That's pretty interesting. I wonder how this history will be effected by the volume-regulating software built into iTunes and iPod. If the player is going to equalize the volume for a consumer's music, then there would no longer be an incentive to boost the volume. For that reason, clipping should go away with CDs (despite the fact that clipping isn't a technological limit of the CD). This make me wonder if Apple has already caught on? It should be relatively easy to find out.
Yes $.99 is high. But no higher than CDs. If you want all of an album, you only pay $10 (on both Apple Store and Napster). Since the DRM doesn't prevent you from writing a CD, there isn't anything stopping you from having a permanent format. On top of all that, you no longer have to buy 13 crappy songs to get the two that you like. For that reason the 15 songs you get from Apple should have more personal value to you than the 15 you get from a CD at Best Buy.
The file format is lossy, but the files are created from original tapes. So you aren't getting CD-Rips like you would from Kazza. Maybe AAC sounds like crap to you, but it sounds great to me
DRM is not an issue unless you want to use a non-supported player or pirate music. I have an iMac, several PCs and an iPod. The only issue I have is my Audiotron won't play my Apple Store music. It just isn't an issue
You would be lucky to find the same quality online. And you would have to download several copies of the same song before you found one of sufficent quality. After that, you would have to clean up the ID3 tags and delete the bad copies. But if that dollar is that important to you, have fun!
You haven't converted because you haven't tried it (yes, I can tell from your post). Spend an hour on iTunes. Download 5 songs. Then tell me your not converted.
Don't fool yourself into thinking CDs have 'full dynamic range' of sound. CDs are a compromise, just like anything else. No, they don't have lossy compression, but they do have limited range. While the AAC files on Apple's music store use lossy compression, it's a much better technology than the 10 year old mp3 format -- and the recordings are made from the original tapes (they are not CD rips).
Recording sound is all about compromise. Don't base your judgment of one format over another based on a single word like 'lossy'. Listen to a few songs on the music store and let your ears be the judge.
That just sounds like the ISPs are acting like idiots. I used to run a movie fan site, and was contacted about copyrighted material being on my site (I had pictures of the inside of Spielberg's house from Architectural Digest. After someone broke into his house and tried to rape him, I was asked to take the pictures down.) I was pretty far outside fair use, and was happy to take them down. But when Dreamworks contacted my web host (geocities at the time) to get my number, Dreamworks had to argue with Geocities not to shut me down. The bastards at Geocities were just looking for a reason to shut my site down and the PR woman from Dreamworks just wanted my phone number! When she asked me to take the pictures down, the Dreamworks rep told me about this, and soon after, I switched providers.
It may not be the same case here, but I don't trust most service providers any more than I trust the RIAA.
Maybe I'm missing something. The article said the RIAA requested contact information for the given IP addresses. After that they plan to seek a settlement before going to court. Once in court, the normal rules of court seem to apply. Is the RIAA just ignoring these powers you speak of, or is there another article I should be reading?
A EULA is just a contract between you an your internet carrier. Your ISP could use it against you if they were involved, but how on earth would a third party use it against you?
I agree. What most people think of as.NET will always run better on windows. At the very best mono will one day be able to run a large portion of.NET windows programs without error. I hope it runs all of them, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Running windows.NET programs isn't the only reason for mono, however. Mono has brought C# to Unix along with many libraries (many of which are not tightly bound to win32). Other libraries are being built with C# to run on the CLR that have nothing to do with windows (GTK# for example).
Personally this is the real reason I look forward to using Mono. As C# becomes more popular in the Linux community, it will allow those of us who have an aversion to C, to get a chance to contribute to more main stream open source applications.
Why would you use Gnu classpath? It's nice someone put it together (from an academic point of view), but it's not the same thing as what mono is doing. Sun's JDK and libraries run just fine on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc..Net does not. Mono fills a need. Classpath is just a port (albeit a free one) of an already existing product.
I completely agree with your sentiment, but I don't think we are ready to move out of the age of the nerd. Simplifying computers to the extreme that they become regular appliances mean removing flexibility that current users expect. It can only be done if we can isolate a specific use for the device and make sure that it has ALL of the features that appliance requires. If it's missing more than a few features, too many people will just bite the bullet and learn how to do the same task on a general purpose computer. Little by little we are identifying products that eventually become appliances (Tivo, XBox, Home Routers, Mp3 players, etc.), but even these meet resistance if they don't have all the features that a more flexible computer could offer (which explains XBox hacking and MythTV).
