Try going and having a picnic 10 meters past any normal airport security fences and the exact same thing will happen to you... sure there's something there but the level of security doesn't make it particularly special by itself.
Surely this is pretty good news and indicates that MS might not be so able to force these kind of security measures on their custimers.
Although I imagine knowing Microsoft, the problems were at least as much technical than political, and they just gave up considering it to be "too hard and we can't be arsed", just like WinFS.
If you're familiar at all with Apple's excellent iPhoto and iTunes, then Google for 'Lphoto' and 'Lsongs'. Just do it.. go on... no arguing - you will be SHOCKED by the blatant rip off... they have copied the apps entirely but gotten the overall idea SO wrong. Just go google it now (I had all the links and submitted them as a story to slashdot but got rejected for some reason).
Re:Not agreeing with Apple here
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
1. You explicitly indicated that you had read entirely and agreed to the contract when you bought the music (or seeing as you're European (me too) whoever bought the music).
2. You knew of the quality of the recordings before you bought the music (or at least this information was made freely available by Apple).
People of your viewpoint have *no* *fucking* *leg* *to* *stand* *on*.
Sorry to be harsh, but it really is as simple as that.
Re:Not agreeing with Apple here
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As of the last financial earnings report (Q2) the iTunes Music Store is actually "turning a small profit".
That's a heck of a "loss-leader" (but I do get the gist of your post).
- Nex
Re:Contents of the Letter (playfair.txt)
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: -1, Troll
PlayFair does not give the user any special facilities that Apple itself has not given the user:
This is like me going around handing out Uzi 9 millimeters to whoever wants one, and substantiating my actions by saying "well this doesn't give the user any special facilities they didn't have before - before they could have murdered by bludgeoning someone to death with a blunt object, I'm just reinforcing the abilities they already had."
PlayFair is dangerous - it is an assault on the security of DRM. Apple's DRM is the industry "Gold standard", it really does allow you a great deal of freedom:
- Burn to compilation CD as many times as you want (making 10 duplicates of a specific playlist before you have to change the playlist - this is to thwart professional music piraters and should have no impact at all on 99% of legit users).
- Use on three of your machines simultaneously, I am a computer geek and I only have three computers, only two of them that I listen to music through, this has no impact on 99% of legit users.
- Use in iPhoto, iMovie and ability to use as the background music in DVD's (only applies to OS X).
- The music resides as a file that will always play after you have paid the 99c cost, it is not subscription based DRM.
By undermining this DRM it encourages record companies to sway towards enforcing more arcane DRM,not removing it.
What do people expect? That by cracking the DRM of the music services the record industry will just give up completely on DRM? You have to be joking, continue to crack the DRM of these services and the DRM rules will get harsher (like only streaming subscriptions for example), continue to break these and they will push the costs higher and higher, encouraging the purchase of physical CD's.
You do not get your message across by breaking the law - PlayFair is counterproductive to reducing DRM restrictions. It makes it more difficult for bridge companies to work out issues with the recording companies, hampering the progress of online music.
Basically, break the DRM and you will not create a revolution in DRM free music. The recording industry will simply take their ball home altogether.
If you really have a problem with the terms of Apple's DRM, here is how to go about making your voice heard: 1. Consumer action. don't buy from iTMS. 2. Write to Apple/Your local newspaper/Your congressman with your views.
Breaking the DRM will always make things worse for all involved, and will spoil the fun for those who at the moment DO enjoy the services of the iTMS and aren't impacted by the DRM, of which there are millions.
This reminds me of something I've read. When Apple was engineering the GUI back in the early 1980's, early tendency in testing was to just use icons and imagery for buttons and functions, testing showed that this was disatrous however, and the best approach in terms of speed to learn and usability was to use both descriptive text and an icon.
Apparently, the lead engineer is quoted as saying "a word is worth a thousand pictures" when it comes to GUI design.
I've never had the png problem you speak of so I can't comment on that - surely associating the.png extension with something other than Quicktime will fix it though.
