Did you read the article? The only non-Rosetta result that was slower was iPhoto (export to files). It came in at a "dramatic" 0.91x as fast as the G5. Well, I wouldn't call that dramatically slower.
Why was it slower? It's probably spending the vast majority of its time writing data to files. And guess what's the bottleneck there? The hard disk. The disk in the new Intel iMac is most likely slower than the disk in the older G5 (non-iSight) iMac. this post at the Ars forum explains why. Apparently older iMacs had Maxtor disks, newer ones have Western Digital. And according to that post, the Maxtors are faster. Case closed.
As for the other tests, it would be interesting to see the results with varying (but equal) RAM configurations -- say, 512M, 1G, 2G. Does the Intel machine get faster relative to the G5 when both have more memory? Or does the memory help the G5 more? Does extra memory help Rosetta? What about running Rosetta apps multiple times?
It's a shame that none of the current reviews have done such a thorough enough test yet. It should be fairly easy to do, and vastly more informative!
First, closing the only open window does not close the program.
Usability feature. Next time you want to open something in that program, it'll pop up instantly. Nice, huh? The point is that the user shouldn't have to care about what programs are open. If a program's not doing anything, it won't impact usage of other stuff at all. If memory is getting tight, it'll get swapped out. Still no slower to "relaunch" (read pages from swap) than restarting the app. And for something like Photoshop that does a significant amount of initialization at startup, I guarantee unswapping it with no windows open is much faster than starting up from scratch. This is most definitely not something to be fixed.
Another oddity, the menu at the top of the screen. Great! instead of moving the mouse a 100 pixels or so I again have to move way out of the area I'm working to access a menu, whose bright idea was that?
It was the bright idea of somebody who did real research into usability (there's that word again). Which movement takes more concentration for the average user: quickly flicking the mouse up to the top, where it's impossible to overshoot; or carefully aiming and hitting a narrow horizontal area, possibly taking multiple adjustments to get it just right? You and I may be pros at using the mouse, but your average user isn't, and the top menu bar gives them effectively infinite space to aim for. Much easier. Bright idea indeed.
Now lets look at uniformity, brushed metal, white, white with stipples, top window bar blended into the window as to be invisible ( aka System Preferences), brushed metal window, window with a visible top bar.
Absolutely agreed. The gui in Tiger is a complete mishmash of at least 4 different styles, quite possibly more. Apple is badly disobeying their own rules in this area. And the Spotlight window is a complete abomination, owned by no application and impossible to switch to via Cmd-Tab!
Things that are pretty much standard practice on every other OS/GUI in the world, are different on a Mac.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Why should we all emulate the Windows Way? As I illustrated above, some of Apple's interface design choices are a heck of a lot smarter than those of any other OS. They are far from perfect, but there was a lot of thought behind what you think was "for no good reason except to be different."
No OS is perfect period.
Agreed! Like you I use numerous different operating systems daily. I have a ton of gripes about OS X, but I still find it the most pleasant (or maybe least unpleasant) overall experience at the end of the day.
Does it play AAC? Does it support on-the-fly updating playlists based on arbitrary logical rules? Does it update metadata like "play count" and "last played time" every time a song is played? Does it automatically synchronize with the music library software (songs, metadata, playlists) every time it's connected? Including aforementioned updated metadata? Does it allow you to make new playlists on the go? Does it play albums with absolutely no gap in between tracks (not even the small gap introduced by some audio formats like MP3)?
The iPod does all the but the last, and if any other product doesn't do these things, I consider it clearly inferior. I'm looking for a replacement due to the gap issue that Apple refuses to address, so I'm genuinely curious about the iRiver. However, I'm not willing to give up any aspect of the excellent experience to get gapless. All other features (FM, video, etc) are a waste of time to me. Just make it play and manage my music in the best way possible.
Do you have any live albums on your iPod? How do you like those gaps of silence between each track?;-)
I'm not the original poster, but I'll respond to this. I hate the gaps. That's the one thing about the iPod that I absolutely despise. It upsets me that Apple continues to ignore this problem after 4 years and now in the 5th generation of iPod (not to mention 3 other companion models).
But let me ask you this. Does your Rio Karma support anything analogous to iTunes' Smart Playlists (playlists that update on the fly based on arbitrary logical rules)? Does it automatically sync with your music library when connected to the computer, or do you have to manually drag files around? Does it update metadata on a per-song basis like "last played time" and "play count" every time you play a song? Does it play AAC? In terms of maximum compatibility, AAC is just as "stupid" of a choice as OGG; some things support it (Mac, Windows, iPod, Linux/BSD), some things don't (most other hardware players).;)
If the answer is "no" to any of the above, is there any non-iPod player that can truly answer "yes" to all? (AAC would be nice, but isn't 100% necessary; like you with OGG, I could reimport if I absolutely had to; would really rather not)
I've become spoiled by these features in the iPod and its seamless integration with iTunes, and much as the gaps irritate me, I'm not willing to give this up in order to get gapless playback. I have a lot of Smart Playlists based on metadata that changes on a regular basis (see above), and I can't imagine going back to simple playlists, or worse, only artist/album/song navigation. I want every time I listen to a song to be counted in metadata, because it's interesting to see my listening habits fall out of the data.
The gaps annoy me enough that I've been searching for a replacement. I have no loyalty to Apple, but I won't give up the rest of the excellent experience. A proper replacement has to give me everything I have now, plus gapless. I haven't found anything that qualifies yet, but I still search.
The project in this article is intriguing, but it has a huge amount of work to do to win me over. Cramming features into the player doesn't cut it if the library software is crap and doesn't synchronize seamlessly. Call me a skeptic.
