Yes, if the companies in question want to qualify as "tested and approved" by Microsoft. Using an association with a more trusted brand name costs money.
As other posters have mentioned, companies aren't prohibited from making iPod-compatible accessories if they don't pay the tax. They just don't get to use Apple's name or logo, and they don't get access to specifications that might help them release products that work better.
Lian Li's V1200 Plus represents the apex of enclosure technology to date. Lian Li is a long time favorite of computer builders, especially those who are willing to spend more so that they will get the features and design benefits of a high end product.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and other "niche" browsers render PNGs correctly, with the use of the 8-bit alpha channel. IE6, on the other hand, ONLY recognizes boolean transparency in PNGs -- in other words, it treats them like GIFs. It is possible to force IE5+ to recognize the full alpha channel, but only with the use of a Direct3D filter command.
Dude, you didn't even READ the article. The author talks more about economic theory than anything else, and his discussions on the topic are both cogent and coherent. It's not players that make economies inflate -- it's the developers not balancing the game correctly.
Taking FFXI into account, as you mention: there are crafting recipes that generate more G when the finished product is sold to an NPC, than requires to make them. With an ever-increasing money supply like that, inflation is INEVITABLE. That's the article's point, and it's NOT whining about his eBay auctions.
Doesn't sound like you've really tried iTunes at all, actually. Let's look at this paragraph:
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders.
Simple solution: drag-and-drop the files from the folder into iTunes. It's a song database, not a filesystem with automatic indexing, and it's never been touted as such.
You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them.
Or you can add the specific songs you just ripped or downloaded, instead of dropping the entire music folder again. And of course it takes forever, if you're telling iTunes to make duplicate entries.
(You can list them with the duplicate tracks tool, but I find it to be FAR too loose with its rules, for example, it thinks "Intro Theme (3:20)" and "Intro Theme (TV version) (0:30)" are the same track.)
So now you're whining because you told it to create duplicates but it's not identifying them as precisely as you'd like so you can remove them after the fact?
Meanwhile, Winamp 5 can very quickly and automatically rescan my music folder for new songs or changed tags.
Meanwhile, Winamp can't rip and burn CDs unless you pay for the functionality, doesn't provide an easy way to share songs across a network (no, shoutcast is neither easy nor simple), and you have to use third-party tools with limited features to sync with your iPod. I agree that Winamp has some advantages over iTunes, like a smaller memory footprint, but your problems with iTunes all seem to originate between the chair and your input device.
Except that most of their trademark work is done by Christensen, O'Connor, Johnson, and Kindness... another firm in the Seattle area.
(My sister did the trademark for Conker's.)
Read the damn bug yourself. (Note: copy and paste the link, Bugzilla rejects visits from Slashdot.) It is not designed to encourage bad writing: support for document.all will ONLY activate if the web developer really was stupid and did not use any sort of test to detect it.
Additional discussion can be seen from the Mozillazine article published weeks ago.
Yes, the GIMP does lots of things and does them well. But it will never, EVER replace Photoshop, Fireworks, or Paint Shop Pro until it gets a reasonable, intuitive user interface.
So what's unreasonable, you say? Things like having a separate icon in the toolbar for every single damn palette aren't reasonable. (Who knows, they might have fixed that by now, but I'm using an example.) A layer palette that hides 90% of its functions in menus not even connected to the palette isn't intuitive. The total lack of configuration options (what if I don't *want* my color palette tacked on to my toolbar? no dice!) is unreasonable. You want consumer-level features? Where's the automatic red-eye removal, the glorified-clone-brush-cum-scratch-remover? Where are the options to automatically adjust the white point, gamma, brightness and contrast? My father uses those features, and there's no way in hell he'll switch to an operating system that requires him to spend double the amount of time editing a single photo.
Like the parent poster said, there's no way any serious designer will take such an article without a ton of salt. The GIMP is simply not a replacement for serious or consumer-level work.