However, bad software practises that discourage freedom and innovation? Please when you make these claims back them up. Like the OS X microkernal being open source? Like giving significant help and assistance to the KHTML engine in return for its implementation in Safari (which increases its usage in the wild by many magnitudes)?
Sure, corporate entities keep secrets, and some of these secrets relate to software, but guess what? These things cost money to make, and if Apple were to give away all the stuff it worked hard on then its 11,000 employees would be literally going hungry.
As far as fair play with ITunes Music Store, you are being WILDLY unfair - the terms, by any normal standards - are unobtrusive. You can use your music on more than one computer (three) you can use your music in your movies and DVD's (if you use iMovie and iDVD on your Mac), you can burn your tunes to CD as many times as you wish. Tell me of one other large commercial online music store with better DRM than this. Apple should, in fact must, be congratulated on forcing the RIAA and the labels to bend this far - no one else even got close.
Yeah, apparently we Britons have excellent power supply - how often do you get a power-cut (or power-outage, or whatever you call them) in the states? I can't remember the last one for me here in the UK. Certainly not one in the last two years for me (living in Plymouth) and never had I had outage for more than 15 mins.
I think you're laying the blame in the wrong place here. Until the main source team has completed certain parts of the 2.0 code, the 2-man porting team can't even really get started on the porting effort (and we're not going to see a full attempt at getting OO.org to OS X with anything but the 2.0 source).
So where should Apple throw their developers? Put them to work on the main source? THEN pull them off and put them on the porting effort? No.
The job is a big one, and the payoff just wouldn't be there at this moment in time. As soon as the 2.0 source is more complete and the porting work can begin, maybe then we will see Apple commitment (in the OS X port ONLY).
It's not Apple's fault, it's just that complex software takes time, and OO.org is pretty complex. Sure, the porting team could attempt to move OO.org 1.1.1 to native Aqua, but all their work would be broken with regards to 2.0, as the source is changing significantly in this transition (a lot of it to do with abstracting interfaces so that this kind of problem is surmountable and we can get an Aqua version).
But sadly, we're just going to have to wait - it's a big job, and Apple have much more pressing things to put their developers on than a two year project involving fixing up the main OO.o source, then moving to another 6 month - 1 year project to port it.
At the moment, Apple gains a lot from being able to claim Microsoft Office support, especially with the new Office 2004 coming soon. How much business sense does it make to be seen to be throwing your resources all over the shop into a competing office suite when despite that effort, the suite isn't going to be available for over two years? Not a lot! The way Apple should/is playing this is to support MS Office on the platform as it's really needed, and only attempt to publicly move momentum to something like OO.o when the transition can be swift, and OO.o is near mature for the platform.
Look at what happened when Apple supported the open source KHTML engine for Safari, as soon as Microsoft were snubbed they removed IE support. Luckily Safari was (juuuust about) ready to fill the gap left by MS. Now look at OO.o - it is NOT ready to fill the gap left by MS (as evidenced by all the posts here) how bright would it be to give MS any excuse/reason to withdraw support for Office on OS X before a replacement is ready to be announced?
As for KDE rivaling OS X, well each to his own I guess. You say that there is little that will be in Panther that won't be in KDE in a year - well I think more accurately would be 2-3 years... and then you are forgetting that Apple updates their OS too, and in that timeframe OS X would be moving forward also.
In terms of "Linux & Co breathing down [OS X's] neck...", well I would love to see a Linux distro give me what OS X gives me (then I wouldn't have to pay for it!) but I simply don't think you're right. Look at how things have moved ahead in the last three years (since OS X 10.0). Sure, KDE and Gnome have made nice enhancements, significant ones, much needed ones too. But when you compare where KDE/Gnome and OS X (or Aqua I guess) was three years ago, and where they both are today - the paths are NOT converging, OS X is moving further and further ahead at a fantastically TREMENDOUS pace... sure KDE and Gnome WILL implement the same features, but these features will by their nature be copy-cat features, and OS X at the moment is simply moving faster adding new features than KDE/Gnome can copy the old ones.