Why don't you suggest it to Apple? They won't do it if nobody asks and they don't think of it themselves. Feedback or Bug Reports, depending on how direct you wish to be.
Wow, there's a whole application to make a simple edit to a config file? Sheesh. I'm sure it's good for typical command-line-fearing Apple users, but this is Slashdot. Just edit/etc/hostconfig and change SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-. Heck, it even says that right on the Spotless download page.
If you could get an iPod with video capability and at a only slightly higher price point, would you?
Not if it still doesn't fix the gapless playback problem. I have too many albums where the music seamlessly transitions from track to track, and I'm tired of being jolted by that bit of silence in between. I won't rip the CD as one big file because I also like to skip around to different songs or randomize. This is a glaring flaw in the iPod's music capability that Apple should have fixed within a year of its first release.
Like I said in another forum recently, I think I'm gonna go postal if they release a video iPod without gapless playback of music. Take Steve Jobs hostage and make him personally implement a fix.:)
To me, as both a software developer and a music lover, it's simply criminal to ignore this issue for so long when so many simple solutions exist. There are numerous ways they could fix it, some backwards compatible with existing ripped music, others requiring a reimport. At this point, I'm willing to suffer through reimporting my 450 CDs if they finally fix the damn problem. The point is that any programmer talented enough to work at Apple should be able to code a working solution in his/her sleep. To introduce video, a vastly more complex feature, without fixing the gap problem, is beyond negligent.
Of course, the general public doesn't care, so I will continue to suffer as Apple continues to rake in the cash. Meanwhile, all competing products fall woefully short against the iPod's seamless integration and overall superb listening experience (gaps notwithstanding).
Gapless playback is a problem becuase files aren't encoded properly. The end of one file and the start of the next don't line up.
If you'd read the site I linked to, you'd understand that this is only a very small part of the problem. The iPod (and iTunes) adds a much larger gap than can be attributed to encoded frame length alone. The site shows this beautifully with real data. It's simply sloppy programming on Apple's part - they obviously chose to do the simplest thing, which is don't even open or start decoding the next file until the current one is finished playing and closed. Any decent programmer worthy of breathing could buffer audio output so that there's no extra delay introduced. And the gap inherent in the frame size could be removed with a little smart logic that skips any silence at the end of the very last frame.
They're just too lazy (and this is the company that's constantly praised for "paying attention to detail" - yeah right!).
If that bothers you then stick the wav files together and compress it as one file. It would be easy for playback software to support virtual tracks within that larger track.
That's not even close to an acceptable solution. The entire CD becomes one big track, and you can no longer store metadata on a per-song basis. You can't skip around and play individual songs. Doesn't work.
Importing the album twice isn't acceptable either, so don't even think about suggesting that.:)
Plenty of complete solutions do exist, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for their implementation.
Most people don't care.
Exactly, and that's why it's so frustrating to me. I do care, but I know the current situation makes it unlikely that Apple (or any of its competitors) will listen to the minority. It's really the only blemish on an otherwise superb listening experience, so I usually focus on the positives (and the music!) and enjoy myself anyway.;)
Still, who needs an overpriced Apple when a Creative Zen player offers better sound quality and higher storage capacity for a lower price?
Anyone who wants seamless integration between their music library and their portable device. Anyone who wants the smallest physical size per storage amount in their portable device. Anyone who wants a clean user interface uncluttered by "kitchen sink" syndrome.
I've looked at the Zen and others, but none come even close to Apple's solution with iTunes and iPod. My music is automatically synchronized when connecting the iPod to the computer, both ways. Maybe I'm weird, but I like tracking data like Last Played Time and Play Count, making Smart Playlists based on them. When I hook up the iPod, all the tunes I played while I was out get updated in the library. And I love Smart Playlists. Keeps things nice and organized based on just about any criteria I can possibly imagine. It's in my library and on my portable device.
Nobody needs it, but all of the above is worth the small bit of extra money to me. If it isn't to you, cool. Get something else and be happy.
Believe me, I'd love to jump ship to another product because Apple's continuing lack of attention to the gapless playback problem is getting irritating. They obviously don't care at all, because 99.99% of their customers don't care. Unfortunately I'm one of the few who does. I've looked at the alternatives. And I've found no other solution that comes close to Apple's in every other facet of the system. Guess that makes me a stupid fanboy who only cares about being trendy and fashionable, huh?
I'd prefer it if Apple didn't work on the next BIG thing until they solve the the gap problem. Make music playback actually work before worrying about what's next.
I can't believe that Apple managed to design, prototype, test, mass produce, market and ship the iPod in 9 months.
They did. This article talks about how Apple hired Tony Fadell in early 2001 to begin development of the iPod. They worked with PortalPlayer on the hardware, and developed the software in conjunction with Pixo, Inc. According to this article, Pixo didn't even get the call from Apple until late spring 2001. It was a rushed product because they were so behind in that market, but it turned out to be one of the most successful things they ever did.
No need to be nervous. Just take your time, be careful, and follow the instructions. I replaced the hard drive on my wife's iBook late last year and it went much smoother than I expected. Then recently I accidentally dropped it from countertop height with the lid open. Cracked the display bezel so that it was nearly impossible to open or close. So I disassembled the whole thing again, this time removing the display and opening that up too. Turns out the LCD panel was fine, just got disconnected in the drop (thank goodness, as those can be a few hundred bucks), so I just needed a replacement bezel from eBay. I installed it over the weekend, and again the iBook is good as new! I'm starting to feel like a pro at this...
