder why you respond to them...
I sit about six feet from my speakers...any further away, and you start to lose what little soundstage you have left after MP3. A web interface for a stereo component is totally worthless -- my stereo does not have anything to do with the web, and for most users of home audio the web is another kludgey interface.
My Adcom has about eight functions: Play, Pause, Stop, Eject, Skip Track (up and down) and Scan FF/Rwnd. For many home audio enthusiasts, simple is better. For components like this to sell, they have to be all inclusive, have a simple interface, and yet not be critically crippled. It is possible to perform all three of these with good design, and I feel SonicBlue has done this.
I'm not buying it or anything, but I respect the unit. This is exactly what I'd be looking for if I hadn't sworn off MP3s for good when I sold my Rio Volt.
For a new component? Hell no. Think about it: you're paying as much for the service and the software as you are for the box itself. And though you can say very easily that you could find quality ripping, encoding and navigation software and add that to your $800 box, the fact is it still won't have the correct footprint, decent enough optical out, clean enough analogue out, a nice resolution mini monitor or a decent controller.
What a lot of people don't understand is that any idiot can toss together a cheap computer. Making a cheap computer into a great machine takes good software and an eye for detail -- what will cause a problem where, what will be unreliable and unsupportable in three months, what will cause dependencies that aren't intuitive. Shit, when I went Athlon I found out after installing the mobo and chip that both my NIC and my sound card were incompatible...meaning three hours of downtime while I shlepped to the local hardware emporium. That's why people buy boxes from Apple, SGI, Sun Cobalt, Snap, F5 and RADware...you don't have to hack anything to get them to work.
I figure the software that went into this machine took at least as much care as my Sun Cobalt webserver ($1900 for similar power), plus it's got that sweet little display. $1500 may be a lot for a computer -- but for this device, it's worth it and when the price drops in two or three months it'll be even more worth it.
Or it could be a worthless dead end.
At Internet World 2000 there were close to thirty companies offering new search engines, everything from voice controlled searching to variations on a miningco theme.
They're all dead. Not necessarily because their ideas weren't good...the best of these were eaten by google and altavista and lycos and are still around. They're dead because they offered nothing new to the searching public -- no better results, no improved searching. Nothing but good ideas listing no pages with a buggy interface. The searching public has no tolerance for buggy code or crummy results. This tool WILL be a nest of crummy links until they figure out a clever way to omit them...and by that time, we'll have already given up
name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet.
MP3. Think about it: would DRM or the DMCA ever have become mandatory were it not the restrictions on the flow of large datamasses lifted by the internet?
Only so many people you can connect via parcel post, telephone and sneakernet. It's controllable because it's a hassle. The internet offered this great solution to abetting content "theft," and people have taken it. That's the internet's real major social change: it's allowed us an opportunity to share the art of our lives with each other, and now that we've done so we have become criminals.
Shit, I wonder what it must have been like in the sixties, trading records and not being reprimanded for it. I'll bet it was amazingly freeing...a secret club, just like the original incarnation of Napster, only much more personal and localized.
Well, no. Cookies are commonly used to track you -- but only within a single domain. And who cares, really? This data is used by companies and designers to tell what areas of the site attract the most attention and to create patterns of usage. This data is then used by good web crews to streamline the process, eliminate confusing links and add new features based on what you want.
Sure, we can mine some of this data from the logs, but using cookies has the offshoot of opting out of our tracking: turn off your damn cookies.
Problem with this: "most" websites do not link to sites with similar content. Most websites link to "partner" sites that have nothing in common with them -- after all, who links to a competitor?
Good websites link to similar sites -- academic websites link to simialr sites and sources. This type of search engine would be killer on Internet 2. But on our wonderful, chaotic, porn and paid link filled Internet 1, it's useless. Spider MSN and you'll get a circular web leading to homestore, ms.com, Freedom To Onnovate, ZDNet and Slate. Spider Sun and never find a single page in common with their close competitors like IBM.
What happens when sites get associated with their ads? Search on Microsoft Windows and grab a lot of casino and porn links...because a "security" site covered in porn banners was spidered and came up with top relevancy.
Now, combined with a click-to-rate-usefulness engine like Google, this could be an interesting novelty. But it'll never be the simple hands off site hunter the big Goo has become.
Seems like the perfect time for BSD to enter the 21st century.
:)
Seriously, ACPI is the wave of three years ago. It's a better interface in many ways, especially since (in theory) it eliminates the painful IRQ merrygoround we all rode back in 1997.
The choices here appear to be adapt, abort or avoid. I'd choose the latter. But then again, I'm running OSX anyway so it's a moot point
Oh, how very geek -- a my-computer-was-shittier-than-thine post.
Well, I'll bite. My first computer had a monochrome display, 40 character columns and 8k memory. We upgraded it with a hard drive for close to $3000; the hard drive was 4 meg.
That machine is less than a tenth of the power of my cellular phone. I emulate it on my Pocket PC while playing A Flock of Seagulls MP3s in the background. Ahh memories...
