But will it run on anything other than Lindows? Considering Lindows costs money, saying that Nvu is free to download and neglecting to mention that it only runs on Lindows wouldn't be something I'd put past Robertson.
It's like how MS offers IE 'free to download' (or used to) but it only runs on Windows - big deal, you have to buy Windows to get it.
I'm sure there aren't many people who agree with me, but I personally consider RealOne to be spyware. It's intrusive and has lots of 'features' that are extremely difficult to turn off if you can turn them off at all, and it installs things without telling you. (For example, its 'message center' in the system tray that tells you to Buy RealNetworks Products(tm)(r)!0
Other than that, I don't really run into spyware much, but I find gator and its kin to be the most intrusive and common on the web.
You could combine this with electronic ink and have a fingerprint verification system built into a piece of paper, and then if it isn't activated by a verified fingerprint, you can't read the contents... the possibilities for this are interesting.
My resizing issues may be due to the fact that I run a dual-monitor system with one monitor at 1024x768 and another at 1600x1200. Obviously, someone running at 800x600 is going to experience better performance displaying iTunes fullscreen than someone running at 1600x1200.
Also, for the titlebar, you could try: http://classic.winamp.com/skins/detail.jhtml ?compo nentId=96734 http://classic.winamp.com/skins/deta il.jhtml?compo nentId=97298 http://classic.winamp.com/skins/deta il.jhtml?compo nentId=96732
Winamp's titlebar mostly follows Windows interface guidelines. It actually has a maximize button, and a context menu, and a system menu (iTunes has none of these.)
iTunes definitely uses ~85-100% CPU when I'm resizing it. I just repeated this 15 seconds ago. I checked and the RAM usage drops to about 10 megs when I minimize it, but this is still with no music in my library and nothing playing, so it's obviously going to use more with a 2000+ song library and an MP3 or AAC playing.
Basically, iTunes offers nothing to me that my current CDex/Winamp combination does not, and it comes with the undesirable 'bonuses' of lower performance, more memory usage, a (in my opinion) less usable and streamlined GUI, less customization, support for less music formats, and less functionality (Winamp can burn CDs if you install a plugin; it can also stream audio live over the web, and send current track information to instant messenger services and IRC and even to your webpage; it can also play audio on multiple soundcards at once if configured correctly, useful for DJing; et cetera) than the software I already have installed.
This, and the download is larger than the two apps I use currently (The setups CDex and Winamp combined come in at far under 10MB, even if you include all the plugins I use.)
Sure, iTunes is nice. But as I said earlier - Best windows app ever? Hardly.
The main oversight I've noticed in reviews of iTunes is performance/efficiency, and it just so happens that performance is my major gripe with iTunes, and actually the main reason why I don't plan to use it.
iTunes uses around 40 MB of RAM on my WinXP SP1 machine, with no music files in my library and nothing playing. Add in the iPod driver and the iTunesHelper app that it runs in the background, and you've probably got around ~60MB of RAM usage on average. Winamp uses 8-10 megs in comparison.
Resizing the iTunes window is insanely slow - 100% CPU usage, and it takes a quarter to half second just for the screen to update while resizing the window. Oh yes, and if the Music Store is open? It takes, I kid you not, more than a second for the screen to update while resizing. The resizing performance seems to increase a little when the window gets small, which implies that the entire iTunes window is being buffered offscreen (which probably explains some of the RAM usage too.) I also noticed that dragging the volume slider would peg my CPU at 100%. I don't have a low-end machine, and I can only imagine how horribly slow iTunes must be on older machines. On one hand, though, iTunes didn't seem to lag when playing music and things like that. Switching playlists/views on the Source sidebar usually took between a half second and two seconds. Playing a 96KBPS MP3 radio stream used an average of ~8-12% CPU usage, which while not terrible is a lot more than Winamp uses to do the equivalent on my system. The iTunes visualizer averages a decent framerate of around 30FPS, so it looks smooth, but it obviously pegs the CPU.
iTunes's setup is also around 20 megs, which is a bit hefty for a music player. But since you get CD burning, iPod support, and online music purchasing in the deal, it's not too bad, but it probably is a little painful for modem users.