Unlike the rules of the road, the rules for computers completely change every 5 years. From the perspective of an end user, a PC bought in 1993 act nothing like one bought in 1998 or 2003. Not only did the way you use a computer change, but the way you maintain one has changed as well. If this were true with cars and traffic laws, no one but the most die hard fanatics would be driving anywhere.
It's better than the alternative. This way, you can get samples with a Q-tip in a couple seconds. The alternative involves tiny little mouse pornos and a pair of latex tweezers.
Is this flamebait? Let the moderators call it what they like. I don't expect everyone to agree, but I didn't say it to start a war either. Just to get people to think about usability a bit. The interface to the iPod is very cool. That doesn't mean it's intuitive.
Besides, I have karma to burn. If I'm not going to use it to express my opinion, then what would I use it for?
It didn't make sense to me at first, but now it's just intuitive.
If it didn't make sense at first, by definition, it's not intuitive. The word your looking for is idiom. An idiom is something everyone memorizes and if used often enough becomes part of our user's vocabulary. The symbol on your computer's power button is an example of an idiom.
That being said, I don't believe that holding down the stop button (or the play/pause button in this case) is a well accepted idiom. That's just my opinion, though. Feel free to disagree.
I think the power button should either be a menu item or a separate button. If they want to keep the 'hold down pause for three seconds' feature, it should be considered a shortcut. I've never met anyone who figured out how to turn it off without looking it up or asking someone.
When you first pick up an iPod, you fidget with the wheel, and see that it does stuff. The unlabeled button in the middle, as it's surrounded by the wheel, probably does something in conjunction with the wheel... like selecting things in menus, selecting time in track, etc.
I do like the wheel, in the sense that it encourages exploration and it acts consistently for most of the menus (with the exception of adding songs to your playlist). I don't like that the menu button is labeled "menu" rather than "back". And I don't like that many of the buttons have multiple functions, but a single label.
Re:example in practice
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How do you turn off an iPod? Hold down play for 3 seconds!
How do you go to a previous menu? Press menu
How do you go to the next menu? Press the button in the center of the dial
How do you change the volume? With the scroll wheel* *as long as the display is showing the current song and it's not showing the song's rating or the progress bar (in which case you press the middle button until you see the volume, and THEN you use the scroll wheel)
How do I plug it into the wall? Use the firewire port -- duh!?!
Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod, but removing buttons does not make something more simple.
Changing the context of a button only works when you can change its label too.
This is just my interpretation. I'm not a C# developer:
Its faster because C# ints don't have to be converted. They are already objects (more like second class structure-like objects). When you define a collection of ints in C#, there is no boxing needed to populate the collection.
You are right about Java, however. The byte code looks the same if you use generics, or not. There won't be any performance loss from old code, just better looking code.
What the article is saying, is that adding primitives to a collection is slower than adding objects (due to boxing - automatic or otherwise). This is supposed to negate the benefits of using primitives (rather than objects) in Java.
I was just showing an example of how shapes in SVG are reused. SVG graphics can be every bit as complex as fonts. The only feature fonts have that SVG is missing is hinting (changing drawing rules based on scaling).
On top of the issues you mention, companies also like contractors because they fit in a different column in the balance sheet. Full time employees are liabilities. Contractors (even if employed for years) are temporary costs that can be attributed to specific projects.
You wouldn't use a font. Many Music fonts (and math fonts) draw the same character once in each position; each in it's own glyph. With SVG, you simply draw a note:
Space may be an issue, but MusicXML isn't exactly light-weight. An SVG conversion might even be a bit smaller than the original file. Either way, a full composition would be a huge download (even in its original MusicXML format).
The real problems with an SVG or PDF implementation would be details like wrapping lines. I also question, in retrospect, if XSLT would be too much of a pain in the ass. Maybe a Ruby script would do a better job.
We still can't get good SVG support in a browser (unless you have IE on window/mac and Adobe's plugin installed). I can't imagine supporting MusicXML in the browser before SVG... besides, once SVG is supported, XSLT should be able to transform MusicXML to SVG, SVG Print, or PDF.
One of the ideas I like about lifestreams are their sense of space. I think space is really important in organization. Lifestreams, however places things in order by time, which I don't think is often important for organization. I personally can't remember when I bought a book, relative to when I paid my gas bill. I'd rather remember that I left my bills 'over there somewhere', and go look for them. Substreams just seem like searches. This doesn't seem different to me than the features MS is putting in Longhorn (or any index search results).
