A majority of cycles are wasted with the user sitting there..
What the hell does everyone need a 1Ghz or 2Ghz spec'd machine for? It produces tons of heat, typically noise too and eats up tons of electric with that huge power supply you all want...
Because nobody is offering up a 500MHz system that can do in 4 idle seconds what I want done in 1 immediate second. You could just as well argue that the majority of a car's time is spent idle or off, and that the user hardly ever redlines it, so why not stick in a smaller engine? The problem being that no amount of hours it spends sitting in the parking lot will turn my hour commute into a 1 second commute. Computers are over-engineered in just the same way to accommodate what is the common "burst" usage.
A low-end machine alone is not a solution. The promise of a thin client was supposed to allow a basic system to also meet the needs when burst processing, but it never got any commercial traction. The big hurdle was having a network of machines to serve the client requests, the logistics of which usually made standard desktops about as cost effective. There are even things that could be done today to "average out" CPU usage on a single computer, but the economics just don't support them. Could you relieve some CPU burden by pre-decoding an MP3 and just streaming raw audio data? Sure, but how often do you know what will be listened to far in advance, and what kind of trade-off is 10x the disk space for less than 10% of the CPU?
The same thing applies to all sorts of other non-CPU-bound tasks. At some point, they just all add up and overwhelm a 2GHz CPU, to say nothing of a 500MHz or less CPU. Unless you can devise a system that essentially caches very well, thus providing an illusion of faster processing, you're going to have usability issues. Yes, the CPU is sitting idle 90% of the time, but you need to also realize that what humans remember is the all the time we have to sit and wait and wait and wait for the computer. They wait for all sorts of things, too, and not just the CPU. Just throwing an underpowered CPU at them isn't going to help.
. . . came factory installed, you insensitive clod! Even handles two processors. Yet another $200+ feature that never seems to get factored in when people compare platforms.
I like this idea - I dont really care if Segway is the best method but its great that researchers (and hobbiests if the price goes down) can use a simple building block.
Exactly how is a Segway a simple building block compared to any other electric scooter that costs an order of magnitude less?
Re:Core Data = good idea, weak storage
on
Tiger Early Start Kit
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why not an odbc/ado/adsi type of interface that will allow the use of any persistence mechanism?
It's called setting a reasonable goal for version 1.0. SQLite is an excellent, public domain database that works on a local file and requires no server. It directly fits in as a persistence mechanism with Apple's document-based architecture. Hell, even I saw the potential years ago when I started development of STEnterprise. If Apple picks up the ball, then I say "Great". If they go on to extend it to meet the enterprise void they left when they stuffed EOF into WebObjects and then made it Java-only, then I say "Even better!"
Firefox already uses sheets. But sheets come out of the window, not the tab.
Then Firefox simply doesn't implement tabs as well as Safari has (in other cases). When something in a background tab wants to fly a sheet in Safari, all you get is a litlle yellow triangle "i" in the tab. The actually dialog doesn't appear until you switch to that tab. Maybe Apple will do something more security-centric to address this, but my bet is they'll just use that established behavior of sheets for handling the JavaScript. Knowing Cocoa, it's probably just one line of code to fix.
I just tried the exploit demonstration for Safari, but it did not work. The active tab switched back to the one providing the pop-up, not the target site. Did anyone else try it and have it work?
It switched back for me, too, when using tabs, but not when I opened the URL in another window. It doesn't much matter, though, because I think the point is supposed to be that the dialog could say "Citibank needs your SSN to access your account on our site" and 90% of the people would only know that they just opened the URL, so they'd assume it was related to that page. What's great for the Mac is that there is already an interface element Apple can use to address this issue: the sheet!
Now, a virus that spreads epidemically like the recent ones has, and at a given point destroys boot sectors or partition tables, now that would be funny..
If you want to be a really tricky black hat, exploit what real parasites don't have access to: a global communications network. I'm thinking that the "given point" you suggest could be something like a reverse deadman's switch; if you lose contact with the machine that infected you for more than a day, then you implode. So if someone finds they've been infected, cleaning the system runs the risk of them destroying all the systems of friends/family/whoever they screwed over by allowing the virus to propagate. Hell, make it pop up a dialog that explicitly tells the user "Hey, you've been infected with the Vampire*69 virus, so you better not run any anti-virus programs or shut your computer off." That would be a wonderfully brutal lesson.
Or just put a camera into the iPod. Or combine it all into a phone/camera/audio/video recorder/PC with 802.11 XXX, Ethernet, and Firewire capabilities and be done with it.
I see where you're going, but I'm not talking about convergence. I'm talking about a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Having an iPod + iSight camcorder is a nice modular solution, not a "jam it all together" solution. Both pieces have a distinct use outside being a camcorder, and that's exactly why it's a better solution than one device trying to do everything. There is no need to carry all that junk around if you just want to listen to music.
Jobs doesn't want to fracture market lines right now, though. And there is a huge tape/camcorder industry that, although it knows the future will be hard drive cartriges rather than tape, won't appreciate Apple jumping the gun before they can phase out their old factory lines and recoup their investment.
Fuck'em. Jobs didn't wait for Sony to get off its ass and market the next Walkman, so I don't see why he should wait for the camcorder people to get their act together. If Apple can offer something at $599 that can match or beat what that industry offers for $999, that industry needs to die, allowing everyone else to benefit from the change.
Also, there is the good ol' we're-being-robbed! "IP industry" of the MPAA and its brethren who are terrified that the video iPod will rear up soon. Don't forget, a unit that can record a video feed from a camera could also record it from any other video source... the entire DVD industry is at stake.
Fuck them, too. What I was really hoping to see with the introduction of HDTV was a tuner (or DVD player, or whatever) that just feeds DV over Firewire for capture/display by any device that can handle it. Instead, DRM popped up everywhere and is set to make this particular part of the technological revolution a complete mess. Everyone is so intent on protecting their piece the pie that they're keeping consumer from buying it! The irony being that once any single person cracks the protection, they distribute it far and wide to people who wanted to pay for it, but couldn't get the thing distributed in a user friendly way. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
Or a "we need to create documents compatable with MS Office problem". Unless you don't deal with other companies who use MS.
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, that is an edge condition, and an ill-defined one at that. Just because someone else runs a Windows infrastructure doesn't force you to do the same. Many non-proprietary formats are easily read by Word, or you can set up dedicated machines (and I'd suggest Macs) for converting things to the.doc format. You simply don't make a case here for running Windows on every desktop.
If other companies are like ours, the business often put together Access databases by themselves, without any IT control or imput (they are often badly done too, but that is another matter).
But it's not; it's the heart of the matter! If the environment is one where just anyone can use anything to throw stuff together, they shouldn't even begin to pretend they can work out a good solution for Windows malware problems. If the environment is one where the business plan does not exist outside the tools, it is in a dangerous place when it comes to long-term viability. If where you work is actually that way, you should polish your resume.
Where I work we are trying to kill Access and replace it with a server based, web-plug in architecture (Brio), but it is costly and painful. All the client side Access sutff has to be rewritten onto server reports, and it is all horrible custom MS stuff, even the SQL queries.
You're making my case for me. The business started off on the wrong foot and now you're paying for it, but in the end you'll have a stronger business instead of something that runs ad hoc at the whims of an external corporation. You'll have an asset in that, instead of an expense with a Windows core.
If we are talking about moving to Linux you have to consider the costs.
You only have to consider the difference in costs compared to keeping a Windows solution stable. A conversion is a one-time expense, and once done with everyone up to speed, it has usually been the case that non-Windows solutions have lower operating costs than all-Windows solutions.
It only takes a few people installing a few programs, or even going to the wrong websites with IE, to get their machines screwed up. Pleny of people work plenty hard, and can still manage to screw their machines up with a bit of browsing, or installing the odd piece of software that looked cool or useful (like Hotbar).