You're quite right. OS X is perhaps the greatest operating system that's ever been available, truly sheer brilliance - not perfect, but now using Windows XP feels like going back to Win 3.1.
But we really need a nice office suite, sure there's MS Office, and I prefer it to the Windows version for several reasons, but there is no choice here. Everything except for MS Office is a half-finished non-full featured also-ran and that's a sad state of affairs. There's so much software in EVERY other category for OS X, I want for nothing but more choice in Office suites.
OO.org seems to be the only way out of this situation, but those OS X porting guys are having one hell of a time - until version 2.0 comes along, theres going to be no native Aqua stuff, and I think we're really looking at 2nd quarter 2006 before we have an installer and full featured Aqua OSS OO.org.
I know there are about 2 people working on the OS X port, partly because there's just not a lot of momentum because the main source team needs to finish parts of the 2.0 release before the OS X porting team can even begin.
It's much nicer to use than the Windows version butt, still uses 14% of CPU when idling with one 5 page doc open in the background, mistreats a few GUI standards, and is riddled, absolutely riddled with bugs. SO many that you just forget after you see them -
the tooltip that shows you what page youre on as you scroll with the scrollbar broke yester day and insisted I was always on page two, and the dirty flag (dot in red close button) refused to disappear once I saved the document.
Undo-ing a auto-format with Apple-Z (like where Office tries to add numbering to bulleted lists etc.) causes the entire page to blank for up to four seconds (REALLY panicking you) then it redraws the text as it should be.
Several times a minute the blinking cursor disappears so you don't know where text will appear when you type.
Most of the big features are implemented ok, so I ask myself why why why why whyw hy must they continue to destroy their own reputation with these REALLY simple bugs???
At my University (Plymouth) in the UK, we have something called the Microsoft Academic Alliance. That's where anyone in the school of computing (and others too if you smile nicely) can borrow a copy of any MS software, excluding Office and the Games.
This includes Windows XP, Visual Studio.NET, all sorts of things. Just another dirty little tactic to push all the other software aside and force a MS centric software policy.
In Europe it is highly doubtful a huge predatory company, with a track record such as Microsoft's, would get the EU go ahead to acquire/merge with a company like AOL.
MAC == Media Access Control (an acronym used in networking)
Mac == Abbreviation for Macintosh
Please use the correct one in the future.
Re:Slashdotters==Curmudgeons?
on
iPod Mini Sells Out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You'll be happy to hear that things are really still a they always have been... deleting the folder is still how you delete an app in OS X, and it's a great way of working.
The parent is talking about setting up a hardware device... but even then, there's so little that you need to do when using the iPod in a standard way I don't know what he's on about.
Don't bash him though, in my opinion the guys a great lot of fun - apparently he has been known to fly his Russian built fighter over Gate's house to piss him off.
So he has a big ego too.
As for his credentials and people slagging Ellison for the thinPC/thinClient/netPC idea, it really wasn't a bad idea, but was put out of the water by the dramatically falling price of normal PC's. On other matters he's been right on the ball - convergence in enterprise apps for example in the 11i suite - it's going to make increasing inroads into systems integrators territory such as IBM if it continues along its current path of success.
Plus he's best mates with Steve, between them you can bet this dynamic duo get up to a lot of fun (Google for the trick they played on a technician at Pixar - offering him the CEO job at Apple).
Re:But I have many brands of tools...
on
Mac v. Microsoft TCO
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Agree: UT2004 Sucks computing power like a specially designed computing power sucker, and doesn't run really smoothly on anything but the current lineup of PowerMacs.
Disagree: "Mac Gaming is Awful". Mac gaming is not awful, sure we do have a less extensive library, but the games that are available are good, and some of them ported extremely well - such as Halo. Halo runs absolutely fantastically smoothly in 1600x1200 on my Dual 1Ghz G4 w/ GeForce 4. I had heard the game is a hog, but I was very impressed with its performance.
