I don't think it's really "their" format. It's part of the MPEG-2 standard, isn't it?
But yes I agree that Apple would keep using it, as well they should. It doesn't customers into their own players. Even Zune supports AAC. Anyone can implement it without Apple's permission.
And yes I think Apple would sell their music without DRM if labels decided en masse to let it happen.
No, it seems to me that I still have the better deal. Or did Vista suddenly get a utility to make it easy (and supporrted!) to install other OSs on the box? Did that happen and I just missed it?
And let's be honest here. You're thinking of installing Linux on your PC. I can do that, too, and completely without Apple's permission.
Sweet Jesus, they never described BootCamp as anything but a beta technology from their upcoming major OS release. The fact that Tiger users even have the option at any price to continue using it once Leopard is released is more than they ever stated they would do and more than any Tiger user had reason to hope for. I think everyone needs to stop their goddamned whining about it. I fully expected to have to upgrade to use it. I don't know why anyone wouldn't have had that assumption.
he problem is more than ever people are getting tired of the whole one manufacturer/style bit.
Are they? Show me. Just becuase nerds on/. carry on about it all the time doesn't mean the remaining 99.999% of the universe even knows what you're talking about.
I think we really need to be careful not to overestimate the influence and power of nerddom. it may be true that a segment of computer users might play with an unsupported version of OS X on their PCs, they do not constitute a significant number of people. You may make the argument that these nerds are the most important constituency, but I do not think they are influential enough to make up for their infinitesimal numbers.
(You see this kind of nerd fallacy all the time. A record company dude just said the other day that the era of the music CD as we know it is dead. It took 2 nanoseconds for nerds to counter: CDs are here to say because of DRM and that their opposition to it was going to halt the migration away from this media in its tracks. Which is of course nonsense. Most people have no idea what DRM is and, until and unless it bites them in the ass, do not care.)
The first thing a person would want to do with such an iTunes-phone is download something from iTunes and use it as a ringtone. But you cannot do this with the ROKR. This is because:
a) Apple hates it when you buy songs off iTunes.
b) Motorola would rather you paid them $2.99 for the ringtones they already provide.
c) The technology to make this happen is just too hard and/or expensive.
I'm at the Desire2Learn User's Conference right now in Guelph, Ontario. The buzz here is that the whole patent is ludicrous and only serves to further D2Ls status as a major player in the LMS space.
A computer game is not just art. It's also platform for social interaction and a host for modifications. I think it's exactly the sort of thing that can benefit from a direct line of communication between customers and developers. Remember ID and all their.plan files? People paid close attention to them and developers probably received helpful feedback from the community about what development choices they were making. Besides, we're not just talking about games. We're talking about all kinds of products and services. Not just technology ones and not just internet-based ones. Some products and services are less interesting than others and thus will not have a tremendous need for such interaction, but I believe many can benefit.
Do you want that game developed in isolation with what gamers think and want, or would you rather it be developed with a thorough understanding of what makes a game community thrive? Thought so.
The point isn't that blogging is going to mean company employees dishing dirt on their bosses. The point is for the company to be engaging in a meaningful dialog with their customers and the communities they operate in. Corporate bloggers can be expected, I think, to have a pro-company viewpoint. But a gernuine conversation can still take place. And that's what corporate blogging is bringing us.
Jesus, do they actually use the acronym LUA? *shudder* It's just a vivid reminder that they make this stuff for corporate IT departments and not for me.
I'm impressed, kind of. But I bet you can count on this thing working only or best) with MS products and services. That is, can I just configure the thing to FTP (or SFTP) to any web directory? Can I us any other product to edit it's strange code? Must I upload to some crazy (but free!) MSN account? C'mon. Nothing's free with these guys. It either is a strategic part of their plan to dominate the world or they don't bother with it.
Re:frustrated a few times with Windows limitations
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1
I who have supported and used both Windows and Mac for years can make no sense of that argument. OS X is no less nerdy and "tweakable" than Windows. In fact, having the open source BSD layer underneath makes it probably more tweakable in many important respects.
instances where Mac users want to do something that only Windows machines can do are almost universally the result of some lazy developer who makes their app or their web app function only in Windows - it has nothing whatsoever to do with the platforms themselves.
