Well you can check the link to be sure -- the only thing that struck me about that IBM box is that it has a pretty nice graphics card, although I don't think it's the NVidia one that you're thinking it is.
It's the "3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 800" which is apparently a dual-GPU, PCI Express monster of a card (640MB RAM) that takes at least 2, if not 3, card slots because of its thickness [2], and is designed to either drive two monitors independently or drive a stereoscopic system. Still, it only lists separately for about $2k, so it doesn't go that far in justifying the Intellistation's price tag. Plus at least according to Anandtech [1], it's outperformed by the NVidia Quadro 4400. So it's not even the ultimate top of the line (according to them). The only really special thing I've seen about it is that it does video genlock, so you can use an external "house clock" source if you were working with digital video. [3] However that doesn't really mesh with the application for a big IBM workstation, at least that I've ever seen. But what do I know.
If anyone wants to offer a good explanation of why the IBM Opteron workstations cost so much, except for the three letters on the front, I'm curious. But I sure as hell can't figure it out.
It has an aftermarket FPU upgrade installed, I think. I'm not the original owner of the machine, but it came to me from a guy who had it pretty well tweaked out in other respects (it has an AC-powered blower that sits in the 'handle' part of the top and down the back and sounds like a jet engine when it starts up, plus an external 40MB FD-HD). My assumption is that it has a aftermarket FPU installed. I don't have the case-cracking tool to look in there and check (and I'm several hundred miles away right now), but that's the only explanation I can offer. There were quite a lot of upgrades like that -- they either clipped onto the processor itself or went into an add-on slot. I'm not sure which way the CII was.
Actually, now I'm a little embarrassed/intrigued not to have known what it's actually got inside it. It's been a while since I played with it... I'll have to see what I can figure out.:)
The last few times I've started it up were just to demo it for people and show them the noise it makes while starting up -- the AC blower plus the regular startup sounds, plus the big external FD-HD make an incredible racket. Those times I just booted it into the ROM disk, which is a neat feature in itself (Apple-Opt-O-X I think...). It's sort of a hard-wired recovery mode.
Congrats, you may have renewed my interest in that project. I never realized that what I was doing shouldn't have -- by all rights -- worked.
I'm a relatively new subscriber to Cedega -- I actually bought a HP workstation and installed Ubuntu for the sole purpose of running WoW under Cedega (my 400MHz Mac ain't gonna cut it) -- and I've been not unimpressed by it. I'm not going to say "wow, it's great!", but in my experience it's worked okay.
They definitely move from one "most popular" title to the next, and I've never been clear on exactly how many people they have working on it at any one time (it could be one guy, it could be 50 people, you'd not have any clue from their forums or site), but the end result works works okay for my purposes, given that WoW is really popular right now.
Getting it to work initially can be frustrating, though. I had a LOT of issues getting WoW to work (some weird mouse-clicking issue), and eventually fixed it by running with certain configuration options. Every time Blizzard puts out a new version, it's a crapshoot -- it might continue to work fine, or I might have to spend an afternoon tweaking its config files again.
Eventually I'm just going to buy a new Mac, and at that point I'll probably stop bothering with Cedega: I don't have any Windows-only games that I want to play -- I'm a one-game-at-a-time guy, and right now that game is WoW. I do appreciate that it exists though, and I might even consider continuing to support TransGaming for a while even if I wasn't actively using Cedega, just so I can keep voting for games I might be interested in playing in the future (once they reach the bargain bin at CompUSA).
It's $5 a month, and it doesn't make me feel like I'm kneeling down and sucking Microsoft's collective cock and running Windows every time I want to play a game. To me, that's worth it.
No, I think that dubious honor belongs to this: the IBM IntelliStation A Pro. Take it home today, only $11,779.00.
And that's for a dual-Opteron system with RHEL, it's not one of the big RISC-based AIX workstations. Granted, it does come with 8GB of RAM, Ultra320 SCSI, and a ridiculous display card (3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 800).
I think in retail it's a combination of brightness and contrast/color saturation. If you look at the TVs people are drooling over at Best Buy, they're often the ones that have the contrast and saturation jacked up ridiculously high, also. Sometimes to the point where flesh tones start to look really distorted, everyone looks like they're wearing a lot of blush on their cheeks and stuff. It's pretty bad.
But this same thing happens with photos. A few years ago there was a sort of "contrast war" between the makers of different high end digital minilab equipment (principally Agfa and Fuji). In order to create pictures that "look best," they each would come out with new software for the minilab system that would pre-process the digital image coming from the film scan before it went to the printer. Generally the "automatic" options (on either brand) would compress the dynamic range horribly, then proceed to drive the saturation up to almost unbelievable levels. But customers loved it because it made their vacation photos look like postcards, so what the hell. Nobody really cares about 'accuracy' in the real world -- or rather, not accuracy to the physical world or to the film, they want a product that's accurate to their memory of something, which often is nearly unrelated to reality. Give them that, and you'll get rich.
Same thing with the "bass boosters" or "sound enhancers" on low end stereos. It mucks the music up, but people think it's better that way.
The television thing is the same. People don't really want to see what the actual football field looks like, they want to see what they think the football field looks like, and that means the grass ought to be bright, hunter green, the white uniforms should be almost shiny, and the yellow lines should be just about ready to pop off the screen, walk across the room, and rip your eyeballs out. Being true to the video signal that's coming into them isn't a factor.