The iTunes executable is nearly 8 megabytes. I can't imagine that this does anything to help the ~6 second load times for iTunes that I experienced on my system (which has 768MB of DDR233 RAM, and an Athlon XP 1800+, FYI.) In comparison, Winamp loads in under a second. It seems to me almost that every single library and component iTunes uses is static-linked in, which is a bit bizarre.
Just to weigh in on the rest of iTunes:
The GUI is, overall, acceptable. I've never cared much for the Apple 'steel/silver/whatever' look, and while it's not bad, I can't say that it looks terribly attractive. One peculiar thing is that the titlebar looks very strange and is neither the titlebar that you see in OS X, or the standard Windows one - I can't say I understand their choice to roll their own titlebar, as the iTunes one lacks a few usability features of the Windows titlebar that I've come to rely on (context menu, icon, etc).
In comparison, the iTunes preferences dialogs are very well designed and use Windows XP themes when available, so they look mostly pleasing to the eye and are easy to navigate for someone who is comfortable with Windows.
iTunes adds a simple but useful system tray icon that lets you change tracks and turn shuffle/repeat on and off. Good feature, I'm glad they didn't leave it out.
One strange GUI quirk is that there are two options for Exit on the iTunes File menu - Exit, and Close Window. One would assume that Close Window would just close the window and leave iTunes running, like on the Mac, but no such luck - it exits, with no confirmation dialog. Strange.
You can't resize the iTunes window unless you grab the bottom-left corner. I've never liked this aspect of Mac GUIs at all, but I'm sure there are some people who do like it.
The music store is very polished and easy to navigate, and my guess is that it uses a subset of Safari for rendering (but of course, I could be wrong.) The front page presents lots of content in a very organized manner, and it's easy to navigate back to wherever you came from while looking around. I didn't get around to buying any songs, so I can't say how well th
The flaws aren't good, but it's good that Microsoft found them. The pace of MS finding bugs seems to be picking up lately; maybe MS's trustworthy computing shtick is finally doing some good? Perhaps MS will finally get on the ball about security!
Would 'taking on the recording industry' include illegaly and stupidly ripping thousands of CDs and making them available for download from your website?
I'm willing to say that Kazaa and MP3.com have done more to harm legal P2P and legal MP3 usage/distribution than anything else. I'd rather they had never existed.
It guess it just goes to show you that at the end of the day, someone will always find a new way to screw everyone else over for money.
Even though it's just Microsoft, I can't help but think that this is going to end up affecting other stuff too. Once a company like Eolas gets away with this garbage, I doubt they'll quit while they're ahead. I see more lawsuits like this in the future.
I'm still waiting for a supercomputer that can create hurricanes. Who cares about predicting them when you can't do anything to stop them? I envision a future where we stop hurricanes by throwing other hurricanes at them, and nations conduct large scale wars by throwing hurricanes at each other.
Photoshop CS - improved file browser, layer comps, text on a path (finally)
GoLive CS - buffed up CSS and PDF features
InDesign CS - improved cross-media support
Illustrator CS - 3D Effects, Refined Typography and Lightning Performance
This doesn't sound that amazing. What's newsworthy about this? Anyone in the know care to comment? The story's links seem to be extremely light on content.
Have you ever used the keyboard on the Danger HipTop (aka T-Mobile SideKick)? Obscenely bad phone design issues aside, it has a nice keyboard. I can type quite fast on it, and it requires almost no learning time because it's very close to a standard QWERTY layout. I'd venture to guess I get at least 30WPM on it.
If I was to buy another mobile device with internet/email/etc features, I would definitely look for one with a keyboard similar to the hiptop's. Nothing innovative, but it works great.
Various configurations and flexibility aside, how is "Everyone Use Linux" any less homogenous than "Everyone Use Windows"? If Linux is to gain that kind of widespread acceptance and use, it'll have to be more standardized to the point where the hundreds of various configurations you see will be reduced to a much smaller set of maybe a dozen or two at most. That will hardly be much better than everyone using Windows - other than the fact that Linux is inherently more secure, users will still be users, and people will still infect their computers with viruses. And everyone will still be running the same basic kernel and applications; just some will be running older versions and some newer ones.
