Sure, it's no big deal to transfer music on and off of it, but it's an extra hassle. You're packing for a big trip and just as you're heading out the door you think, "Oh crap! I forgot to put a new batch of songs on the iPod, I don't want to listen to the same ones as the last trip!" If the iPod holds everything, you never have to worry about that. Just go, and when you're on the road, pick a playlist or album or whatever you feel like listening to at the moment. No extra planning required.
Maybe for some people really don't care about that, but I sure do. I have a wide variety of music, and I like to listen to whatever I happen to be in the mood for at the moment. I don't want to plan ahead what I think I'll want to listen to on an upcoming trip. I used to do what you did - bring a dozen CDs or so. I usually either spent considerable time picking just which ones I wanted to have, or I forgot and wasn't happy with whatever I grabbed at the last minute. Since I got my 30 GB iPod, that's no longer an issue. I have all 4200 something songs available, all the time. It's changed how I listen to my music in such a positive way.
My wife is like you. She has about 10 gigs right now, and she really wants the mini. I keep telling her to wait until it gets a larger drive, or just get the 15 gig regular iPod. I'm not sure if she'll hold out, but I hope she does, because I think a lot of people underestimate the convenience of never having to reload songs.
That said, go for it if you really want to. Maybe it's really not a big deal to you, but it always was to me.:)
OS 8/9 wasn't BAD, but it wasn't as modern as Windows 9x or what I could do on Linux. I wouldn't have wanted to use it for a main computer.
I've always felt exactly the same way about System 7 through OS 9. I had used it a fair amount in college, and never really disliked it. Nice interface, but not nearly enough power to get at the internals for me to use it as my main machine. I was a Linux person (and later FreeBSD) and you could pry that from my cold, dead fingers.
Still, I bought a PowerMac 7600 running 7.5 back in 1996. It served one specific purpose (and still does today, running OS 8.6) as the centerpiece of my home recording studio, running Digital Performer. It was always my music machine and nothing else. Everything else was done on my Unix PC. Actually starting in 2000, I began dabbling in movie editing, using this little program from Apple called iMovie. So then the Mac had exactly two functions.
I had been lusting after OS X since I first starting reading about it, with the Developer Previews. Of course, my little Mac wasn't going to run it well enough to bother, but I wanted it. Finally in 2002, we decided that we wanted to make a video of our upcoming wedding, but we wanted to do it cheap. Of course this was the perfect opportunity to sneak in my desire to try OS X, especially since I'd already become proficient with iMovie. So we got a new Power Mac G4 and a DV camera (the wedding DVD turned out great).
Now the G4 is my primary machine. Terminal is still my most used app, but the rest of it is so much nicer than anything else. The FreeBSD PC sits headless in the corner as the household firewall/router/server. It's setup nicely and I don't want to tinker with it anymore for day to day stuff (that was fun in college, but not so much anymore). We bought an iBook for the wife about a year and a half ago, and we'll never go back. Interestingly, I still keep the 7600 around for music stuff. I had planned to upgrade my Digital Performer for OS X and move all the music stuff to the G4, but the 7600 works so well that I never bothered. It worked great for writing some music for the wedding, and I actually mixed the sound for the wedding video on it because iMovie doesn't give as much control. Perfect!
And then there's work. It's a Windows world. Everyone has a PC, and Mac/Apple are practically dirty words. We use Unix workstations in my group, mostly Sun and SGI. But those are getting to be pretty overpriced in the workstation market for the performance you get. We needed some Unix laptops that could still run Microsoft Office, so I managed to justify a couple of PowerBooks. Then we needed a file server with a couple terabytes that could serve our Unix machines and PCs. Hmm, Power Mac G5 + Xserve RAID. Management wanted to know why we weren't going with a Windows server. Aside from the lower cost vs. comparable Dell or IBM solutions, I think the lack of viruses was a big selling point. Serves NFS automounts, SMB, integrates with NIS, printers, web server, runs our scientific codes faster than any big iron workstation we have. I'd like to see a Windows machine do all of that as well!
So uh, happy birthday, Mac OS X. I know my computing life is much easier and enjoyable because of it. Though now it's kind of frustrating to use anything else.:) With OS X I get to have my cake (gui interface, expose) and eat it too (command line)!
In my experience, there's a set of longtime Mac users who have resisted and complained about Mac OS X mostly because it's different from OS 9 and below. They've gotten very set in their ways, and any change - for better or worse - is very upsetting to them. Some of their complaints have been legitimate, in cases where the classic OS did things more intuitively than OS X. Often for these cases, Apple has tried to make OS X more like classic Mac OS in successive releases. But I've always felt that a lot of the complaining was simply because they didn't want to learn something new. These people chose the Mac way back when because it was far and away easier for them to use, and they got accustomed to it. Very, very accustomed.
So I'd guess that these old Mac friends are largely complaining due to the fact that OS X is a pretty big change from OS 9, especially when compared to the relative differences in OS versions before that. A user familiar with System 7 (or probably even System 6) would have no problem jumping right into OS 9. Not much changed in the basic user interface. In comparison, a lot of these people are finding quite a few stumbling blocks in OS X, simply because things don't quite work the same. They're finding a lot of things unfamiliar (and often seeing this as complexity) as you say. Unfamiliarity is uncomfortable, and probably moreso for people like this than for technical people like us. I'd say part of the time this is because it's really different in a particular aspect, but part of the time it's really the same but superficially different (for example OS X calls some things different names, but they work about the same -- even this small change can be bewildering to certain users).
I'd be willing to bet that her old Mac friends would be complaining 10 times as much if they were using XP instead of OS X. I think that the transition from OS 9 to OS X is far and away easier than OS 9 to XP. Not that XP is all bad; the difference is just much, much greater. A Mac running OS X is still a Mac. It looks a little different and sometimes acts a little different, but it really isn't that much different once you get used to it. I can't think of any reason why a typical non-technical user would ever have to open Terminal or anything of that sort. There will be some frustration in any change like this, but I think far less than in going to XP. But that's just my opinion.