This is why if you want accuracy, you generally have to pay for it or expend some effort. With a photo, you have to tell the lab operator to run it though without corrections. With audio, you have to get "nearfield monitors" instead of regular consumer stereo speakers, and with televisions, it's why there are video monitors that are actually made to display what they're being fed, instead of an idealized version.
It's all about giving people what they think they want.
Huh? What are you talking about, almost every single camera on that page lists IEEE 1394.
The ones that don't have it listed probably almost all HAVE it, it's just such a standard feature that they don't bother giving it top billing anymore. It's practially assumed on anything that's MiniDV.
Many of them have, in addition to FireWire, USB connections, usually for downloading still pictures using proprietary software or drivers. It's what I would consider a completely useless feature, but it fills space on the outside of the box I guess, and apparently somebody thinks it's a good idea. I'm not sure whether you can actually download the full-quality DV stream through the USB port, but I doubt it. On the cameras I've used (mostly small Sonys) they have a built in DV-to-MPEG converter, and they put the MPEG stream out the USB port, so you can have pre-shrunk movies for email or webcam use.
Just as an example from that list, the Canon Optura 600 isn't listed as having IEEE1394 or FireWire, it just says USB 2.0. But if we go to the Amazon page for the same item, we read: "Otherwise known as Firewire or iLink, the Optura 600's IEEE 1394 DV Terminal is a high-speed digital interface that ensures virtually no loss of video or audio quality when transferring videos to a computer. Simply use a DV cable to connect the camcorder to your computer's DV Terminal and you can be sure that your favorite, recorded moments retain their pristine image and sound." Furthermore, in regards to the USB port: "Quickly transfer images from the Optura 600 to a computer with the USB 2.0 High Speed Terminal."
So basically, the USB capabilities on there are just fluff -- they're for transferring still photos that are taken onto the memory cards to your computer, and on the higher end cameras they'll sometimes do video. But the real video transport is FireWire/IEEE1394, and probably always will be for MiniDV. The whole 1394 system was designed as an interconnect for DV equipment, and I don't think you're going to get all the players in USB together and invent an alternative, with all the stuff that's already in existence.
The only exception I can think of are the DVD based camcorders down at the bottom of the page, which really aren't "DV" at all, they're MPEG2. And as you'll find out if you read some of the owner comments from people who've bought them, there isn't a particularly good way of getting the video into your PC anyway -- basically you have to rip it off the DVD.
Uh, you totally fail to understand how that conversation at Ritz Camera (or anyplace else) would go:
Consumer: "How about that camera there? It's $499." Salesperson: "Sure. It's not bad. But you have to be careful, it's USB." C: "Oh... I think my computer has that. That's good, right?" S: "USB is really for hooking up keyboards. If your computer isn't really fast, it'll drop frames, and suffer compression artifacts." C: "Drop....frames?" S: "It'll look bad." C: "Oh. Well, that's not good. What else can I buy?" S: "This one right here is only $699, and it comes with the card for your computer so you don't get dropped frames..."
I wouldn't be surprised to see mac os x to change to another OS, though. Multiple core CPUs are there and the freebsd code injected in their mach kernel is know to have had some problems (just like freebsd 5.x) WRT. scalability. Is not that freebsd will never be fixed and that 6.x is not rocking already, but damn, solaris han been opensourced and it is one of the hottest events on the OS field in the latest years...I wouldn't be surprised that apple were considering to switch their freebsd code for solaris code
Now that, I find interesting.
I'm not going to discuss the main article anymore, because it's just too painfully retarded to think about, much less read. But as long as we're out in the Land of Wild Speculation anyway, I kind of like the whole Solaris kernel + Aqua idea.
It's no secret that MacOS gets pretty thrashed by Linuxes at some DB benchmarks -- there were articles about it on Slashdot a few months ago, IIRC -- and I think most of the blame ended up getting pointed at either the kernel, or the G5 and the other hardware. Now that they've changed out the hardware for Intel stuff, it'll be interesting to see how the stats change. If it's still not as good as other commercial server platforms (e.g. Sun, RHEL), then it would start to seem more believable that they'd consider a replacement for Mach.
I wonder if anyone's run any preliminary DB benchmarks on the new Intel Macs yet.
And at its core is seems to suppose that Apple WANTS to compete with Dell and Compaq. And that's what really strikes me as dumb: nobody in their right mind wants to compete in that arena. It's dead: it's low margin, it's totally saturated, and it's dominated by whoever can make the cheapest box and operate on the slimmest margins, with the most streamlined supply chain.
It's a WalMart market, in other words. That's like the absolute antithesis of everything Apple. Apple does fat profit margins on low-volume niche machines. They're a big fish in a small pond, and they do very well by it. Why they'd want to be the same small fish, in a much bigger, FAR more brutal pond, I cannot possibly understand.
IBM, one of the biggest, longest-time players in the PC arena, dumped it's PC division last year, and sold it to the Chinese. Why? Because margins were too low and demand wasn't strong enough to give them a healthy profit off of what they were selling: high quality laptops and desktops. People aren't willing to pay a premium for PCs anymore, unless you can really do something to distinguish yourself. Alienware manages to do it, but just barely (and you get a lot of people criticizing them for being expensive, too); Apple wouldn't be able to compete as just a hardware company in the commodity arena.
It's stupid to even think it. I knew Devorak was a publicity whore, but this is just retarded. Anyone who's ever taken a single business class in their life, or who even has a basic understanding of the PC market today, knows it would be a suicidal move.
