1.) The GPL is not the same as the Constitution. The GPL is little more than a software distribution license, so throwing it out for another license is no big deal.
2.) The DMCA and Patriot Act have absolutely nothing to do with this, so your attempt to illicit emotion by mentioning them was out of place.
3.) Emotively mentioning the Constitution and the DMCA is a terrible way to karma whore, but apparently it continues to work.
Another issue to consider is the attempt to morph several devices into one, like what they're with cell phones. If your devices' browser gets exploited through RSS, now that all your data and activity has been packed all into one device, it's exposed all at once. On the other hand, if it's just a music player with a browser on it, what would they get? The song names in your music library? Centralizing all your information and net activity into one device has its drawbacks.
CmdrTaco said: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." On the day of iPod's launch. In another article, he actually took the effort to say it again: "Apple just released a lame mp3 player."
Nobody knows what the deal is with Slashdot's irrational hatred of iPod and iTunes, but they sure seem to love everything else about Apple.
...is the small group of reactionary critics that have risen in its success to deride anyone owning one as a victim of marketing and fashion.
iPod won because it's simple and easy. Why?
1.) iTunes makes it incredibly easy to put music on it. Often, you just plug in your iPod, and it will auto-sync in less than a minute, and you're done. Unplug and play.
2.) The interface. No hitting an "Up" or "Down" button repeatedly, or pressing and waiting during that second of delay for it to begin auto-scrolling. You just grab the iPod and jam the wheel with your thumb to immediately start scrolling through that massive music collection of yours. A big white button in the center to select stuff.
3.) No complicated buttons and lines. Other electronics devices are always made to look so techy as a way to impress consumers. They often come out ugly and intimidating as a result. The iPod is just a screen and a wheel with five buttons integrated into it. It doesn't even look all that flashy. It just ends up being that way through its minimalism. Yes, it doesn't hurt that the source of the music in your life is pleasant to look at and interact with.
Jonathan Ives, the designer of iMac and iPod said it best: "Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds."
"No biggie for your college-educated, Slashdot-reading brain"
That might have been true five years ago...these days, Slashdot stories are so inaccurate and alarmist that it's remarkable how many people still show up simply out of habit. I'm one of 'em, but as soon as I find a better website, I'm staying there for good.
When Firefox starts shipping with Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, and other products the way Opera does now, then I'll start saying Firefox is kicking Opera's ass. But right now, those pretty websites you're previewing in every copy of Dreamweaver MX are using Opera's rendering engine.
Not to mention Opera is the originator of tabs, gestures, auto-fill, and a host of other features that the slow and resource-intensive Firefox gets praised for. When Firefox stops pointlessly reimplementing its own buttons, menus, and even string classes, I'll start praising that mess of a codebase (that layout manager makes my head spin)! Gecko has to be one of the most overrated engines out there, mostly thanks to years of hype on Slashdot and people who don't question it and just run out to download it.
"Hackers" in the Slashdot sense are just people who want to take the cool, anti-authority connotations of the word hacker and apply it to their love of technology to make themselves feel hip.
In reality, the vast, vast majority of society uses the term hacker to refer to people who hack computer systems, as in break in to them. It doesn't matter if you can cite some arcane BBS history where hacker meant what you want it to mean and cracker meant what hacker means now.
The apple folks who like to talk about usability and the "it just works" shit should be severely beaten.
Sorry, it's true. Even before you start your list of criticisms, OS X is absolutely way more usable than desktop Linux.
The dock. What a hideous piece of crap this is. My trash can is on the dock. So are my running applications.
So far, so good. No different than "taskbars" on Linux.
So are my non-running applications.
No different than the shortcut icons on the left side of the KDE taskbar or the "Quick Launch" icons in Windows.
But not all of my non-running applications.
Yes. Just like any bar of shortcuts, as in desktop Linux, it doesn't happen to contain every single one of your applications. What is the difference here?
To get to those, I have to go into the applications folder, which has a nice alias on the desktop that Apple didn't create.
What alias on the desktop? Yes, horror of horrors, you have to go to your Applications folder to get to your applications. What's worse, you can drag whatever apps you want onto the Dock! You're right, this usability thing is a piece of crap. Let's go back to the Linux desktop taskbar which is the exact same thing but differently arranged.