Seriously though, 640k WAS enough for most programs when they knew how to manage the top ram. They just had to treat it the same way we deal with swap files today -- stick memory up there if you don't want to get rid of it but don't actively need it. There are plenty of devices, programs and utilities that run with command stacks under 128k (the size of the biggest x86 command cache i'm aware of) that swap miscellaneous data (ie pictures, sounds, even text) out of the larger ram. The problem was that sloppy compilers (MS is not the only one to blame; if I remember Borland was the biggest player in the compilation game back when 640k was 'nuff) DIDN'T do the swapping for you.
Windows has spoiled us all by doing such things under the scenes -- to the point that code optimizers are hot commodities that are prized for their savant abilities. In short: the same practices that create the code bloat we all cringe at were responsible for the streamlining of some very sticky swap processes. Resource files, i hate you and I could kiss you.
And now, the problems with this, for those not following it close enough:
1) If I bought the n*sync album, and liked it, I'd already know a new one was coming out. Informing me it of this would embarrass you and creep me the hell out.
2) If I bought said album and didn't like it, your informing me that there is a new one would probably not entice me to buy it. Getting a free "clip," which would no doubt be identical to the songs played on mtv, the radio, and cars parked next to mine at Target, would not entice me to buy it. So again, it embarrasses you and creeps me the hell out.
3) If you let me know there's a new Nicole Kidman flick out, and tell me where I can see it, you assume that I had nothing to do that evening but what you tell me. Basically, you're suggesting that I do what you say and forcefully providing me with a suggestion. And since nobody goes to a film alone, I'd have to admit to my friends that we're going to see this damn butterfly movie because a cell-phone provider told me to. When they were done laughing, we wouldn't go. Again, you are embarrassed and I am shamed.
There is no way for this technology not to be obnoxious. It is not passive advertising, like a magazine or banner ad, which I act on if that's what I am searching for. It is active advertising, singling me out, and unlike telemarketing which has a (slightly) human factor to it increasing the probability of success. So we have obnoxious technology on expensive devices. Result? Devices become marginalized to only people who are themselves obnoxious, deleting the street appeal (one of the largest sellers of cell phones). Companies realise this and don't use the service. The service dies, and CIOs fire ad sellers like it's their fault.
Jesus, people, how hard is it to build a company through great customer service, useful products and quality goods? It seems that everybody's looking to force junk down our throats for loads and loads of money, claiming it's "free." Is it any wonder OSS has such trouble in this market?
No, you couldn't. Can't do it on a PC because you'd have to first install the device's drivers, wait for it to autodetect, have security permissions to use it, have to grab the files and the files in common folders and the system folder and dump the registry. If a CompUSA employee left you alone long enough to do that...well, you'd also have your coat lined with copies of Medal of Honor and some mouse cozies.
Can't do it on a linux machine because once you had good enough access to grab software, you'd just use the box to spam people. Plus, what's worth stealing? Anything in the linux world that isn't already free is worthless without the service that goes with it. The price of freedom is eternal documentation.
The point here is Apple's new click & drag isntall paradigm. Click & drag to your palmtop is actually something I'm sure they intended you to do. That's how you do network installs, anyway. They just didn't intend for a random kid to do it.
Like it matters anyway. He can't even run the stuff without a serial number, and if he's not bright enough to have a better bead on Mac Warez than CompUSA, he won't know where to get one.
CompUSA eh? I'm surprised they even knew it WAS a Macintosh. Honestly, I've gone into that store to look for accessories for my mac and had them try and sell me a Compaq. Hello? Dumbass? I *HAVE* a mac, and I'm trying to purchase accesories for it. I don't want to buy a third rate PC with an updated "model number."
Incidentally, I'd like to point out that the ease with which you can pirate software from a Macintosh raises an interesting point with Apple's vision. You install OfficeX by copying it where you want it...similar to the way you installed software on PCs before the invention of the "install wizard." Somebody realised that a single motion (drag program to applications) was easier than clicking through a dozen confusing menus. Somebody realized the time to ask for a serial number was when you tried to run a program, not while the install CD was in the drive.
Oh, and I'd like to mention in this anonymous forum that I steal bandwidth from the Apple store all the time. That lovely open (well, i consider 128bit WEP pretty open) Airport network is perfect for chilling in the mall with my palmtop, comparing online prices to b&m.
How is listening to the radio (indepedent radio...ups to WEQX) any different from Napster's evils?
Back before radio became the bastion of independent producers and huge coglomerates, it was THE place to steal music. Long before napster, long before CDs, there was a device known as the tape recorder. Quality wasn't great, and like Margaret Cho all my old music has my mom yelling at me in the background from when I held the Sharp handheld tape recorder up to the old crystal radio my dad built in high school. But it's how we got it. My friends would trade copies of Wierd Al on 90 minute tapes, selling them on the schoolyard. One friend spent all week making "ultimate mixes" for field trips.
And we had access to every great song ever. Our network was sneakernet, but through it you could get anything. Springstein? Matt Bonaparte's sister's best friend's dad has the whole collection. Dylan? That wierd kid whose family never mows the lawn has a complete set on vinyl and will trade it for a pudding cup.