Again, you're making my case for me. For those things, they don't need IE or even Windows. If you don't give them Windows, it's that much more likely they simply won't be exposed to those exploits. Do you think we ever had to worry about people running NeXT desktops visiting a lot of questionable web sites, or how likely it was they'd find NeXT spyware on them? Most didn't even know that OmniWeb was installed or that it was a browser! People being familiar with Windows doesn't necessarily make them more productive at work.
You seem to want to ignore all the cost involved of moving, and pretend you don't have to worry about being compatable with any other companies using MS (probably true for some companies).
On the contrary. I don't want to ignore them, I specifically want to calculate them! That's not a job you leave to the IS department, either, because they're going to come back with numbers that show you need 5 MSCEs x $100,000 to maintain the corporate technology when it may well be that one smart Unix admin at $200,000 can not only put a new system in place, but can do it in a way that better and more cheaply meets the needs of the business. People always bring up costs for moving to a new system as though once that system is in place it will be an equal expense. The whole point of moving off Windows is that having to maintain the systems is costing too much! If I could shave $100,000 a year off my budget by running Linux or Mac OS X, why wouldn't I spend $200,000 right now to do it? I do plan on being in business for 2 years, right?
You must work IT for an amazingly educated company that runs almost no proprietary software.
No, I tend to work where custom software is king. However, they must understand that the software itself is not an asset, but what the software does is the real value. If doing it on something other than Windows better solves the problem, you can bet that's what we care about. It's a one-time expense to shift the desktop to another platform, which usually more than makes up for Windows-related problems that are continually hitting the bottom line.
If the owner can't figure out why the start button looks different, how exactly am I to tell him to fire himself?
Well, you could drop them as a client. It really depends what the nature of your job with them is. A good consultant sees that kind of question as a missed opportunity in training. Really, why would it be a complete surprise to them that XP does things a bit different? Why didn't you hold a small or one-on-one session to get them familiar with the changes you put in place?
Furthermore, it's not just VB - MANY companies use propreitary apps that are only available on Windows, and have been using them for years. These apps generally are very specialized, have small install bases, and tend to be a hell of a lot more picky and quirky than your average large, well-written app.
That's true of any custom software, and that's exactly why a company shouldn't get too attached to one particular tool. A properly run business cares about solving the problem they incorporated to handle, not about making sure MS (and all the third parties that release anti-malware to keep it limping along) keeps getting checks. When I see some people running business on old mainframe or even DOS programs, it always makes me shake my head. There's "don't fix it unless it's broken" and then there's "my company is a blown capacitor away from going under".
We just moved 20 insurance agents to XP Pro. They needed a wide variety of software that SIMPLY ISN'T AVAILABLE ON LINUX. If we had tried to set it up with Wine? PuLEEZE! Do you think we could've ever gotten support from the software vendor ever again? Write a Linux equivalent? Oh, I'm sorry, AFLAC doesn't have an open protocol, and this company of 20 people can't afford to pay the tens of thousands in development costs for me to reverse engineer this stuff.
I'm not sure why people keep posting stories like this; you're just making my case for me. Doing thing wrong in the first place costs you money in the long run; that isn't really news. But beyond that, you're ignoring what I said about having specialized desktops for people who have something that absolutely can't be immediately done on another platform. You have something that depends on Access or AFLAC or whatever? Then you limit the Windows box to just that stuff. For reading email or browsing the web, two big vectors of malware infection, nobody really needs Windows.
People who are ignorant about computers are frequently intimidated by them - they've normally been bitten before by things they didn't forsee, so if things aren't as expected they get worried.
But that is stupidity and not ignorance. Computer's don't "bite" people. They're dumb machines that are to be used as tools, and if they are broken it is seldom by something the user did with the keyboard and mouse. If the user doesn't understand what the Start button is, that would be ignorance. If they understand what it is but are totally thrown by a difference in appearance between XP and Win95, so much so that they have to call tech support, that is raw stupidity.
You obviously have the knowledge to tell the difference between a cosmetic difference and a problem, the vast majority of people don't.
Bullet to the head, I say! At the very least, I do not want to work with those people. A lot of people bitch about jobs being outsourced overseas, but when you look at the kind of stupidity exuded from American employees, I find it hard to blame management for looking for a better talent pool.
I don't know anything about large corporate enviroments, but I do make a living selling compuers to people, so I deal with a lot of non-expert users with computer problems. These are not stupid people, they just want their computer to do what they want it to do, while they get on with writing their book, or doing brain surgery or whatever.
Then you're selling them Macs, right? If not, you're just part of the problem. I think every OS has its own particular strength. There are very few people in this thread who have hit on things that are Windows' strengths. Without that, and with the relative certainty of getting malware and/or otherwise spending effort to keep your box clean, I just couldn't recommend Windows as first-tier desktop.
1/ It is hard to find ppl to maintain
2/ Those ppl are usually expensive to hire
Flat out lies, and you should have called them on it. Odds are they never even seriously bothered to try finding a Unix admin, or know how to compare their value with Windows admins doing the same job.
3/ Most of the staff would/could not pick up a new system
Er, so they admit their Windows admins are too stupid to learn new things? Not exactly something to be bragging about.
4/ Most, if not all, of their "already working" program have to be redone for linux
I don't know what that means. It sounds a lot like "our staff is too stupid to do portability, too". Even so, there is no reason to mass convert an entire operation from Windows to something else over night. People who really do need something that isn't immediately available on Unix can be phased over as things get made available. That should in no way prevent people who don't need Windows from using something else.
5/ Cost to retrain all staff
Retrain for what? What are these people doing at the OS level? Or maybe a better question is why the staff would be so stupid as to significantly change interface elements at the same time they change OS. I mean, if someone knows how to click an OK button at some point, they should be able to do it on Windows, Mac, Linux, or anything else, right?
6/ If say there are 1000 staff, u pissed off 500 of them, I dont think it would be easy to hire 500 professional to keep the company working not to mention the productivity of the company came to a halt while the system is switching
Why assume you're going to piss half the people off? In my experience, Windows is something that is tolerated more than loved. If you were trying to get them to give up a Mac, yeah, I could see some people getting upset. But given the headaches Windows causes (in this specific case, having to deal with malware), you should go in with the assumption that people are actually eager to try something better. And if your staff thinks they need to bring everything to a stop just to start switch over systems, that's just more evidence of their incompetence.
7/ Even if the programs are all rewritten, there can and will have loads of bugs and security issue
Are they seriously suggesting that stability and security are the strengths in Windows? Fire them.
So solving spyware problems are alot less than switching system.
Spyware is just the Windows exploit du jour. Addressing it is a short term solution. That's fine, so long as you have a long term solution as well. Smart people stop treating symptoms at some point and go looking for a cure.
Also to think if the company really does switched successfully, they wont need as much IT staff anymore since their computers are stable enough (think of losing your job).
Which is why the IS department should never have the technology vision for the company. They show every day what their abilities do to damage the company. If malware is a big problem and they can't put a system in place to cure it, management should fire them for using only Windows.
I work for a travel agency. Our Airline reservation systems doesn't work outside of windows. Nor does our accounting platform. What are we supposed to do? Move to different systems and spend thousands retraining people?
Possibly. Why does it somehow make more sense to spend the thousands on keeping malware under control instead? There is nothing about accounting or reservations that requires Windows. Hell, both were done before computers were ubiquitous. If you think about it, what does it say about your staff/company if they need Windows to get their job done? Shades of Fight Club's "The things you own end up owning you."
He's not pushing a product at all, merely pointing out that a great many applications are written in VBA and that this isnt supported on Linux. Its not an advocacy thing, merely pointing out that its not simple to convert all those programs over to Linux!
Read it again. He isn't making any specific claims about how extensively VB is used. He raises a strawman, essentially saying "Oh, no! Someone might use VB!" Unless that is the actual case, it's irrelevant. If it is the case, yes, you'd have to evaluate what being locked into VB gains you and what it costs you.