Those useful programs that you only use once in a blue moon? Go dig for them... go dig.
Or, drag them to the Dock. Or, create an alias on the desktop. Or, drag the Applications folder to the Dock and right-click for an instant "Start menu."
- Driver support. I have a cheapo webcam that came with an Earthlink subscription years ago. I plug it into linux and it works. I plug it into my Mac and it does nothing. No drivers available.
Freeware webcam drivers are available for the Mac.
- Quicktime. It plays 8 seconds of video and stops. Every time. MPlayer for OSX handles the same files fine.
Was it MPEG? DivX? Any of the other files that Quicktime doesn't support until you download the free decoder components? Yep, just like in Windows or Linux, you have to download the codecs. Thankfully, MPlayer is completely free, plays all of them, and is available for OS X as you pointed out. So what is your problem again? Oh, right, there is none whatsoever.
- Sleep. It does it whether or not I want it to. Downloading a big file, it'll go to sleep. How the hell does one stop that? Other than that, sleep works great. Or not.
There's this magic thing called "System Preferences" with an "Energy Saver" icon. Turn off Sleep. Or, type "sleep" into the search field to get to it. Since this is the same as in Linux and Windows and takes zero effort to figure out and change for yourself, another point crumbles to dust.
- Virtual Desktops. Man, I never thought I'd miss them so much. And even the very good replacement I found, Desktop Manger, has flaws. If I leave the adium buddy list open on one desktop, go to another desktop, and mouse over the where the buddy list is on the non-visible desktop, I see tool tips. Among other bugs, that's the most annoying.
So download a different desktop manager. There are plenty out there for free. Though I'm sure you've tried them all, right?
- Java apps. Either swallow the menubar for the active window or don't. Don't do it in some cases and not in others. Get your act together. I know I can code to specifically do that, but I shouldn't have to. Write once, run anywhere and all that.
So your beef is with the very few Java apps. Not OS X. What a crappy post. I use OS X and could have easily come up with a valid list of usability criticisms. But your list was nothing but silly stuff easily fixed or that had nothing
Exactly. I can install Windows on just about any old computer I can scrounge up from thrift shops
Including future Intel Macs, amusingly enough.
So you're complaining that Apple "rapes customers" (ah, emotion-based hyperbole) with hardware but then you defend the company that rapes customers with both hardware and software.
At least with Apple, the stuff you're buying will last for years and actually work. I can't even get sleep mode to work half the time on my Gateway computer.
Apple is about making computers where you don't have to worry about the guts inside. Their machines last and last, to their own detriment in terms of market share, because people don't buy new Macs as often. If you want to construct your own computer, nope, you won't get help from Apple. But then again, I don't go around building my own automobiles, either. I buy one from the local car lot and use it for years and years.
Apple has already stated the dev kits don't represent the final hardware. For instance, an Apple engineer said they're looking at EFI and OpenFirmware for the final x86 Macs, unlike the PC BIOS the development kit uses.
Also, the first x86 Macs will be using Pentium Ms. I wouldn't be surprised to see the XServes and high-end Macs using a form of IA-64.
Why are Slashdotters seemingly so desperate for P2P networks to be more popular than iTunes? When the original article was posted, it's like nobody wanted it to be true, and now that some random website is claiming such, everyone's going to say, "See! My beloved eMule really is more popular!"
Is there something I missed? I thought everyone has been saying for years that the music industry should embrace online downloading. It's like people were taking it personally that iTunes might dare be competing with their beloved piracy. Why is everyone so desperate for iTunes not to be more popular than a bunch of P2P networks? Honest question.
Some songs have high pitched sounds every 40 seconds that are designed to destroy speakers. I would like to see someone sue the RIAA for blown out speakers.
Let me get this straight. You're attempting to illegally download a song without paying for it, and you want to sue them because they put a high-pitched whine into an MP3? They'd win the case on free speech rights alone.
I have every right to share music I paid for. If I want you to hear my copy of music, it is my absolute right to show it to you.
No. You don't. You don't have any right to do that at all. You're 100% wrong. You can't provide other people with copies of your music so that they don't have to pay for it. Not only is it illegal, but it's immoral freeloading.
