As computers were getting standardized Radio Shack/Tandy were trying to force consumers into buying hardware from only one source. As a result there are no more Tandy computers. Apple does the same things, but they have always maintained somewhat superior hardware which has kept them ahead.
So, tell me, exactly what part of a Macintosh computer is locked down and forcing you to buy hardware from only one source (Apple)?
Let's see -- Mac Pro. Industry standard PCIe slots, into which you can install any PCIe card (assuming the device vendor has drivers). Industry-standard USB 2.0, industry-standard FW 800, industry-standard DVI, industry-standard Gigabit Ethernet, industry-standard 802.11n wireless ethernet, industry-standard Bluetooth, industry-standard memory and industry-standard SATA hard disks. (OK, so the mice don't have any buttons and the keyboards don't have a "window" key.)
You can install any vendor's SATA hard drives. You can use any mouse or keyboard you like. You can connect any vendor's displays. You can connect to any vendor's printers, scanners and such through the standard interfaces.
Obviously, on the iMacs and the mac mini you don't have an easily-accessible enclosure, but the parts inside are all standards, so if you wanted to crack the case and swap out the hard drive, you can.
So i really don't see where Apple is forcing you to buy only Apple hardware. Unless, of course, your argument is that you want to use OS X on a non-Apple computer. But that's not your argument, is it?
Apple has severe intrest in controlling how people consume their media and their hardware is reflecting this, making it harder and harder to install alternative methods. You can of course believe they won't abuse this, you can but you would be a silly person.
So explain to me how Apple is "controlling how [I] consume [my] media."
Out of the thousand or so albums in my iTunes library, maybe only half a dozen were actually purchased through the iTunes Store.
The majority are rips of CDs I own. The rest includes songs made available by bands on their web sites, various mixes of songs I did in Logic (speaking of lockdown, I have two words: Pro Tools) and a bunch of rips of my old 7" punkrock singles. (Will the Motorolla Cloudburst 7" ever appear on CD?)
I'm sure if I had time to search for, and demo, alternative ways of organizing half a terabyte of song data, and ways to sync said data to a portable media device that I can use in my car or wherever, I would. And since none of the data in my iTunes library have any sort of DRM, I could move it all to some alternative if necessary.
That's how I have heard this categorized here in the NY area. See, if you are a Cablevision/Optimum Online sub, you get Newsday Online for free. "That's a $260 Value -- If You Sign Before Midnight Tonight!"
Remember, Newsday is owned by The Dolans, the certifiably insane family that also owns and/or operates Madison Square Garden, the Knicks, the Rangers, the Liberty, Clearview Cinemas, the Beacon Theater, Radio Friggin' Music Hall, and prolly my toaster oven as well, haven't checked lately. This isn't about love or money for the newspaper, this is about things like "synergies" and "paradigms" and "leverage." These are the kind of robber baron sociopaths who would burn an orphanage they own to the ground if the price of diapers got higher than they had budgeted, or they needed to light a lot of their cigars at once and they only had one match left.
Wow, I wish I had mod points, because this is friggin' brilliant. And completely true. The Dolans are the reason the Knicks suck.
Is Tektronix still making anything? It used to be THE brand for oscilloscopes, but I haven't heard anything about them since the 7000 series.
Absolutely, Tektronix is still in business. Though they were bought by Fluke a couple of years ago, they seem unaffected by that. There's still a 3-way race between Tek, Agilent and LeCroy in high-end 'scopes, but the good Tek stuff is still good.
Indeed. I remember back when if you didn't have a Voodoo card then you don't really have a 3d accelerator.
Number 9, Matrox, etc. The glory years, where we actually had a choice of more than 2 vendors. *sigh*
While Matrox still plays in the video-card arena, their real strengths are in frame grabbers (analog in, Camera Link in, etc) and software support for them. Somewhat pricey but the stuff works well and their support is pretty good.
And digital is NOT a more accurate reproduction; you get a sample every 44k seconds, while analog "samples" continuously. With a high enough sampling rate digital should blow LPs away, but CD quality is far from that point. Even if they did use its advantages, which they don't.