The site you linked to looks pretty good, but I highly, highly recommend also looking at the guides at pbfixit.com as well. Tip: print out every large size image where any screws are removed. Lay them all out on a large table. Each time you remove a screw, place it on the printout exactly where it would go. Then, when you reassemble it, you know exactly where each screw goes. Saves a ton of hassle and ensures that every screw goes back where it came from (important when there are many different sizes).
Good luck (if you haven't already done it).
I'm not so sure that journaling is a great idea for an iPod. Before it was recently stolen, I had mine set to journaled HFS+. Almost every time I hooked it up, the Mac either complained about the journal being inconsistent or left a similar message in dmesg. Many times I'd have to do several attempts, disconnecting the iPod, resetting it, etc, before it would register on the Mac. My theory was that the iPod firmware doesn't do journaling (I would be really surprised if it did), so any updates it makes while you're out and about will not be reflected in the journal.
I turned off journaling and never had a problem again when hooking it up to sync. Unfortunately that was within a week or so of its theft, but that's another story...
Yep. My wife teaches a beginning computer class for adults. Most of these people have never sat down in front of a computer before the class, and many have never even seen one up close. Hard to believe, but there are millions of people out there like this!
Anyway, she really enjoys teaching the class, but some days she comes home totally frustrated, like when the whole class couldn't understand the difference between a file and a folder. I'm sure these people would all do much better with just one button, at least until (if) they get the hang of things.
Amazon's search is seriously messed up with respect to DVD-Audio. If you look at their DVD-Audio section, there are a few more in various genres (146 by my count). You can get there by clicking on Music from the main page, then DVD-Audio. Both in the left sidebar. Obviously the SACD section is much bigger.
It's still not very impressive, and I know of at least one DVD-Audio title (Steve Stevens' Flamenco a go go) that shows up in no listing or search. It's not in the DVD-Audio section of the store, and if you search for the title and/or artist, you only get the audio CD version. I stumbled upon this by happy accident and immediately ordered myself a copy after already having owned the CD version for a few years. The 5.1 mix is incredible, enhancing an already astounding piece of work.
As someone else mentioned, there's also DualDisc stuff which is becoming popular. I've found that you don't always get what you think with those, so beware. The only one I have is not true DVD-Audio on the DVD side - the sound is in some DVD-Video compatible compressed format (Dolby Digital?). Not that anyone could truly tell the difference in quality... And the CD side does not adhere to the Redbook standard (it says this on the outside of the case, so in theory you could see it before buying). My Pioneer DVR-A03 in the Mac refused to read the CD side, but thankfully the cheapass CD-ROM drive in another machine was able to do it, so I still got the tracks into iTunes. Would have been pretty pissed off if I hadn't been able to rip the audio, and certainly wouldn't consider further DualDisc purchases if that were the case.
I guess I was one of those people with high expectations. I was really excited about Spotlight from the time it was first publically unveiled last year. But unfortunately the assumptions I made about what its capabilities should have been were a little too optimistic for a first generation release. Mind you, it's a very impressive technology and will certainly only get better, but it missed the mark on many things I looked forward to doing with it.
Below is an excerpt of a long blog post I recently wrote about Tiger, focusing on Spotlight. It turns out that I had other issues with Tiger (kernel panics every other day on a clean install) that forced me back to Panther, so I'm not using it anymore. Spotlight was cool, just not as cool as I'd hoped.
Spotlight: Not So Bright
And then there was Spotlight. A very cool technology, and obviously what computers should do in terms of desktop search. I had high hopes. It basically indexes your entire hard drive like a database, so you can search for files by content in addition to name. This is not necessarily new, but what is new is that the indexing allows search results to come up immediately. Microsoft is planning a similar feature in their next OS, while Google and others already offer their own third-party solutions for the Windows world. It's nice to finally catch up again.
Spotlight is particularly nice in that any time a file is created or modified on disk, it automatically gets reindexed. There's literally no perceptible delay (you can have a search window open with results, create a new file with content that will match the results, and it'll instantly pop into the search window), since there are hooks into the filesystem layer of the kernel. Nice. Read all the gory details at the above linked Ars Technica review.
Spotlight indexed my three hard drives fairly quickly, and soon all my content was available for instant search. Or so I thought. Well, no, maybe not. This new technology is clearly a bit immature and appears to be hit and miss. Many people have reported inconsistencies or flat out limitations. Rather disappointing, but some might argue that it's pretty good for a first release. I guess so - I can search for a keyword and within about 10 seconds, 3,000 documents are listed. Pretty impressive, I guess. I thought this would change the way I looked for files, but so far it hasn't. I haven't performed one Spotlight search in the interest of finding something - everything has just been fiddling with it to see how it works. Maybe that's just me, or maybe it's Spotlight. Maybe it's both.
One significant bug I discovered immediately affects the initial indexing that is done after installing Tiger. When you first install Tiger, of course it has no index with which to perform its blazingly fast searches. So it kicks off a background process that chugs through your local hard drives, indexing the contents of every file it knows about. Simple enough, and needs to be done, right? Well, apparently this process was too stupid to continue where it left off if you rebooted your machine before the initial index was complete. I did exactly this, and when later searching for files I knew were there, Spotlight came up empty. A quick google showed me the joy of mdutil, and I was able to force reindexing to occur. After that, my search was successful.
(Not So) Smart Folders
Apple has touted Smart Folders as a great new feature utilizing Spotlight. You specify a custom set of criteria, and boom, all files matching those criteria show up in your Smart Folder. Indeed, it is quite convenient. Want a collection of images large enough to be desktop wallpaper? Make a Smart Folder, and never worry about where those images are physically stored.