Presto! Expensive multitool that now does half of everything you want and only does it half as good as it could.
All-in-one solutions aren't exactly a great idea. For a portable music player, most people want it to be as inexpensive, small and lightweight as possible, but to still have the features they want in a music player. I'm afraid wireless file/web serving is not on that list for the majority of users.
As much as I'd love to board the train, the ticket price is a bit expensive, especially because I don't know exactly where the train goes.
I'm sure this is true for most other computer users as well. 64-bit on the x86 desktop is not really a 'mature' technology, even though it's been done before with Alpha and Itanium... I for one would hate to spend lots of money moving to an Opteron-based platform, to find out that one of my devices doesn't work or that one of my programs doesn't work. So I suspect that the risk involved (even though it's rather minimal, really) probably is going to keep a lot of people from moving to Opteron and co. for a while.
I'd rather have the plants shut down than have another Chernobyl. You never know when someone's going to screw up, and when you're messing with nuclear power, it never hurts to be safe...
Something like this happened recently to my mom. Someone used her credit card to buy a domain name and some other services... luckily the company they bought it from called us. We had to cancel the card, but we don't have any idea if they bought anything else; she might even have paid for it already. Today we got a letter from a local Costco store saying that they had lost one of her checks, and asking her to cut another one - the check they say they lost already cleared a week ago.
So this brings to mind a point - it's very easy for someone who works at a store to get their hands on all the necessary information they need to screw you, especially stores with membership like Costco. Right at their fingertips they have your home address, your name, credit card information, checks, even a photo. If they were to spend some time and money to get their hands on your SSN, they'd have everything they need to pretend to be you. It's pretty frightening.
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Mac OS X is BSD. Does Safari run on FreeBSD?
Free to download, cool. That's nice.
But will it run on anything other than Lindows? Considering Lindows costs money, saying that Nvu is free to download and neglecting to mention that it only runs on Lindows wouldn't be something I'd put past Robertson.
It's like how MS offers IE 'free to download' (or used to) but it only runs on Windows - big deal, you have to buy Windows to get it.
I'm sure there aren't many people who agree with me, but I personally consider RealOne to be spyware. It's intrusive and has lots of 'features' that are extremely difficult to turn off if you can turn them off at all, and it installs things without telling you. (For example, its 'message center' in the system tray that tells you to Buy RealNetworks Products(tm)(r)!0
Other than that, I don't really run into spyware much, but I find gator and its kin to be the most intrusive and common on the web.
You could combine this with electronic ink and have a fingerprint verification system built into a piece of paper, and then if it isn't activated by a verified fingerprint, you can't read the contents... the possibilities for this are interesting.
My resizing issues may be due to the fact that I run a dual-monitor system with one monitor at 1024x768 and another at 1600x1200. Obviously, someone running at 800x600 is going to experience better performance displaying iTunes fullscreen than someone running at 1600x1200.
l ?compo nentId=96734a il.jhtml?compo nentId=97298a il.jhtml?compo nentId=96732
Also, for the titlebar, you could try:
http://classic.winamp.com/skins/detail.jhtm
http://classic.winamp.com/skins/det
http://classic.winamp.com/skins/det
Winamp's titlebar mostly follows Windows interface guidelines. It actually has a maximize button, and a context menu, and a system menu (iTunes has none of these.)
iTunes definitely uses ~85-100% CPU when I'm resizing it. I just repeated this 15 seconds ago. I checked and the RAM usage drops to about 10 megs when I minimize it, but this is still with no music in my library and nothing playing, so it's obviously going to use more with a 2000+ song library and an MP3 or AAC playing.
Basically, iTunes offers nothing to me that my current CDex/Winamp combination does not, and it comes with the undesirable 'bonuses' of lower performance, more memory usage, a (in my opinion) less usable and streamlined GUI, less customization, support for less music formats, and less functionality (Winamp can burn CDs if you install a plugin; it can also stream audio live over the web, and send current track information to instant messenger services and IRC and even to your webpage; it can also play audio on multiple soundcards at once if configured correctly, useful for DJing; et cetera) than the software I already have installed.