I'm curious, and I figure somebody here probably knows a good deal about this. The Wi-Fi Protected Access Q&A (pdf) says:
Many cryptographers are confident that Wi-Fi Protected Access addresses all the known attacks on WEP. It also adds strong user authentication, which as absent in WEP.
Ok, user authentication is good, but what are the "known attacks on WEP"? I'm using a Linksys access point which obviously can't be upgraded to WPA with this update, so should I be concerned that my 128-bit WEP key isn't good enough?
I used to have a huge mess every place I lived, but when we moved into the current place, I decided to do it right. The wire ties worked just fine.
I have a ton of equipment all interconnected in the main room (3 cpus, 2 monitors, wireless router/switch, cable modem, keyboards/mice, mixer, guitar amp, effects processors, guitars, keyboard (musical), midi equipment, DAT, power conditioner, dv camera (firewire), digicam, iPod, speakers, headphones, audio ins/outs, etc... you get the idea!). After figuring out approximately where everything would go, I placed everything without cables and then started hooking them up. Whenever I finished a group of cables in the same area and going the same direction, a cable tie or two made them all nice and neat. It's a bit of a pain to move a cable or add one to a bundle, but no biggie.
For home use, I don't see a need to be any more elaborate than this. You can get a box of 100 ties or something for a couple bucks at any place like Target. Unless you want to build a more involved solution for fun, this does the trick.
Disclaimer: I'm partial because I'm involved in this project. Take that for what it's worth, but I really do believe in it.
You might take a look at BYOND (Build Your Own Net Dream). It has a simple tile-based graphics engine, an object oriented language that is easy to learn, and automatic networking so you don't have to do any extra work to get multiplayer games. And it's completely free to download and use.
We've had a number of kids around the junior high age get involved and create their own games using BYOND. For most of them, it's their first introduction to real programming, and serves as a great springboard for getting into more advanced languages like C++ and Java. In fact, the success in that age group has almost become a problem -- the community is swarming with young adolescents and we adults feel like a minority there sometimes. We're even thinking of pushing it as an educational tool somewhere down the line...
Browse around at some of the games listed on the games site to get an idea of the system's capabilities. You won't be making first person shooters, but it could be just right for someone your son's age. Puzzle games and RPG/adventure style games do particularly well in BYOND. Once you've downloaded the client (Downloads link, obviously), you can even connect to any games that are currently online. Just beware the ones in the Unpublished section - they may or may not be up to snuff, and may be hosted by immature 13 year olds looking to be rude.
Then take a look at the programming guide and jump in to see if it will work for you. I'm not sure if 9 years old is too young for this, but your son sounds very smart, so he may pick it up just fine. Good luck!
No, thanks. I'd much rather have true gapless playback of albums with contiguous tracks, and STILL be able to skip between tracks. You know, like a 20-year-old CD player can do. Right now, the iPod can only do one or the other (gapless if you ripped the whole album as one file OR skip between tracks as separate files with gaps) but not both.
Generally these coupons are only for upgrades to the current OS that shipped with your machine -- 10.2.x. It's for people who can't update software over the internet and need to get CDs.
That said, some folks over at MacRumors seem to have had early success in getting their previously obtained PowerBook serial numbers accepted for the up-to-date program. Who knows if Apple will actually honor them, though? Also, there's a group trying to persuade Apple to extend the up-to-date program to all new PowerBook purchasers. Phone number to contact Apple is here.
I'll be interested to find out if this ends up working, as I'm expecting 2 new PowerBooks at work any day now (they were supposed to be here yesterday!).
Perhaps SCUD will work for you. I've never used it, but a quick search in/usr/ports/comms turned it up.
A few years ago I had a whole answering machine system running on my Linux box using this voice modem package and a heavily modified version of the included script. I rewrote the script in perl and modified to, among other things, answer unknown or private calls after the first ring. It was hacked together, but not half bad in the end.
Then about 3 years ago I switched to FreeBSD and never quite got the voice modem control program working. I gave up and got privacy manager from the phone company, which does a fairly good job. Besides, the voice modem was ISA, in a machine that was getting pretty old. I probably still have all that stuff on some backup CD somewhere, but who knows exactly where...
Oh, no, I meant I never bothered to look up how to do it in bash. set nobeep is the first thing I add to the.tcshrc on a new account.;-) Along with set autolist and autoexpand. I can't survive without them!
This one doesn't always save me -- one of my common typos is to repeat the 'd' when changing directory, thus:
% cdd ~/Desktop/
Do you, by any chance, happen to use an Apple Pro keyboard with your Mac? The one with the black keys? I'm pretty sure this is a quirk of that keyboard because it happens to me all the time, but ONLY on that keyboard. I finally gave up and put alias cdd cd in my.tcshrc.
On the subject of switching to bash, I've been using tcsh since I started with Unix 11 years ago. I'd be happy to switch, but I need to be able to translate all the 'comfort' features that I've grown accustomed to over the years. Those occasional times when I have to use a bash command-line, I find that it does do most of the features I like about tcsh (tab completion is by far the biggest; autocorrection rocks) but it's usually a bit different (I haven't bothered to read up on how to turn off the beep, which I hate!). Even if bash is so much better than tcsh, I'm still gonna need to have all my settings about the same, or I don't care if it's more powerful!:)
I may try it for a bit out of laziness when I get Panther, but then I wouldn't be surprised if I switch back to tcsh pretty quickly...
eWeek had a recent article about this, and I pretty much agree with what he says. For people who just want to type a letter (printed or email), browse the web and buy things online, play a few games, computers are way more complex than they need to be. To successfully operate a computer, you need to know a whole lot more about the underlying system than most ordinary people are capable of learning (or willing to learn). And there's nothing wrong with that. People shouldn't have to be experts just to send an email off to Aunt Millie without getting the latest virus or worm. (this is not an anti-MS flame, just a convenient example)
What the world needs is a PC that really is an appliance. Something that's simple and just works, requiring zero knowledge of the inner workings. So far, many companies have tried and failed. Unfortunately many common computing tasks are so simple at a high level but get complex very quickly at lower levels. So is it even possible to have a drop-dead simple system that accomplishes the modest goals of average computer users? Or is this a paradox? I'm not sure. Some of the best code adheres fiercely to the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), but the complex requirements of common tasks often preclude us from providing truly simple solutions from the inside out.