Thats allmost a troll, but I'll bite. Have you ever worked in the IT industry? With real computer users?
Probably longer than you have, User 665498.:-)
As part of instructions from the powers that be, we recently upgraded 10 machines in one of the downstairs offices to XP (from 2000). The number of calls that we got because the start button looked different was amazing! Its a familiarity thing. If something looks different, then there's no guarantee that its going to work in the same way.
OK, maybe those kinds of people shouldn't be fired; a bullet to the head seems more appropriate. What do these people do in the real world when there is a detour or a store changes its sign? Hell, my Mailboxes, Etc. drop box got converted to a UPS Store a while back and I didn't skip a beat because everything still operated the same. If your people are fretting over a surface appearance without even using the feature, I'm not sure they're fit to live let alone be employed.
Firing them is not an option - many of these people are great people who are very good at their jobs! Just because they use a computer only when they must, does that really mean they should loose their jobs??
Pretty much; welcome to the 21st century. Or maybe the solution is more obvious. Given your qualification of "when they must", it makes me wonder why those people need to use a computer at all. If they do a good job that doesn't involve computers, why force them to use a technology they are overly concerned about? Give them a less technophobic secretary or assistant who can take care of those "when they must" situations. The problem there doesn't even seem to be Windows, but rather one of giving everyone computers for no good reason and just expecting them to be more productive for it.
Lots of people have a "we need to coopererate with people in other institutions who only uses MS Word" problem.
But that is at least a real and well-defined problem, and the solution that presents itself doesn't necessarily involve having Windows on every desktop. Why should other people's dependence on Windows affect your entire technology infrastructure? You have a nice border condition that can be solved any number of ways. If your productivity is really that shot, it's beyond me why IS wouldn't take steps to give you want you need to get your job done and assign the interoperability issues to another unit.
why can't they just put in a decent 20Gb harddrive (like the iPod)
What I'm waiting for is someone (maybe Apple, maybe not) to put out a widget for connecting an iSight to an iPod. For basic home movies of the kids, something that that should sell quite well if you could package it all together at $599 or so. At the higher end, why not a camcorder that simply used an iPod mini as a "cartridge". It's only 4GB currently, but their form factor makes them a really attractive option. If the regular iPod was good enough to handle LoTR, aren't a few iPod mini (is mini the plural of mini?:-) good enough to handle my budget productions?
No it is not. There is no Microsoft Word for Linux, Open Office comes close and I love it to death but its just not ready yet.
But there is a Microsoft Word for Mac OS X. Of course, you're really just side-stepping the real issue. Nobody really has a "We need to run Word" problem (except maybe when converting that legacy format to an open format); they have a "We need to create documents" problem. Just about every place I've been that had Word widely installed, 90% of the people used it as a glorified text editor.
There is no god damned Access for Linux either. Heres a newsflash a lot of companies have database frontends that rely on Access, it may not be the best solution but it is the current system and to change it would cost thousands of dollars.
The time to complain would have been when the picked Access as their solution, not when they finally figured out that they have vendor lock-in. There are tons of other database solution they could freely choose from. But, again, you're side-stepping. Malware, especially as described for this article, is mainly a user problem. If you have a server running Access, it's unlikely such garbage will be installed on it. This in no way forces you to keep Windows for desktop systems.
Like it or Loathe it Visual Basic is used throughout many companies. Please correct me if I am wrong but do any Linux office products work with Visual Basic?
Again, you're pushing a product instead of solving a problem. Please describe how VB is used for custom development that cannot be matched by other tools. Bonus points if you've figured out you can't name lock-in with MS products any further.
These are just a few of the many examples why you couldn't just switch to Linux like that. Those are just the software factors too, forget user training, the cost of changing hardware that isn't supported to Linux etc.
Bogus excuses. I've been in environments that had users sitting in front of old NeXT boxes to run in-house apps. Why? Because it got the job done quite well, and the users were more likely to be working than dinking around on the web or with some game they downloaded (or suffering with spyware/adware). MS is the hammer some companies use as their only tool, and it's stupid.
What about thousands of pissed off users because they can't figure out why the hell the start button looks different or why text on the screen doesn't behave as expected.
Fire them. If you have to go to the Start button as a major part of getting your work done, your system for doing business is screwed up beyond whatever kind of OS you run. And I'm not sure I even understand your text FUD. How about you describe specific use cases instead of trying to sound ominous while telling your tale of woe?
I'm not trolling, I like Linux I think it is great for the home and for a hobby but its just not ready for the mainstream. Perhaps in a few years, but not today.
Linux on the desktop is always seemingly a few years away. For a general desktop, yes, that is true; it's why many geeks have switched to Mac OS X. But for specific desktops, there is no good reason you can't run something other than Windows. I mean, seriously, if you have 200 people who are screwing around on non-work enough to cause you malware headaches, they're clearly people that need to be "refocussed", and Linux probably provides all the good they need to actually do their job without all the bad that comes with crufty ol' Windows.
It may or may not be true that it is a waste of business resources to invest in Ogg Vorbis. I say that it is premature to declare that.
That's backwards. I take it you don't run a business? If you did, you'd know that it's a bigger mistake to back a losing format than it is to adopt a winning format later. I mean, if Ogg Vorbis took off at some point, what harm would there be if the iPod (and other players) supported it? Compare that to the decision to throw resources at supporting it as a 0.1% marketshare format when it may never reach 0.2%.
The market will make the call. But if it is not even offered, especially when at least some customers are asking for it, then it will never have a chance to succeed.
The old chicken/egg, eh? Ogg Vorbis supporters have to face the fact that MP3 is a "good enough" format. The problem is not technical, but purely one of marketing. I'll definitely grant you that some customers are asking for it, but I bet orders of magnitude more are asking for basic features like a longer battery life. And then you have solve the integration problem between the portable player and the desktop player. If the whole process isn't any easier than just using MP3s, why do you expect the market to decide in favor of Ogg Vorbis?
I think we can agree on what the priorities are. There's really no debate there, other than to argue that Ogg Vorbis should be on the list.
No question it should be on the list. Really, really low on the list. That's what gets a lot of fevered supporters so pissed off. They seem to think that their preferred format for compressed music is more important than it really is.
To target exclusively, yes. To attempt to include, no. And it isn't necessarily the act of a fanboy to choose a technology based on its merits.
It's the fanboy who declares that what is meritorious to them should be just as important to others. They are rabid about a choice that doesn't matter to most people. If someone came to me asking about a new computer, my response is to first ask what they want to do. The fanboy takes that opportunity to shove their favorite down their throat without listening to what the user is asking. I see the same thing from Ogg Vorbis fanatics. It's just a fucking lossy music format!
You'll get no argument from me that most people don't know or care about formats other than MP3, especially Ogg Vorbis. And I agree MP3 sounds good enough for most, if not all, buyers. And I haven't argued that lack of Ogg Vorbis support will be the demise of any player. Any player that is to be a true "iPod killer" will have to provide a package that is so compelling that everyday folks will want it over the iPod. That's always been true.
Right; we agree more than we disagree but continue to bicker about the small stuff (ah, the wonders of Slashdot!:-). I am reminded of the original "Lame" editorial that ran on Slashdot when the iPod was first released, and I pretty much agreed with it at the time because the market was so new. But Apple did their Apple thing and made it dead easy in a market where everyone else was worrying about complex things that most people didn't care about. Ogg Vorbis still falls into that category, and I don't see how people that jump in with "I'm not buying anything without it!" are helping at all.
Well, you've provided no evidence to lead me to believe they are just irrationally throwing features in so they can say "See, unlike the iPod, we also do X". In fact, the evidence I have seen suggests they try to provide what their customers ask for. As an example, DAP manufacturers typically offer frequent firmware updates to provide features customer's lobby for.