Never had a problem with it. Be aware, though, that if you are using it with KVM, that Win2K/XP boxes need to have access to said devices while they power up, or they won't be recognized until you reboot.
Except, my sister gave me a "deluxe" language training software package. Windows-only, of course, which defeated the idea of learning with my Powerbook. But after I installed it, I tried it for about twenty minutes before I got sick of the pathetic interface, dog-slow loading times (they do their best to prevent you from loading it on the hard drive, too) and the overall horrible audio tracks and pixelated graphics. If anyone's seen the sort of drivel produced out of Toolbook 2.0 -- along with the associated media from the time when that program was popular -- that's the sort of product my sister paid $50 for. I gave up, went online, and started doing my own searching.
My personal approach to learning Japanese isn't driven out of any specific need -- just a deep-seated curiosity (and one I've had before I'd ever played video games or watched anime, mind you.) I decided I'd learn the alphabets first, adding kanji slowly, until I could safely go purchase a few kids' books written almost entirely in hiragana and katakana. It's worked, so far. My friend is taking courses the traditional way, through a community college, and though his speaking abilities are obviously better at this stage, he's got some serious dependence on romaji.
My single greatest resource for learning the characters has been, oddly enough, the Microsoft and Apple IMEs. I used a word processor to make myself worksheets and practice writing the characters. Five minutes and 100 sheets of "appropriated" office paper later, I had a stack of worksheets to practice with that beat any of the ones I found online or as samples in books. Best of all, if I needed more practice with a specific group, I could just print more of the same worksheet whenever I wanted it.
As for online references, someone compiled a great list of them already. In particular, my favorite from that list has been Takasugi Shinji's site, written from the perspective of a linguist. It's also got a great java applet that helps you memorize the kana alphabets -- allowing you to switch fonts to get a greater familiarity with writing styles.
In short -- I've not found any particular free-as-in-beer resource for language learning, and I don't think there's likely to be any because such courses are usually subjective. Perhaps it's something MIT and OpenCourseware can tackle in the future. In the meantime, IMEs are your best friend, and try to avoid getting dependent on romaji.:)
Re:CSS is crap for layout
on
Core CSS (2nd ed.)
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yup. Wired certainly isn't a "big commercial website." Neither is ESPN, apparently. Or AOL, Inc.com, the PGA Open Championship, Sprint PCS, Phish.com, Quark.com, the U.S. Mercedes-Benz site... the list goes on. Did you even think to Google for any of the myriad discussions about all of these sites switching to a better layout -- or did you just feel like pulling generalizations like "You won't find one." out of your ass?
There are very, very few things that HTML can do, that CSS cannot -- and what's more, it's simple to design a site that works around those limitations. For every incompatibility or limitation CSS has that causes an extra five minutes of design headache, it saves fifty minutes through its simplicity.
But, who am I to tell you that? Why don't you discover it for yourself? Start here.
Moz, the latest stable version (or the beta, if it's got something I want in particular.)
Windows Services for Unix
Ports of the GNU Utilities (grep, wget, etc.)
PuTTy
Trillian
iTunes
NoteTab Light
PowerMenu
Media Player Classic
JASC Paint Shop Pro
Those keep me sane -- I still remember all of my windows commands for when I have to work on someone else's box, but it's so much more familiar to use ls and rm than dir and del now.
There are, at any given hour of the day, between 4-5k people on my server -- I've seen 7k before at peak hours after a patch, when everyone logged on to try out the new content. Multiplying 5k people by 31 servers, and you've got about 150k people online at any given time. That's easily enough to put it in the running for that chart, even if it's not in first place.
I'm aware that it's characters, rather than people, but in my experience most of the players don't have a mule, or if they do, it's shared with their friends and linkshell members. I'm sure there are the oddballs with the full amount of sixteen characters, but honestly -- anyone actually playing more than one character in that game has to be a full-time player. I'm fairly high-level, and it's taken me months to get to where I am. It's likely, therefore, that the number of subscribers is not as low as 1m/16, or even 1m/4.