Has Slashdot really skewed so many people's viewpoints? It's like they can't accept legal music in any way shape or form because in all cases, you will have to pay money for it. That's how the real world works.
I have a feeling you're one of the first people to complain when a company "steals" GPL intellectual property.
Every one of those requires explicit activation by the user (which is why they're called trojans, not viruses). A virus propagates itself. Cowhand is a rootkit requiring an already exploited Mac. In fact, someone already addressed this stuff in an earlier comment.
No OS can fully prevent social engineering attacks, but the fact none of these are out in the wild says a lot.
Probably a lot more expensive than you're considering, but at my new job, we have two XServes serving data in the back room. They were incredibly easy to set up and administer, and they are FAST. And best of all, they're UNIX.
However, we also have a low-end PC Linux Gentoo cluster for some extra low-end processing, mostly for when we get a special task and don't want to have the XServes do it. But I'm in love with the XServes. To those who say Apple isn't targeting the enterprise, look no further.
It's a ploy to get people not to buy Linux (or Macs, which happily run the latest OS X and get faster with each release).
I imagine this "Eiger" implementation will be half-assed, because PC sales have slowed, Bill Gates rushed to the defensive and declared that the PC was not dead, and Microsoft has amped up Longhorn's system requirements to the 3Ghz area just to appease hardware manufacturers. So releasing this conflicts with Microsoft's hardware agenda of getting people to buy new computers to run Windows Longhorn. Expect this to therefor suck and have arbitrary limitations ala Starter Edition.
I've mostly forgotten about SCO these days, as they were all bark and no bite. My question is, what took so long? I remember people constantly writing to the feds and calling for investigations into this company last year. What was the freakin' holdup? Even non-tech people can see the writing on the wall.
I keep seeing comments on Slashdot about the Sony PSP being some sort of pressure on Nintendo.
That "Nintendogs" title mockingly referred to in the submission? Go take a look at how many copies it sold in Japan (hint, it's a high six-figure number). It sold 80,000 just the first day. In fact, the game caused DS sales to increase fivefold.
The PSP? Nintendo DS outsold it 3 to 1! These things don't get reported as much by the gaming press for some reason. Perhaps because the console gaming press, moreso than other tech press media, falls in love with any prerendered graphics or hyped up spec numbers.
Hello? PS2 rendering Toy Story in real-time, anyone? I see this every time there's a new generation of console releases. I don't deny Nintendo is in trouble, but it doesn't matter if E3 2005 was low-key for them because the system's not out for another year anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
1.) The GPL is not the same as the Constitution. The GPL is little more than a software distribution license, so throwing it out for another license is no big deal.
2.) The DMCA and Patriot Act have absolutely nothing to do with this, so your attempt to illicit emotion by mentioning them was out of place.
3.) Emotively mentioning the Constitution and the DMCA is a terrible way to karma whore, but apparently it continues to work.
Another issue to consider is the attempt to morph several devices into one, like what they're with cell phones. If your devices' browser gets exploited through RSS, now that all your data and activity has been packed all into one device, it's exposed all at once. On the other hand, if it's just a music player with a browser on it, what would they get? The song names in your music library? Centralizing all your information and net activity into one device has its drawbacks.
NeXT wasn't meant for the consumer. It was meant for universities and research. Jobs wanted to make "the ultimate research computer."
CmdrTaco said: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." On the day of iPod's launch. In another article, he actually took the effort to say it again: "Apple just released a lame mp3 player."
Nobody knows what the deal is with Slashdot's irrational hatred of iPod and iTunes, but they sure seem to love everything else about Apple.
...is the small group of reactionary critics that have risen in its success to deride anyone owning one as a victim of marketing and fashion.
iPod won because it's simple and easy. Why?
1.) iTunes makes it incredibly easy to put music on it. Often, you just plug in your iPod, and it will auto-sync in less than a minute, and you're done. Unplug and play.
2.) The interface. No hitting an "Up" or "Down" button repeatedly, or pressing and waiting during that second of delay for it to begin auto-scrolling. You just grab the iPod and jam the wheel with your thumb to immediately start scrolling through that massive music collection of yours. A big white button in the center to select stuff.