The root of that is bad market research; not exactly something to brag about. As another poster said elsewhere in the discussion, you can go and do a random survey on the street tomorrow if you want, and you'll find 99 out 100 people don't even know what Ogg Vorbis is. For those that care, yeah, it's great that a player would have support, but from a business perspective it is a brain-dead move to pour resources into a feature that the vast majority of the market doesn't care about.
Regarding your Sony example, it is just not the same thing. Sony sought to limit customer choices by not supporting MP3. Limiting customer choice can be a bad strategy, as Sony is now finding out. Most customers I know like choices. In the case of the present discussion, a DAP that offers choice about codecs is an attractive feature, at least for some customers.
OK, that's true. Not supporting MP3 is indeed a dumber move than supporting Ogg Vorbis. But to realize that means you have to realize that support for different formats have different priorities. Like I said, MP3 has #1 priority, and anything after that is a distant second. Based on players and music stores, let's call AAC and WMA as tied for second. After a pretty big gap we'll probably find the loss-less formats like WAV, AIFF, and even FLAC. After that, it's another huge gap before the fringe lossy
formats like ATRAC and Ogg Vorbis are represented, all under the "margin of error" noise level no less.
If anything, what I see is everytime Ogg Vorbis support gets raised as an issue on Slashdot, you can practically count on someone claiming that no one is interested in Ogg Vorbis, that it is a dead end technology, and basically try to make the case that it should be dropped altogether. That sounds a hell of a lot like MP3 supporters shoving their format down other people's throats.
Pointing out reality is not the action of a fanboy. As the de facto standard, MP3 doesn't need any advocates; it simply is and those who ignore it have a lot of explaining to do. Ogg Vorbis can be safely ignored, though. It's the fanboys who somehow make that format the basis for their music library and all related purchasing decisions. That's too pedantic a market for any sane business to target.
So I'll give you that support for more formats beats support for fewer formats, but you have to acknowledge that most people don't know or even care about the formats. With pretty much everything sounding good enough at 1MB/minute, other factors in a player make a much, much bigger difference in the average person's purchasing decision. Any company that neglects that will not be producing an iPod killer.
Shove it down our throats? That's a bit of an exaggeration.
Maybe. Maybe that's just how we talk about things where I come from.:-)
What I see the Ogg fans doing is just chiming in on every/. story about audio, with the "what about Ogg Vorbis/I'll only buy it if it runs Vorbis/Vorbis is technically superior/Monty is a better hax0r than you" refrain.
That's what I consider a nice throat shoving. Just because it's a grassroots effort doesn't mean it's any more polite. It can be just as bad with the Apple fanboys or the Linux zealots, too. Sometimes we all just need to take a step back and ask ourselves if we're doing more harm than good by offering unwanted advocacy. It's just a bloody music file format; we both know the general market doesn't really care beyond that. So I stand my assertion that the reason Apple got traction on ACC+Fairplay for their own offering is because they made it dead simple for people to use it and keep on not caring about the particulars of the file format. That's not a strength of Ogg Vorbis today; hell, that's not even a strength of the WMA offerings today!
Judging how a device works by pictures of its buttons is like choosing an operating system based on screen shots.
It's a reasonable method if you have sufficient experience in the domain. I mean, I may not be a car expert but if I see a picture of one with the stick shift behind the driver's seat, I'm going to call a "usability bullshit". If I've got enough experience with various interfaces for large (music) lists, I think I can make a pretty good initial judgment based on a photograph. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that a scroll wheel has beaten out scroll buttons on the desktop already, so some sort of wheel should be used on a portable device. Then all you have to do is think about how annoying it is for having to "chunk" through really long lists, leading you to drop it horizontal for continuous scrolling as a jog wheel. Apple put it all together and did some other usability tweaks, and that created a work of genius. Now all that is left is to incorporate the design back into a mouse to finally silence the losers who can't get beyond the one button default.
Hmm, maybe some folks DO care about Ogg Vorbis support in their DAPs? Enough, apparently, that manufacturers are starting to notice.
No, you got it backwards. It's clueless manufactures that don't have the skills to produce an actual iPod killer who scramble for any little thing that they can use as a checkbox item in their favor or otherwise attempt to gain geek creds. It's just a plain bad business decision; right up there with Sony not supporting MP3 on their new Walkman. The reality is that once you do anything other than MP3, you have to do it in a way that is so slick that people don't have to think about it. Contrast that with the way people who support Ogg Vorbis are continually trying to shove the format itself down everyone's throats. If they just shut up and pulled an Apple they might actually get some real world traction on the format.
I am not disregarding fair use, but as it is a defense to infringement, it would have to be infringing already just to get to that point. The issue previously was whether downloading infringed at all. If it did not, fair use would not apply; it would be superfluous.
Then perhaps I am simply not using the exact legal terminology necessary. What I know is this (cue Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer intro): I can rip CDs I own and listen to them on my computer or on my iPod, and indeed that sort of usage is the basis for billion dollar industries. So whether or not it is called backups or time shifting or space shifting or fair use doesn't matter a great deal to me. If I own or can own a copy of the work in question, the copyright holder would have to be a fool to go after me for using it in a way that does not infringe on their rights.
Maybe, but usually you don't have a right to reproduce; it's exclusive to the copyright holder for copyrighted works (17 USC 106). So your claim is inappropriate for a discussion mostly about downloading music from P2P networks, since you have no "(limited) right to copy" those works to begin with.
But that isn't really the discussion. The entire point made by blorg is that they're going after P2P user for their uploading, and there seemingly hasn't been a single case where they've gone after someone who is only downloading (naturally not by means of P2P). I was merely pointing out why that could be: because they keep a tight grip on the granting of rights to reproduce, but there can exercise no such control over those who can easily get the same content by laying down $20 at the local Best Buy.
There's very little support in statutory or case law for ripping, incidentally. While there is a theory of space shifting, and I do believe it is fair up to a point (which downloading likely exceeds), it is a very weak theory, resting entirely on the fourth factor in a normal fair use analysis.
And yet we have the aforementioned billion dollar industries. I think it is safe to say that if the RIAA or MPAA did go after anyone who had an mp3 of a CD (or DivX of a DVD) they owned, all hell would break lose. As I see it, very little matters for the owner of the media regarding how they got that rip. I mean, I just stick a CD in my computer and click on Import in iTunes; I really have no idea (wink, wink:-) what that might mean technically or how that differs from buying the same CD directly in iTunes.
A lawyer is counsel. An advisory body is a council.
Well as far reaching as the RIAA is, I'm sure they have a council of counsel to console the consul in the next nation of citizens they're trying to rape for having a backup copy of a scratched CD stored on a web server.:-/
Read the Napster case and Intellectual Reserve cases to see courts finding downloading to be infringement, using it in the manner I have just described.
Please give a good link for those that supports your claim, because I am dubious. It makes no sense to sue Napster for downloading because they weren't downloading. They were making things available to download, which is seemingly not something they acquired the rights to do. So, again, I'm fairly certain blorg got it right when he implied that downloaders/leeches weren't the ones who should be worrying, and that all those hit were uploading/sharing things they did not have the right to distribute.
The immediate difference that I see is that this is out a year earlier, even if it is still in testing.
Then you see something that isn't there, because that is the same situation that Spotlight is in. Developers already have the Tiger pre-release with Spotlight in it for "testing".
By the time spotlight comes out, google search will be searching absolutely everything on the pc and maybe they'll have a mac version too. I don't know how interested google is in supporting macs though.
It's not really about what platforms are supported, but what kind of search is supported. By allowing plug-ins from both users and vendors, Spotlight allows you to better deal with "complex" formats (e.g., mbox isn't just text, mp3 isn't just data). Maybe Google will allow that at some point, but until they do they really can't be compared with Spotlight is supposed to offer.
Slashdot Mirror
A majority of cycles are wasted with the user sitting there..