Last, I'm sure someone wants to point out that I should've RTFA'd and seen their reasoning for not including FFXI -- that it's too "new." It's been out in the states since September -- is eight months really so short a time to measure impact? Methinks someone has an agenda to push.
FFXI (Final Fantasy 11): It's missing. Why? All of the million-plus players can't be in Japan. I know more people in my area that play FFXI than play the rest of these games combined, and no, they're not even on my server.
Just went to SourceForge, clicked on the 0.2.tar.gz file, and chose ibiblio for the mirror. It's half done downloading as I speak, even if it is at 4K/sec.
Panther is faster than 10.2 or 10.1, but it's still not as fast for them as 9. Not to mention that a lot of them still can't afford to buy new versions of OS X software. Students are poor.:)
Yes, Microsoft exists in the United States. The comment I was replying to was not about the DoJ's statement, but rather it was poking fun at Patty Murray for being a Microsoft shill.
Now, she very well might be (and my post makes comments to that effect), but my point was that as the representative of that part of the state, such a supportive statement is hardly out of the ordinary.
Microsoft (and a good chunk of their employees) reside in her district. Speaking as a Washington voter, she's expected to represent her constituents' interests, no?
That said, her statement does look like a lot of tripe. I've talked with her before, and it looks like something she was given to publish (by whom, I wonder?) rather than something she had one of her aides do.
Not to be a pedant, but Safari's only the default browser in Panther (10.3). 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 all use IE5/mac as the default browser. It does make sense as people upgrade to Panther, but knowing how many of my friends are sticking with their ancient G3s and not upgrading, the 'default browser' argument can't be the only cause.
Apple didn't come up with the idea behind iTunes any more than the Rhythmbox developers, this Wikipedia article explains how it is based on SoundJam MP from another company and Apple just hired the people and bought the app. I would not be terribly surprised if there was something comparable even before that.
So you're saying that even though Apple bought iTunes off some other company, the last few versions haven't offered anything new? That the only differenc between version 2 and version 4.1 is a different set of colored notes on that photorealistic icon? Get real. Just because a company purchases code from some other company doesn't mean innovation stops completely.
The "GPL != theft" part makes you sound a lot like a troll. Where did you get the idea that writing a similar app to an existing one is anything even remotely comparable to theft? It happens all the time even in the non-free software industry. More on that a little later.
Because even if imitation's the most sincere form of flattery, it's still stagnation. Open source doesn't go places when all we do is copy other companies' ideas, package it in a cruddy RPM with a terrible UI, and post it on a brand-new, shiny SourceForge page. We go places when people come up with a way to do things better. Not that there's anything wrong with copying others' technology and recreating it to be better (Hello, Samba!)--but that's QA, not creativity.
People made Aqua GTK themes because they wanted them. It hasn't much to do with what direction GNOME, KDE or the free software desktop is taking. Why not rant about Windows XP which also has this Aqua theming craze and how Microsoft just doesn't get it?
You missed the point, too. Microsoft doesn't make and sell an Aqua theme because it'd land them a copyright infringement lawsuit. People like Aqua on OS X, so they copy the look and feel for their own themes. Which is fine and dandy, but when mere reproductions represent the majority of all theming work in open-source desktop development, there's something wrong.
... there's other proprietary software such as Paint Shop Pro that is even closer to Photoshop as far as the look and feel go.
Haven't used Paint Shop Pro in awhile, have you? Download the trial version of 8, install it. Then open it and Photoshop together, and notice that Photoshop doesn't have customizable toolbars. Or that PSP's material palette is a far cry from Photoshop's color picker. The menu orders are different. The layer palettes, though offering similar functionality, are designed totally differently because PSP works with layers in a different way. Oh, and see the icon on the toolbar labeled "Pen"? Think of 80% of Illustrator inside one button, and not just a half-assed solution like Photoshop's gimped shape masks. Then look at Photoshop's PANTONE support and vast printing options. Notice the file browser (that PSP's had since version 3, and PS just got in 7.) Notice, ultimately, the fact that companies will steal ideas from each other -- and do it constantly.