Why do you post about things you clearly don't understand?
You meant what you typed - that Glenn Beck fans are drooling retards AND outraged by the decision, in your opinion.
How come Glenn Beck won't address the rumors that his fans are drooling retards? I mean, there's a very very very small chance that they are NOT drooling retards, but I want to know why Glenn Beck won't comment on whether his fans are drooling retards.
Admit it. If Bush had done even a tenth of the corrupt acts Obama's administration has done, you would be tearing your own hair out in clumps.
I wonder why you're an anoymous coward -- because you are a fucking idiot. Let's start a list of Bush's corrupt acts with: Weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invading Iraq. Oh, yeah, declaring victory in Afghanistan because we had to invade Iraq. Declaring "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.
A recent obvious example is the story of the very serious problems with the ACORN organization. We heard many things of Haliburton during the Bush years and ACORN is no less newsworthy for similar reasons.
You're comparing ACORN to Halliburton? That's ridiculous. Which company, formerly headed by the former Vice President, gets hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, is allowed to violate the law (and claim immunity from it) and yet still gets more contracts? And which is a community organization with a couple of stupid former employees, and gets a tiny fraction of its operating money from the government?
Yeah, cut your nose off to spite your face. That's a good plan. It'll really show them who's boss!
My bet: you talk big, but you won't actually modify your behavior (iow: either you already don't buy movies, or you'll keep buying at the same rate).
No need for nose cutting. Torrenting is already efficient and easy enough that in reality most people who actually buy movies are just making a token gesture to play by the rules.
It's a simple issue: the industry has ZERO negotiating power with most consumers these days. Disney's "Vault" used to have some power. Stupid tactics like this USED to have some influence on people. These days though? Piss us off and we'll torrent what we want. They've did enough to damage their reputation already. For the people still content to be paying for stuff like these they shouldn't work too hard towards hindering the arrangement that is working.
You keep forgetting that most of the populace are NOT geeks and wouldn't know a BitTorrent from a nasty rain. Your little protest won't affect them.
...by 2012 I'm sure Google will have something out that will have blown iTunes away. If you think that Google is not already working on something like that, you're naive.
Obviously Google is working on something like that. Of course, don't expect Apple to stand still...
Funny, it reminds me of the short story, "Paycheck," by Philip K Dick.
What annoyed me most about the movie was that right in the beginning, The Hero reverse-engineers a video display, but then improves on it by making it 3D. So why is this reverse engineering, and why does his wiped need to be wiped? Seems to me that they should've given this guy a huge R+D budget and let him work! But no, they wipe his memory, including the part that knows how to make the new display.
A clean install of Windows 7 is less than 7 GB. That would be an amazing thing that an install of Windows XP takes up negative space on your HDD.
My father-in-law brought over his Vista-running Lenovo ThinkPad because he said he was getting "Running out of disk space." I thought that was rather odd, because I knew it had a 120 GB disk and he's not the sort to install everything and anything.
Anyways, forget for the moment the RIDICULOUS way that Lenovo preconfigures their machines with a 20 GB Windows boot partition and a 100 GB general-use data partition. He had 50 MB left on C:. I cleaned out about 4 GB from a temp folder, and still couldn't figure out where all of the disk space went. I stumbled on the winsxs directory, which basically ate up half of the disk -- it was easily 10 GB. After a few minutes with the Google, I figured out what it is and why I couldn't just delete it.
So the $64 question: does Windows 7 retain this disk-space-eating winsxs nonsense?
The main new feature is Exchange support. I guess the short feature list is why this one costs $29 for an upgrade rather than the $129 you usually pay for a new version.
Because Windows 7 is just around the corner, and as per the usual Microsoft way, there will be several flavors at different prices, none of which will be inexpensive. So all Apple needs to do is say, "See? Our evolutionary new release is $29 but Microsoft wants to charge you $229 for the evolutionary upgrade to Windows. And we have one version for EVERYONE."
This is the advantage of being a hardware company with respectable margins.