What the hell does everyone need a 1Ghz or 2Ghz spec'd machine for? It produces tons of heat, typically noise too and eats up tons of electric with that huge power supply you all want...
Because nobody is offering up a 500MHz system that can do in 4 idle seconds what I want done in 1 immediate second. You could just as well argue that the majority of a car's time is spent idle or off, and that the user hardly ever redlines it, so why not stick in a smaller engine? The problem being that no amount of hours it spends sitting in the parking lot will turn my hour commute into a 1 second commute. Computers are over-engineered in just the same way to accommodate what is the common "burst" usage.
A low-end machine alone is not a solution. The promise of a thin client was supposed to allow a basic system to also meet the needs when burst processing, but it never got any commercial traction. The big hurdle was having a network of machines to serve the client requests, the logistics of which usually made standard desktops about as cost effective. There are even things that could be done today to "average out" CPU usage on a single computer, but the economics just don't support them. Could you relieve some CPU burden by pre-decoding an MP3 and just streaming raw audio data? Sure, but how often do you know what will be listened to far in advance, and what kind of trade-off is 10x the disk space for less than 10% of the CPU?
The same thing applies to all sorts of other non-CPU-bound tasks. At some point, they just all add up and overwhelm a 2GHz CPU, to say nothing of a 500MHz or less CPU. Unless you can devise a system that essentially caches very well, thus providing an illusion of faster processing, you're going to have usability issues. Yes, the CPU is sitting idle 90% of the time, but you need to also realize that what humans remember is the all the time we have to sit and wait and wait and wait for the computer. They wait for all sorts of things, too, and not just the CPU. Just throwing an underpowered CPU at them isn't going to help.
. . . came factory installed, you insensitive clod! Even handles two processors. Yet another $200+ feature that never seems to get factored in when people compare platforms.
I like this idea - I dont really care if Segway is the best method but its great that researchers (and hobbiests if the price goes down) can use a simple building block.
Exactly how is a Segway a simple building block compared to any other electric scooter that costs an order of magnitude less?
Why not an odbc/ado/adsi type of interface that will allow the use of any persistence mechanism?
It's called setting a reasonable goal for version 1.0. SQLite is an excellent, public domain database that works on a local file and requires no server. It directly fits in as a persistence mechanism with Apple's document-based architecture. Hell, even I saw the potential years ago when I started development of STEnterprise. If Apple picks up the ball, then I say "Great". If they go on to extend it to meet the enterprise void they left when they stuffed EOF into WebObjects and then made it Java-only, then I say "Even better!"
Firefox already uses sheets. But sheets come out of the window, not the tab.
Then Firefox simply doesn't implement tabs as well as Safari has (in other cases). When something in a background tab wants to fly a sheet in Safari, all you get is a litlle yellow triangle "i" in the tab. The actually dialog doesn't appear until you switch to that tab. Maybe Apple will do something more security-centric to address this, but my bet is they'll just use that established behavior of sheets for handling the JavaScript. Knowing Cocoa, it's probably just one line of code to fix.
I just tried the exploit demonstration for Safari, but it did not work. The active tab switched back to the one providing the pop-up, not the target site. Did anyone else try it and have it work?
It switched back for me, too, when using tabs, but not when I opened the URL in another window. It doesn't much matter, though, because I think the point is supposed to be that the dialog could say "Citibank needs your SSN to access your account on our site" and 90% of the people would only know that they just opened the URL, so they'd assume it was related to that page. What's great for the Mac is that there is already an interface element Apple can use to address this issue: the sheet!
Now, a virus that spreads epidemically like the recent ones has, and at a given point destroys boot sectors or partition tables, now that would be funny..
If you want to be a really tricky black hat, exploit what real parasites don't have access to: a global communications network. I'm thinking that the "given point" you suggest could be something like a reverse deadman's switch; if you lose contact with the machine that infected you for more than a day, then you implode. So if someone finds they've been infected, cleaning the system runs the risk of them destroying all the systems of friends/family/whoever they screwed over by allowing the virus to propagate. Hell, make it pop up a dialog that explicitly tells the user "Hey, you've been infected with the Vampire*69 virus, so you better not run any anti-virus programs or shut your computer off." That would be a wonderfully brutal lesson.
Or just put a camera into the iPod. Or combine it all into a phone/camera/audio/video recorder/PC with 802.11 XXX, Ethernet, and Firewire capabilities and be done with it.
I see where you're going, but I'm not talking about convergence. I'm talking about a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Having an iPod + iSight camcorder is a nice modular solution, not a "jam it all together" solution. Both pieces have a distinct use outside being a camcorder, and that's exactly why it's a better solution than one device trying to do everything. There is no need to carry all that junk around if you just want to listen to music.
Jobs doesn't want to fracture market lines right now, though. And there is a huge tape/camcorder industry that, although it knows the future will be hard drive cartriges rather than tape, won't appreciate Apple jumping the gun before they can phase out their old factory lines and recoup their investment.
Fuck'em. Jobs didn't wait for Sony to get off its ass and market the next Walkman, so I don't see why he should wait for the camcorder people to get their act together. If Apple can offer something at $599 that can match or beat what that industry offers for $999, that industry needs to die, allowing everyone else to benefit from the change.
Also, there is the good ol' we're-being-robbed! "IP industry" of the MPAA and its brethren who are terrified that the video iPod will rear up soon. Don't forget, a unit that can record a video feed from a camera could also record it from any other video source... the entire DVD industry is at stake.
Fuck them, too. What I was really hoping to see with the introduction of HDTV was a tuner (or DVD player, or whatever) that just feeds DV over Firewire for capture/display by any device that can handle it. Instead, DRM popped up everywhere and is set to make this particular part of the technological revolution a complete mess. Everyone is so intent on protecting their piece the pie that they're keeping consumer from buying it! The irony being that once any single person cracks the protection, they distribute it far and wide to people who wanted to pay for it, but couldn't get the thing distributed in a user friendly way. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
Or a "we need to create documents compatable with MS Office problem". Unless you don't deal with other companies who use MS.
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, that is an edge condition, and an ill-defined one at that. Just because someone else runs a Windows infrastructure doesn't force you to do the same. Many non-proprietary formats are easily read by Word, or you can set up dedicated machines (and I'd suggest Macs) for converting things to the .doc format. You simply don't make a case here for running Windows on every desktop.
If other companies are like ours, the business often put together Access databases by themselves, without any IT control or imput (they are often badly done too, but that is another matter).
But it's not; it's the heart of the matter! If the environment is one where just anyone can use anything to throw stuff together, they shouldn't even begin to pretend they can work out a good solution for Windows malware problems. If the environment is one where the business plan does not exist outside the tools, it is in a dangerous place when it comes to long-term viability. If where you work is actually that way, you should polish your resume.
Where I work we are trying to kill Access and replace it with a server based, web-plug in architecture (Brio), but it is costly and painful. All the client side Access sutff has to be rewritten onto server reports, and it is all horrible custom MS stuff, even the SQL queries.
You're making my case for me. The business started off on the wrong foot and now you're paying for it, but in the end you'll have a stronger business instead of something that runs ad hoc at the whims of an external corporation. You'll have an asset in that, instead of an expense with a Windows core.
If we are talking about moving to Linux you have to consider the costs.
You only have to consider the difference in costs compared to keeping a Windows solution stable. A conversion is a one-time expense, and once done with everyone up to speed, it has usually been the case that non-Windows solutions have lower operating costs than all-Windows solutions.
It only takes a few people installing a few programs, or even going to the wrong websites with IE, to get their machines screwed up. Pleny of people work plenty hard, and can still manage to screw their machines up with a bit of browsing, or installing the odd piece of software that looked cool or useful (like Hotbar).