One interface I really thought was innovative, was 'Black and White' (the interface was the only thing I liked about the game). I liked how easy it was to get around. You could grabbing the ground and pull your self around for short distances, or zoom out real quickly and zoom in to some other point on the map.
I would love to see a gui interface based on black and white: "I left my pictures by the barn, my email from my family are near the beach, and the porn is under a rock near the house."
It probably shouldn't have everything in it. It may be pointless to have a spatial home for your shell scripts.
Ahhhh! It's the user's fault. They would get rated 'Insightful' here!
I think what the original poster was looking for was some innovative new organizational strategy, possibly based on a paradigm other than what computers currently offer. I doubt such a thing has been invented, or it would have been all over the news.
The major players (Microsoft, Apple, etc) seem to be tuning old features such as document searching and retooling interface issues with our current set of widgets (Mac OS 10.3 has yet another way to navigate a hierarchy).
If anyone has seen any truly innovative ideas, feel free to share... or we could just make fun of the messy guy.
Once again, that isn't as useful as what VB does. It requires user interaction. This isn't a shortcoming of Eclipse. A user decision is necessary because Java is case sensitive (but you would have understood that, had you read my previous post).
I do use Eclipse from time to time, to see how close it is to catching up to IDEA. It's a very good IDE, and I recommend it to people on a regular basis. I personally still prefer the extra polish of Idea, and plan to pay the $250 for the 4.0 upgrade when it's released.
I think I know what your talking about now. If Idea knows the context of what your typing, the code completion dialog comes up. The code completion feature will correct your case, if everything else is correct.
For example, a class has a field called foo. Typing 'this.fOO' will bring up the code completion. After typing the space character at the end of the word, the reference will change to 'this.foo'.
If you are referencing the class in a static context (MyClass.MY_CONST), typing MyCLASS gets you an error (unless you force code completion with ctrl-space). 'MyClass.my_const' invokes code completion and changes the code to 'MyClass.MY_CONST'.
If you don't specify the context, it doesn't work either (unless you force it to start code completion by pressing ctrl-space). In the first example 'fOO = 12;' will not automatically correct to 'foo = 12;'. I assume, this is because it would have to search your entire scope and make a guess as to what you meant. In VB, no case sensitivity means no guessing.
So, IDEA does have some useful features, but they don't do the same thing as VB does. The limitations are probably based on the language, but if there is a way around it, the Jetbrains people will find a way.
Slashdot Mirror
That's pretty interesting. I wonder how this history will be effected by the volume-regulating software built into iTunes and iPod. If the player is going to equalize the volume for a consumer's music, then there would no longer be an incentive to boost the volume. For that reason, clipping should go away with CDs (despite the fact that clipping isn't a technological limit of the CD). This make me wonder if Apple has already caught on? It should be relatively easy to find out.
You haven't converted because you haven't tried it (yes, I can tell from your post). Spend an hour on iTunes. Download 5 songs. Then tell me your not converted.
Don't fool yourself into thinking CDs have 'full dynamic range' of sound. CDs are a compromise, just like anything else. No, they don't have lossy compression, but they do have limited range. While the AAC files on Apple's music store use lossy compression, it's a much better technology than the 10 year old mp3 format -- and the recordings are made from the original tapes (they are not CD rips).
Recording sound is all about compromise. Don't base your judgment of one format over another based on a single word like 'lossy'. Listen to a few songs on the music store and let your ears be the judge.
That just sounds like the ISPs are acting like idiots. I used to run a movie fan site, and was contacted about copyrighted material being on my site (I had pictures of the inside of Spielberg's house from Architectural Digest. After someone broke into his house and tried to rape him, I was asked to take the pictures down.) I was pretty far outside fair use, and was happy to take them down. But when Dreamworks contacted my web host (geocities at the time) to get my number, Dreamworks had to argue with Geocities not to shut me down. The bastards at Geocities were just looking for a reason to shut my site down and the PR woman from Dreamworks just wanted my phone number! When she asked me to take the pictures down, the Dreamworks rep told me about this, and soon after, I switched providers.
It may not be the same case here, but I don't trust most service providers any more than I trust the RIAA.
Maybe I'm missing something. The article said the RIAA requested contact information for the given IP addresses. After that they plan to seek a settlement before going to court. Once in court, the normal rules of court seem to apply. Is the RIAA just ignoring these powers you speak of, or is there another article I should be reading?
A EULA is just a contract between you an your internet carrier. Your ISP could use it against you if they were involved, but how on earth would a third party use it against you?