I think any machine that is going to run Windows should come with an additional processor dedicated to continual virus detection.
Re:Flickr alternative in case you really need cont
on
A History of Flickr
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· Score: 1, Redundant
I went from a staunch Gallery user to Flickr Pro. Gallery is great and maybe is still the first choice for lots of folks, but not me. In addition to all the features they have in common, Flickr can show latest photos on blog, can publish photos sent via email, can receive camera phone pics, can blog photos sent by email/camera phone, integrated creative commons licensing, supports notes on pics, can link to friends, makes awesome use of metadata tags, and is a great way to find other people's photos. Flickr feels social to me. And I think my pictures get looked at more. It's well worth the $25 for pro.
those with a generally sunny outlook on life expect to succeed and tend to deny responsibility when they perform badly.
This kind of reminds me of Martin Seligman's book "Learned Optimism." Among other things it discusses research on how different kinds of people attribute their successes and failures. It's not at all "pop" psychology. Seligman was (is?) a research psychologist at Penn State. Definitely worth a read.
Hardware clones would be very bad for Apple. It would a) kill their user experience, b) degrade their chic consumer appeal and c) dry up their revenues to the point where innovation takes a permanent back seat.
I think it obvious that an increased marketshare would lead to an increased exposure to malware of all kinds. What is also obvious to me, but not to many others apparently, is that Apple's stellar record with regard to malware isn't solely due to it's tiny marketshare. It's not even mostly due to that factor. The cleanliness of today's Macintoshes is primarily due to sensible policies and sound engineering on behalf of coders at Apple and in the open source community.
Translation: even if Apple captured (an unlikely) 50% marketshare, their share of malware would still be far less than that of Windows.
Upon reflection, I think you're right. Apple hasn't used hardware boot ROMs in ages.
But one thing I feel absolutely certain of: Apple will make it extremely difficult for anyone to boot X on non-Apple systems. it's going to go way beyond "we don't support it" and even beyond "we'll sue you if we know."
If any Joe Blow can run OS X on his $500 Dell then Apple will cease to be. At the very least they will cease to be the company they are now; their hardware business (and they don't have any other!) will dry up and they'll be an iPod/software company within a couple of years.
There's also the fact that their special Apple magic will disappear when they no longer control both hardware and OS, thus sucking more of the life out of the platform. I mean why do you think we Mac users pay the premium we do? It's not just the slick cases!
There's no way they just signed their own death warrant by releasing OS X for Intel that will run on any PC box. I just do not see it.
Duh! Apple has no interest in seeing Mac clones happen. (And neither do we; it'd kill most of their revenue and the one thing that makes them unique.)
Apple-branded MacPentium will NOT boot Windows.
Apple will prevent anyone from booting OS X on a non-Apple system via their proprietary boot ROMs and vigorous legal defenses.
Think about it! What prevents you from building your own mac right now? I mean G5 processors are commercially available. You could make one right now! Stock hard drive, vid card, RAM, etc.. It's the proprietary shit on the motherboard that stops you. If it's so easy for someone to reverse-engineer it for a PentiumMac then it's equally easy to do so for a G5, right? And yet nobody is doing it.
Yeah, right. The Slashdot editors and community is known to fall all over themselves on everything Apple does. Not. Shall I count the number of Mac-related articles that include the obligatory smart-ass line indicating the authors disdain for everything Mac? C'mon. Apple has done really well reaching out to the nerd set over the last few years. What acceptance they've gotten here is well-deserved.
You want to see slashdot get really stupid? See how everything having to do wth Linux is unquestioningly regarded as The Best Thing Ever.
That's what I've charged people in the past. Sometimes I'd put a 2-hour minimum on it, sometimes not. Of course if the person is a relative or a friend I charge nothing. Except maybe dinner or something.
Slashdot Mirror
They've got too much invested in their format
I don't think it's really "their" format. It's part of the MPEG-2 standard, isn't it?