Before tapes, people would trade records at parties. Before records, people taught each other songs. Jesus, music is *ABOUT* trading, it's about making friends. My wife and I used to make out to stoner rock, we met at a coffehouse folk show. Our first date was to a midnight Beatles Anthology party. Most of my friends were met at concerts and shows.
Somebody mentioned something about the best acts nowadays not being marketed, or certainly overshadowed by handsome total crap bands willing to trade their integrity for a pay day. Music trading is the only way most bands will get any exposure. Have you heard of the Atomic Numbers? MC Paul Barman? Queens of the Stone Age and Dream Theatre have great new albums out, did you know about them? I found all of these acts through music trading, through my 13 exobyte, 100,000 user WinMX network set. I've met good friends there.
And last month, I spent $300 on CDs.
Sun did think of it. They're pushing Linux like crazy, with machines starting as low as $1000 and great software support. The dozen Cobalt machines I admin attest to that. It's the reason why there's a sun released JVM for Linux, promoting it to the lofty standards of NT x86, NT alpha and Solaris, whereas us BSD and Mac users need to wait until Apple, IBM or the Kaffe boys to get off their humps.
Visit Earthworld Comics on Central Ave in Albany. Try to get the lady who works there to shut up. Apologize for the stereotypical troll.
Oh great, another of my dork hobbies goes legit!
"Lady, I'm not 'wasting time and money on funny books,' I'm conducting an analysis of social interaction through the medium of networked vigilantism. Now pass that new issue of X-Force and refresh my strawberry sprite."
the universe has brought suit against the estate of Albert Einstein, claiming that fission is illegal under the DMCA, and that fair use of elementary particles applies only to cold fusion.
They'll fidn out all I watch on WMP is internet porno. Which is an interesting metric. Until now, Redmond's stayed out of the pr0nline gig, and I feel the industry has been waiting for a true killer app for a while.
The time is now for Open Source porno to combat this future menace!
True. Apple is a "marginal player, selling to a fan club."
But why does it need to be anything more?
Apple, unlike "bigger" companies such as Dell or Micron, always makes a profit and has a much higher margin per machine sale than anybody else. This is because there's no other player in their market -- who knows what the cost of a "clone" apple would be nowadays?
Now, Apple stock is a different thing. It's currently worth next to butkiss, and even though Apple the company is run more solidly that any other computer manufacturer, it's still hovering low. Why? Because Apple's practices aren't going to make shareholders rich. They'll never post a fifty dollar per share profit year, because most profits go back into R&D.
In short: Apple is a failure because they research and develop. Apple is also a success because they research and develop. If you can't stand the dichotomy, well, place your funds in Microsoft.
"The human society is against closing pets because of the dangers of overpopulation."
Why? This is the smartest idea for pets ever. Think about it -- the Human Society encourages everybody to spay or neuter their pets to discourage overpopulation. Now what if we engineered pets that are genetically incapable of breeding? There's no danger of "accidents," no need to be cruel to unwanted pets. There's a much better means of discovering the nature of a pet. Want a dog that's good with children? Don't pay for a "breed" that's good with children, only to get a monster like my parents adopted(a stubborn 95 pound Airedale terrier). Pay for exactly the dog you want. Get exactly the size and colour animal that will fit your lifestyle, and don't worry about "cloned" personalities as personalities are developed through training.
Sound sickening? It shouldn't. Cloned pets are a direct extension of breeding. It's not the orwellian nightmare that cloning humans is. And if all the cloned pets are cloned sterile (which, I might add, is a great deal for both the cloners and the pet loving public), there's no danger of overpopulation. It's not like a cloning machine can meet another cloning machine under the hedge and make whoopy.
Think of it like seedless watermelons.
I have no problem with porn. In fact, I state that clearly on the host's front page. But I get my bandwidth from other providers, buying racks and rackspace at whatever the most valuable deal is. And many of my providers (well, most of them) say out and out "no porn." The providers that do allow porn, because they're so few in number, can charge an arm and a leg so they're not really worth pursuing.
Plus porn -- even shitty porn -- is a huge bandwidth draw. We don't have unlimited bandwidth but we don't charge for overbandwidth unless our providers start bitching. Confused? Basically it means we charge users what we get charged, and we only get charged if we push a certain lebel of bandwidth. Porn is very very popular shit, and good porn has very large file sizes. And since users aren't likely to save it to their hard drive, it gets downloaded again and again and again. Even a small porn site pushes more bandwidth than our larger 10k hit sites.
So, more bandwidth usage, more expensive bandwidth and the possibility of getting disconnected from our provider? I don't think so. In this case, it's feasibility, not morality, that forces censorship upon us.
I read the first four Harry Potter books on my palmtop. I bought the originals in hardcover, and found myself downloading them in illicit ebook format anyway. Why? Becaus the books were huge and wouldn't stay open when placed atop the elliptical climber, which is the best place to get some good reading done (whilst ignoring the burn). The palmtop is bright, has adjustable fonts for when my glasses get too fogged with sweat to read, and easily switches between books (i was reading "Hills of Killimanjaro" in parellel at one point).
Being able to grab the new potter book on ebook would just legalise the sort of content repurposing i'm doing already. And I'd probably still buy the hardcover for the wife and others who don't dig the digital.