Again, you're making my case for me. For those things, they don't need IE or even Windows. If you don't give them Windows, it's that much more likely they simply won't be exposed to those exploits. Do you think we ever had to worry about people running NeXT desktops visiting a lot of questionable web sites, or how likely it was they'd find NeXT spyware on them? Most didn't even know that OmniWeb was installed or that it was a browser! People being familiar with Windows doesn't necessarily make them more productive at work.
You seem to want to ignore all the cost involved of moving, and pretend you don't have to worry about being compatable with any other companies using MS (probably true for some companies).
On the contrary. I don't want to ignore them, I specifically want to calculate them! That's not a job you leave to the IS department, either, because they're going to come back with numbers that show you need 5 MSCEs x $100,000 to maintain the corporate technology when it may well be that one smart Unix admin at $200,000 can not only put a new system in place, but can do it in a way that better and more cheaply meets the needs of the business. People always bring up costs for moving to a new system as though once that system is in place it will be an equal expense. The whole point of moving off Windows is that having to maintain the systems is costing too much! If I could shave $100,000 a year off my budget by running Linux or Mac OS X, why wouldn't I spend $200,000 right now to do it? I do plan on being in business for 2 years, right?
You must work IT for an amazingly educated company that runs almost no proprietary software.
No, I tend to work where custom software is king. However, they must understand that the software itself is not an asset, but what the software does is the real value. If doing it on something other than Windows better solves the problem, you can bet that's what we care about. It's a one-time expense to shift the desktop to another platform, which usually more than makes up for Windows-related problems that are continually hitting the bottom line.
If the owner can't figure out why the start button looks different, how exactly am I to tell him to fire himself?
Well, you could drop them as a client. It really depends what the nature of your job with them is. A good consultant sees that kind of question as a missed opportunity in training. Really, why would it be a complete surprise to them that XP does things a bit different? Why didn't you hold a small or one-on-one session to get them familiar with the changes you put in place?
Furthermore, it's not just VB - MANY companies use propreitary apps that are only available on Windows, and have been using them for years. These apps generally are very specialized, have small install bases, and tend to be a hell of a lot more picky and quirky than your average large, well-written app.
That's true of any custom software, and that's exactly why a company shouldn't get too attached to one particular tool. A properly run business cares about solving the problem they incorporated to handle, not about making sure MS (and all the third parties that release anti-malware to keep it limping along) keeps getting checks. When I see some people running business on old mainframe or even DOS programs, it always makes me shake my head. There's "don't fix it unless it's broken" and then there's "my company is a blown capacitor away from going under".
We just moved 20 insurance agents to XP Pro. They needed a wide variety of software that SIMPLY ISN'T AVAILABLE ON LINUX. If we had tried to set it up with Wine? PuLEEZE! Do you think we could've ever gotten support from the software vendor ever again? Write a Linux equivalent? Oh, I'm sorry, AFLAC doesn't have an open protocol, and this company of 20 people can't afford to pay the tens of thousands in development costs for me to reverse engineer this stuff.
I'm not sure why people keep posting stories like this; you're just making my case for me. Doing thing wrong in the first place costs you money in the long run; that isn't really news. But beyond that, you're ignoring what I said about having specialized desktops for people who have something that absolutely can't be immediately done on another platform. You have something that depends on Access or AFLAC or whatever? Then you limit the Windows box to just that stuff. For reading email or browsing the web, two big vectors of malware infection, nobody really needs Windows.
People who are ignorant about computers are frequently intimidated by them - they've normally been bitten before by things they didn't forsee, so if things aren't as expected they get worried.
But that is stupidity and not ignorance. Computer's don't "bite" people. They're dumb machines that are to be used as tools, and if they are broken it is seldom by something the user did with the keyboard and mouse. If the user doesn't understand what the Start button is, that would be ignorance. If they understand what it is but are totally thrown by a difference in appearance between XP and Win95, so much so that they have to call tech support, that is raw stupidity.
You obviously have the knowledge to tell the difference between a cosmetic difference and a problem, the vast majority of people don't.
Bullet to the head, I say! At the very least, I do not want to work with those people. A lot of people bitch about jobs being outsourced overseas, but when you look at the kind of stupidity exuded from American employees, I find it hard to blame management for looking for a better talent pool.
I don't know anything about large corporate enviroments, but I do make a living selling compuers to people, so I deal with a lot of non-expert users with computer problems. These are not stupid people, they just want their computer to do what they want it to do, while they get on with writing their book, or doing brain surgery or whatever.
Then you're selling them Macs, right? If not, you're just part of the problem. I think every OS has its own particular strength. There are very few people in this thread who have hit on things that are Windows' strengths. Without that, and with the relative certainty of getting malware and/or otherwise spending effort to keep your box clean, I just couldn't recommend Windows as first-tier desktop.
1/ It is hard to find ppl to maintain
2/ Those ppl are usually expensive to hire
Flat out lies, and you should have called them on it. Odds are they never even seriously bothered to try finding a Unix admin, or know how to compare their value with Windows admins doing the same job.
3/ Most of the staff would/could not pick up a new system
Er, so they admit their Windows admins are too stupid to learn new things? Not exactly something to be bragging about.
4/ Most, if not all, of their "already working" program have to be redone for linux
I don't know what that means. It sounds a lot like "our staff is too stupid to do portability, too". Even so, there is no reason to mass convert an entire operation from Windows to something else over night. People who really do need something that isn't immediately available on Unix can be phased over as things get made available. That should in no way prevent people who don't need Windows from using something else.
5/ Cost to retrain all staff
Retrain for what? What are these people doing at the OS level? Or maybe a better question is why the staff would be so stupid as to significantly change interface elements at the same time they change OS. I mean, if someone knows how to click an OK button at some point, they should be able to do it on Windows, Mac, Linux, or anything else, right?
6/ If say there are 1000 staff, u pissed off 500 of them, I dont think it would be easy to hire 500 professional to keep the company working not to mention the productivity of the company came to a halt while the system is switching
Why assume you're going to piss half the people off? In my experience, Windows is something that is tolerated more than loved. If you were trying to get them to give up a Mac, yeah, I could see some people getting upset. But given the headaches Windows causes (in this specific case, having to deal with malware), you should go in with the assumption that people are actually eager to try something better. And if your staff thinks they need to bring everything to a stop just to start switch over systems, that's just more evidence of their incompetence.
7/ Even if the programs are all rewritten, there can and will have loads of bugs and security issue
Are they seriously suggesting that stability and security are the strengths in Windows? Fire them.
So solving spyware problems are alot less than switching system.
Spyware is just the Windows exploit du jour. Addressing it is a short term solution. That's fine, so long as you have a long term solution as well. Smart people stop treating symptoms at some point and go looking for a cure.
Also to think if the company really does switched successfully, they wont need as much IT staff anymore since their computers are stable enough (think of losing your job).
Which is why the IS department should never have the technology vision for the company. They show every day what their abilities do to damage the company. If malware is a big problem and they can't put a system in place to cure it, management should fire them for using only Windows.
I work for a travel agency. Our Airline reservation systems doesn't work outside of windows. Nor does our accounting platform. What are we supposed to do? Move to different systems and spend thousands retraining people?
Possibly. Why does it somehow make more sense to spend the thousands on keeping malware under control instead? There is nothing about accounting or reservations that requires Windows. Hell, both were done before computers were ubiquitous. If you think about it, what does it say about your staff/company if they need Windows to get their job done? Shades of Fight Club's "The things you own end up owning you."
He's not pushing a product at all, merely pointing out that a great many applications are written in VBA and that this isnt supported on Linux. Its not an advocacy thing, merely pointing out that its not simple to convert all those programs over to Linux!
Read it again. He isn't making any specific claims about how extensively VB is used. He raises a strawman, essentially saying "Oh, no! Someone might use VB!" Unless that is the actual case, it's irrelevant. If it is the case, yes, you'd have to evaluate what being locked into VB gains you and what it costs you.