I wonder when computers reach a point where artificial intelligence, voice and language recognition, etc are actually usable, will this problem go away? If the computer is intelligent enough to know what a simple user wants and to go do it properly, then presumably we have reached our goal. Yet interestingly, this would be a case where the underlying system is insanely complex, but I suppose smart enough to hide all that from the user. Right now, modern computers and operating systems simply don't do a good enough job at that.
Of course, for those of us reading this website, we enjoy the complexity of our computers and wouldn't have it any other way. But the computing world will never again be like it was 20+ years ago, when people like us were the only ones using computers. But obviously there's a ton of work that can be done to make the experience more satisfying and useful to those who don't compute just for the sake of computing.
Thank you! I've always heard that classical, jazz, etc don't do well with MP3 or similar compression when compared to mainstream rock/pop. But that goes against both my intuition (which I admit could be wrong) and empirical evidence.
My intuition tells me that a rock song, with lots of cymbals crashing, overdriven guitars, screaming vocals, and the whole thing compressed to hell, is loaded with high frequency components. This ought to give an MP3 compressor a fairly difficult time trying to throw out enough stuff but preserve all that high frequency cacaphony. Now consider a typical classical music piece. Lush strings, woodwinds, and even a lot of brass will sound silky smooth in comparison to a typical pop song. In other words, far less high frequency junk all over the place. Thus, a much easier job for the MP3 compressor to keep as much data as possible, right??
My empirical evidence also backs this up. Until I recently switched to AAC, my CD collection was encoded with LAME at one of the highest VBR quality settings. Average bitrate for rock tracks tended to be in the 210-230 kbps range. Moving to 160 kbps AAC was therefore a decent space savings out of nearly 4000 tracks. But I found that my classical music actually went up in size because the MP3s, encoded with the same quality as the rock tracks, averaged closer to 140 or 150 kbps. That means that LAME's algorithm for choosing how much data was needed had used a lot more for the rock than the classical.
So is my intuition wrong, as well as the algorithm in LAME? Or is this a myth that will probably persist regardless of any facts? I'm genuinely curious, for anyone who may know more technical details.
People get upset if they have to turn their stereo up in the car to hear the soft sections, and then get shocked when a loud chorus comes on.
You hit it right on the head. The trend in radio lately has been to compress the hell out of the music they broadcast, and in turn, record companies have jumped on the bandwagon with CDs. Most music consumers think louder sounds better, and so that's what sells. It kind of makes sense even -- just listen to a recent mega-compressed track at a comfortable volume, then listen to a track from an old CD at the same volume. The older one sounds weaker, but only because it is softer. Adjust the volume again and it probably actually sounds better. But most consumers don't care enough to make that realization.
Back in the early 90s, a remastered CD was something that actually sounded much better than the initial digital transfer of a classic album. Nowadays, remasters accomplish two things: compressing the music until it's all one uniform LOUD volume, and lining the pockets of the record industry as die hard fans buy the same albums again.
Of course, this trend is not all bad. Not hearing soft sections of music in the car is a legitimate problem. I won't listen to classical music in the car because of this - I tend to stay within the rock genre because of this and only listen to classical and jazz in the quiet of home. It's too bad that record companies are now "solving" the problem by giving us this "one volume fits all" compression now. The ideal solution might be for car stereos to start including some sort of compression circuitry so that you can hear more of a tune over the road noise, but you get to hear it in its full dynamic glory at home. Heck, other things like TVs and DVD players could use this too. Sometimes a TV show or DVD will need some compression so I can hear the quiet parts but don't piss off the neighbors during the loud parts! Either that or maybe some sort of new audio format with two versions of each audio stream - normal and compressed. Of course we already have SACD and DVD Audio, yet another new format is just what we need...
Like some people already said, you have a couple of options. In the vast majority of cases, the quality will be far better than using something like the iTrip. On Apple's discussion board many people have reported major problems just finding an open frequency in populated areas. Anyway, your alternatives are:
Use a cassette adapter, which you can get pretty cheap at any place like Best Buy, etc. The quality is pretty good, but you definitely get some tape hiss type of noise. I use this daily in my truck and am quite happy with it.
Hook it up directly to the antenna input using an FM modulator. Unlike the iTrip, this is a direct-wired connection that goes in between the radio's head unit and your car's antenna. The quality is pretty much the best that FM can be, as if you were parked right outside a radio station with a powerful transmitter. And with this, you don't have to worry about interference from existing stations because the iPod's signal overrides the antenna when it is in use.
Hook it up directly to the head unit's auxiliary input, if one exists. This will give you the best quality if you can do it. Many stereo head units have a CD changer input in the back, even if the car didn't come with a changer. You would need some sort of converter for this type of input. Some stereos actually have RCA inputs in the back (or front) and some even have a 3.5mm stereo jack in the front, in which case all you need is a simple cable.
I ended up going with the third option for my wife's 2002 Nissan Altima, since it has no tape deck and I didn't want to mess with an FM modulator. It has a CD changer input in the back, but the place linked above doesn't have anything for the Altima. I found a guy who makes custom cables for it, so I ordered that along with a switch to put the radio in aux mode. Installation was pretty easy and actually kind of a fun project, especially drilling the hole in the dash to install the switch.;-)
So as you can see, there are plenty of options. Of course what would be the best is a little dock that provides power, line out, and steering wheel remote controls. Just slide the iPod in and off you go!
Of course, everyone has been expecting new PowerBooks for some time, especially with the 8-month-old 15" model still lagging the other two in system specs. Both WWDC and MWNY came and went without a refresh, and it seems that the latest rumors are predicting a late August update to the line, using new Motorola PPC 7457 processors running at 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 GHz. As always, rumors should be taken with a huge helping of salt, but perhaps Apple realized that many students and educators have been waiting for a PowerBook revision before buying for the fall. End of August is probably a bit too late for most people to get new machines before the semester starts, so maybe this is just a small incentive to get people to buy current models now?