For example, he has a big go at the Death Star having this glaring exhaust port weakness. Well maybe it's not so easy to design a weapon that generates enough energy to blow up planets that doesn't have a big exhaust port. Not to mention that it's the size of a small moon yet can travel interstellar distances.
It's the size of a small moon that can travel interstellar distances, yet it takes hours to orbit Yavin so it can destroy the moon with the rebel base. Assuming the Death Star can travel in hyperspace, why can't it come out of hyperspace on the other side of the planet? Or better yet, why not just destroy Yavin first?
I think it's because the first movies came out in the 70's and 80's aimed at the PG-13 market, and we didn't have major release movies showing endless hordes getting mowed down in the style of Tarentino or Rodriguez back then. Heck, the PG-13 didn't even exist at the time, and a R rating would have probably made Star Wars stillborn. As far as I can recall, the first three movies were completely bloodless. Pretty sure all of them were, come to think of it.
Shooting a stormtrooper was like shooting a robot; they didn't come across as being "people" on the screen, just faceless, nameless "bad guys" with no emotional impact or graphic violence tied to their deaths. I think if they were creating the stormtrooper costumes today they'd look quite different.
I agree with this -- and if you think about it, the majority of the big battles in the prequels was against robots.
First of all, Linux is not the guilty one for not providing software for musicians. It is the developers of the software, like Apple, Steinberg, Propellerheads and Native Instruments, to name a few big ones.
Software is only half of the problem. Imagine Cubase ported to Linux -- all well and good, but the support for multi-channel professional-quality interfaces doesn't exist. And without the I/O, you have nothing.
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As computers were getting standardized Radio Shack/Tandy were trying to force consumers into buying hardware from only one source. As a result there are no more Tandy computers. Apple does the same things, but they have always maintained somewhat superior hardware which has kept them ahead.
So, tell me, exactly what part of a Macintosh computer is locked down and forcing you to buy hardware from only one source (Apple)?
Let's see -- Mac Pro. Industry standard PCIe slots, into which you can install any PCIe card (assuming the device vendor has drivers). Industry-standard USB 2.0, industry-standard FW 800, industry-standard DVI, industry-standard Gigabit Ethernet, industry-standard 802.11n wireless ethernet, industry-standard Bluetooth, industry-standard memory and industry-standard SATA hard disks. (OK, so the mice don't have any buttons and the keyboards don't have a "window" key.)
You can install any vendor's SATA hard drives. You can use any mouse or keyboard you like. You can connect any vendor's displays. You can connect to any vendor's printers, scanners and such through the standard interfaces.
Obviously, on the iMacs and the mac mini you don't have an easily-accessible enclosure, but the parts inside are all standards, so if you wanted to crack the case and swap out the hard drive, you can.
So i really don't see where Apple is forcing you to buy only Apple hardware. Unless, of course, your argument is that you want to use OS X on a non-Apple computer. But that's not your argument, is it?
Apple has severe intrest in controlling how people consume their media and their hardware is reflecting this, making it harder and harder to install alternative methods. You can of course believe they won't abuse this, you can but you would be a silly person.
So explain to me how Apple is "controlling how [I] consume [my] media."
Out of the thousand or so albums in my iTunes library, maybe only half a dozen were actually purchased through the iTunes Store.
The majority are rips of CDs I own. The rest includes songs made available by bands on their web sites, various mixes of songs I did in Logic (speaking of lockdown, I have two words: Pro Tools) and a bunch of rips of my old 7" punkrock singles. (Will the Motorolla Cloudburst 7" ever appear on CD?)
I'm sure if I had time to search for, and demo, alternative ways of organizing half a terabyte of song data, and ways to sync said data to a portable media device that I can use in my car or wherever, I would. And since none of the data in my iTunes library have any sort of DRM, I could move it all to some alternative if necessary.
But iTunes and the iPod work for me.
Apple now gives good cheap tools that work. But they are still the same old apple wanting a share of your pie.
Of course this is not true for Mac OS X applications.
That's how I have heard this categorized here in the NY area. See, if you are a Cablevision/Optimum Online sub, you get Newsday Online for free. "That's a $260 Value -- If You Sign Before Midnight Tonight!"