Sure, Windows X86 machines are better at gaming. The hardware marginally cheaper, the games library bigger, and theres no port-time delay for the game to get to the platform. But is all you do on your machine game? Consider the tradeoffs you make when you actively choose a Windows machine over an OS X machine.
Incidently, while Apple is going around buying up eMagic and Shake, and other cool tools, why not spend some of that $5bn on a top games company, just Like MS did with Bungie for the XBox?
Just imagine how sales would fare, if Apple announced tomorrow that they were purchasing Valve, and Half-Life 2 would only be available for OS X.
I have to disagree, Apple dropped certain technologies when they were replaced by superior ones, and were thus 'not that useful any more.'
PC manufacturers dropped certain technologies when they were finally perceived not to be useful any more.
Apple can act as the gentle motivational herder, because they have complete control over their flock, as long as they make sure they replace the things they phase out with generally superior technologies, and they have (floppy > email, legacy ports > USB).
PC manufacturers have no choice, as there is less unity and it is human nature to be wary of new things, and to want to stick to what is tried and tested. In this scenario where it is impossible to move the flock forward as a whole (as the direction of the industry is dictated by many) it must first be shown and proven that the newer technology is superior.
So I would hardly call this scenario a 'blunder' on Apple's behalf! Quite the opposite in fact - I'm sure it was of great benefit to both Apple and their users to make a swift concerted step forward.
Er... the guy they get to review the Dell Digital Jukebox has never owned or reviewed an iPod?
Wow is that sloppy journalism on behalf of THG.
The one question all the way through that everyone wants to know is how it compares to the iPod, and this guy basically admits he never touched one? Anyone else think this makes this review a bit of a waste of time?
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly your whining is tiring. The original article carries an almost identical headline.
B) Magical.
As long as you're going to correct people so meticulously you may as well learn some grammar. ;)
Try going and having a picnic 10 meters past any normal airport security fences and the exact same thing will happen to you... sure there's something there but the level of security doesn't make it particularly special by itself.
Isn't NGSCB Palladium?
Surely this is pretty good news and indicates that MS might not be so able to force these kind of security measures on their custimers.
Although I imagine knowing Microsoft, the problems were at least as much technical than political, and they just gave up considering it to be "too hard and we can't be arsed", just like WinFS.
Win 3.1 Windows folder approx 40MB
Win95 approx 100MB - 150MB (4x increase)
Win 98 approx 450MB (4x increase)
Win XP approx 2.5GB (5x increase)
Longhorn? Around 12GB???
Well, seems to be the trend.
Market is growing *ever so slightly* not shrinking. Market in notebooks/portables is growing just slightly more. Not stellar but the fort is holding.
Just thought I should correct this... God we worked so hard (10 years) to drag "Apple" and "beleaguered" apart, let's not go ruin it now.
If you're familiar at all with Apple's excellent iPhoto and iTunes, then Google for 'Lphoto' and 'Lsongs'. Just do it.. go on... no arguing - you will be SHOCKED by the blatant rip off... they have copied the apps entirely but gotten the overall idea SO wrong. Just go google it now (I had all the links and submitted them as a story to slashdot but got rejected for some reason).
1. You explicitly indicated that you had read entirely and agreed to the contract when you bought the music (or seeing as you're European (me too) whoever bought the music).
2. You knew of the quality of the recordings before you bought the music (or at least this information was made freely available by Apple).
People of your viewpoint have *no* *fucking* *leg* *to* *stand* *on*.
Sorry to be harsh, but it really is as simple as that.
As of the last financial earnings report (Q2) the iTunes Music Store is actually "turning a small profit".
That's a heck of a "loss-leader" (but I do get the gist of your post).
- Nex
PlayFair does not give the user any special facilities that Apple itself has not given the user:
This is like me going around handing out Uzi 9 millimeters to whoever wants one, and substantiating my actions by saying "well this doesn't give the user any special facilities they didn't have before - before they could have murdered by bludgeoning someone to death with a blunt object, I'm just reinforcing the abilities they already had."