This, and the download is larger than the two apps I use currently (The setups CDex and Winamp combined come in at far under 10MB, even if you include all the plugins I use.)
Sure, iTunes is nice. But as I said earlier - Best windows app ever? Hardly.
The main oversight I've noticed in reviews of iTunes is performance/efficiency, and it just so happens that performance is my major gripe with iTunes, and actually the main reason why I don't plan to use it.
iTunes uses around 40 MB of RAM on my WinXP SP1 machine, with no music files in my library and nothing playing. Add in the iPod driver and the iTunesHelper app that it runs in the background, and you've probably got around ~60MB of RAM usage on average. Winamp uses 8-10 megs in comparison.
Resizing the iTunes window is insanely slow - 100% CPU usage, and it takes a quarter to half second just for the screen to update while resizing the window. Oh yes, and if the Music Store is open? It takes, I kid you not, more than a second for the screen to update while resizing. The resizing performance seems to increase a little when the window gets small, which implies that the entire iTunes window is being buffered offscreen (which probably explains some of the RAM usage too.) I also noticed that dragging the volume slider would peg my CPU at 100%. I don't have a low-end machine, and I can only imagine how horribly slow iTunes must be on older machines. On one hand, though, iTunes didn't seem to lag when playing music and things like that. Switching playlists/views on the Source sidebar usually took between a half second and two seconds. Playing a 96KBPS MP3 radio stream used an average of ~8-12% CPU usage, which while not terrible is a lot more than Winamp uses to do the equivalent on my system. The iTunes visualizer averages a decent framerate of around 30FPS, so it looks smooth, but it obviously pegs the CPU.
iTunes's setup is also around 20 megs, which is a bit hefty for a music player. But since you get CD burning, iPod support, and online music purchasing in the deal, it's not too bad, but it probably is a little painful for modem users.
The iTunes executable is nearly 8 megabytes. I can't imagine that this does anything to help the ~6 second load times for iTunes that I experienced on my system (which has 768MB of DDR233 RAM, and an Athlon XP 1800+, FYI.) In comparison, Winamp loads in under a second. It seems to me almost that every single library and component iTunes uses is static-linked in, which is a bit bizarre.
Just to weigh in on the rest of iTunes:
The GUI is, overall, acceptable. I've never cared much for the Apple 'steel/silver/whatever' look, and while it's not bad, I can't say that it looks terribly attractive. One peculiar thing is that the titlebar looks very strange and is neither the titlebar that you see in OS X, or the standard Windows one - I can't say I understand their choice to roll their own titlebar, as the iTunes one lacks a few usability features of the Windows titlebar that I've come to rely on (context menu, icon, etc).
In comparison, the iTunes preferences dialogs are very well designed and use Windows XP themes when available, so they look mostly pleasing to the eye and are easy to navigate for someone who is comfortable with Windows.
iTunes adds a simple but useful system tray icon that lets you change tracks and turn shuffle/repeat on and off. Good feature, I'm glad they didn't leave it out.
One strange GUI quirk is that there are two options for Exit on the iTunes File menu - Exit, and Close Window. One would assume that Close Window would just close the window and leave iTunes running, like on the Mac, but no such luck - it exits, with no confirmation dialog. Strange.
You can't resize the iTunes window unless you grab the bottom-left corner. I've never liked this aspect of Mac GUIs at all, but I'm sure there are some people who do like it.
The music store is very polished and easy to navigate, and my guess is that it uses a subset of Safari for rendering (but of course, I could be wrong.) The front page presents lots of content in a very organized manner, and it's easy to navigate back to wherever you came from while looking around. I didn't get around to buying any songs, so I can't say how well th
The flaws aren't good, but it's good that Microsoft found them. The pace of MS finding bugs seems to be picking up lately; maybe MS's trustworthy computing shtick is finally doing some good? Perhaps MS will finally get on the ball about security!
Would 'taking on the recording industry' include illegaly and stupidly ripping thousands of CDs and making them available for download from your website?