But Smart Folders were unnecessarily restricted to a
Even better: Programmer view in Calculator.app. I always hated having to switch to Windows just to convert between binary and decimal. Now I don't have to. Tiger's new Calculator not only does that conversion, but it has tons of other useful features for programmers, like AND, OR, NOR, XOR, <<, >>, Byte Flip, Word Flip, ASCII, Unicode, RoL, RoR, etc. Very nice.
The bad thing is that I got my first Tiger kernel panic in about 3 hours of use while originally typing up this reply. Bleh. Maybe those reports of continuing instability in late builds were not so far fetched? The nice thing about it was that after restarting and logging in, there was a dialog asking if I wanted to report the incident to Apple. Good deal - hopefully my data was useful!
And make sure that backup is well off site, say, halfway across the country.:)
I played the game with 7-Eleven cups last year and got 20-something free songs out of it. Not sure if I'll do it again this year, though. You can usually get 2-liter bottles on sale for under a buck at the grocery (wait for a good sale and stock up). So for about $2 I can get 67 ounces of soda and a song from iTMS.
With this promotion, I need 3 bottles at about $1.20 a pop for a reasonable chance at one song. That's 60 ounces of soda and maybe a song for $3.60. No, thanks.
Now, if they'd do it with the 2-liter bottles, sure. But that wouldn't make them any money, now would it?
You know, with a digital audio out, the Mac mini could be a great set-top box. Small, sleek, quiet, powerful enough to record/display HD video, DVD, etc. With the right software, it could be a DVR, DVD player, music jukebox, photo viewer, all hooked up to your home theater system. The software already exists for the last 3 items, and Apple would just need to build in an intuitive TV/remote interface. I'm not sure why Jobs always seemed to think there was no potential in this, but hopefully Apple has some secret project in development along these lines.
If it did have a digital audio out, I'd be seriously considering buying one. Sometimes when we rent movies, we don't get around to watching them before they're due, so we rip them to the Power Mac in the office for later viewing. When it's time to watch, we hook up the iBook to the TV and receiver, plug it into the network port in the family room, and watch the movie in DVD Player.app over AFP. The folder is then deleted when we're done with it.
It's kind of a pain to hook up all the cables every time you want to do this, and you don't get surround sound as the iBook only has analog stereo out. With digital surround sound out, the Mac mini would be perfect to have as a permanent fixture in the home theater system. Get a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, an IR remote, and you can surf the web or do whatever from the couch without tying up the laptop. Could have been nice!
Yes it does. The reason it doesn't seem to have issues is that the vast majority of Mac users run as administrator. Why? Because the first account that gets created upon initial setup of the machine necessarily has administrator rights. Most people are too lazy or ignorant to reserve a separated, admin-only account, and use a non-admin account for their daily computing. And really, they shouldn't have to know to do this. I've always said that Apple should ask the user for an "administration password" at initial setup, and silently create a hidden admin account for this purpose. Any dialog that asks for an administrator's name and password would then only ask for the "administration" password. Nobody needs to know that it's actually a separate user account. Meanwhile, the real user account that's created at setup would have no special rights. They should have done this from the beginning.
As someone with about a decade of strong unix experience before I started using OS X 3 years ago, I made absolutely sure to setup my machines as I've said above. My normal account has no admin privileges, and there's a separate "admin" account for those times when I need it. And I've run into several software problems because the vendors assumed I was running as an administrator (or more likely, didn't even think about it because Apple doesn't make a big deal of it to their developer community):
Quicken 2002 was a particularly bad offender. My wife and I wanted to be able to use it from both of our accounts to update the same financial data. Not only did it not want to run without admin privileges, but I had to jump through numerous hoops so that it would allow us both to use the same data file. I ultimately created a new "quicken" group with both of us as members, and changed permissions and group ownership on a number of files after installation.
I recently got Photoshop Elements 3.0 and went to install it. It uses Apple's Installer program, which asks for an admin user/password in order to complete installation. This is the way it should be, right? Well, apparently not. Even though the software installed fine, it failed to properly write the serial number information. Even though I had given the installer admin privileges! Bleh. I had to login as the admin user and install it directly from that account.
Numerous other software that refused to install at all without being logged in as admin. Usually they were using old installers that assume the OS 9 paradigm of "one user controls the whole machine" still applies in OS X.
I blame Apple as much as the companies who are too negligent to fix these easily rectified problems. Apple doesn't seem to think it's a significant problem for a regular user to have admin privileges all the time - true, you're not root, but you might as well be, with access to everything under/Applications and more. And many software companies have demonstrated more desire to add new features that generate new sales than to fix -- or even test! -- these kind of things that affect only a small percentage of their users.
Ultimately, it's just annoying when it comes up. Usually I can fix it by fiddling with permissions, but I just wish I didn't have to. The phrase "it just works" simply does not always apply...
Sadly no, the Linux method of copy/paste won't work except in X11 applications
I just discovered by accident a while back that Terminal does support this style of copy/paste. The only catch is that it must be in the same Terminal window, and the text must still be highlighted when you click the middle button. Not as useful as I'd like, but still nice. Of course, half the time I still use Command-C / Command-V since I've gotten so used to it.
Email-only accounts were also bumped to 50 MB each, but it appears that this amount is fixed. While it's nice that you can partition the main account between iDisk and email, it would be even better if you could partition space among all accounts.
I have the main.Mac account and my wife has an email-only account attached to it. She uses hers as her primary email address, but I only use mine as a backup for the rare time when I can't get to my main email. I'd rather have the option to give her more space since she'd be more likely to need it.