But yes I agree that Apple would keep using it, as well they should. It doesn't customers into their own players. Even Zune supports AAC. Anyone can implement it without Apple's permission.
And yes I think Apple would sell their music without DRM if labels decided en masse to let it happen.
No, it seems to me that I still have the better deal. Or did Vista suddenly get a utility to make it easy (and supporrted!) to install other OSs on the box? Did that happen and I just missed it?
And let's be honest here. You're thinking of installing Linux on your PC. I can do that, too, and completely without Apple's permission.
Sweet Jesus, they never described BootCamp as anything but a beta technology from their upcoming major OS release. The fact that Tiger users even have the option at any price to continue using it once Leopard is released is more than they ever stated they would do and more than any Tiger user had reason to hope for. I think everyone needs to stop their goddamned whining about it. I fully expected to have to upgrade to use it. I don't know why anyone wouldn't have had that assumption.
he problem is more than ever people are getting tired of the whole one manufacturer/style bit.
/. carry on about it all the time doesn't mean the remaining 99.999% of the universe even knows what you're talking about.
Are they? Show me. Just becuase nerds on
I think we really need to be careful not to overestimate the influence and power of nerddom. it may be true that a segment of computer users might play with an unsupported version of OS X on their PCs, they do not constitute a significant number of people. You may make the argument that these nerds are the most important constituency, but I do not think they are influential enough to make up for their infinitesimal numbers.
(You see this kind of nerd fallacy all the time. A record company dude just said the other day that the era of the music CD as we know it is dead. It took 2 nanoseconds for nerds to counter: CDs are here to say because of DRM and that their opposition to it was going to halt the migration away from this media in its tracks. Which is of course nonsense. Most people have no idea what DRM is and, until and unless it bites them in the ass, do not care.)
Apple already sabotaged that
Apple did? Multiple choice:
The first thing a person would want to do with such an iTunes-phone is download something from iTunes and use it as a ringtone. But you cannot do this with the ROKR. This is because:
a) Apple hates it when you buy songs off iTunes.
b) Motorola would rather you paid them $2.99 for the ringtones they already provide.
c) The technology to make this happen is just too hard and/or expensive.
I'm at the Desire2Learn User's Conference right now in Guelph, Ontario. The buzz here is that the whole patent is ludicrous and only serves to further D2Ls status as a major player in the LMS space.
A computer game is not just art. It's also platform for social interaction and a host for modifications. I think it's exactly the sort of thing that can benefit from a direct line of communication between customers and developers. Remember ID and all their .plan files? People paid close attention to them and developers probably received helpful feedback from the community about what development choices they were making. Besides, we're not just talking about games. We're talking about all kinds of products and services. Not just technology ones and not just internet-based ones. Some products and services are less interesting than others and thus will not have a tremendous need for such interaction, but I believe many can benefit.
(Imogen Heap, rock!)
Do you want that game developed in isolation with what gamers think and want, or would you rather it be developed with a thorough understanding of what makes a game community thrive? Thought so.
The point isn't that blogging is going to mean company employees dishing dirt on their bosses. The point is for the company to be engaging in a meaningful dialog with their customers and the communities they operate in. Corporate bloggers can be expected, I think, to have a pro-company viewpoint. But a gernuine conversation can still take place. And that's what corporate blogging is bringing us.
Jesus, do they actually use the acronym LUA? *shudder* It's just a vivid reminder that they make this stuff for corporate IT departments and not for me.
I'm impressed, kind of. But I bet you can count on this thing working only or best) with MS products and services. That is, can I just configure the thing to FTP (or SFTP) to any web directory? Can I us any other product to edit it's strange code? Must I upload to some crazy (but free!) MSN account? C'mon. Nothing's free with these guys. It either is a strategic part of their plan to dominate the world or they don't bother with it.
I who have supported and used both Windows and Mac for years can make no sense of that argument. OS X is no less nerdy and "tweakable" than Windows. In fact, having the open source BSD layer underneath makes it probably more tweakable in many important respects.
instances where Mac users want to do something that only Windows machines can do are almost universally the result of some lazy developer who makes their app or their web app function only in Windows - it has nothing whatsoever to do with the platforms themselves.