Thats allmost a troll, but I'll bite. Have you ever worked in the IT industry? With real computer users?
Probably longer than you have, User 665498. :-)
As part of instructions from the powers that be, we recently upgraded 10 machines in one of the downstairs offices to XP (from 2000). The number of calls that we got because the start button looked different was amazing! Its a familiarity thing. If something looks different, then there's no guarantee that its going to work in the same way.
OK, maybe those kinds of people shouldn't be fired; a bullet to the head seems more appropriate. What do these people do in the real world when there is a detour or a store changes its sign? Hell, my Mailboxes, Etc. drop box got converted to a UPS Store a while back and I didn't skip a beat because everything still operated the same. If your people are fretting over a surface appearance without even using the feature, I'm not sure they're fit to live let alone be employed.
Firing them is not an option - many of these people are great people who are very good at their jobs! Just because they use a computer only when they must, does that really mean they should loose their jobs??
Pretty much; welcome to the 21st century. Or maybe the solution is more obvious. Given your qualification of "when they must", it makes me wonder why those people need to use a computer at all. If they do a good job that doesn't involve computers, why force them to use a technology they are overly concerned about? Give them a less technophobic secretary or assistant who can take care of those "when they must" situations. The problem there doesn't even seem to be Windows, but rather one of giving everyone computers for no good reason and just expecting them to be more productive for it.
Lots of people have a "we need to coopererate with people in other institutions who only uses MS Word" problem.
But that is at least a real and well-defined problem, and the solution that presents itself doesn't necessarily involve having Windows on every desktop. Why should other people's dependence on Windows affect your entire technology infrastructure? You have a nice border condition that can be solved any number of ways. If your productivity is really that shot, it's beyond me why IS wouldn't take steps to give you want you need to get your job done and assign the interoperability issues to another unit.
why can't they just put in a decent 20Gb harddrive (like the iPod)
What I'm waiting for is someone (maybe Apple, maybe not) to put out a widget for connecting an iSight to an iPod. For basic home movies of the kids, something that that should sell quite well if you could package it all together at $599 or so. At the higher end, why not a camcorder that simply used an iPod mini as a "cartridge". It's only 4GB currently, but their form factor makes them a really attractive option. If the regular iPod was good enough to handle LoTR, aren't a few iPod mini (is mini the plural of mini? :-) good enough to handle my budget productions?
No it is not. There is no Microsoft Word for Linux, Open Office comes close and I love it to death but its just not ready yet.
But there is a Microsoft Word for Mac OS X. Of course, you're really just side-stepping the real issue. Nobody really has a "We need to run Word" problem (except maybe when converting that legacy format to an open format); they have a "We need to create documents" problem. Just about every place I've been that had Word widely installed, 90% of the people used it as a glorified text editor.
There is no god damned Access for Linux either. Heres a newsflash a lot of companies have database frontends that rely on Access, it may not be the best solution but it is the current system and to change it would cost thousands of dollars.
The time to complain would have been when the picked Access as their solution, not when they finally figured out that they have vendor lock-in. There are tons of other database solution they could freely choose from. But, again, you're side-stepping. Malware, especially as described for this article, is mainly a user problem. If you have a server running Access, it's unlikely such garbage will be installed on it. This in no way forces you to keep Windows for desktop systems.
Like it or Loathe it Visual Basic is used throughout many companies. Please correct me if I am wrong but do any Linux office products work with Visual Basic?
Again, you're pushing a product instead of solving a problem. Please describe how VB is used for custom development that cannot be matched by other tools. Bonus points if you've figured out you can't name lock-in with MS products any further.
These are just a few of the many examples why you couldn't just switch to Linux like that. Those are just the software factors too, forget user training, the cost of changing hardware that isn't supported to Linux etc.
Bogus excuses. I've been in environments that had users sitting in front of old NeXT boxes to run in-house apps. Why? Because it got the job done quite well, and the users were more likely to be working than dinking around on the web or with some game they downloaded (or suffering with spyware/adware). MS is the hammer some companies use as their only tool, and it's stupid.
What about thousands of pissed off users because they can't figure out why the hell the start button looks different or why text on the screen doesn't behave as expected.
Fire them. If you have to go to the Start button as a major part of getting your work done, your system for doing business is screwed up beyond whatever kind of OS you run. And I'm not sure I even understand your text FUD. How about you describe specific use cases instead of trying to sound ominous while telling your tale of woe?
I'm not trolling, I like Linux I think it is great for the home and for a hobby but its just not ready for the mainstream. Perhaps in a few years, but not today.
Linux on the desktop is always seemingly a few years away. For a general desktop, yes, that is true; it's why many geeks have switched to Mac OS X. But for specific desktops, there is no good reason you can't run something other than Windows. I mean, seriously, if you have 200 people who are screwing around on non-work enough to cause you malware headaches, they're clearly people that need to be "refocussed", and Linux probably provides all the good they need to actually do their job without all the bad that comes with crufty ol' Windows.
It may or may not be true that it is a waste of business resources to invest in Ogg Vorbis. I say that it is premature to declare that.
That's backwards. I take it you don't run a business? If you did, you'd know that it's a bigger mistake to back a losing format than it is to adopt a winning format later. I mean, if Ogg Vorbis took off at some point, what harm would there be if the iPod (and other players) supported it? Compare that to the decision to throw resources at supporting it as a 0.1% marketshare format when it may never reach 0.2%.
The market will make the call. But if it is not even offered, especially when at least some customers are asking for it, then it will never have a chance to succeed.
The old chicken/egg, eh? Ogg Vorbis supporters have to face the fact that MP3 is a "good enough" format. The problem is not technical, but purely one of marketing. I'll definitely grant you that some customers are asking for it, but I bet orders of magnitude more are asking for basic features like a longer battery life. And then you have solve the integration problem between the portable player and the desktop player. If the whole process isn't any easier than just using MP3s, why do you expect the market to decide in favor of Ogg Vorbis?
I think we can agree on what the priorities are. There's really no debate there, other than to argue that Ogg Vorbis should be on the list.
No question it should be on the list. Really, really low on the list. That's what gets a lot of fevered supporters so pissed off. They seem to think that their preferred format for compressed music is more important than it really is.
To target exclusively, yes. To attempt to include, no. And it isn't necessarily the act of a fanboy to choose a technology based on its merits.
It's the fanboy who declares that what is meritorious to them should be just as important to others. They are rabid about a choice that doesn't matter to most people. If someone came to me asking about a new computer, my response is to first ask what they want to do. The fanboy takes that opportunity to shove their favorite down their throat without listening to what the user is asking. I see the same thing from Ogg Vorbis fanatics. It's just a fucking lossy music format!
You'll get no argument from me that most people don't know or care about formats other than MP3, especially Ogg Vorbis. And I agree MP3 sounds good enough for most, if not all, buyers. And I haven't argued that lack of Ogg Vorbis support will be the demise of any player. Any player that is to be a true "iPod killer" will have to provide a package that is so compelling that everyday folks will want it over the iPod. That's always been true.
Right; we agree more than we disagree but continue to bicker about the small stuff (ah, the wonders of Slashdot! :-). I am reminded of the original "Lame" editorial that ran on Slashdot when the iPod was first released, and I pretty much agreed with it at the time because the market was so new. But Apple did their Apple thing and made it dead easy in a market where everyone else was worrying about complex things that most people didn't care about. Ogg Vorbis still falls into that category, and I don't see how people that jump in with "I'm not buying anything without it!" are helping at all.
Well, you've provided no evidence to lead me to believe they are just irrationally throwing features in so they can say "See, unlike the iPod, we also do X". In fact, the evidence I have seen suggests they try to provide what their customers ask for. As an example, DAP manufacturers typically offer frequent firmware updates to provide features customer's lobby for.