No biggie, though - I imagine we won't be filling up either anytime soon!
Yep, I agree completely. We didn't have a huge budget to spend on the photographer, so ultimately that meant we found someone more reasonable than the high-priced pros. For about $700 she took about 200 great photos with high quality equipment and we got to keep the negatives. I immediately took them to a good photo lab and had them all scanned at high resolution. The digital versions look fabulous and we didn't have to break the bank to go with a big time pro using digital equipment.
A friend of mine got married the week before, and their photographer had a couple of assistants and a bunch of extra equipment. I'm sure it was in the several thousand dollar range, but I never asked him about details. One cool thing that theirs did do, was showed a slideshow at the reception using a projector and a PowerBook with all of the digital photos. Neat, but not worth the cost to us.:)
I happen to work for a company that manufactures and sells some of these satellite-based temperature sensors to the government. I actually work on the ground processing software for one of them, which has all kinds of neat algorithms for turning raw microwave spectrum measurements into meaningful science data, including surface temperature and air temperature at several different levels of the atmosphere. If anyone is interested in the technology behind them, here are just a few of the sensors used by the US government for these purposes:
SSMIS - next generation SSM/T-1 that also combines functions of 2 other older sensors (atmospheric water vapor and a ton of surface data like ice concentration, sea surface wind speed, soil moisture, etc), the first of 5 launched in October of last year
All of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.
It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the article? The only non-Rosetta result that was slower was iPhoto (export to files). It came in at a "dramatic" 0.91x as fast as the G5. Well, I wouldn't call that dramatically slower.
Why was it slower? It's probably spending the vast majority of its time writing data to files. And guess what's the bottleneck there? The hard disk. The disk in the new Intel iMac is most likely slower than the disk in the older G5 (non-iSight) iMac. this post at the Ars forum explains why. Apparently older iMacs had Maxtor disks, newer ones have Western Digital. And according to that post, the Maxtors are faster. Case closed.
As for the other tests, it would be interesting to see the results with varying (but equal) RAM configurations -- say, 512M, 1G, 2G. Does the Intel machine get faster relative to the G5 when both have more memory? Or does the memory help the G5 more? Does extra memory help Rosetta? What about running Rosetta apps multiple times?
It's a shame that none of the current reviews have done such a thorough enough test yet. It should be fairly easy to do, and vastly more informative!
First, closing the only open window does not close the program.
Usability feature. Next time you want to open something in that program, it'll pop up instantly. Nice, huh? The point is that the user shouldn't have to care about what programs are open. If a program's not doing anything, it won't impact usage of other stuff at all. If memory is getting tight, it'll get swapped out. Still no slower to "relaunch" (read pages from swap) than restarting the app. And for something like Photoshop that does a significant amount of initialization at startup, I guarantee unswapping it with no windows open is much faster than starting up from scratch. This is most definitely not something to be fixed.
Another oddity, the menu at the top of the screen. Great! instead of moving the mouse a 100 pixels or so I again have to move way out of the area I'm working to access a menu, whose bright idea was that?
It was the bright idea of somebody who did real research into usability (there's that word again). Which movement takes more concentration for the average user: quickly flicking the mouse up to the top, where it's impossible to overshoot; or carefully aiming and hitting a narrow horizontal area, possibly taking multiple adjustments to get it just right? You and I may be pros at using the mouse, but your average user isn't, and the top menu bar gives them effectively infinite space to aim for. Much easier. Bright idea indeed.
Now lets look at uniformity, brushed metal, white, white with stipples, top window bar blended into the window as to be invisible ( aka System Preferences), brushed metal window, window with a visible top bar.
Absolutely agreed. The gui in Tiger is a complete mishmash of at least 4 different styles, quite possibly more. Apple is badly disobeying their own rules in this area. And the Spotlight window is a complete abomination, owned by no application and impossible to switch to via Cmd-Tab!
Things that are pretty much standard practice on every other OS/GUI in the world, are different on a Mac.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Why should we all emulate the Windows Way? As I illustrated above, some of Apple's interface design choices are a heck of a lot smarter than those of any other OS. They are far from perfect, but there was a lot of thought behind what you think was "for no good reason except to be different."
No OS is perfect period.
Agreed! Like you I use numerous different operating systems daily. I have a ton of gripes about OS X, but I still find it the most pleasant (or maybe least unpleasant) overall experience at the end of the day.
Now, the iRiver is vastly superior to the iPod
Honest questions:
Does it play AAC? Does it support on-the-fly updating playlists based on arbitrary logical rules? Does it update metadata like "play count" and "last played time" every time a song is played? Does it automatically synchronize with the music library software (songs, metadata, playlists) every time it's connected? Including aforementioned updated metadata? Does it allow you to make new playlists on the go? Does it play albums with absolutely no gap in between tracks (not even the small gap introduced by some audio formats like MP3)?
The iPod does all the but the last, and if any other product doesn't do these things, I consider it clearly inferior. I'm looking for a replacement due to the gap issue that Apple refuses to address, so I'm genuinely curious about the iRiver. However, I'm not willing to give up any aspect of the excellent experience to get gapless. All other features (FM, video, etc) are a waste of time to me. Just make it play and manage my music in the best way possible.
Do you have any live albums on your iPod? How do you like those gaps of silence between each track? ;-)
;)
I'm not the original poster, but I'll respond to this. I hate the gaps. That's the one thing about the iPod that I absolutely despise. It upsets me that Apple continues to ignore this problem after 4 years and now in the 5th generation of iPod (not to mention 3 other companion models).