PlayFair is dangerous - it is an assault on the security of DRM. Apple's DRM is the industry "Gold standard", it really does allow you a great deal of freedom:
- Burn to compilation CD as many times as you want (making 10 duplicates of a specific playlist before you have to change the playlist - this is to thwart professional music piraters and should have no impact at all on 99% of legit users).
- Use on three of your machines simultaneously, I am a computer geek and I only have three computers, only two of them that I listen to music through, this has no impact on 99% of legit users.
- Use in iPhoto, iMovie and ability to use as the background music in DVD's (only applies to OS X).
- The music resides as a file that will always play after you have paid the 99c cost, it is not subscription based DRM.
By undermining this DRM it encourages record companies to sway towards enforcing more arcane DRM,not removing it.
What do people expect? That by cracking the DRM of the music services the record industry will just give up completely on DRM? You have to be joking, continue to crack the DRM of these services and the DRM rules will get harsher (like only streaming subscriptions for example), continue to break these and they will push the costs higher and higher, encouraging the purchase of physical CD's.
You do not get your message across by breaking the law - PlayFair is counterproductive to reducing DRM restrictions. It makes it more difficult for bridge companies to work out issues with the recording companies, hampering the progress of online music.
Basically, break the DRM and you will not create a revolution in DRM free music. The recording industry will simply take their ball home altogether.
If you really have a problem with the terms of Apple's DRM, here is how to go about making your voice heard: 1. Consumer action. don't buy from iTMS. 2. Write to Apple/Your local newspaper/Your congressman with your views.
Breaking the DRM will always make things worse for all involved, and will spoil the fun for those who at the moment DO enjoy the services of the iTMS and aren't impacted by the DRM, of which there are millions.
This reminds me of something I've read. When Apple was engineering the GUI back in the early 1980's, early tendency in testing was to just use icons and imagery for buttons and functions, testing showed that this was disatrous however, and the best approach in terms of speed to learn and usability was to use both descriptive text and an icon.
Apparently, the lead engineer is quoted as saying "a word is worth a thousand pictures" when it comes to GUI design.
I've never had the png problem you speak of so I can't comment on that - surely associating the .png extension with something other than Quicktime will fix it though.
However, bad software practises that discourage freedom and innovation? Please when you make these claims back them up. Like the OS X microkernal being open source? Like giving significant help and assistance to the KHTML engine in return for its implementation in Safari (which increases its usage in the wild by many magnitudes)?
Sure, corporate entities keep secrets, and some of these secrets relate to software, but guess what? These things cost money to make, and if Apple were to give away all the stuff it worked hard on then its 11,000 employees would be literally going hungry.
As far as fair play with ITunes Music Store, you are being WILDLY unfair - the terms, by any normal standards - are unobtrusive. You can use your music on more than one computer (three) you can use your music in your movies and DVD's (if you use iMovie and iDVD on your Mac), you can burn your tunes to CD as many times as you wish. Tell me of one other large commercial online music store with better DRM than this. Apple should, in fact must, be congratulated on forcing the RIAA and the labels to bend this far - no one else even got close.
Yeah, apparently we Britons have excellent power supply - how often do you get a power-cut (or power-outage, or whatever you call them) in the states? I can't remember the last one for me here in the UK. Certainly not one in the last two years for me (living in Plymouth) and never had I had outage for more than 15 mins.
How bout other people?
I think you're laying the blame in the wrong place here. Until the main source team has completed certain parts of the 2.0 code, the 2-man porting team can't even really get started on the porting effort (and we're not going to see a full attempt at getting OO.org to OS X with anything but the 2.0 source).
So where should Apple throw their developers? Put them to work on the main source? THEN pull them off and put them on the porting effort? No.
The job is a big one, and the payoff just wouldn't be there at this moment in time. As soon as the 2.0 source is more complete and the porting work can begin, maybe then we will see Apple commitment (in the OS X port ONLY).