I think any machine that is going to run Windows should come with an additional processor dedicated to continual virus detection.
I went from a staunch Gallery user to Flickr Pro. Gallery is great and maybe is still the first choice for lots of folks, but not me. In addition to all the features they have in common, Flickr can show latest photos on blog, can publish photos sent via email, can receive camera phone pics, can blog photos sent by email/camera phone, integrated creative commons licensing, supports notes on pics, can link to friends, makes awesome use of metadata tags, and is a great way to find other people's photos. Flickr feels social to me. And I think my pictures get looked at more. It's well worth the $25 for pro.
those with a generally sunny outlook on life expect to succeed and tend to deny responsibility when they perform badly.
This kind of reminds me of Martin Seligman's book "Learned Optimism." Among other things it discusses research on how different kinds of people attribute their successes and failures. It's not at all "pop" psychology. Seligman was (is?) a research psychologist at Penn State. Definitely worth a read.
Hardware clones would be very bad for Apple. It would a) kill their user experience, b) degrade their chic consumer appeal and c) dry up their revenues to the point where innovation takes a permanent back seat.
I think it obvious that an increased marketshare would lead to an increased exposure to malware of all kinds. What is also obvious to me, but not to many others apparently, is that Apple's stellar record with regard to malware isn't solely due to it's tiny marketshare. It's not even mostly due to that factor. The cleanliness of today's Macintoshes is primarily due to sensible policies and sound engineering on behalf of coders at Apple and in the open source community.
Translation: even if Apple captured (an unlikely) 50% marketshare, their share of malware would still be far less than that of Windows.
Upon reflection, I think you're right. Apple hasn't used hardware boot ROMs in ages.
But one thing I feel absolutely certain of: Apple will make it extremely difficult for anyone to boot X on non-Apple systems. it's going to go way beyond "we don't support it" and even beyond "we'll sue you if we know."
If any Joe Blow can run OS X on his $500 Dell then Apple will cease to be. At the very least they will cease to be the company they are now; their hardware business (and they don't have any other!) will dry up and they'll be an iPod/software company within a couple of years.
There's also the fact that their special Apple magic will disappear when they no longer control both hardware and OS, thus sucking more of the life out of the platform. I mean why do you think we Mac users pay the premium we do? It's not just the slick cases!
There's no way they just signed their own death warrant by releasing OS X for Intel that will run on any PC box. I just do not see it.
Duh! Apple has no interest in seeing Mac clones happen. (And neither do we; it'd kill most of their revenue and the one thing that makes them unique.)
Apple-branded MacPentium will NOT boot Windows.
Apple will prevent anyone from booting OS X on a non-Apple system via their proprietary boot ROMs and vigorous legal defenses.
Think about it! What prevents you from building your own mac right now? I mean G5 processors are commercially available. You could make one right now! Stock hard drive, vid card, RAM, etc.. It's the proprietary shit on the motherboard that stops you. If it's so easy for someone to reverse-engineer it for a PentiumMac then it's equally easy to do so for a G5, right? And yet nobody is doing it.
Aw, you can't fault them for that. A lot more of the people here actually USE Windows ;)
Yeah, right. The Slashdot editors and community is known to fall all over themselves on everything Apple does. Not. Shall I count the number of Mac-related articles that include the obligatory smart-ass line indicating the authors disdain for everything Mac? C'mon. Apple has done really well reaching out to the nerd set over the last few years. What acceptance they've gotten here is well-deserved.
You want to see slashdot get really stupid? See how everything having to do wth Linux is unquestioningly regarded as The Best Thing Ever.
Because it sounds good at low bit rates?
Plus Apple has a lot more experience and expertise in engineering Really Small computers.
That's what I've charged people in the past. Sometimes I'd put a 2-hour minimum on it, sometimes not. Of course if the person is a relative or a friend I charge nothing. Except maybe dinner or something.