Interesting. Well, that's a very different experience than I or anyone I've ever talked to has had.
I'm going to guess that you're a Windows user. I'm making that guess because I think you'd have to be a Windows user to think it's more obvious to select something, right click, and send it to the player, than drag-and-drop it onto the iPod in the left-hand Source pane. (I'm not sure how you got that hidden by default, since it's where the Library and all the user's Playlists are kept, as well as how the iTMS and Podcasts are accessed... I find it hard to believe that it's not there by default. Perhaps your girlfriend or someone had hidden it right after they installed the program and then never told you about/forgot it? It's in every screenshot of iTunes, though.)
I guess that may be a difference between being used to a Mac, where a lot of things are accomplished with drag-and-drop, and a PC, where the mouse buttons are used heavily. But I think a lot of inexperienced people find iTunes very easy to use, in the absence of competing ingrained UI philosophies. Apple obviously makes software that follows a certain way of thinking, and I suppose if you're not used to that, or worse if you're deeply used to something different, it might not be obvious.
When you want things on an iPod, you drag and drop them there. You drag-and-drop to add to playlists, you drag-and-drop to add to a portable player, and although I've never tried it, I suspect you can drag-and-drop to play a file on a remote AirTunes device.
You are correct, though, in saying that the interface is definitely set up for having an iPod that is automatically synced to the computer's entire library, and everything is "smoother" if this is the case. However, I've seen even very novice users figure out that they can set up a dynamic playlist, drop that onto an iPod, and then have that playlist updated every time they plug the iPod in. (So you can make a shuffled playlist of 50 songs of a particular genre or something for a small-capacity iPod.) That's something that would be very difficult to do using just a regular file manager. In fact I'm not sure exactly how I'd go about doing it.
I'm not trying to be a total Apple apologist here -- there are definitely some things iTunes could do to improve its interface. (I'm not a fan of the whole brushed metal look in general, for starters.) But I can't think of any way to do what I do with it on a daily basis, without at least half a dozen separate programs (esp. the podcasting parts, which is something I always thought was too much of a PITA to use until they built it in). I'm not touting iTunes for the sake of touting iTunes, I'm doing it because I think it's a crummy situation that there's basically only one decent music manager, and it's not available for Linux. And furthermore, that it only works with one kind of portable player, and that portable player won't play OGG or FLAC files.
I think there's a market for more than one music jukebox, but I think nobody besides Apple has really done it right yet, UI gaffes nonwithstanding.
I still think Rythmbox has a long way to go before it can hold a candle to iTunes -- and I'm not talking about DRM functions, because I don't give a hummingbird's fart about iTMS, but just regular usability stuff -- but it certainly beats the hell out of their other suggestions.
A music jukebox is one thing where I think "the UNIX way" just isn't going to agree with most people. In most other circumstances I appreciate small tools that do their job well, but a jukebox is inherently a do-everything-and-do-it-well proposition. It's that or failure. And the past is littered with music management programs that didn't succeed, or were quickly supplanted by something that did the job better. The reason we have a monoculture in the music-manager world is because everything else besides iTunes, quite frankly, sucks.
What iTunes does: * It manages your local music, keeps it organized. (In addition to just keeping track of it, it also maintains extensive metadata, such as playcount, normalized volume level, etc.) * Dynamic playlists. * No-brains-required iPod syncronization AND metadata download. The sync is bidirectional: play count information and other stuff comes down from the iPod, which keeps your most played and recently played lists current. I've yet to see any other piece of software that does this correctly. * Podcast management: including subscribing, downloading, uploading to iPod, and keeping track of which have been heard. * Local network sharing: other computers running compatible software can access the local music library and stream music. (Yes, they've essentially broken this feature in new releases, which is too bad.)
This doesn't even touch on things like video, iTMS, and AirTunes support; it's just the featureset that I think you'd have to implement in order to have a realistic iTunes alternative. And is has to be all in one program, no halfassing things with a dozen little special purpose apps. People like iTunes because it's monolithic (some would say bloated). From a design standpoint, a UNIX person might hate it, but I think several million people have decided otherwise.
I'm following the progress of Rythmbox with interest, because I think it's come the closest so far to hitting the iTunes mark. Until other programs start figuring out that there's no shame in blatantly copying what iTunes does -- after all, it does it well and is popular for a good reason -- they're always going to be relegated to obscurity.
The fifth, iTunes, is a proprietary DRM package that it would be best to stay away from (although it too, is popular in geekdom).
If you could make a program which replicated everything that iTunes does, without the iTMS or DRM functions, I think you'd do what 90% of people want.
I know a lot of iPod owners (and I'm sure there are quite a few here on/.) who have never purchased any music from iTMS and have never had to use a DRMed file. Personally I've only ever bought two, out of a total library of close to 20,000. The Music Store is not iTunes' "killer feature." Ease of use, a basically seamless interface, and tight integration with the iPod are. The new automatic features for subscribing to, downloading, and maintaining Podcasts on an iPod are going to be more important as people realize how cool a thing it is.
But replicating the DRM functions isn't necessarily important in terms of coming up with a free alternative to iTunes, it's replicating that useability experience and other features that is.
So, assuming they're willing to give me CDs or digital downloads for less than the price of a blank CD-R, plus the electricity required to run a computer for 10 minutes, we'll be all set.