I'm willing to say that Kazaa and MP3.com have done more to harm legal P2P and legal MP3 usage/distribution than anything else. I'd rather they had never existed.
My web browsing experience just got even better!
It guess it just goes to show you that at the end of the day, someone will always find a new way to screw everyone else over for money.
Even though it's just Microsoft, I can't help but think that this is going to end up affecting other stuff too. Once a company like Eolas gets away with this garbage, I doubt they'll quit while they're ahead. I see more lawsuits like this in the future.
I'm still waiting for a supercomputer that can create hurricanes. Who cares about predicting them when you can't do anything to stop them? I envision a future where we stop hurricanes by throwing other hurricanes at them, and nations conduct large scale wars by throwing hurricanes at each other.
Yes?
I don't think Larry appreciates how you treat him. Just think of this as payback on a cosmic level. Retards have feelings too!
It's only 4th best if you forget to notice that the #1 codec was 128KbPS MP3. All the other codecs were at 64, including Vorbis.
Have you ever used the keyboard on the Danger HipTop (aka T-Mobile SideKick)? Obscenely bad phone design issues aside, it has a nice keyboard. I can type quite fast on it, and it requires almost no learning time because it's very close to a standard QWERTY layout. I'd venture to guess I get at least 30WPM on it.
If I was to buy another mobile device with internet/email/etc features, I would definitely look for one with a keyboard similar to the hiptop's. Nothing innovative, but it works great.
Various configurations and flexibility aside, how is "Everyone Use Linux" any less homogenous than "Everyone Use Windows"? If Linux is to gain that kind of widespread acceptance and use, it'll have to be more standardized to the point where the hundreds of various configurations you see will be reduced to a much smaller set of maybe a dozen or two at most. That will hardly be much better than everyone using Windows - other than the fact that Linux is inherently more secure, users will still be users, and people will still infect their computers with viruses. And everyone will still be running the same basic kernel and applications; just some will be running older versions and some newer ones.
Presto! Expensive multitool that now does half of everything you want and only does it half as good as it could.
All-in-one solutions aren't exactly a great idea. For a portable music player, most people want it to be as inexpensive, small and lightweight as possible, but to still have the features they want in a music player. I'm afraid wireless file/web serving is not on that list for the majority of users.
Every single plugin that used ancient, hardly DOM-aware if DOM-aware at all, netscape plugin APIs?
As much as I'd love to board the train, the ticket price is a bit expensive, especially because I don't know exactly where the train goes.
I'm sure this is true for most other computer users as well. 64-bit on the x86 desktop is not really a 'mature' technology, even though it's been done before with Alpha and Itanium... I for one would hate to spend lots of money moving to an Opteron-based platform, to find out that one of my devices doesn't work or that one of my programs doesn't work. So I suspect that the risk involved (even though it's rather minimal, really) probably is going to keep a lot of people from moving to Opteron and co. for a while.
*sigh*... life is so unfair.
A Timex Sinclair? Impossible. I have an authentic, original ENIAC. Your puny sinclair can't possibly match that.
The guy on eBay said it's scientifically proven as the fastest computer on earth*.
* In 1947, that is.
What the hell are those things for?
Well duh, baking fluffy pastries!
I'd rather have the plants shut down than have another Chernobyl. You never know when someone's going to screw up, and when you're messing with nuclear power, it never hurts to be safe...
Earthquakes in bottles! I'll make millions!
Suprise your friends, amaze your family! Earthquake in a bottle!
Bottled at the source in scenic california.
Something like this happened recently to my mom. Someone used her credit card to buy a domain name and some other services... luckily the company they bought it from called us. We had to cancel the card, but we don't have any idea if they bought anything else; she might even have paid for it already. Today we got a letter from a local Costco store saying that they had lost one of her checks, and asking her to cut another one - the check they say they lost already cleared a week ago.
So this brings to mind a point - it's very easy for someone who works at a store to get their hands on all the necessary information they need to screw you, especially stores with membership like Costco. Right at their fingertips they have your home address, your name, credit card information, checks, even a photo. If they were to spend some time and money to get their hands on your SSN, they'd have everything they need to pretend to be you. It's pretty frightening.