Regardless of speculation, it'll be interesting to see what happens with pricing when newer models do come out (whenever that may be).
Re:calling clueful car manufacturers
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There was a thread about this on Apple's discussion boards, and one guy mentioned a great idea: a sort of iPod dock in the dash, probably below the head unit. Slide the iPod in, it slips onto the standard dock connector, gets power and line out to the stereo. Even better would be showing track info on the head unit's display, and maybe even wiring in steering wheel remote buttons if applicable. Probably will never happen, but it would be excellent if Apple did work with any car company to do something like this.
I ended up installing a custom aux input cable in my 2002 Nissan Altima (it uses a funny connector in the back of the head unit designed for CD changers) and I just use a cassette adapter in the 4Runner. Works for me!
You got one too, eh? I haven't had mine lock up once, with quite a bit of daily use. Perhaps it's a particular problem with your MP3 or AAC files, but I'd take it back to the store and get a replacement unit (assuming 2.0.1 doesn't fix it).
I'm just glad the click is gone. Now if only they could implement true gapless playback, plus all the other little suggestions I've already submitted...
Oh, and it still has the bug where if the hard disk spins up too slowly when you first start playing, it'll skip the first song. Time to send off another feedback.
A few years ago I stumbled upon this page and really enjoyed what this guy had to say. I'm still building my collection and slowly expanding my own tastes. Right now in the Jazz genre of my collection, my biggest favorites are Herbie Hancock and Wynton Marsalis. I've got a fairly basic collection of early Miles Davis stuff, and lately I've been getting into jazz guitar (as you may guess from my username, I'm a huge fan of instrumental rock guitar already). Lately I've been really digging Charlie Hunter (plays an 8-string guitar, doing the bass and guitar parts simultaneously -- quite amazing) as well as Frank Gambale, whose style I suppose may be considered a bit of a fusion of jazz and rock (though is it "Fusion"? I don't think so, but I don't know much about that genre yet).
Anyway, just some ramblings and potential starting points if anything interests you.
I've had my 30 GB iPod for a little over 2 weeks now, and I absolutely love it. Finally I have access to my entire CD collection (over 320 CDs) wherever and whenever I want! But that said, it's not without its problems. This thread at Apple's discussion boards seems to hit most of them. The only ones I've had personally are the clicking between tracks and channel swapping when seeking through a track. Not nearly as bad as what some people have experienced, but it can be annoying.
ThinkSecret keeps predicting an iPod firmware update but apparently it keeps getting pushed back. Perhaps Apple is having a lot of problems with this one. When it does finally come out, hopefully it'll not only add the USB 2.0 support, but fix most of these issues.
Anyway, to me, caffeine is just bad stuff. It makes me jittery and I can feel my heartbeat much more prominently. I guess that probably means my blood pressure goes up. Honestly it doesn't do much at all for my mental alertness, but then I suppose it's hard to doze off when you're jittery. Maybe I just react poorly to the stuff, but based on this, I'm pretty sure it's not good for me. Whether it's really bad and can do long term damage is another question altogether. I have no idea...
Regardless, I can say with good confidence that I've always felt much better overall when I injested no caffeine for a significant period of time. I posted about this once before, but a few years back I went for over a year without any caffeine at all, consciously avoiding it. I never felt better during that time - I felt like I had more energy and required less sleep. In reality though, I'd bet I was probably getting more sleep as a result of being able to fall asleep sooner at night.
So my personal recommendation is to avoid it if you can, substituting a regular and sufficient sleep schedule, plenty of exercise, and a decent diet. Sounds like you have most of that going anyway. Even if you don't cut it out completely (I still have some on occasion), moderation is probably best. It's kind of like that saying - everything you eat may eventually kill you, but not eating it will kill you faster! The trick is always finding the balance to maximize potential benefits while minimizing potential harm.
The AAC encoder was hard-coded to use the "fast" setting, when it was supposed to be hard-coded to use "best."
Was this actually changed in 4.0.1? I've been busily re-ripping my CDs since I got my shiny new iPod the other week, and I didn't really notice a difference in encoding speed or quality from iTunes 4 to 4.0.1. I had already done my own blind listening tests to determine what bitrate would make me happy (where I couldn't reliably tell the difference between the source and the AAC), and that was with version 4. So if 4.0.1 did improve from "good" to "best" quality setting, I guess it wouldn't matter to me since the "good" was already "perfect" to my ears.
Unfortunately, don't hold your breath on Linux (or any other non-OSX unix) support. The demand simply isn't large enough to justify the significant amount of work it would take to port iTunes, test, debug, and support it operationally. Apple needs iTunes to support their weak DRM in order to satisfy the record companies. Without that, there is no iTunes Music Store at all. Also see the complete lack of an Apple QuickTime Player for Linux et al.
For Windows support, I think we all know that they're working on a Windows version of iTunes (and were even recently advertising job positions specifically for this). I also recall reading that the big record labels are having a harder time signing onto a Windows version of the service - my recollection is that only 2 are onboard so far, but I could be wrong. With a US-only Mac-based service, they can stick their toes in and test the waters without major risk. Windows support dramatically increases the potential audience, and from the record labels' point of view, the possibility for piracy and other eeeeeevil things that those nassty consumerses do. I wouldn't be too surprised if some of the majors balk at Windows support without even more restrictive DRM. But if it comes to that, hopefully Apple wins out and keeps it as is (usable for those of us who wish to be legitimate!).
Finally, international support brings many of the same issues that the Windows support does - that the audience is much larger and therefore a bigger potential threat in the eyes of the RIAA et al (funny how it seems they view their customers, who make their business possible, as a threat sometimes). But from what I've read, the bigger stumbling block here is simply obtaining distribution rights. Apparently different entities and organizations hold copyrights, publishing rights, and distribution rights in different companies. So even if Apple has the right to distribute a song/album in the US, they may have to talk to 10 different entities for rights in Europe. Sounds like a huge headache.