Sorry, but it really pisses me off when people label PSP as Just Another Photoshop Clone. JASC doesn't just sit on their heels and let Adobe do the R&D, and since version 6, that's really been apparent. Too bad it's not open source, but it's a great product, and one that I've found worth buying time and again.
But then again, I wouldn't expect you to let small things like factual information to get in the way of making your point. We need to be thinking independently. Slicker's great, but it represents the exception rather than the rule. We need to change the rules, and start thinking on our own.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if the companies in question want to qualify as "tested and approved" by Microsoft. Using an association with a more trusted brand name costs money.
As other posters have mentioned, companies aren't prohibited from making iPod-compatible accessories if they don't pay the tax. They just don't get to use Apple's name or logo, and they don't get access to specifications that might help them release products that work better.
Now, can we do something about the other industry cartels?
You're forgetting Free as in Herpes.
Can it get any more blatant than this?
Your assertion is misleading.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and other "niche" browsers render PNGs correctly, with the use of the 8-bit alpha channel. IE6, on the other hand, ONLY recognizes boolean transparency in PNGs -- in other words, it treats them like GIFs. It is possible to force IE5+ to recognize the full alpha channel, but only with the use of a Direct3D filter command.
Mustang?
Try a Pinto.
Dude, you didn't even READ the article. The author talks more about economic theory than anything else, and his discussions on the topic are both cogent and coherent. It's not players that make economies inflate -- it's the developers not balancing the game correctly.
Taking FFXI into account, as you mention: there are crafting recipes that generate more G when the finished product is sold to an NPC, than requires to make them. With an ever-increasing money supply like that, inflation is INEVITABLE. That's the article's point, and it's NOT whining about his eBay auctions.
Exercising "fair use" does not make you immune from prosecution. Repeat after me: fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement.
Doesn't sound like you've really tried iTunes at all, actually. Let's look at this paragraph:
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders.
Simple solution: drag-and-drop the files from the folder into iTunes. It's a song database, not a filesystem with automatic indexing, and it's never been touted as such.
You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them.
Or you can add the specific songs you just ripped or downloaded, instead of dropping the entire music folder again. And of course it takes forever, if you're telling iTunes to make duplicate entries.
(You can list them with the duplicate tracks tool, but I find it to be FAR too loose with its rules, for example, it thinks "Intro Theme (3:20)" and "Intro Theme (TV version) (0:30)" are the same track.)
So now you're whining because you told it to create duplicates but it's not identifying them as precisely as you'd like so you can remove them after the fact?
Meanwhile, Winamp 5 can very quickly and automatically rescan my music folder for new songs or changed tags.
Meanwhile, Winamp can't rip and burn CDs unless you pay for the functionality, doesn't provide an easy way to share songs across a network (no, shoutcast is neither easy nor simple), and you have to use third-party tools with limited features to sync with your iPod. I agree that Winamp has some advantages over iTunes, like a smaller memory footprint, but your problems with iTunes all seem to originate between the chair and your input device.
Except that most of their trademark work is done by Christensen, O'Connor, Johnson, and Kindness ... another firm in the Seattle area.
(My sister did the trademark for Conker's.)
Read the damn bug yourself. (Note: copy and paste the link, Bugzilla rejects visits from Slashdot.) It is not designed to encourage bad writing: support for document.all will ONLY activate if the web developer really was stupid and did not use any sort of test to detect it.
Additional discussion can be seen from the Mozillazine article published weeks ago.
Thank you!
Yes, the GIMP does lots of things and does them well. But it will never, EVER replace Photoshop, Fireworks, or Paint Shop Pro until it gets a reasonable, intuitive user interface.