3.) No complicated buttons and lines. Other electronics devices are always made to look so techy as a way to impress consumers. They often come out ugly and intimidating as a result. The iPod is just a screen and a wheel with five buttons integrated into it. It doesn't even look all that flashy. It just ends up being that way through its minimalism. Yes, it doesn't hurt that the source of the music in your life is pleasant to look at and interact with.
Jonathan Ives, the designer of iMac and iPod said it best: "Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds."
Better tell all those podcasters using RSS to distribute their shows that it's "completely and totally questionable."
"No biggie for your college-educated, Slashdot-reading brain"
That might have been true five years ago...these days, Slashdot stories are so inaccurate and alarmist that it's remarkable how many people still show up simply out of habit. I'm one of 'em, but as soon as I find a better website, I'm staying there for good.
When Firefox starts shipping with Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, and other products the way Opera does now, then I'll start saying Firefox is kicking Opera's ass. But right now, those pretty websites you're previewing in every copy of Dreamweaver MX are using Opera's rendering engine.
Not to mention Opera is the originator of tabs, gestures, auto-fill, and a host of other features that the slow and resource-intensive Firefox gets praised for. When Firefox stops pointlessly reimplementing its own buttons, menus, and even string classes, I'll start praising that mess of a codebase (that layout manager makes my head spin)! Gecko has to be one of the most overrated engines out there, mostly thanks to years of hype on Slashdot and people who don't question it and just run out to download it.
Just my opinion.
The biggest trick is that Underrated and Overrated mods don't appear in meta-moderation, but still affect a user's karma.
This is great for trolls to modbomb accounts. Case in point, this one (see my user history and journal).
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v291/dmeister/g4 techtv/doomed.jpg
"Hackers" in the Slashdot sense are just people who want to take the cool, anti-authority connotations of the word hacker and apply it to their love of technology to make themselves feel hip.
In reality, the vast, vast majority of society uses the term hacker to refer to people who hack computer systems, as in break in to them. It doesn't matter if you can cite some arcane BBS history where hacker meant what you want it to mean and cracker meant what hacker means now.
Sorry, it's true. Even before you start your list of criticisms, OS X is absolutely way more usable than desktop Linux.
So far, so good. No different than "taskbars" on Linux.
No different than the shortcut icons on the left side of the KDE taskbar or the "Quick Launch" icons in Windows.
Yes. Just like any bar of shortcuts, as in desktop Linux, it doesn't happen to contain every single one of your applications. What is the difference here?
What alias on the desktop?
Yes, horror of horrors, you have to go to your Applications folder to get to your applications. What's worse, you can drag whatever apps you want onto the Dock! You're right, this usability thing is a piece of crap. Let's go back to the Linux desktop taskbar which is the exact same thing but differently arranged.
Or, drag them to the Dock. Or, create an alias on the desktop. Or, drag the Applications folder to the Dock and right-click for an instant "Start menu."
Freeware webcam drivers are available for the Mac.
Was it MPEG? DivX? Any of the other files that Quicktime doesn't support until you download the free decoder components? Yep, just like in Windows or Linux, you have to download the codecs. Thankfully, MPlayer is completely free, plays all of them, and is available for OS X as you pointed out. So what is your problem again? Oh, right, there is none whatsoever.
There's this magic thing called "System Preferences" with an "Energy Saver" icon. Turn off Sleep. Or, type "sleep" into the search field to get to it.
Since this is the same as in Linux and Windows and takes zero effort to figure out and change for yourself, another point crumbles to dust.
So download a different desktop manager. There are plenty out there for free. Though I'm sure you've tried them all, right?
So your beef is with the very few Java apps. Not OS X.
What a crappy post. I use OS X and could have easily come up with a valid list of usability criticisms. But your list was nothing but silly stuff easily fixed or that had nothing
Exactly. I can install Windows on just about any old computer I can scrounge up from thrift shops
Including future Intel Macs, amusingly enough.
So you're complaining that Apple "rapes customers" (ah, emotion-based hyperbole) with hardware but then you defend the company that rapes customers with both hardware and software.
At least with Apple, the stuff you're buying will last for years and actually work. I can't even get sleep mode to work half the time on my Gateway computer.
Apple is about making computers where you don't have to worry about the guts inside. Their machines last and last, to their own detriment in terms of market share, because people don't buy new Macs as often. If you want to construct your own computer, nope, you won't get help from Apple. But then again, I don't go around building my own automobiles, either. I buy one from the local car lot and use it for years and years.