Hopefully they'll work through all this fairly well and the future of music distribution will change for the better.
Distros like Gentoo are a throwback and really are more useful as learning tools as opposed to useful OS's for normal people.
Yup. I've never used Gentoo and probably never will*, but that's exactly what I gather from all I've read about it.
<nostalgia>
I started using Linux in the fall of 1993, with SLS 1.01 and kernel 0.99p12 (p13 was the first version that worked with my network card). I remember sitting there and feeding all of those floppies into my 386/16 with 2 (yes, two) MB of ram and a 60 MB hard drive (20 for DOS/Win, 40 for Linux). The first time I actually had vi running on my own computer -- not just over a terminal session to the school's big unix server, but on my computer -- was a momentus event for me. Could it possible get any cooler than that?
Back then, we didn't have these fancy gui installers or configuration tools. vi was my configuration tool. And so that's how I learned Linux, and unix in general. Man pages, source code, and the occasional usenet group.
Over the years, I installed several different versions of Linux. When I got my shiny new Pentium 90 the following summer, this new distro called Slackware came out and had a lot of promise. It was so much easier to install with those curses based menus! Later, as I gained more skill at the command line, I heavily modified my installation of Slackware with lots of new packages and customizations I did myself. I even took it so far as building a complete system where every single binary and library had been compiled on my machine. This was probably at the height of my Linux/unix geekness.
After that I settled down some and moved to RedHat. After having a fairly easy time installing 4.2 on a machine at work, I went with 5.1 at home. That was later upgraded to 6.1 or so. As RedHat got more and more gui-based, I resisted. I always rolled my own kernels with my specific set of options, never trusting the rpm-packaged versions they provided. But somewhere along the line I began to tire of the tedium of the command line administration.
But not completely! Late 2000 ended my use of Linux in frustration as a particular series of kernels (stable, mind you) would crash every couple of weeks. Such instability was unheard of and completely unacceptable! I had heard so many good things about FreeBSD that I decided to give it a try. Not only did the system no longer crash (to be fair, I'm sure current Linux would probably work better than whatever version I was running back then), but it was beautiful from a Unix geek's perspective. Such elegance and forethought in the complete system design! It was like Unix nirvana. It brought the fun back to command line administration, at least for awhile.
</nostalgia>
Then last year I bought my second Mac, a PowerMac 733, and my first one capable of running OS X (the 7600 was strictly for my music hobby). OS X blew me away. Sure, it needed (and still does) work in many corners of its unixy mind, but wow! The FreeBSD machine was promptly relegated to server-in-the-corner status, trading my WindowMaker desktop for the goodness of Aqua.
Now, while I spend 90% of my "working" time at the command line, I use it far less than before for system administration tasks. Whenever possible, I try to use the Apple-supplied gui to do things. If that doesn't cut it, then the command line will do just fine (curiously, my gui Software Update hasn't worked right for some time now, but sudo softwareupdate saves the day every time). I've had to dig deep into the guts of OS X on occasion when wanting to do something very specific, but I'd say I've done so far less than with previous unixes. I even use vi for administration more on the SGIs at work than I do on OS X at home.
I actually haven't upgraded my FreeBSD box from 4.6 because I don't want to bother with the hassle. I know it's easy, but why bother? My firewall rules are very strict so I don't worry about a security problem.
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Maybe for some people really don't care about that, but I sure do. I have a wide variety of music, and I like to listen to whatever I happen to be in the mood for at the moment. I don't want to plan ahead what I think I'll want to listen to on an upcoming trip. I used to do what you did - bring a dozen CDs or so. I usually either spent considerable time picking just which ones I wanted to have, or I forgot and wasn't happy with whatever I grabbed at the last minute. Since I got my 30 GB iPod, that's no longer an issue. I have all 4200 something songs available, all the time. It's changed how I listen to my music in such a positive way.
My wife is like you. She has about 10 gigs right now, and she really wants the mini. I keep telling her to wait until it gets a larger drive, or just get the 15 gig regular iPod. I'm not sure if she'll hold out, but I hope she does, because I think a lot of people underestimate the convenience of never having to reload songs.
That said, go for it if you really want to. Maybe it's really not a big deal to you, but it always was to me. :)
I've always felt exactly the same way about System 7 through OS 9. I had used it a fair amount in college, and never really disliked it. Nice interface, but not nearly enough power to get at the internals for me to use it as my main machine. I was a Linux person (and later FreeBSD) and you could pry that from my cold, dead fingers.
Still, I bought a PowerMac 7600 running 7.5 back in 1996. It served one specific purpose (and still does today, running OS 8.6) as the centerpiece of my home recording studio, running Digital Performer. It was always my music machine and nothing else. Everything else was done on my Unix PC. Actually starting in 2000, I began dabbling in movie editing, using this little program from Apple called iMovie. So then the Mac had exactly two functions.
I had been lusting after OS X since I first starting reading about it, with the Developer Previews. Of course, my little Mac wasn't going to run it well enough to bother, but I wanted it. Finally in 2002, we decided that we wanted to make a video of our upcoming wedding, but we wanted to do it cheap. Of course this was the perfect opportunity to sneak in my desire to try OS X, especially since I'd already become proficient with iMovie. So we got a new Power Mac G4 and a DV camera (the wedding DVD turned out great).
Now the G4 is my primary machine. Terminal is still my most used app, but the rest of it is so much nicer than anything else. The FreeBSD PC sits headless in the corner as the household firewall/router/server. It's setup nicely and I don't want to tinker with it anymore for day to day stuff (that was fun in college, but not so much anymore). We bought an iBook for the wife about a year and a half ago, and we'll never go back. Interestingly, I still keep the 7600 around for music stuff. I had planned to upgrade my Digital Performer for OS X and move all the music stuff to the G4, but the 7600 works so well that I never bothered. It worked great for writing some music for the wedding, and I actually mixed the sound for the wedding video on it because iMovie doesn't give as much control. Perfect!