But let me ask you this. Does your Rio Karma support anything analogous to iTunes' Smart Playlists (playlists that update on the fly based on arbitrary logical rules)? Does it automatically sync with your music library when connected to the computer, or do you have to manually drag files around? Does it update metadata on a per-song basis like "last played time" and "play count" every time you play a song? Does it play AAC? In terms of maximum compatibility, AAC is just as "stupid" of a choice as OGG; some things support it (Mac, Windows, iPod, Linux/BSD), some things don't (most other hardware players).
If the answer is "no" to any of the above, is there any non-iPod player that can truly answer "yes" to all? (AAC would be nice, but isn't 100% necessary; like you with OGG, I could reimport if I absolutely had to; would really rather not)
I've become spoiled by these features in the iPod and its seamless integration with iTunes, and much as the gaps irritate me, I'm not willing to give this up in order to get gapless playback. I have a lot of Smart Playlists based on metadata that changes on a regular basis (see above), and I can't imagine going back to simple playlists, or worse, only artist/album/song navigation. I want every time I listen to a song to be counted in metadata, because it's interesting to see my listening habits fall out of the data.
The gaps annoy me enough that I've been searching for a replacement. I have no loyalty to Apple, but I won't give up the rest of the excellent experience. A proper replacement has to give me everything I have now, plus gapless. I haven't found anything that qualifies yet, but I still search.
The project in this article is intriguing, but it has a huge amount of work to do to win me over. Cramming features into the player doesn't cut it if the library software is crap and doesn't synchronize seamlessly. Call me a skeptic.
Why don't you suggest it to Apple? They won't do it if nobody asks and they don't think of it themselves. Feedback or Bug Reports, depending on how direct you wish to be.
Wow, there's a whole application to make a simple edit to a config file? Sheesh. I'm sure it's good for typical command-line-fearing Apple users, but this is Slashdot. Just edit /etc/hostconfig and change SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-. Heck, it even says that right on the Spotless download page.
If you could get an iPod with video capability and at a only slightly higher price point, would you?
:)
Not if it still doesn't fix the gapless playback problem. I have too many albums where the music seamlessly transitions from track to track, and I'm tired of being jolted by that bit of silence in between. I won't rip the CD as one big file because I also like to skip around to different songs or randomize. This is a glaring flaw in the iPod's music capability that Apple should have fixed within a year of its first release.
Like I said in another forum recently, I think I'm gonna go postal if they release a video iPod without gapless playback of music. Take Steve Jobs hostage and make him personally implement a fix.
To me, as both a software developer and a music lover, it's simply criminal to ignore this issue for so long when so many simple solutions exist. There are numerous ways they could fix it, some backwards compatible with existing ripped music, others requiring a reimport. At this point, I'm willing to suffer through reimporting my 450 CDs if they finally fix the damn problem. The point is that any programmer talented enough to work at Apple should be able to code a working solution in his/her sleep. To introduce video, a vastly more complex feature, without fixing the gap problem, is beyond negligent.
Of course, the general public doesn't care, so I will continue to suffer as Apple continues to rake in the cash. Meanwhile, all competing products fall woefully short against the iPod's seamless integration and overall superb listening experience (gaps notwithstanding).
</rant>
Gapless playback is a problem becuase files aren't encoded properly. The end of one file and the start of the next don't line up.
:)
;)
If you'd read the site I linked to, you'd understand that this is only a very small part of the problem. The iPod (and iTunes) adds a much larger gap than can be attributed to encoded frame length alone. The site shows this beautifully with real data. It's simply sloppy programming on Apple's part - they obviously chose to do the simplest thing, which is don't even open or start decoding the next file until the current one is finished playing and closed. Any decent programmer worthy of breathing could buffer audio output so that there's no extra delay introduced. And the gap inherent in the frame size could be removed with a little smart logic that skips any silence at the end of the very last frame.
They're just too lazy (and this is the company that's constantly praised for "paying attention to detail" - yeah right!).
If that bothers you then stick the wav files together and compress it as one file. It would be easy for playback software to support virtual tracks within that larger track.
That's not even close to an acceptable solution. The entire CD becomes one big track, and you can no longer store metadata on a per-song basis. You can't skip around and play individual songs. Doesn't work.
Importing the album twice isn't acceptable either, so don't even think about suggesting that.
Plenty of complete solutions do exist, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for their implementation.
Most people don't care.
Exactly, and that's why it's so frustrating to me. I do care, but I know the current situation makes it unlikely that Apple (or any of its competitors) will listen to the minority. It's really the only blemish on an otherwise superb listening experience, so I usually focus on the positives (and the music!) and enjoy myself anyway.
Still, who needs an overpriced Apple when a Creative Zen player offers better sound quality and higher storage capacity for a lower price?
Anyone who wants seamless integration between their music library and their portable device. Anyone who wants the smallest physical size per storage amount in their portable device. Anyone who wants a clean user interface uncluttered by "kitchen sink" syndrome.
I've looked at the Zen and others, but none come even close to Apple's solution with iTunes and iPod. My music is automatically synchronized when connecting the iPod to the computer, both ways. Maybe I'm weird, but I like tracking data like Last Played Time and Play Count, making Smart Playlists based on them. When I hook up the iPod, all the tunes I played while I was out get updated in the library. And I love Smart Playlists. Keeps things nice and organized based on just about any criteria I can possibly imagine. It's in my library and on my portable device.
Nobody needs it, but all of the above is worth the small bit of extra money to me. If it isn't to you, cool. Get something else and be happy.