Apple has already stated the dev kits don't represent the final hardware. For instance, an Apple engineer said they're looking at EFI and OpenFirmware for the final x86 Macs, unlike the PC BIOS the development kit uses.
Also, the first x86 Macs will be using Pentium Ms. I wouldn't be surprised to see the XServes and high-end Macs using a form of IA-64.
Why are Slashdotters seemingly so desperate for P2P networks to be more popular than iTunes? When the original article was posted, it's like nobody wanted it to be true, and now that some random website is claiming such, everyone's going to say, "See! My beloved eMule really is more popular!"
Is there something I missed? I thought everyone has been saying for years that the music industry should embrace online downloading. It's like people were taking it personally that iTunes might dare be competing with their beloved piracy. Why is everyone so desperate for iTunes not to be more popular than a bunch of P2P networks? Honest question.
Let me get this straight. You're attempting to illegally download a song without paying for it, and you want to sue them because they put a high-pitched whine into an MP3? They'd win the case on free speech rights alone.
No. You don't. You don't have any right to do that at all. You're 100% wrong. You can't provide other people with copies of your music so that they don't have to pay for it. Not only is it illegal, but it's immoral freeloading.
Has Slashdot really skewed so many people's viewpoints? It's like they can't accept legal music in any way shape or form because in all cases, you will have to pay money for it. That's how the real world works.
I have a feeling you're one of the first people to complain when a company "steals" GPL intellectual property.
Do you really think the niche of "thousands" of self-built systems is enough to tip that balance?
Every one of those requires explicit activation by the user (which is why they're called trojans, not viruses). A virus propagates itself. Cowhand is a rootkit requiring an already exploited Mac. In fact, someone already addressed this stuff in an earlier comment.
No OS can fully prevent social engineering attacks, but the fact none of these are out in the wild says a lot.
Nice try, though.
Dupe.
Probably a lot more expensive than you're considering, but at my new job, we have two XServes serving data in the back room. They were incredibly easy to set up and administer, and they are FAST. And best of all, they're UNIX.
However, we also have a low-end PC Linux Gentoo cluster for some extra low-end processing, mostly for when we get a special task and don't want to have the XServes do it. But I'm in love with the XServes. To those who say Apple isn't targeting the enterprise, look no further.
"Sex clips found on Internet"
"Cell phones are popular"
"'Information Superhighway' begins to take off"
It's a ploy to get people not to buy Linux (or Macs, which happily run the latest OS X and get faster with each release).
I imagine this "Eiger" implementation will be half-assed, because PC sales have slowed, Bill Gates rushed to the defensive and declared that the PC was not dead, and Microsoft has amped up Longhorn's system requirements to the 3Ghz area just to appease hardware manufacturers. So releasing this conflicts with Microsoft's hardware agenda of getting people to buy new computers to run Windows Longhorn. Expect this to therefor suck and have arbitrary limitations ala Starter Edition.
Cartridges actually already exist for Blu-ray discs. I have a feeling consumers won't like it thought, but I'd prefer it.
However, TDK has already address this issue by creating a protective layer technology for Blu-ray discs called "Durabis."
I've mostly forgotten about SCO these days, as they were all bark and no bite. My question is, what took so long? I remember people constantly writing to the feds and calling for investigations into this company last year. What was the freakin' holdup? Even non-tech people can see the writing on the wall.
I keep seeing comments on Slashdot about the Sony PSP being some sort of pressure on Nintendo.
That "Nintendogs" title mockingly referred to in the submission? Go take a look at how many copies it sold in Japan (hint, it's a high six-figure number). It sold 80,000 just the first day. In fact, the game caused DS sales to increase fivefold.
The PSP? Nintendo DS outsold it 3 to 1! These things don't get reported as much by the gaming press for some reason. Perhaps because the console gaming press, moreso than other tech press media, falls in love with any prerendered graphics or hyped up spec numbers.
Hello? PS2 rendering Toy Story in real-time, anyone? I see this every time there's a new generation of console releases. I don't deny Nintendo is in trouble, but it doesn't matter if E3 2005 was low-key for them because the system's not out for another year anyway.