So what's unreasonable, you say? Things like having a separate icon in the toolbar for every single damn palette aren't reasonable. (Who knows, they might have fixed that by now, but I'm using an example.) A layer palette that hides 90% of its functions in menus not even connected to the palette isn't intuitive. The total lack of configuration options (what if I don't *want* my color palette tacked on to my toolbar? no dice!) is unreasonable. You want consumer-level features? Where's the automatic red-eye removal, the glorified-clone-brush-cum-scratch-remover? Where are the options to automatically adjust the white point, gamma, brightness and contrast? My father uses those features, and there's no way in hell he'll switch to an operating system that requires him to spend double the amount of time editing a single photo.
Like the parent poster said, there's no way any serious designer will take such an article without a ton of salt. The GIMP is simply not a replacement for serious or consumer-level work.
... and works just fine: IOGear's PS2-USB adapter
Never had a problem with it. Be aware, though, that if you are using it with KVM, that Win2K/XP boxes need to have access to said devices while they power up, or they won't be recognized until you reboot.
Except, my sister gave me a "deluxe" language training software package. Windows-only, of course, which defeated the idea of learning with my Powerbook. But after I installed it, I tried it for about twenty minutes before I got sick of the pathetic interface, dog-slow loading times (they do their best to prevent you from loading it on the hard drive, too) and the overall horrible audio tracks and pixelated graphics. If anyone's seen the sort of drivel produced out of Toolbook 2.0 -- along with the associated media from the time when that program was popular -- that's the sort of product my sister paid $50 for. I gave up, went online, and started doing my own searching.
My personal approach to learning Japanese isn't driven out of any specific need -- just a deep-seated curiosity (and one I've had before I'd ever played video games or watched anime, mind you.) I decided I'd learn the alphabets first, adding kanji slowly, until I could safely go purchase a few kids' books written almost entirely in hiragana and katakana. It's worked, so far. My friend is taking courses the traditional way, through a community college, and though his speaking abilities are obviously better at this stage, he's got some serious dependence on romaji.
My single greatest resource for learning the characters has been, oddly enough, the Microsoft and Apple IMEs. I used a word processor to make myself worksheets and practice writing the characters. Five minutes and 100 sheets of "appropriated" office paper later, I had a stack of worksheets to practice with that beat any of the ones I found online or as samples in books. Best of all, if I needed more practice with a specific group, I could just print more of the same worksheet whenever I wanted it.
As for online references, someone compiled a great list of them already. In particular, my favorite from that list has been Takasugi Shinji's site, written from the perspective of a linguist. It's also got a great java applet that helps you memorize the kana alphabets -- allowing you to switch fonts to get a greater familiarity with writing styles.
In short -- I've not found any particular free-as-in-beer resource for language learning, and I don't think there's likely to be any because such courses are usually subjective. Perhaps it's something MIT and OpenCourseware can tackle in the future. In the meantime, IMEs are your best friend, and try to avoid getting dependent on romaji. :)
Yup. Wired certainly isn't a "big commercial website." Neither is ESPN, apparently. Or AOL, Inc.com, the PGA Open Championship, Sprint PCS, Phish.com, Quark.com, the U.S. Mercedes-Benz site ... the list goes on. Did you even think to Google for any of the myriad discussions about all of these sites switching to a better layout -- or did you just feel like pulling generalizations like "You won't find one." out of your ass?
There are very, very few things that HTML can do, that CSS cannot -- and what's more, it's simple to design a site that works around those limitations. For every incompatibility or limitation CSS has that causes an extra five minutes of design headache, it saves fifty minutes through its simplicity.
But, who am I to tell you that? Why don't you discover it for yourself? Start here.
Those keep me sane -- I still remember all of my windows commands for when I have to work on someone else's box, but it's so much more familiar to use ls and rm than dir and del now.
There are other factors, too:
FFXI (Final Fantasy 11): It's missing. Why? All of the million-plus players can't be in Japan. I know more people in my area that play FFXI than play the rest of these games combined, and no, they're not even on my server.
Just went to SourceForge, clicked on the 0.2 .tar.gz file, and chose ibiblio for the mirror. It's half done downloading as I speak, even if it is at 4K/sec.