Unfortunately, I think that might cut into their profits a little, since CD-Rs are hovering around about $0.13 USD when purchased in bulk (assuming you don't get them free with a rebate). I'm not going to do the math for the electricity for you.
Yeah, for some reason I think their definition of "reasonably priced" isn't the same as ours.
You could take a picture of the CD. Good luck playing that though... maybe if you cut it out and blew it up a few times with the copier to cd size..... Or would that be violating the DMCA?
Unfortunately the government-mandated identification watermarks that the photocopier is going to embed in its output will distort the image too much for that to work.
Where are you getting legal 320 CBR MP3s for $0.14 a track? Are they of bands anyone else has ever heard of?
I'm not flaming you, I'm curious. The only thing I've run into that's that cheap is Allofmp3.com, and while I like them (I'll be sad when they get shut down, or shot and their bodies dumped into a river by their financiers, whichever happens first), they're probably not "legal" in the sense that most people use that word. Although they do certainly give you a lot more plausible deniability than downloading something off of P2P. I can't imagine getting arrested for using it, since it looks like (and probably is, under somebody's law) a totally legitimate site.
Anyway, back to the present. A simple, welcome solution, would be to just show the names of applications in bold text. That would be helpful to power user and novice alike, and it would probably also look good.
I like it. Good idea.
While we're at it, maybe they can give us back our aliases in italics at the same time; that was a nice 'no brainer' feature if I ever saw one.
That will probably go over better with application developers than some sort of visual indicator on the application's icon that would mess up their pretty custom look. Bolded text is definitely the better way to go.
Oh, and the most obvious thing, you'd have to also look for the resource fork's Type code that's used on Carbon apps, and flag it as executable if the Type was APPL.
(See my other comments in this discussion -- this is how MP3Concept works, and the Type code is the traditional, pre-OSX Mac analog to the UNIX eXecute bit or the Windows/DOS file extension.)
If you choose "View as List" in the finder (equivalent to the Detail view in Windows), and then expand the window so that you can see the "Kind" column, the Finder will tell you the kind of file you're looking at. For example, Application, Picture, Document, etc.
The Finder looks at some stuff which is not visible to the user in determining this -- in addition to the ".app" file extension on Cocoa bundles, there are also the traditional Mac 'Type' and 'Creator' codes, stored in the file metadata in the resource fork. By setting a file's Type to "APPL," it becomes an executable. This is the traditional Macintosh analog to the UNIX eXecute bit (but arguably more flexible, since it also handles file typing), and is totally independent of the file name. But anything that you set this way will be clearly marked as an Application in List View, regardless of what you name it, or what kind of custom icon it has.
This is how the MP3Concept trojan worked, and how many old-school ResEdit tricks worked. You can have something that's legitimately named "Mp3Concept.mp3" and looks like an MP3 but is really an executable, by setting the Type and custom icons correctly. It's nothing new, people have been doing it for years. (There were a lot of ResEdit "hacks" that worked off of this principle -- for example, creating a dummy Excel document that gave a rude dialog when double-clicked.) I think it's because we've migrated away from OS 9 and the metadata concepts that people have forgotten how easy it is to do, and that the Mac still supports it.
Um, I'm admittedly not looking at my OS X box right now, but unless this change was made in the 10.4.4 update (the one released just in the past few days via Software Update), the ".app" extension is hidden on most Applications, at least with the general "hide extensions" preference turned on in the Finder.
The MP3Concept trojan didn't disguise itself because the Finder was hiding the ".app" extension, anyway. It's filename really was "MP3Concept.mp3". If you had gone in and looked at it via the Terminal, that's what you would have seen.
It was an executable because of the way its metadata was set: it had a "type" of APPL, for application, thus it would execute when double-clicked. The icon came because the creator had simply given the iTunes MP3 file icon as the application bundle's custom icon resource (this is the same way a legitimage application sets itself to a custom icon). It wasn't being assigned automatically by the Finder or anything else. This type of exploit isn't really new, it would have worked just as well on MacOS9 (and probably even better); back in the day there were lots of dumb little tricks that you could do to take advantage of the same thing (you could make small applications that put up rude dialog boxes, for instance, and disguise them as documents).
And (as screenshots on the link below show), if you had looked at the MP3Concept.mp3 file in the Finder's list view, it would be correctly reported as an Application, not a Document. (Because the Finder looks at the file metadata in addition to the filename, when determining what it is.)
Without appending ".app" to the end of every Carbon application out there still in use, which in some cases might cause problems, and then not letting the user turn off the displaying of extensions (which would piss off a lot of longtime Mac users), I don't think there's really any way to prevent this. I find the change you're saying Apple made somewhat doubtful, although I'm open to any evidence you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Neato. Sounds a lot like this really great planetarium I had installed a while back.
I'll demo it for you tonight.
Well you can check the link to be sure -- the only thing that struck me about that IBM box is that it has a pretty nice graphics card, although I don't think it's the NVidia one that you're thinking it is.
3 &p=4e s_wildcat_realizm_8009 3
It's the "3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 800" which is apparently a dual-GPU, PCI Express monster of a card (640MB RAM) that takes at least 2, if not 3, card slots because of its thickness [2], and is designed to either drive two monitors independently or drive a stereoscopic system. Still, it only lists separately for about $2k, so it doesn't go that far in justifying the Intellistation's price tag. Plus at least according to Anandtech [1], it's outperformed by the NVidia Quadro 4400. So it's not even the ultimate top of the line (according to them). The only really special thing I've seen about it is that it does video genlock, so you can use an external "house clock" source if you were working with digital video. [3] However that doesn't really mesh with the application for a big IBM workstation, at least that I've ever seen. But what do I know.