I agree. What most people think of as .NET will always run better on windows. At the very best mono will one day be able to run a large portion of .NET windows programs without error. I hope it runs all of them, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
.NET programs isn't the only reason for mono, however. Mono has brought C# to Unix along with many libraries (many of which are not tightly bound to win32). Other libraries are being built with C# to run on the CLR that have nothing to do with windows (GTK# for example).
Running windows
Personally this is the real reason I look forward to using Mono. As C# becomes more popular in the Linux community, it will allow those of us who have an aversion to C, to get a chance to contribute to more main stream open source applications.
Why would you use Gnu classpath? It's nice someone put it together (from an academic point of view), but it's not the same thing as what mono is doing. Sun's JDK and libraries run just fine on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. .Net does not. Mono fills a need. Classpath is just a port (albeit a free one) of an already existing product.
I completely agree with your sentiment, but I don't think we are ready to move out of the age of the nerd. Simplifying computers to the extreme that they become regular appliances mean removing flexibility that current users expect. It can only be done if we can isolate a specific use for the device and make sure that it has ALL of the features that appliance requires. If it's missing more than a few features, too many people will just bite the bullet and learn how to do the same task on a general purpose computer. Little by little we are identifying products that eventually become appliances (Tivo, XBox, Home Routers, Mp3 players, etc.), but even these meet resistance if they don't have all the features that a more flexible computer could offer (which explains XBox hacking and MythTV).
Unlike the rules of the road, the rules for computers completely change every 5 years. From the perspective of an end user, a PC bought in 1993 act nothing like one bought in 1998 or 2003. Not only did the way you use a computer change, but the way you maintain one has changed as well. If this were true with cars and traffic laws, no one but the most die hard fanatics would be driving anywhere.
It's better than the alternative. This way, you can get samples with a Q-tip in a couple seconds. The alternative involves tiny little mouse pornos and a pair of latex tweezers.
Is this flamebait?
Let the moderators call it what they like. I don't expect everyone to agree, but I didn't say it to start a war either. Just to get people to think about usability a bit. The interface to the iPod is very cool. That doesn't mean it's intuitive.
Besides, I have karma to burn. If I'm not going to use it to express my opinion, then what would I use it for?
It didn't make sense to me at first, but now it's just intuitive.
If it didn't make sense at first, by definition, it's not intuitive. The word your looking for is idiom. An idiom is something everyone memorizes and if used often enough becomes part of our user's vocabulary. The symbol on your computer's power button is an example of an idiom.
That being said, I don't believe that holding down the stop button (or the play/pause button in this case) is a well accepted idiom. That's just my opinion, though. Feel free to disagree.
I think the power button should either be a menu item or a separate button. If they want to keep the 'hold down pause for three seconds' feature, it should be considered a shortcut. I've never met anyone who figured out how to turn it off without looking it up or asking someone.
When you first pick up an iPod, you fidget with the wheel, and see that it does stuff. The unlabeled button in the middle, as it's surrounded by the wheel, probably does something in conjunction with the wheel... like selecting things in menus, selecting time in track, etc.
I do like the wheel, in the sense that it encourages exploration and it acts consistently for most of the menus (with the exception of adding songs to your playlist). I don't like that the menu button is labeled "menu" rather than "back". And I don't like that many of the buttons have multiple functions, but a single label.
How do you turn off an iPod?
Hold down play for 3 seconds!
How do you go to a previous menu?
Press menu
How do you go to the next menu?
Press the button in the center of the dial
How do you change the volume?
With the scroll wheel*
*as long as the display is showing the current song and it's not showing the song's rating or the progress bar (in which case you press the middle button until you see the volume, and THEN you use the scroll wheel)
How do I plug it into the wall?
Use the firewire port -- duh!?!
Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod, but removing buttons does not make something more simple.
Changing the context of a button only works when you can change its label too.
This is just my interpretation. I'm not a C# developer:
Its faster because C# ints don't have to be converted. They are already objects (more like second class structure-like objects). When you define a collection of ints in C#, there is no boxing needed to populate the collection.
You are right about Java, however. The byte code looks the same if you use generics, or not. There won't be any performance loss from old code, just better looking code.
What the article is saying, is that adding primitives to a collection is slower than adding objects (due to boxing - automatic or otherwise). This is supposed to negate the benefits of using primitives (rather than objects) in Java.