Believe me, I'd love to jump ship to another product because Apple's continuing lack of attention to the gapless playback problem is getting irritating. They obviously don't care at all, because 99.99% of their customers don't care. Unfortunately I'm one of the few who does. I've looked at the alternatives. And I've found no other solution that comes close to Apple's in every other facet of the system. Guess that makes me a stupid fanboy who only cares about being trendy and fashionable, huh?
It's not that difficult, Apple, really.
I can't believe that Apple managed to design, prototype, test, mass produce, market and ship the iPod in 9 months. They did. This article talks about how Apple hired Tony Fadell in early 2001 to begin development of the iPod. They worked with PortalPlayer on the hardware, and developed the software in conjunction with Pixo, Inc. According to this article, Pixo didn't even get the call from Apple until late spring 2001. It was a rushed product because they were so behind in that market, but it turned out to be one of the most successful things they ever did.
No need to be nervous. Just take your time, be careful, and follow the instructions. I replaced the hard drive on my wife's iBook late last year and it went much smoother than I expected. Then recently I accidentally dropped it from countertop height with the lid open. Cracked the display bezel so that it was nearly impossible to open or close. So I disassembled the whole thing again, this time removing the display and opening that up too. Turns out the LCD panel was fine, just got disconnected in the drop (thank goodness, as those can be a few hundred bucks), so I just needed a replacement bezel from eBay. I installed it over the weekend, and again the iBook is good as new! I'm starting to feel like a pro at this... The site you linked to looks pretty good, but I highly, highly recommend also looking at the guides at pbfixit.com as well. Tip: print out every large size image where any screws are removed. Lay them all out on a large table. Each time you remove a screw, place it on the printout exactly where it would go. Then, when you reassemble it, you know exactly where each screw goes. Saves a ton of hassle and ensures that every screw goes back where it came from (important when there are many different sizes). Good luck (if you haven't already done it).
I'm not so sure that journaling is a great idea for an iPod. Before it was recently stolen, I had mine set to journaled HFS+. Almost every time I hooked it up, the Mac either complained about the journal being inconsistent or left a similar message in dmesg. Many times I'd have to do several attempts, disconnecting the iPod, resetting it, etc, before it would register on the Mac. My theory was that the iPod firmware doesn't do journaling (I would be really surprised if it did), so any updates it makes while you're out and about will not be reflected in the journal.
I turned off journaling and never had a problem again when hooking it up to sync. Unfortunately that was within a week or so of its theft, but that's another story...
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000410.php
Anyway, she really enjoys teaching the class, but some days she comes home totally frustrated, like when the whole class couldn't understand the difference between a file and a folder. I'm sure these people would all do much better with just one button, at least until (if) they get the hang of things.
It's still not very impressive, and I know of at least one DVD-Audio title (Steve Stevens' Flamenco a go go) that shows up in no listing or search. It's not in the DVD-Audio section of the store, and if you search for the title and/or artist, you only get the audio CD version. I stumbled upon this by happy accident and immediately ordered myself a copy after already having owned the CD version for a few years. The 5.1 mix is incredible, enhancing an already astounding piece of work.
As someone else mentioned, there's also DualDisc stuff which is becoming popular. I've found that you don't always get what you think with those, so beware. The only one I have is not true DVD-Audio on the DVD side - the sound is in some DVD-Video compatible compressed format (Dolby Digital?). Not that anyone could truly tell the difference in quality... And the CD side does not adhere to the Redbook standard (it says this on the outside of the case, so in theory you could see it before buying). My Pioneer DVR-A03 in the Mac refused to read the CD side, but thankfully the cheapass CD-ROM drive in another machine was able to do it, so I still got the tracks into iTunes. Would have been pretty pissed off if I hadn't been able to rip the audio, and certainly wouldn't consider further DualDisc purchases if that were the case.
Below is an excerpt of a long blog post I recently wrote about Tiger, focusing on Spotlight. It turns out that I had other issues with Tiger (kernel panics every other day on a clean install) that forced me back to Panther, so I'm not using it anymore. Spotlight was cool, just not as cool as I'd hoped.
Spotlight: Not So Bright
And then there was Spotlight. A very cool technology, and obviously what computers should do in terms of desktop search. I had high hopes. It basically indexes your entire hard drive like a database, so you can search for files by content in addition to name. This is not necessarily new, but what is new is that the indexing allows search results to come up immediately. Microsoft is planning a similar feature in their next OS, while Google and others already offer their own third-party solutions for the Windows world. It's nice to finally catch up again.
Spotlight is particularly nice in that any time a file is created or modified on disk, it automatically gets reindexed. There's literally no perceptible delay (you can have a search window open with results, create a new file with content that will match the results, and it'll instantly pop into the search window), since there are hooks into the filesystem layer of the kernel. Nice. Read all the gory details at the above linked Ars Technica review.
Spotlight indexed my three hard drives fairly quickly, and soon all my content was available for instant search. Or so I thought. Well, no, maybe not. This new technology is clearly a bit immature and appears to be hit and miss. Many people have reported inconsistencies or flat out limitations. Rather disappointing, but some might argue that it's pretty good for a first release. I guess so - I can search for a keyword and within about 10 seconds, 3,000 documents are listed. Pretty impressive, I guess. I thought this would change the way I looked for files, but so far it hasn't. I haven't performed one Spotlight search in the interest of finding something - everything has just been fiddling with it to see how it works. Maybe that's just me, or maybe it's Spotlight. Maybe it's both.