If anyone wants to offer a good explanation of why the IBM Opteron workstations cost so much, except for the three letters on the front, I'm curious. But I sure as hell can't figure it out.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=238
[2] http://www.computerarts.co.uk/news/3dlabs_unleash
[3] http://www.3dlabs.com/products/product.asp?prod=2
It has an aftermarket FPU upgrade installed, I think. I'm not the original owner of the machine, but it came to me from a guy who had it pretty well tweaked out in other respects (it has an AC-powered blower that sits in the 'handle' part of the top and down the back and sounds like a jet engine when it starts up, plus an external 40MB FD-HD). My assumption is that it has a aftermarket FPU installed. I don't have the case-cracking tool to look in there and check (and I'm several hundred miles away right now), but that's the only explanation I can offer. There were quite a lot of upgrades like that -- they either clipped onto the processor itself or went into an add-on slot. I'm not sure which way the CII was.
... I'll have to see what I can figure out. :)
Actually, now I'm a little embarrassed/intrigued not to have known what it's actually got inside it. It's been a while since I played with it
The last few times I've started it up were just to demo it for people and show them the noise it makes while starting up -- the AC blower plus the regular startup sounds, plus the big external FD-HD make an incredible racket. Those times I just booted it into the ROM disk, which is a neat feature in itself (Apple-Opt-O-X I think...). It's sort of a hard-wired recovery mode.
Congrats, you may have renewed my interest in that project. I never realized that what I was doing shouldn't have -- by all rights -- worked.
I'm a relatively new subscriber to Cedega -- I actually bought a HP workstation and installed Ubuntu for the sole purpose of running WoW under Cedega (my 400MHz Mac ain't gonna cut it) -- and I've been not unimpressed by it. I'm not going to say "wow, it's great!", but in my experience it's worked okay.
They definitely move from one "most popular" title to the next, and I've never been clear on exactly how many people they have working on it at any one time (it could be one guy, it could be 50 people, you'd not have any clue from their forums or site), but the end result works works okay for my purposes, given that WoW is really popular right now.
Getting it to work initially can be frustrating, though. I had a LOT of issues getting WoW to work (some weird mouse-clicking issue), and eventually fixed it by running with certain configuration options. Every time Blizzard puts out a new version, it's a crapshoot -- it might continue to work fine, or I might have to spend an afternoon tweaking its config files again.
Eventually I'm just going to buy a new Mac, and at that point I'll probably stop bothering with Cedega: I don't have any Windows-only games that I want to play -- I'm a one-game-at-a-time guy, and right now that game is WoW. I do appreciate that it exists though, and I might even consider continuing to support TransGaming for a while even if I wasn't actively using Cedega, just so I can keep voting for games I might be interested in playing in the future (once they reach the bargain bin at CompUSA).
It's $5 a month, and it doesn't make me feel like I'm kneeling down and sucking Microsoft's collective cock and running Windows every time I want to play a game. To me, that's worth it.
Cheney shot a lawyer?
There won't be one. We're kind of hoping he starts a trend.
World's most expensive desktop linux machine
No, I think that dubious honor belongs to this: the IBM IntelliStation A Pro. Take it home today, only $11,779.00.
And that's for a dual-Opteron system with RHEL, it's not one of the big RISC-based AIX workstations. Granted, it does come with 8GB of RAM, Ultra320 SCSI, and a ridiculous display card (3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 800).
Frankly though, I think the Mac looks cooler.
Nothing "colorful" is crusty, that's still good gear! Once the plastic starts turning yellow, then it's time to start thinking of an OS recycle.
... :)
For example, I put Linux onto my Mac Classic II
Okay, so I'm not sure that it'll ever do anything useful, other than make hot air, but it's there.
If I could find a SCSI-to-Ethernet adaptor for cheap, I suppose I could use it as a terminal client...nothing like white-on-black text on a 9" screen.
I think in retail it's a combination of brightness and contrast/color saturation. If you look at the TVs people are drooling over at Best Buy, they're often the ones that have the contrast and saturation jacked up ridiculously high, also. Sometimes to the point where flesh tones start to look really distorted, everyone looks like they're wearing a lot of blush on their cheeks and stuff. It's pretty bad.
But this same thing happens with photos. A few years ago there was a sort of "contrast war" between the makers of different high end digital minilab equipment (principally Agfa and Fuji). In order to create pictures that "look best," they each would come out with new software for the minilab system that would pre-process the digital image coming from the film scan before it went to the printer. Generally the "automatic" options (on either brand) would compress the dynamic range horribly, then proceed to drive the saturation up to almost unbelievable levels. But customers loved it because it made their vacation photos look like postcards, so what the hell. Nobody really cares about 'accuracy' in the real world -- or rather, not accuracy to the physical world or to the film, they want a product that's accurate to their memory of something, which often is nearly unrelated to reality. Give them that, and you'll get rich.
Same thing with the "bass boosters" or "sound enhancers" on low end stereos. It mucks the music up, but people think it's better that way.