Panther is faster than 10.2 or 10.1, but it's still not as fast for them as 9. Not to mention that a lot of them still can't afford to buy new versions of OS X software. Students are poor. :)
Yes, Microsoft exists in the United States. The comment I was replying to was not about the DoJ's statement, but rather it was poking fun at Patty Murray for being a Microsoft shill.
Now, she very well might be (and my post makes comments to that effect), but my point was that as the representative of that part of the state, such a supportive statement is hardly out of the ordinary.
Microsoft (and a good chunk of their employees) reside in her district. Speaking as a Washington voter, she's expected to represent her constituents' interests, no?
That said, her statement does look like a lot of tripe. I've talked with her before, and it looks like something she was given to publish (by whom, I wonder?) rather than something she had one of her aides do.
Not to be a pedant, but Safari's only the default browser in Panther (10.3). 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 all use IE5/mac as the default browser. It does make sense as people upgrade to Panther, but knowing how many of my friends are sticking with their ancient G3s and not upgrading, the 'default browser' argument can't be the only cause.
Apple didn't come up with the idea behind iTunes any more than the Rhythmbox developers, this Wikipedia article explains how it is based on SoundJam MP from another company and Apple just hired the people and bought the app. I would not be terribly surprised if there was something comparable even before that.
So you're saying that even though Apple bought iTunes off some other company, the last few versions haven't offered anything new? That the only differenc between version 2 and version 4.1 is a different set of colored notes on that photorealistic icon? Get real. Just because a company purchases code from some other company doesn't mean innovation stops completely.
The "GPL != theft" part makes you sound a lot like a troll. Where did you get the idea that writing a similar app to an existing one is anything even remotely comparable to theft? It happens all the time even in the non-free software industry. More on that a little later.
Because even if imitation's the most sincere form of flattery, it's still stagnation. Open source doesn't go places when all we do is copy other companies' ideas, package it in a cruddy RPM with a terrible UI, and post it on a brand-new, shiny SourceForge page. We go places when people come up with a way to do things better. Not that there's anything wrong with copying others' technology and recreating it to be better (Hello, Samba!)--but that's QA, not creativity.
People made Aqua GTK themes because they wanted them. It hasn't much to do with what direction GNOME, KDE or the free software desktop is taking. Why not rant about Windows XP which also has this Aqua theming craze and how Microsoft just doesn't get it?
You missed the point, too. Microsoft doesn't make and sell an Aqua theme because it'd land them a copyright infringement lawsuit. People like Aqua on OS X, so they copy the look and feel for their own themes. Which is fine and dandy, but when mere reproductions represent the majority of all theming work in open-source desktop development, there's something wrong.
Haven't used Paint Shop Pro in awhile, have you? Download the trial version of 8, install it. Then open it and Photoshop together, and notice that Photoshop doesn't have customizable toolbars. Or that PSP's material palette is a far cry from Photoshop's color picker. The menu orders are different. The layer palettes, though offering similar functionality, are designed totally differently because PSP works with layers in a different way. Oh, and see the icon on the toolbar labeled "Pen"? Think of 80% of Illustrator inside one button, and not just a half-assed solution like Photoshop's gimped shape masks. Then look at Photoshop's PANTONE support and vast printing options. Notice the file browser (that PSP's had since version 3, and PS just got in 7.) Notice, ultimately, the fact that companies will steal ideas from each other -- and do it constantly.
Sorry, but it really pisses me off when people label PSP as Just Another Photoshop Clone. JASC doesn't just sit on their heels and let Adobe do the R&D, and since version 6, that's really been apparent. Too bad it's not open source, but it's a great product, and one that I've found worth buying time and again.
But then again, I wouldn't expect you to let small things like factual information to get in the way of making your point. We need to be thinking independently. Slicker's great, but it represents the exception rather than the rule. We need to change the rules, and start thinking on our own.
Had a similar problem with my 12" AlBook, but a call to AppleCare told me I could probably fix it myself by resetting the PRAM. Instructions.
You can also try resetting the PMU.