I was just showing an example of how shapes in SVG are reused. SVG graphics can be every bit as complex as fonts. The only feature fonts have that SVG is missing is hinting (changing drawing rules based on scaling).
In fact, there are tools for converting true type fonts to svg. The W3C has information on how to use these svg fonts.
On top of the issues you mention, companies also like contractors because they fit in a different column in the balance sheet. Full time employees are liabilities. Contractors (even if employed for years) are temporary costs that can be attributed to specific projects.
You wouldn't use a font. Many Music fonts (and math fonts) draw the same character once in each position; each in it's own glyph. With SVG, you simply draw a note:
/> />
<g name="wholeNote">
<circle cx="0" cy="0" r="40" class="wholeNote"/>
</g>
And draw that same note as many times as needed. No need to make a separate glyph for C and D note:
<use xlink:href="#wholeNote" x="580" y="450"
<use xlink:href="#wholeNote" x="560" y="490"
Space may be an issue, but MusicXML isn't exactly light-weight. An SVG conversion might even be a bit smaller than the original file. Either way, a full composition would be a huge download (even in its original MusicXML format).
The real problems with an SVG or PDF implementation would be details like wrapping lines. I also question, in retrospect, if XSLT would be too much of a pain in the ass. Maybe a Ruby script would do a better job.
As long as your spreading seed by airplane, just use bird seed... let the birds find the mines!
We still can't get good SVG support in a browser (unless you have IE on window/mac and Adobe's plugin installed). I can't imagine supporting MusicXML in the browser before SVG... besides, once SVG is supported, XSLT should be able to transform MusicXML to SVG, SVG Print, or PDF.
I'm very bothered by this. I'm going to send a message about this to everyone I know. I suggest you all do the same.
One of the ideas I like about lifestreams are their sense of space. I think space is really important in organization. Lifestreams, however places things in order by time, which I don't think is often important for organization. I personally can't remember when I bought a book, relative to when I paid my gas bill. I'd rather remember that I left my bills 'over there somewhere', and go look for them. Substreams just seem like searches. This doesn't seem different to me than the features MS is putting in Longhorn (or any index search results).
One interface I really thought was innovative, was 'Black and White' (the interface was the only thing I liked about the game). I liked how easy it was to get around. You could grabbing the ground and pull your self around for short distances, or zoom out real quickly and zoom in to some other point on the map.
I would love to see a gui interface based on black and white: "I left my pictures by the barn, my email from my family are near the beach, and the porn is under a rock near the house."
It probably shouldn't have everything in it. It may be pointless to have a spatial home for your shell scripts.
Ahhhh! It's the user's fault. They would get rated 'Insightful' here!
I think what the original poster was looking for was some innovative new organizational strategy, possibly based on a paradigm other than what computers currently offer. I doubt such a thing has been invented, or it would have been all over the news.
The major players (Microsoft, Apple, etc) seem to be tuning old features such as document searching and retooling interface issues with our current set of widgets (Mac OS 10.3 has yet another way to navigate a hierarchy).
If anyone has seen any truly innovative ideas, feel free to share... or we could just make fun of the messy guy.
Once again, that isn't as useful as what VB does. It requires user interaction. This isn't a shortcoming of Eclipse. A user decision is necessary because Java is case sensitive (but you would have understood that, had you read my previous post).
I do use Eclipse from time to time, to see how close it is to catching up to IDEA. It's a very good IDE, and I recommend it to people on a regular basis. I personally still prefer the extra polish of Idea, and plan to pay the $250 for the 4.0 upgrade when it's released.
Do they take pay pal?
I think I know what your talking about now. If Idea knows the context of what your typing, the code completion dialog comes up. The code completion feature will correct your case, if everything else is correct.
For example, a class has a field called foo. Typing 'this.fOO' will bring up the code completion. After typing the space character at the end of the word, the reference will change to 'this.foo'.
If you are referencing the class in a static context (MyClass.MY_CONST), typing MyCLASS gets you an error (unless you force code completion with ctrl-space). 'MyClass.my_const' invokes code completion and changes the code to 'MyClass.MY_CONST'.
If you don't specify the context, it doesn't work either (unless you force it to start code completion by pressing ctrl-space). In the first example 'fOO = 12;' will not automatically correct to 'foo = 12;'. I assume, this is because it would have to search your entire scope and make a guess as to what you meant. In VB, no case sensitivity means no guessing.
So, IDEA does have some useful features, but they don't do the same thing as VB does. The limitations are probably based on the language, but if there is a way around it, the Jetbrains people will find a way.