And then there's work. It's a Windows world. Everyone has a PC, and Mac/Apple are practically dirty words. We use Unix workstations in my group, mostly Sun and SGI. But those are getting to be pretty overpriced in the workstation market for the performance you get. We needed some Unix laptops that could still run Microsoft Office, so I managed to justify a couple of PowerBooks. Then we needed a file server with a couple terabytes that could serve our Unix machines and PCs. Hmm, Power Mac G5 + Xserve RAID. Management wanted to know why we weren't going with a Windows server. Aside from the lower cost vs. comparable Dell or IBM solutions, I think the lack of viruses was a big selling point. Serves NFS automounts, SMB, integrates with NIS, printers, web server, runs our scientific codes faster than any big iron workstation we have. I'd like to see a Windows machine do all of that as well!
So uh, happy birthday, Mac OS X. I know my computing life is much easier and enjoyable because of it. Though now it's kind of frustrating to use anything else. :) With OS X I get to have my cake (gui interface, expose) and eat it too (command line)!
So I'd guess that these old Mac friends are largely complaining due to the fact that OS X is a pretty big change from OS 9, especially when compared to the relative differences in OS versions before that. A user familiar with System 7 (or probably even System 6) would have no problem jumping right into OS 9. Not much changed in the basic user interface. In comparison, a lot of these people are finding quite a few stumbling blocks in OS X, simply because things don't quite work the same. They're finding a lot of things unfamiliar (and often seeing this as complexity) as you say. Unfamiliarity is uncomfortable, and probably moreso for people like this than for technical people like us. I'd say part of the time this is because it's really different in a particular aspect, but part of the time it's really the same but superficially different (for example OS X calls some things different names, but they work about the same -- even this small change can be bewildering to certain users).
I'd be willing to bet that her old Mac friends would be complaining 10 times as much if they were using XP instead of OS X. I think that the transition from OS 9 to OS X is far and away easier than OS 9 to XP. Not that XP is all bad; the difference is just much, much greater. A Mac running OS X is still a Mac. It looks a little different and sometimes acts a little different, but it really isn't that much different once you get used to it. I can't think of any reason why a typical non-technical user would ever have to open Terminal or anything of that sort. There will be some frustration in any change like this, but I think far less than in going to XP. But that's just my opinion.
Ok, user authentication is good, but what are the "known attacks on WEP"? I'm using a Linksys access point which obviously can't be upgraded to WPA with this update, so should I be concerned that my 128-bit WEP key isn't good enough?
I have a ton of equipment all interconnected in the main room (3 cpus, 2 monitors, wireless router/switch, cable modem, keyboards/mice, mixer, guitar amp, effects processors, guitars, keyboard (musical), midi equipment, DAT, power conditioner, dv camera (firewire), digicam, iPod, speakers, headphones, audio ins/outs, etc... you get the idea!). After figuring out approximately where everything would go, I placed everything without cables and then started hooking them up. Whenever I finished a group of cables in the same area and going the same direction, a cable tie or two made them all nice and neat. It's a bit of a pain to move a cable or add one to a bundle, but no biggie.
For home use, I don't see a need to be any more elaborate than this. You can get a box of 100 ties or something for a couple bucks at any place like Target. Unless you want to build a more involved solution for fun, this does the trick.
You might take a look at BYOND (Build Your Own Net Dream). It has a simple tile-based graphics engine, an object oriented language that is easy to learn, and automatic networking so you don't have to do any extra work to get multiplayer games. And it's completely free to download and use.
We've had a number of kids around the junior high age get involved and create their own games using BYOND. For most of them, it's their first introduction to real programming, and serves as a great springboard for getting into more advanced languages like C++ and Java. In fact, the success in that age group has almost become a problem -- the community is swarming with young adolescents and we adults feel like a minority there sometimes. We're even thinking of pushing it as an educational tool somewhere down the line...
Browse around at some of the games listed on the games site to get an idea of the system's capabilities. You won't be making first person shooters, but it could be just right for someone your son's age. Puzzle games and RPG/adventure style games do particularly well in BYOND. Once you've downloaded the client (Downloads link, obviously), you can even connect to any games that are currently online. Just beware the ones in the Unpublished section - they may or may not be up to snuff, and may be hosted by immature 13 year olds looking to be rude.
Then take a look at the programming guide and jump in to see if it will work for you. I'm not sure if 9 years old is too young for this, but your son sounds very smart, so he may pick it up just fine. Good luck!
Oh well, I still love my 30GB.
That said, some folks over at MacRumors seem to have had early success in getting their previously obtained PowerBook serial numbers accepted for the up-to-date program. Who knows if Apple will actually honor them, though? Also, there's a group trying to persuade Apple to extend the up-to-date program to all new PowerBook purchasers. Phone number to contact Apple is here.
I'll be interested to find out if this ends up working, as I'm expecting 2 new PowerBooks at work any day now (they were supposed to be here yesterday!).
A few years ago I had a whole answering machine system running on my Linux box using this voice modem package and a heavily modified version of the included script. I rewrote the script in perl and modified to, among other things, answer unknown or private calls after the first ring. It was hacked together, but not half bad in the end.
Then about 3 years ago I switched to FreeBSD and never quite got the voice modem control program working. I gave up and got privacy manager from the phone company, which does a fairly good job. Besides, the voice modem was ISA, in a machine that was getting pretty old. I probably still have all that stuff on some backup CD somewhere, but who knows exactly where...
Oh, no, I meant I never bothered to look up how to do it in bash. set nobeep is the first thing I add to the .tcshrc on a new account. ;-) Along with set autolist and autoexpand. I can't survive without them!
Do you, by any chance, happen to use an Apple Pro keyboard with your Mac? The one with the black keys? I'm pretty sure this is a quirk of that keyboard because it happens to me all the time, but ONLY on that keyboard. I finally gave up and put alias cdd cd in my .tcshrc.