It's not Apple's fault, it's just that complex software takes time, and OO.org is pretty complex. Sure, the porting team could attempt to move OO.org 1.1.1 to native Aqua, but all their work would be broken with regards to 2.0, as the source is changing significantly in this transition (a lot of it to do with abstracting interfaces so that this kind of problem is surmountable and we can get an Aqua version).
But sadly, we're just going to have to wait - it's a big job, and Apple have much more pressing things to put their developers on than a two year project involving fixing up the main OO.o source, then moving to another 6 month - 1 year project to port it.
At the moment, Apple gains a lot from being able to claim Microsoft Office support, especially with the new Office 2004 coming soon. How much business sense does it make to be seen to be throwing your resources all over the shop into a competing office suite when despite that effort, the suite isn't going to be available for over two years? Not a lot! The way Apple should/is playing this is to support MS Office on the platform as it's really needed, and only attempt to publicly move momentum to something like OO.o when the transition can be swift, and OO.o is near mature for the platform.
Look at what happened when Apple supported the open source KHTML engine for Safari, as soon as Microsoft were snubbed they removed IE support. Luckily Safari was (juuuust about) ready to fill the gap left by MS. Now look at OO.o - it is NOT ready to fill the gap left by MS (as evidenced by all the posts here) how bright would it be to give MS any excuse/reason to withdraw support for Office on OS X before a replacement is ready to be announced?
As for KDE rivaling OS X, well each to his own I guess. You say that there is little that will be in Panther that won't be in KDE in a year - well I think more accurately would be 2-3 years... and then you are forgetting that Apple updates their OS too, and in that timeframe OS X would be moving forward also.
In terms of "Linux & Co breathing down [OS X's] neck...", well I would love to see a Linux distro give me what OS X gives me (then I wouldn't have to pay for it!) but I simply don't think you're right. Look at how things have moved ahead in the last three years (since OS X 10.0). Sure, KDE and Gnome have made nice enhancements, significant ones, much needed ones too. But when you compare where KDE/Gnome and OS X (or Aqua I guess) was three years ago, and where they both are today - the paths are NOT converging, OS X is moving further and further ahead at a fantastically TREMENDOUS pace... sure KDE and Gnome WILL implement the same features, but these features will by their nature be copy-cat features, and OS X at the moment is simply moving faster adding new features than KDE/Gnome can copy the old ones.
You're quite right. OS X is perhaps the greatest operating system that's ever been available, truly sheer brilliance - not perfect, but now using Windows XP feels like going back to Win 3.1.
:)
But we really need a nice office suite, sure there's MS Office, and I prefer it to the Windows version for several reasons, but there is no choice here. Everything except for MS Office is a half-finished non-full featured also-ran and that's a sad state of affairs. There's so much software in EVERY other category for OS X, I want for nothing but more choice in Office suites.
OO.org seems to be the only way out of this situation, but those OS X porting guys are having one hell of a time - until version 2.0 comes along, theres going to be no native Aqua stuff, and I think we're really looking at 2nd quarter 2006 before we have an installer and full featured Aqua OSS OO.org.
I know there are about 2 people working on the OS X port, partly because there's just not a lot of momentum because the main source team needs to finish parts of the 2.0 release before the OS X porting team can even begin.
Well... at least we'll get it before Longhorn
Office for OS X is NOT nice.
It's much nicer to use than the Windows version butt, still uses 14% of CPU when idling with one 5 page doc open in the background, mistreats a few GUI standards, and is riddled, absolutely riddled with bugs. SO many that you just forget after you see them -
the tooltip that shows you what page youre on as you scroll with the scrollbar broke yester day and insisted I was always on page two, and the dirty flag (dot in red close button) refused to disappear once I saved the document.
Undo-ing a auto-format with Apple-Z (like where Office tries to add numbering to bulleted lists etc.) causes the entire page to blank for up to four seconds (REALLY panicking you) then it redraws the text as it should be.
Several times a minute the blinking cursor disappears so you don't know where text will appear when you type.