The root of that is bad market research; not exactly something to brag about. As another poster said elsewhere in the discussion, you can go and do a random survey on the street tomorrow if you want, and you'll find 99 out 100 people don't even know what Ogg Vorbis is. For those that care, yeah, it's great that a player would have support, but from a business perspective it is a brain-dead move to pour resources into a feature that the vast majority of the market doesn't care about.
Regarding your Sony example, it is just not the same thing. Sony sought to limit customer choices by not supporting MP3. Limiting customer choice can be a bad strategy, as Sony is now finding out. Most customers I know like choices. In the case of the present discussion, a DAP that offers choice about codecs is an attractive feature, at least for some customers.
OK, that's true. Not supporting MP3 is indeed a dumber move than supporting Ogg Vorbis. But to realize that means you have to realize that support for different formats have different priorities. Like I said, MP3 has #1 priority, and anything after that is a distant second. Based on players and music stores, let's call AAC and WMA as tied for second. After a pretty big gap we'll probably find the loss-less formats like WAV, AIFF, and even FLAC. After that, it's another huge gap before the fringe lossy formats like ATRAC and Ogg Vorbis are represented, all under the "margin of error" noise level no less.
If anything, what I see is everytime Ogg Vorbis support gets raised as an issue on Slashdot, you can practically count on someone claiming that no one is interested in Ogg Vorbis, that it is a dead end technology, and basically try to make the case that it should be dropped altogether. That sounds a hell of a lot like MP3 supporters shoving their format down other people's throats.
Pointing out reality is not the action of a fanboy. As the de facto standard, MP3 doesn't need any advocates; it simply is and those who ignore it have a lot of explaining to do. Ogg Vorbis can be safely ignored, though. It's the fanboys who somehow make that format the basis for their music library and all related purchasing decisions. That's too pedantic a market for any sane business to target.
So I'll give you that support for more formats beats support for fewer formats, but you have to acknowledge that most people don't know or even care about the formats. With pretty much everything sounding good enough at 1MB/minute, other factors in a player make a much, much bigger difference in the average person's purchasing decision. Any company that neglects that will not be producing an iPod killer.
Shove it down our throats? That's a bit of an exaggeration.
Maybe. Maybe that's just how we talk about things where I come from. :-)
What I see the Ogg fans doing is just chiming in on every /. story about audio, with the "what about Ogg Vorbis/I'll only buy it if it runs Vorbis/Vorbis is technically superior/Monty is a better hax0r than you" refrain.
That's what I consider a nice throat shoving. Just because it's a grassroots effort doesn't mean it's any more polite. It can be just as bad with the Apple fanboys or the Linux zealots, too. Sometimes we all just need to take a step back and ask ourselves if we're doing more harm than good by offering unwanted advocacy. It's just a bloody music file format; we both know the general market doesn't really care beyond that. So I stand my assertion that the reason Apple got traction on ACC+Fairplay for their own offering is because they made it dead simple for people to use it and keep on not caring about the particulars of the file format. That's not a strength of Ogg Vorbis today; hell, that's not even a strength of the WMA offerings today!
Judging how a device works by pictures of its buttons is like choosing an operating system based on screen shots.
It's a reasonable method if you have sufficient experience in the domain. I mean, I may not be a car expert but if I see a picture of one with the stick shift behind the driver's seat, I'm going to call a "usability bullshit". If I've got enough experience with various interfaces for large (music) lists, I think I can make a pretty good initial judgment based on a photograph. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that a scroll wheel has beaten out scroll buttons on the desktop already, so some sort of wheel should be used on a portable device. Then all you have to do is think about how annoying it is for having to "chunk" through really long lists, leading you to drop it horizontal for continuous scrolling as a jog wheel. Apple put it all together and did some other usability tweaks, and that created a work of genius. Now all that is left is to incorporate the design back into a mouse to finally silence the losers who can't get beyond the one button default.
Hmm, maybe some folks DO care about Ogg Vorbis support in their DAPs? Enough, apparently, that manufacturers are starting to notice.
No, you got it backwards. It's clueless manufactures that don't have the skills to produce an actual iPod killer who scramble for any little thing that they can use as a checkbox item in their favor or otherwise attempt to gain geek creds. It's just a plain bad business decision; right up there with Sony not supporting MP3 on their new Walkman. The reality is that once you do anything other than MP3, you have to do it in a way that is so slick that people don't have to think about it. Contrast that with the way people who support Ogg Vorbis are continually trying to shove the format itself down everyone's throats. If they just shut up and pulled an Apple they might actually get some real world traction on the format.
Creative people see beyond linux vs win
. . . beyond the moon and stars . . . beyond heaven and earth . . .
. . . all the way to the land of . . . Macintosh
I am not disregarding fair use, but as it is a defense to infringement, it would have to be infringing already just to get to that point. The issue previously was whether downloading infringed at all. If it did not, fair use would not apply; it would be superfluous.
Then perhaps I am simply not using the exact legal terminology necessary. What I know is this (cue Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer intro): I can rip CDs I own and listen to them on my computer or on my iPod, and indeed that sort of usage is the basis for billion dollar industries. So whether or not it is called backups or time shifting or space shifting or fair use doesn't matter a great deal to me. If I own or can own a copy of the work in question, the copyright holder would have to be a fool to go after me for using it in a way that does not infringe on their rights.
Maybe, but usually you don't have a right to reproduce; it's exclusive to the copyright holder for copyrighted works (17 USC 106). So your claim is inappropriate for a discussion mostly about downloading music from P2P networks, since you have no "(limited) right to copy" those works to begin with.
But that isn't really the discussion. The entire point made by blorg is that they're going after P2P user for their uploading, and there seemingly hasn't been a single case where they've gone after someone who is only downloading (naturally not by means of P2P). I was merely pointing out why that could be: because they keep a tight grip on the granting of rights to reproduce, but there can exercise no such control over those who can easily get the same content by laying down $20 at the local Best Buy.
There's very little support in statutory or case law for ripping, incidentally. While there is a theory of space shifting, and I do believe it is fair up to a point (which downloading likely exceeds), it is a very weak theory, resting entirely on the fourth factor in a normal fair use analysis.
And yet we have the aforementioned billion dollar industries. I think it is safe to say that if the RIAA or MPAA did go after anyone who had an mp3 of a CD (or DivX of a DVD) they owned, all hell would break lose. As I see it, very little matters for the owner of the media regarding how they got that rip. I mean, I just stick a CD in my computer and click on Import in iTunes; I really have no idea (wink, wink :-) what that might mean technically or how that differs from buying the same CD directly in iTunes.
A lawyer is counsel. An advisory body is a council.
Well as far reaching as the RIAA is, I'm sure they have a council of counsel to console the consul in the next nation of citizens they're trying to rape for having a backup copy of a scratched CD stored on a web server. :-/
Read the Napster case and Intellectual Reserve cases to see courts finding downloading to be infringement, using it in the manner I have just described.
Please give a good link for those that supports your claim, because I am dubious. It makes no sense to sue Napster for downloading because they weren't downloading. They were making things available to download, which is seemingly not something they acquired the rights to do. So, again, I'm fairly certain blorg got it right when he implied that downloaders/leeches weren't the ones who should be worrying, and that all those hit were uploading/sharing things they did not have the right to distribute.
The immediate difference that I see is that this is out a year earlier, even if it is still in testing.
Then you see something that isn't there, because that is the same situation that Spotlight is in. Developers already have the Tiger pre-release with Spotlight in it for "testing".
By the time spotlight comes out, google search will be searching absolutely everything on the pc and maybe they'll have a mac version too. I don't know how interested google is in supporting macs though.
It's not really about what platforms are supported, but what kind of search is supported. By allowing plug-ins from both users and vendors, Spotlight allows you to better deal with "complex" formats (e.g., mbox isn't just text, mp3 isn't just data). Maybe Google will allow that at some point, but until they do they really can't be compared with Spotlight is supposed to offer.