One significant bug I discovered immediately affects the initial indexing that is done after installing Tiger. When you first install Tiger, of course it has no index with which to perform its blazingly fast searches. So it kicks off a background process that chugs through your local hard drives, indexing the contents of every file it knows about. Simple enough, and needs to be done, right? Well, apparently this process was too stupid to continue where it left off if you rebooted your machine before the initial index was complete. I did exactly this, and when later searching for files I knew were there, Spotlight came up empty. A quick google showed me the joy of mdutil, and I was able to force reindexing to occur. After that, my search was successful.
(Not So) Smart Folders
Apple has touted Smart Folders as a great new feature utilizing Spotlight. You specify a custom set of criteria, and boom, all files matching those criteria show up in your Smart Folder. Indeed, it is quite convenient. Want a collection of images large enough to be desktop wallpaper? Make a Smart Folder, and never worry about where those images are physically stored.
But Smart Folders were unnecessarily restricted to a
Even better: Programmer view in Calculator.app. I always hated having to switch to Windows just to convert between binary and decimal. Now I don't have to. Tiger's new Calculator not only does that conversion, but it has tons of other useful features for programmers, like AND, OR, NOR, XOR, <<, >>, Byte Flip, Word Flip, ASCII, Unicode, RoL, RoR, etc. Very nice. The bad thing is that I got my first Tiger kernel panic in about 3 hours of use while originally typing up this reply. Bleh. Maybe those reports of continuing instability in late builds were not so far fetched? The nice thing about it was that after restarting and logging in, there was a dialog asking if I wanted to report the incident to Apple. Good deal - hopefully my data was useful!
I played the game with 7-Eleven cups last year and got 20-something free songs out of it. Not sure if I'll do it again this year, though. You can usually get 2-liter bottles on sale for under a buck at the grocery (wait for a good sale and stock up). So for about $2 I can get 67 ounces of soda and a song from iTMS.
With this promotion, I need 3 bottles at about $1.20 a pop for a reasonable chance at one song. That's 60 ounces of soda and maybe a song for $3.60. No, thanks.
Now, if they'd do it with the 2-liter bottles, sure. But that wouldn't make them any money, now would it?
If it did have a digital audio out, I'd be seriously considering buying one. Sometimes when we rent movies, we don't get around to watching them before they're due, so we rip them to the Power Mac in the office for later viewing. When it's time to watch, we hook up the iBook to the TV and receiver, plug it into the network port in the family room, and watch the movie in DVD Player.app over AFP. The folder is then deleted when we're done with it.
It's kind of a pain to hook up all the cables every time you want to do this, and you don't get surround sound as the iBook only has analog stereo out. With digital surround sound out, the Mac mini would be perfect to have as a permanent fixture in the home theater system. Get a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, an IR remote, and you can surf the web or do whatever from the couch without tying up the laptop. Could have been nice!
As someone with about a decade of strong unix experience before I started using OS X 3 years ago, I made absolutely sure to setup my machines as I've said above. My normal account has no admin privileges, and there's a separate "admin" account for those times when I need it. And I've run into several software problems because the vendors assumed I was running as an administrator (or more likely, didn't even think about it because Apple doesn't make a big deal of it to their developer community):
I blame Apple as much as the companies who are too negligent to fix these easily rectified problems. Apple doesn't seem to think it's a significant problem for a regular user to have admin privileges all the time - true, you're not root, but you might as well be, with access to everything under /Applications and more. And many software companies have demonstrated more desire to add new features that generate new sales than to fix -- or even test! -- these kind of things that affect only a small percentage of their users.
Ultimately, it's just annoying when it comes up. Usually I can fix it by fiddling with permissions, but I just wish I didn't have to. The phrase "it just works" simply does not always apply...
I just discovered by accident a while back that Terminal does support this style of copy/paste. The only catch is that it must be in the same Terminal window, and the text must still be highlighted when you click the middle button. Not as useful as I'd like, but still nice. Of course, half the time I still use Command-C / Command-V since I've gotten so used to it.
I have the main .Mac account and my wife has an email-only account attached to it. She uses hers as her primary email address, but I only use mine as a backup for the rare time when I can't get to my main email. I'd rather have the option to give her more space since she'd be more likely to need it.
No biggie, though - I imagine we won't be filling up either anytime soon!
A friend of mine got married the week before, and their photographer had a couple of assistants and a bunch of extra equipment. I'm sure it was in the several thousand dollar range, but I never asked him about details. One cool thing that theirs did do, was showed a slideshow at the reception using a projector and a PowerBook with all of the digital photos. Neat, but not worth the cost to us. :)
MSU - 1970s era air temperature
- http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_documents/m
s u_instrument.html
AMSU - next generation of MSU, several are flying on US and European satellites- http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
- http://aqua.nasa.gov/AMSU3.html
ATMS - next generation AMSU, scheduled for first flight in a few years- http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/atms_summary.h
t ml
SSM/T-1 - old 1970s/80s era air temperature sensor, the last one launched in 1999- http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/uso/readme/ssmt1.html (about the only decent information that's left about it)
SSMIS - next generation SSM/T-1 that also combines functions of 2 other older sensors (atmospheric water vapor and a ton of surface data like ice concentration, sea surface wind speed, soil moisture, etc), the first of 5 launched in October of last year- http://xenon.aerojet.com/Weapon_Systems/Earth_Sen
s ing/SSMIS/
- http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/IMAGES/ssmisdoc.htm
- http://www.metoffice.com/research/interproj/nwpsa
f /ssmi/ssmis_ug_moud001_v2.pdf (PDF gets pretty technical but lots of good info)
CMIS - next generation SSMIS scheduled to fly by the end of the decadeAll of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.
It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested. :)