Remember, Newsday is owned by The Dolans, the certifiably insane family that also owns and/or operates Madison Square Garden, the Knicks, the Rangers, the Liberty, Clearview Cinemas, the Beacon Theater, Radio Friggin' Music Hall, and prolly my toaster oven as well, haven't checked lately. This isn't about love or money for the newspaper, this is about things like "synergies" and "paradigms" and "leverage." These are the kind of robber baron sociopaths who would burn an orphanage they own to the ground if the price of diapers got higher than they had budgeted, or they needed to light a lot of their cigars at once and they only had one match left.
Wow, I wish I had mod points, because this is friggin' brilliant. And completely true. The Dolans are the reason the Knicks suck.
Is Tektronix still making anything? It used to be THE brand for oscilloscopes, but I haven't heard anything about them since the 7000 series.
Absolutely, Tektronix is still in business. Though they were bought by Fluke a couple of years ago, they seem unaffected by that. There's still a 3-way race between Tek, Agilent and LeCroy in high-end 'scopes, but the good Tek stuff is still good.
I have a brand new DPO3054 sitting on my desk :)
Indeed. I remember back when if you didn't have a Voodoo card then you don't really have a 3d accelerator.
Number 9, Matrox, etc. The glory years, where we actually had a choice of more than 2 vendors. *sigh*
While Matrox still plays in the video-card arena, their real strengths are in frame grabbers (analog in, Camera Link in, etc) and software support for them. Somewhat pricey but the stuff works well and their support is pretty good.
Compaq's power supplies cost an order of magnitude more than anyone else's, also.
And digital is NOT a more accurate reproduction; you get a sample every 44k seconds, while analog "samples" continuously. With a high enough sampling rate digital should blow LPs away, but CD quality is far from that point. Even if they did use its advantages, which they don't.
Why do you post about things you clearly don't understand?
A Møøse once bit my sister ...
Signed, Richard Milhaus Nixon
Ten to one he's also against health care.
More like even money that he's against health care. He's a mouthbreathing teabagger, nothing more.
... is a fucking idiot. Anything he says should be ignored or ridiculed.
Signed, one of his constituents.
"Oh, there are loosers."
Such as yourself -- those who cannot spell "losers," you loser.
Texas has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.
Texas has an awful lot of people in jail.
You meant what you typed - that Glenn Beck fans are drooling retards AND outraged by the decision, in your opinion.
How come Glenn Beck won't address the rumors that his fans are drooling retards? I mean, there's a very very very small chance that they are NOT drooling retards, but I want to know why Glenn Beck won't comment on whether his fans are drooling retards.
'cause they are.
Admit it. If Bush had done even a tenth of the corrupt acts Obama's administration has done, you would be tearing your own hair out in clumps.
I wonder why you're an anoymous coward -- because you are a fucking idiot. Let's start a list of Bush's corrupt acts with: Weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invading Iraq. Oh, yeah, declaring victory in Afghanistan because we had to invade Iraq. Declaring "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.
You are either a fool, or a tool. Probably both.
The White House requested them to be removed from the White House Press Pool. I would consider that trying to muscle them out.
I don't think Obama would ever call on Jeff Guckert/James Gannon, much less plant that guy in the room to ask softball questions ...
A recent obvious example is the story of the very serious problems with the ACORN organization. We heard many things of Haliburton during the Bush years and ACORN is no less newsworthy for similar reasons.
You're comparing ACORN to Halliburton? That's ridiculous. Which company, formerly headed by the former Vice President, gets hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, is allowed to violate the law (and claim immunity from it) and yet still gets more contracts? And which is a community organization with a couple of stupid former employees, and gets a tiny fraction of its operating money from the government?
Yeah, cut your nose off to spite your face. That's a good plan. It'll really show them who's boss!
My bet: you talk big, but you won't actually modify your behavior (iow: either you already don't buy movies, or you'll keep buying at the same rate).
No need for nose cutting. Torrenting is already efficient and easy enough that in reality most people who actually buy movies are just making a token gesture to play by the rules.