Most of the big features are implemented ok, so I ask myself why why why why whyw hy must they continue to destroy their own reputation with these REALLY simple bugs???
At my University (Plymouth) in the UK, we have something called the Microsoft Academic Alliance. That's where anyone in the school of computing (and others too if you smile nicely) can borrow a copy of any MS software, excluding Office and the Games.
This includes Windows XP, Visual Studio.NET, all sorts of things. Just another dirty little tactic to push all the other software aside and force a MS centric software policy.
I read something like this and I think to myself
Does America have NO anti-competition laws???
In Europe it is highly doubtful a huge predatory company, with a track record such as Microsoft's, would get the EU go ahead to acquire/merge with a company like AOL.
(Once again for the hard of hearing)
MAC == Media Access Control (an acronym used in networking)
Mac == Abbreviation for Macintosh
Please use the correct one in the future.
You'll be happy to hear that things are really still a they always have been... deleting the folder is still how you delete an app in OS X, and it's a great way of working.
The parent is talking about setting up a hardware device... but even then, there's so little that you need to do when using the iPod in a standard way I don't know what he's on about.
Rest assured
Ellison is no longer on the board of directors at Apple.
Don't bash him though, in my opinion the guys a great lot of fun - apparently he has been known to fly his Russian built fighter over Gate's house to piss him off.
So he has a big ego too.
As for his credentials and people slagging Ellison for the thinPC/thinClient/netPC idea, it really wasn't a bad idea, but was put out of the water by the dramatically falling price of normal PC's. On other matters he's been right on the ball - convergence in enterprise apps for example in the 11i suite - it's going to make increasing inroads into systems integrators territory such as IBM if it continues along its current path of success.
Plus he's best mates with Steve, between them you can bet this dynamic duo get up to a lot of fun (Google for the trick they played on a technician at Pixar - offering him the CEO job at Apple).
Agree: UT2004 Sucks computing power like a specially designed computing power sucker, and doesn't run really smoothly on anything but the current lineup of PowerMacs.
Disagree: "Mac Gaming is Awful". Mac gaming is not awful, sure we do have a less extensive library, but the games that are available are good, and some of them ported extremely well - such as Halo. Halo runs absolutely fantastically smoothly in 1600x1200 on my Dual 1Ghz G4 w/ GeForce 4. I had heard the game is a hog, but I was very impressed with its performance.
Sure, Windows X86 machines are better at gaming. The hardware marginally cheaper, the games library bigger, and theres no port-time delay for the game to get to the platform. But is all you do on your machine game? Consider the tradeoffs you make when you actively choose a Windows machine over an OS X machine.
Incidently, while Apple is going around buying up eMagic and Shake, and other cool tools, why not spend some of that $5bn on a top games company, just Like MS did with Bungie for the XBox?
Just imagine how sales would fare, if Apple announced tomorrow that they were purchasing Valve, and Half-Life 2 would only be available for OS X.
I have to disagree, Apple dropped certain technologies when they were replaced by superior ones, and were thus 'not that useful any more.'
PC manufacturers dropped certain technologies when they were finally perceived not to be useful any more.
Apple can act as the gentle motivational herder, because they have complete control over their flock, as long as they make sure they replace the things they phase out with generally superior technologies, and they have (floppy > email, legacy ports > USB).
PC manufacturers have no choice, as there is less unity and it is human nature to be wary of new things, and to want to stick to what is tried and tested. In this scenario where it is impossible to move the flock forward as a whole (as the direction of the industry is dictated by many) it must first be shown and proven that the newer technology is superior.
So I would hardly call this scenario a 'blunder' on Apple's behalf! Quite the opposite in fact - I'm sure it was of great benefit to both Apple and their users to make a swift concerted step forward.
Er... the guy they get to review the Dell Digital Jukebox has never owned or reviewed an iPod?
Wow is that sloppy journalism on behalf of THG.
The one question all the way through that everyone wants to know is how it compares to the iPod, and this guy basically admits he never touched one? Anyone else think this makes this review a bit of a waste of time?