The television thing is the same. People don't really want to see what the actual football field looks like, they want to see what they think the football field looks like, and that means the grass ought to be bright, hunter green, the white uniforms should be almost shiny, and the yellow lines should be just about ready to pop off the screen, walk across the room, and rip your eyeballs out. Being true to the video signal that's coming into them isn't a factor.
This is why if you want accuracy, you generally have to pay for it or expend some effort. With a photo, you have to tell the lab operator to run it though without corrections. With audio, you have to get "nearfield monitors" instead of regular consumer stereo speakers, and with televisions, it's why there are video monitors that are actually made to display what they're being fed, instead of an idealized version.
It's all about giving people what they think they want.
Huh? What are you talking about, almost every single camera on that page lists IEEE 1394.
The ones that don't have it listed probably almost all HAVE it, it's just such a standard feature that they don't bother giving it top billing anymore. It's practially assumed on anything that's MiniDV.
Many of them have, in addition to FireWire, USB connections, usually for downloading still pictures using proprietary software or drivers. It's what I would consider a completely useless feature, but it fills space on the outside of the box I guess, and apparently somebody thinks it's a good idea. I'm not sure whether you can actually download the full-quality DV stream through the USB port, but I doubt it. On the cameras I've used (mostly small Sonys) they have a built in DV-to-MPEG converter, and they put the MPEG stream out the USB port, so you can have pre-shrunk movies for email or webcam use.
Just as an example from that list, the Canon Optura 600 isn't listed as having IEEE1394 or FireWire, it just says USB 2.0. But if we go to the Amazon page for the same item, we read: "Otherwise known as Firewire or iLink, the Optura 600's IEEE 1394 DV Terminal is a high-speed digital interface that ensures virtually no loss of video or audio quality when transferring videos to a computer. Simply use a DV cable to connect the camcorder to your computer's DV Terminal and you can be sure that your favorite, recorded moments retain their pristine image and sound." Furthermore, in regards to the USB port: "Quickly transfer images from the Optura 600 to a computer with the USB 2.0 High Speed Terminal."
So basically, the USB capabilities on there are just fluff -- they're for transferring still photos that are taken onto the memory cards to your computer, and on the higher end cameras they'll sometimes do video. But the real video transport is FireWire/IEEE1394, and probably always will be for MiniDV. The whole 1394 system was designed as an interconnect for DV equipment, and I don't think you're going to get all the players in USB together and invent an alternative, with all the stuff that's already in existence.
The only exception I can think of are the DVD based camcorders down at the bottom of the page, which really aren't "DV" at all, they're MPEG2. And as you'll find out if you read some of the owner comments from people who've bought them, there isn't a particularly good way of getting the video into your PC anyway -- basically you have to rip it off the DVD.
Uh, you totally fail to understand how that conversation at Ritz Camera (or anyplace else) would go:
... I think my computer has that. That's good, right?"
Consumer: "How about that camera there? It's $499."
Salesperson: "Sure. It's not bad. But you have to be careful, it's USB."
C: "Oh
S: "USB is really for hooking up keyboards. If your computer isn't really fast, it'll drop frames, and suffer compression artifacts."
C: "Drop....frames?"
S: "It'll look bad."
C: "Oh. Well, that's not good. What else can I buy?"
S: "This one right here is only $699, and it comes with the card for your computer so you don't get dropped frames..."
I wouldn't be surprised to see mac os x to change to another OS, though. Multiple core CPUs are there and the freebsd code injected in their mach kernel is know to have had some problems (just like freebsd 5.x) WRT. scalability. Is not that freebsd will never be fixed and that 6.x is not rocking already, but damn, solaris han been opensourced and it is one of the hottest events on the OS field in the latest years...I wouldn't be surprised that apple were considering to switch their freebsd code for solaris code
Now that, I find interesting.
I'm not going to discuss the main article anymore, because it's just too painfully retarded to think about, much less read. But as long as we're out in the Land of Wild Speculation anyway, I kind of like the whole Solaris kernel + Aqua idea.
It's no secret that MacOS gets pretty thrashed by Linuxes at some DB benchmarks -- there were articles about it on Slashdot a few months ago, IIRC -- and I think most of the blame ended up getting pointed at either the kernel, or the G5 and the other hardware. Now that they've changed out the hardware for Intel stuff, it'll be interesting to see how the stats change. If it's still not as good as other commercial server platforms (e.g. Sun, RHEL), then it would start to seem more believable that they'd consider a replacement for Mach.
I wonder if anyone's run any preliminary DB benchmarks on the new Intel Macs yet.
It's a totally braindead hypothesis.
And at its core is seems to suppose that Apple WANTS to compete with Dell and Compaq. And that's what really strikes me as dumb: nobody in their right mind wants to compete in that arena. It's dead: it's low margin, it's totally saturated, and it's dominated by whoever can make the cheapest box and operate on the slimmest margins, with the most streamlined supply chain.
It's a WalMart market, in other words. That's like the absolute antithesis of everything Apple. Apple does fat profit margins on low-volume niche machines. They're a big fish in a small pond, and they do very well by it. Why they'd want to be the same small fish, in a much bigger, FAR more brutal pond, I cannot possibly understand.
IBM, one of the biggest, longest-time players in the PC arena, dumped it's PC division last year, and sold it to the Chinese. Why? Because margins were too low and demand wasn't strong enough to give them a healthy profit off of what they were selling: high quality laptops and desktops. People aren't willing to pay a premium for PCs anymore, unless you can really do something to distinguish yourself. Alienware manages to do it, but just barely (and you get a lot of people criticizing them for being expensive, too); Apple wouldn't be able to compete as just a hardware company in the commodity arena.