It's a simple issue: the industry has ZERO negotiating power with most consumers these days. Disney's "Vault" used to have some power. Stupid tactics like this USED to have some influence on people. These days though? Piss us off and we'll torrent what we want. They've did enough to damage their reputation already. For the people still content to be paying for stuff like these they shouldn't work too hard towards hindering the arrangement that is working.
You keep forgetting that most of the populace are NOT geeks and wouldn't know a BitTorrent from a nasty rain. Your little protest won't affect them.
...by 2012 I'm sure Google will have something out that will have blown iTunes away. If you think that Google is not already working on something like that, you're naive.
Obviously Google is working on something like that. Of course, don't expect Apple to stand still ...
Funny, it reminds me of the short story, "Paycheck," by Philip K Dick. What annoyed me most about the movie was that right in the beginning, The Hero reverse-engineers a video display, but then improves on it by making it 3D. So why is this reverse engineering, and why does his wiped need to be wiped? Seems to me that they should've given this guy a huge R+D budget and let him work! But no, they wipe his memory, including the part that knows how to make the new display.
A clean install of Windows 7 is less than 7 GB. That would be an amazing thing that an install of Windows XP takes up negative space on your HDD.
My father-in-law brought over his Vista-running Lenovo ThinkPad because he said he was getting "Running out of disk space." I thought that was rather odd, because I knew it had a 120 GB disk and he's not the sort to install everything and anything.
Anyways, forget for the moment the RIDICULOUS way that Lenovo preconfigures their machines with a 20 GB Windows boot partition and a 100 GB general-use data partition. He had 50 MB left on C:. I cleaned out about 4 GB from a temp folder, and still couldn't figure out where all of the disk space went. I stumbled on the winsxs directory, which basically ate up half of the disk -- it was easily 10 GB. After a few minutes with the Google, I figured out what it is and why I couldn't just delete it.
So the $64 question: does Windows 7 retain this disk-space-eating winsxs nonsense?
The main new feature is Exchange support. I guess the short feature list is why this one costs $29 for an upgrade rather than the $129 you usually pay for a new version.
Because Windows 7 is just around the corner, and as per the usual Microsoft way, there will be several flavors at different prices, none of which will be inexpensive. So all Apple needs to do is say, "See? Our evolutionary new release is $29 but Microsoft wants to charge you $229 for the evolutionary upgrade to Windows. And we have one version for EVERYONE."
This is the advantage of being a hardware company with respectable margins.
For example, he has a big go at the Death Star having this glaring exhaust port weakness. Well maybe it's not so easy to design a weapon that generates enough energy to blow up planets that doesn't have a big exhaust port. Not to mention that it's the size of a small moon yet can travel interstellar distances.
It's the size of a small moon that can travel interstellar distances, yet it takes hours to orbit Yavin so it can destroy the moon with the rebel base. Assuming the Death Star can travel in hyperspace, why can't it come out of hyperspace on the other side of the planet? Or better yet, why not just destroy Yavin first?
I think it's because the first movies came out in the 70's and 80's aimed at the PG-13 market, and we didn't have major release movies showing endless hordes getting mowed down in the style of Tarentino or Rodriguez back then. Heck, the PG-13 didn't even exist at the time, and a R rating would have probably made Star Wars stillborn. As far as I can recall, the first three movies were completely bloodless. Pretty sure all of them were, come to think of it.
Shooting a stormtrooper was like shooting a robot; they didn't come across as being "people" on the screen, just faceless, nameless "bad guys" with no emotional impact or graphic violence tied to their deaths. I think if they were creating the stormtrooper costumes today they'd look quite different.
I agree with this -- and if you think about it, the majority of the big battles in the prequels was against robots.
...you must be kiddin'!
First of all, Linux is not the guilty one for not providing software for musicians. It is the developers of the software, like Apple, Steinberg, Propellerheads and Native Instruments, to name a few big ones.
Software is only half of the problem. Imagine Cubase ported to Linux -- all well and good, but the support for multi-channel professional-quality interfaces doesn't exist. And without the I/O, you have nothing.