On the subject of switching to bash, I've been using tcsh since I started with Unix 11 years ago. I'd be happy to switch, but I need to be able to translate all the 'comfort' features that I've grown accustomed to over the years. Those occasional times when I have to use a bash command-line, I find that it does do most of the features I like about tcsh (tab completion is by far the biggest; autocorrection rocks) but it's usually a bit different (I haven't bothered to read up on how to turn off the beep, which I hate!). Even if bash is so much better than tcsh, I'm still gonna need to have all my settings about the same, or I don't care if it's more powerful! :)
I may try it for a bit out of laziness when I get Panther, but then I wouldn't be surprised if I switch back to tcsh pretty quickly...
What the world needs is a PC that really is an appliance. Something that's simple and just works, requiring zero knowledge of the inner workings. So far, many companies have tried and failed. Unfortunately many common computing tasks are so simple at a high level but get complex very quickly at lower levels. So is it even possible to have a drop-dead simple system that accomplishes the modest goals of average computer users? Or is this a paradox? I'm not sure. Some of the best code adheres fiercely to the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), but the complex requirements of common tasks often preclude us from providing truly simple solutions from the inside out.
I wonder when computers reach a point where artificial intelligence, voice and language recognition, etc are actually usable, will this problem go away? If the computer is intelligent enough to know what a simple user wants and to go do it properly, then presumably we have reached our goal. Yet interestingly, this would be a case where the underlying system is insanely complex, but I suppose smart enough to hide all that from the user. Right now, modern computers and operating systems simply don't do a good enough job at that.
Of course, for those of us reading this website, we enjoy the complexity of our computers and wouldn't have it any other way. But the computing world will never again be like it was 20+ years ago, when people like us were the only ones using computers. But obviously there's a ton of work that can be done to make the experience more satisfying and useful to those who don't compute just for the sake of computing.
My intuition tells me that a rock song, with lots of cymbals crashing, overdriven guitars, screaming vocals, and the whole thing compressed to hell, is loaded with high frequency components. This ought to give an MP3 compressor a fairly difficult time trying to throw out enough stuff but preserve all that high frequency cacaphony. Now consider a typical classical music piece. Lush strings, woodwinds, and even a lot of brass will sound silky smooth in comparison to a typical pop song. In other words, far less high frequency junk all over the place. Thus, a much easier job for the MP3 compressor to keep as much data as possible, right??
My empirical evidence also backs this up. Until I recently switched to AAC, my CD collection was encoded with LAME at one of the highest VBR quality settings. Average bitrate for rock tracks tended to be in the 210-230 kbps range. Moving to 160 kbps AAC was therefore a decent space savings out of nearly 4000 tracks. But I found that my classical music actually went up in size because the MP3s, encoded with the same quality as the rock tracks, averaged closer to 140 or 150 kbps. That means that LAME's algorithm for choosing how much data was needed had used a lot more for the rock than the classical.
So is my intuition wrong, as well as the algorithm in LAME? Or is this a myth that will probably persist regardless of any facts? I'm genuinely curious, for anyone who may know more technical details.
You hit it right on the head. The trend in radio lately has been to compress the hell out of the music they broadcast, and in turn, record companies have jumped on the bandwagon with CDs. Most music consumers think louder sounds better, and so that's what sells. It kind of makes sense even -- just listen to a recent mega-compressed track at a comfortable volume, then listen to a track from an old CD at the same volume. The older one sounds weaker, but only because it is softer. Adjust the volume again and it probably actually sounds better. But most consumers don't care enough to make that realization.
Back in the early 90s, a remastered CD was something that actually sounded much better than the initial digital transfer of a classic album. Nowadays, remasters accomplish two things: compressing the music until it's all one uniform LOUD volume, and lining the pockets of the record industry as die hard fans buy the same albums again.
Of course, this trend is not all bad. Not hearing soft sections of music in the car is a legitimate problem. I won't listen to classical music in the car because of this - I tend to stay within the rock genre because of this and only listen to classical and jazz in the quiet of home. It's too bad that record companies are now "solving" the problem by giving us this "one volume fits all" compression now. The ideal solution might be for car stereos to start including some sort of compression circuitry so that you can hear more of a tune over the road noise, but you get to hear it in its full dynamic glory at home. Heck, other things like TVs and DVD players could use this too. Sometimes a TV show or DVD will need some compression so I can hear the quiet parts but don't piss off the neighbors during the loud parts! Either that or maybe some sort of new audio format with two versions of each audio stream - normal and compressed. Of course we already have SACD and DVD Audio, yet another new format is just what we need...
I ended up going with the third option for my wife's 2002 Nissan Altima, since it has no tape deck and I didn't want to mess with an FM modulator. It has a CD changer input in the back, but the place linked above doesn't have anything for the Altima. I found a guy who makes custom cables for it, so I ordered that along with a switch to put the radio in aux mode. Installation was pretty easy and actually kind of a fun project, especially drilling the hole in the dash to install the switch. ;-)
So as you can see, there are plenty of options. Of course what would be the best is a little dock that provides power, line out, and steering wheel remote controls. Just slide the iPod in and off you go!
Regardless of speculation, it'll be interesting to see what happens with pricing when newer models do come out (whenever that may be).
I ended up installing a custom aux input cable in my 2002 Nissan Altima (it uses a funny connector in the back of the head unit designed for CD changers) and I just use a cassette adapter in the 4Runner. Works for me!
I'm just glad the click is gone. Now if only they could implement true gapless playback, plus all the other little suggestions I've already submitted...
Oh, and it still has the bug where if the hard disk spins up too slowly when you first start playing, it'll skip the first song. Time to send off another feedback.
Anyway, just some ramblings and potential starting points if anything interests you.
ThinkSecret keeps predicting an iPod firmware update but apparently it keeps getting pushed back. Perhaps Apple is having a lot of problems with this one. When it does finally come out, hopefully it'll not only add the USB 2.0 support, but fix most of these issues.