It's stupid to even think it. I knew Devorak was a publicity whore, but this is just retarded. Anyone who's ever taken a single business class in their life, or who even has a basic understanding of the PC market today, knows it would be a suicidal move.
Interesting. Well, that's a very different experience than I or anyone I've ever talked to has had.
... I find it hard to believe that it's not there by default. Perhaps your girlfriend or someone had hidden it right after they installed the program and then never told you about/forgot it? It's in every screenshot of iTunes, though.)
I'm going to guess that you're a Windows user. I'm making that guess because I think you'd have to be a Windows user to think it's more obvious to select something, right click, and send it to the player, than drag-and-drop it onto the iPod in the left-hand Source pane. (I'm not sure how you got that hidden by default, since it's where the Library and all the user's Playlists are kept, as well as how the iTMS and Podcasts are accessed
I guess that may be a difference between being used to a Mac, where a lot of things are accomplished with drag-and-drop, and a PC, where the mouse buttons are used heavily. But I think a lot of inexperienced people find iTunes very easy to use, in the absence of competing ingrained UI philosophies. Apple obviously makes software that follows a certain way of thinking, and I suppose if you're not used to that, or worse if you're deeply used to something different, it might not be obvious.
When you want things on an iPod, you drag and drop them there. You drag-and-drop to add to playlists, you drag-and-drop to add to a portable player, and although I've never tried it, I suspect you can drag-and-drop to play a file on a remote AirTunes device.
You are correct, though, in saying that the interface is definitely set up for having an iPod that is automatically synced to the computer's entire library, and everything is "smoother" if this is the case. However, I've seen even very novice users figure out that they can set up a dynamic playlist, drop that onto an iPod, and then have that playlist updated every time they plug the iPod in. (So you can make a shuffled playlist of 50 songs of a particular genre or something for a small-capacity iPod.) That's something that would be very difficult to do using just a regular file manager. In fact I'm not sure exactly how I'd go about doing it.
I'm not trying to be a total Apple apologist here -- there are definitely some things iTunes could do to improve its interface. (I'm not a fan of the whole brushed metal look in general, for starters.) But I can't think of any way to do what I do with it on a daily basis, without at least half a dozen separate programs (esp. the podcasting parts, which is something I always thought was too much of a PITA to use until they built it in). I'm not touting iTunes for the sake of touting iTunes, I'm doing it because I think it's a crummy situation that there's basically only one decent music manager, and it's not available for Linux. And furthermore, that it only works with one kind of portable player, and that portable player won't play OGG or FLAC files.
I think there's a market for more than one music jukebox, but I think nobody besides Apple has really done it right yet, UI gaffes nonwithstanding.
I agree.
I still think Rythmbox has a long way to go before it can hold a candle to iTunes -- and I'm not talking about DRM functions, because I don't give a hummingbird's fart about iTMS, but just regular usability stuff -- but it certainly beats the hell out of their other suggestions.
A music jukebox is one thing where I think "the UNIX way" just isn't going to agree with most people. In most other circumstances I appreciate small tools that do their job well, but a jukebox is inherently a do-everything-and-do-it-well proposition. It's that or failure. And the past is littered with music management programs that didn't succeed, or were quickly supplanted by something that did the job better. The reason we have a monoculture in the music-manager world is because everything else besides iTunes, quite frankly, sucks.
What iTunes does:
* It manages your local music, keeps it organized. (In addition to just keeping track of it, it also maintains extensive metadata, such as playcount, normalized volume level, etc.)
* Dynamic playlists.
* No-brains-required iPod syncronization AND metadata download. The sync is bidirectional: play count information and other stuff comes down from the iPod, which keeps your most played and recently played lists current. I've yet to see any other piece of software that does this correctly.
* Podcast management: including subscribing, downloading, uploading to iPod, and keeping track of which have been heard.
* Local network sharing: other computers running compatible software can access the local music library and stream music. (Yes, they've essentially broken this feature in new releases, which is too bad.)
This doesn't even touch on things like video, iTMS, and AirTunes support; it's just the featureset that I think you'd have to implement in order to have a realistic iTunes alternative. And is has to be all in one program, no halfassing things with a dozen little special purpose apps. People like iTunes because it's monolithic (some would say bloated). From a design standpoint, a UNIX person might hate it, but I think several million people have decided otherwise.
I'm following the progress of Rythmbox with interest, because I think it's come the closest so far to hitting the iTunes mark. Until other programs start figuring out that there's no shame in blatantly copying what iTunes does -- after all, it does it well and is popular for a good reason -- they're always going to be relegated to obscurity.
And people said the Slashdot effect was dead...
The fifth, iTunes, is a proprietary DRM package that it would be best to stay away from (although it too, is popular in geekdom).
/.) who have never purchased any music from iTMS and have never had to use a DRMed file. Personally I've only ever bought two, out of a total library of close to 20,000. The Music Store is not iTunes' "killer feature." Ease of use, a basically seamless interface, and tight integration with the iPod are. The new automatic features for subscribing to, downloading, and maintaining Podcasts on an iPod are going to be more important as people realize how cool a thing it is.
If you could make a program which replicated everything that iTunes does, without the iTMS or DRM functions, I think you'd do what 90% of people want.