Anyway, to me, caffeine is just bad stuff. It makes me jittery and I can feel my heartbeat much more prominently. I guess that probably means my blood pressure goes up. Honestly it doesn't do much at all for my mental alertness, but then I suppose it's hard to doze off when you're jittery. Maybe I just react poorly to the stuff, but based on this, I'm pretty sure it's not good for me. Whether it's really bad and can do long term damage is another question altogether. I have no idea...
Regardless, I can say with good confidence that I've always felt much better overall when I injested no caffeine for a significant period of time. I posted about this once before, but a few years back I went for over a year without any caffeine at all, consciously avoiding it. I never felt better during that time - I felt like I had more energy and required less sleep. In reality though, I'd bet I was probably getting more sleep as a result of being able to fall asleep sooner at night.
So my personal recommendation is to avoid it if you can, substituting a regular and sufficient sleep schedule, plenty of exercise, and a decent diet. Sounds like you have most of that going anyway. Even if you don't cut it out completely (I still have some on occasion), moderation is probably best. It's kind of like that saying - everything you eat may eventually kill you, but not eating it will kill you faster! The trick is always finding the balance to maximize potential benefits while minimizing potential harm.
Was this actually changed in 4.0.1? I've been busily re-ripping my CDs since I got my shiny new iPod the other week, and I didn't really notice a difference in encoding speed or quality from iTunes 4 to 4.0.1. I had already done my own blind listening tests to determine what bitrate would make me happy (where I couldn't reliably tell the difference between the source and the AAC), and that was with version 4. So if 4.0.1 did improve from "good" to "best" quality setting, I guess it wouldn't matter to me since the "good" was already "perfect" to my ears.
Still, I'm curious...
Doofus! That was supposed to be countries.
For Windows support, I think we all know that they're working on a Windows version of iTunes (and were even recently advertising job positions specifically for this). I also recall reading that the big record labels are having a harder time signing onto a Windows version of the service - my recollection is that only 2 are onboard so far, but I could be wrong. With a US-only Mac-based service, they can stick their toes in and test the waters without major risk. Windows support dramatically increases the potential audience, and from the record labels' point of view, the possibility for piracy and other eeeeeevil things that those nassty consumerses do. I wouldn't be too surprised if some of the majors balk at Windows support without even more restrictive DRM. But if it comes to that, hopefully Apple wins out and keeps it as is (usable for those of us who wish to be legitimate!).
Finally, international support brings many of the same issues that the Windows support does - that the audience is much larger and therefore a bigger potential threat in the eyes of the RIAA et al (funny how it seems they view their customers, who make their business possible, as a threat sometimes). But from what I've read, the bigger stumbling block here is simply obtaining distribution rights. Apparently different entities and organizations hold copyrights, publishing rights, and distribution rights in different companies. So even if Apple has the right to distribute a song/album in the US, they may have to talk to 10 different entities for rights in Europe. Sounds like a huge headache.
Hopefully they'll work through all this fairly well and the future of music distribution will change for the better.
Yup. I've never used Gentoo and probably never will*, but that's exactly what I gather from all I've read about it.
<nostalgia>
I started using Linux in the fall of 1993, with SLS 1.01 and kernel 0.99p12 (p13 was the first version that worked with my network card). I remember sitting there and feeding all of those floppies into my 386/16 with 2 (yes, two) MB of ram and a 60 MB hard drive (20 for DOS/Win, 40 for Linux). The first time I actually had vi running on my own computer -- not just over a terminal session to the school's big unix server, but on my computer -- was a momentus event for me. Could it possible get any cooler than that?
Back then, we didn't have these fancy gui installers or configuration tools. vi was my configuration tool. And so that's how I learned Linux, and unix in general. Man pages, source code, and the occasional usenet group.
Over the years, I installed several different versions of Linux. When I got my shiny new Pentium 90 the following summer, this new distro called Slackware came out and had a lot of promise. It was so much easier to install with those curses based menus! Later, as I gained more skill at the command line, I heavily modified my installation of Slackware with lots of new packages and customizations I did myself. I even took it so far as building a complete system where every single binary and library had been compiled on my machine. This was probably at the height of my Linux/unix geekness.
After that I settled down some and moved to RedHat. After having a fairly easy time installing 4.2 on a machine at work, I went with 5.1 at home. That was later upgraded to 6.1 or so. As RedHat got more and more gui-based, I resisted. I always rolled my own kernels with my specific set of options, never trusting the rpm-packaged versions they provided. But somewhere along the line I began to tire of the tedium of the command line administration.
But not completely! Late 2000 ended my use of Linux in frustration as a particular series of kernels (stable, mind you) would crash every couple of weeks. Such instability was unheard of and completely unacceptable! I had heard so many good things about FreeBSD that I decided to give it a try. Not only did the system no longer crash (to be fair, I'm sure current Linux would probably work better than whatever version I was running back then), but it was beautiful from a Unix geek's perspective. Such elegance and forethought in the complete system design! It was like Unix nirvana. It brought the fun back to command line administration, at least for awhile.
</nostalgia>
Then last year I bought my second Mac, a PowerMac 733, and my first one capable of running OS X (the 7600 was strictly for my music hobby). OS X blew me away. Sure, it needed (and still does) work in many corners of its unixy mind, but wow! The FreeBSD machine was promptly relegated to server-in-the-corner status, trading my WindowMaker desktop for the goodness of Aqua.
Now, while I spend 90% of my "working" time at the command line, I use it far less than before for system administration tasks. Whenever possible, I try to use the Apple-supplied gui to do things. If that doesn't cut it, then the command line will do just fine (curiously, my gui Software Update hasn't worked right for some time now, but sudo softwareupdate saves the day every time). I've had to dig deep into the guts of OS X on occasion when wanting to do something very specific, but I'd say I've done so far less than with previous unixes. I even use vi for administration more on the SGIs at work than I do on OS X at home.
I actually haven't upgraded my FreeBSD box from 4.6 because I don't want to bother with the hassle. I know it's easy, but why bother? My firewall rules are very strict so I don't worry about a security problem.
Umm, my point with