I know a lot of iPod owners (and I'm sure there are quite a few here on
But replicating the DRM functions isn't necessarily important in terms of coming up with a free alternative to iTunes, it's replicating that useability experience and other features that is.
So, assuming they're willing to give me CDs or digital downloads for less than the price of a blank CD-R, plus the electricity required to run a computer for 10 minutes, we'll be all set.
Unfortunately, I think that might cut into their profits a little, since CD-Rs are hovering around about $0.13 USD when purchased in bulk (assuming you don't get them free with a rebate). I'm not going to do the math for the electricity for you.
Yeah, for some reason I think their definition of "reasonably priced" isn't the same as ours.
Don't you enjoy screwing your girl? (assuming you have one)
... yeah. You've gotta be new here.
You must be
You could take a picture of the CD. Good luck playing that though... maybe if you cut it out and blew it up a few times with the copier to cd size..... Or would that be violating the DMCA?
Unfortunately the government-mandated identification watermarks that the photocopier is going to embed in its output will distort the image too much for that to work.
Nice try, though.
Where are you getting legal 320 CBR MP3s for $0.14 a track? Are they of bands anyone else has ever heard of?
I'm not flaming you, I'm curious. The only thing I've run into that's that cheap is Allofmp3.com, and while I like them (I'll be sad when they get shut down, or shot and their bodies dumped into a river by their financiers, whichever happens first), they're probably not "legal" in the sense that most people use that word. Although they do certainly give you a lot more plausible deniability than downloading something off of P2P. I can't imagine getting arrested for using it, since it looks like (and probably is, under somebody's law) a totally legitimate site.
It's called "The User"
There are platforms which do not experience this flaw, however.
NeXTSTEP comes to mind....
(Apologies to anyone out there still using a Black Box.)
Anyway, back to the present. A simple, welcome solution, would be to just show the names of applications in bold text. That would be helpful to power user and novice alike, and it would probably also look good.
I like it. Good idea.
While we're at it, maybe they can give us back our aliases in italics at the same time; that was a nice 'no brainer' feature if I ever saw one.
That will probably go over better with application developers than some sort of visual indicator on the application's icon that would mess up their pretty custom look. Bolded text is definitely the better way to go.
Oh, and the most obvious thing, you'd have to also look for the resource fork's Type code that's used on Carbon apps, and flag it as executable if the Type was APPL.
(See my other comments in this discussion -- this is how MP3Concept works, and the Type code is the traditional, pre-OSX Mac analog to the UNIX eXecute bit or the Windows/DOS file extension.)
That's a totally legitimate question.
If you choose "View as List" in the finder (equivalent to the Detail view in Windows), and then expand the window so that you can see the "Kind" column, the Finder will tell you the kind of file you're looking at. For example, Application, Picture, Document, etc.
The Finder looks at some stuff which is not visible to the user in determining this -- in addition to the ".app" file extension on Cocoa bundles, there are also the traditional Mac 'Type' and 'Creator' codes, stored in the file metadata in the resource fork. By setting a file's Type to "APPL," it becomes an executable. This is the traditional Macintosh analog to the UNIX eXecute bit (but arguably more flexible, since it also handles file typing), and is totally independent of the file name. But anything that you set this way will be clearly marked as an Application in List View, regardless of what you name it, or what kind of custom icon it has.
This is how the MP3Concept trojan worked, and how many old-school ResEdit tricks worked. You can have something that's legitimately named "Mp3Concept.mp3" and looks like an MP3 but is really an executable, by setting the Type and custom icons correctly. It's nothing new, people have been doing it for years. (There were a lot of ResEdit "hacks" that worked off of this principle -- for example, creating a dummy Excel document that gave a rude dialog when double-clicked.) I think it's because we've migrated away from OS 9 and the metadata concepts that people have forgotten how easy it is to do, and that the Mac still supports it.
Um, I'm admittedly not looking at my OS X box right now, but unless this change was made in the 10.4.4 update (the one released just in the past few days via Software Update), the ".app" extension is hidden on most Applications, at least with the general "hide extensions" preference turned on in the Finder.
The MP3Concept trojan didn't disguise itself because the Finder was hiding the ".app" extension, anyway. It's filename really was "MP3Concept.mp3". If you had gone in and looked at it via the Terminal, that's what you would have seen.
It was an executable because of the way its metadata was set: it had a "type" of APPL, for application, thus it would execute when double-clicked. The icon came because the creator had simply given the iTunes MP3 file icon as the application bundle's custom icon resource (this is the same way a legitimage application sets itself to a custom icon). It wasn't being assigned automatically by the Finder or anything else. This type of exploit isn't really new, it would have worked just as well on MacOS9 (and probably even better); back in the day there were lots of dumb little tricks that you could do to take advantage of the same thing (you could make small applications that put up rude dialog boxes, for instance, and disguise them as documents).
And (as screenshots on the link below show), if you had looked at the MP3Concept.mp3 file in the Finder's list view, it would be correctly reported as an Application, not a Document. (Because the Finder looks at the file metadata in addition to the filename, when determining what it is.)
Without appending ".app" to the end of every Carbon application out there still in use, which in some cases might cause problems, and then not letting the user turn off the displaying of extensions (which would piss off a lot of longtime Mac users), I don't think there's really any way to prevent this. I find the change you're saying Apple made somewhat doubtful, although I'm open to any evidence you have.
More info on the MP3Concept trojan:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/crying_wolf