Re:Have to disagree with this
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 1
What you fail to acknowledge is Apple's lineage - the Apple I ushered in an era where you bought the box, and the box's operating system was unique to that brand of box.
Whether in 1978-1982 you had an Apple, a TRS-80, a PET, a ZX80, a TI99, an Atari 800, or whatever, the platform was the box.
The Mac continued to follow that model, as it was conceived during that era, and still follows that mentality even in this age of common commodity parts like hard disks, PCI cards and RAM.
Few of those old machines even saw attempts at third-party operating systems (C64 GEOS comes to mind), but even still, those attempts were unique to the hardware. Apple probably saw MS-DOS as a product just as ill-fated as CP/M, and didn't want to destroy their platform by watering it down so that any crappy hardware could run it. (Do you remember installing 3.1, before "plug-and-play", where you had to worry about IRQs and address space?)
Today, most of the problems associated with a common Wintel platform have been solved, but nagging issues remain - the interface inconsistency across Windows apps, crappy and poorly supported drivers for fly-by-nighters' hardware, etc.
This stuff becomes really apparent when you try to get power management working right on most Windows notebooks after installing a new OS. Or resizing a window to find redraw artifacts left behind by the crappy video card driver. Or mouse drivers that cause scrolling to occur at lightspeed when selecting cells in a column of a spreadsheet. Or UI abominations like MS Word.
Sound petty? Sure, but issues like that affect me every day as I regularly use 4 different Windows computers at work (each with their own "issues").
I come home and I feel that my old G4/350, while slower than any of my work computers, is somehow in tune with me. I can move around the file hierarchy way faster, my apps behave as I expect them to, and my OS has gone from 9.0.4 through every step up to 10.3.whatever. I don't want cheaper hardware. I don't want more software choices. I just want my computer to work like THIS one does.
While I respect peoples' choice to run whatever OS they want, I would much rather pay a little more for what I have. If you offered me a 3 GHz x86-based machine in trade for my slow old G4, I would decline. Looking now at its shiny graphite case, the thought almost makes me wince, in the same way I got choked up when I gave up my old minibike.
Getting back to what you said: "if Apple had won." As I see it there was never really a fight. Yes, Apple's personal computer marketshare has fallen when compared to other manufacturers' Windows-compatible boxes, but the Mac continues to exist, and as of recently, the gloom-sayers have been silenced in their "Apple is donna die unless they do this and this and this" tripe. Apple didn't do any of it, and they continue to be in the top ten brands of computers sold.
Is Apple competing with Microsoft? Sure, except that Apple is selling a complete "platform in the box" while MS is selling a "platform in the software". Is Apple competing with Dell/HP/Gateway/whatever? Sure, except that those hardware makers really only compete on marketing and an "our nuts and bolts are tightened better than your nuts and bolts" angle ("Microsoft's products crash less on our machines than the competition").
A Mac is "A Mac" while anything else is (for example) a "2.4 GHz Dell running XP". Most consumers just don't realize the value of that. So let 'em have their PCs.
iPod is a USB peripheral. Cameras are USB peripherals. USB peripherals can't talk to each other -- they can only talk to a "host" (i.e. a computer).
Chalk another one up for the superiority of FireWire, which requires no host. Too bad it never caught on for still cameras. Oh well, it's typical of the short-sighted weenies who design this stuff to ignore superior Apple technology.
Music is not a manufactured commodity. It doesn't have feature sets, like computer software. Taste in music is subjective.
Aren't you in the least bit frustrated to tune through the FM dial and find the same artists on 3/4 of the stations?
Do you really believe that the reason independent artists are never played on the radio is that none of them are as good as commercial artists? The reason they get no airplay is because they can't afford to stuff the pockets of radio programmers. This system keeps the big labels happy, because they essentially own the FM radio band, and they use it as one big commercial for all their latest crappy music.
Logic Pro 7 includes a ton of the stuff I've been waiting for, and when you consider all the bundled synths and effects it's actually a pretty damn good value.
I've been using Logic since version 2, and I have watched it evolve from a do-everything MIDI sequencer to a full-fledged DAW suite.
I'm frustrated to read so many negative comments from people who have obviously never used serious music software before, so I'm going to address a few things:
First, this is very relevant to apple.slashdot.org because Apple owns Logic, and a lot of us have been very eager to see just what Apple was going to do with Logic for version 7.
Is it anything like Fruity Loops or Garage Band? No, not really. You could probably pick up any of the above to create a piece of dance music, but Logic is the only one of the three that is wide open - if there's something a computer can do with audio, Logic Pro can probably do it.
I doubt Cubase is more popular than Logic in the studio. Once you get used to working in Logic, Cubase feels like a toy. I'll admit I haven't used it in a few years so maybe it has improved.
Somebody posted that Logic is unstable and doesn't draw right a lot of the time, but this has not been my experience - in fact version 6 has been rock-solid for me. I know that cracked copies of Logic tend to not work very well.
A few people have said that there aren't a lot of new featured, but I downloaded the Logic Overview PDF from the Apple site, and I see TONS of stuff:
Distributed Audio Processing. Yes this is cool stuff, maybe other software does it too, but how scalable is it? Apple is claiming they can stuff 512 mono streams over a gigabit backbone. That's cool stuff, and makes a pretty neat case for a few XServe cluster nodes. (By the way, this appears to not be XGrid-based, as the nodes don't seem to share a single distributed task - instead you choose which node you want to work on which track from the Arrange window.)
Sculpture. Sorry but I don't know of any DAW app that includes a professional component modelling synth at any price. Emagic's synths have always sounded great to me, and I'm anxious to hear this.
Ultrabeat. A drum machine. Well here's some Fruity Loops functionality - as a matter of fact this looks like a kick-ass drum machine, something I've been anxious to see in Logic. It's got virtual analog, FM, component modelling and sample playback. The only drum machine I know of that's as versatile on paper is the $1100 USD MachineDrum, if ya wanna order one from Sweden.
EFM-1 - another synth - this one looks like a simple FM synth. I reserve judgement, but it's probably nice for metallic and buzzy sounds.
Inclusion of Garage Band Instruments is awesome, and was much-anticipated by Logic composers. Garage Band has a kick-ass sample set, and I'm sure they will find their way into my bread-and-butter work (commercials).
Apple Loops first appeared in SoundTrack, then in Garage Band. It looks as though it is actually possible to create Apple Loops, which means that Logic now has Ableton Live! / Acid - like functionality at last. Live is a lot cheaper at around $400, and Acid is Windows only, but they both lack the flexibility and plug-in set that Logic has.
Guitar Amp Pro is also pretty damn cool. People's jaws drop when they hear the amp simulation in Garage Band, so its inclusion (with the addition of a few extra parameters) in Logic is a no-brainer - it had to happen. Still, it's here, and I will be using it.
Other Effects like Ring Shifter, Vocal Transformer, Pitch Correction are fun effects to play with, and offer lots of opportunities for creative use.
New Mastering Plug-ins: Linear Phase EQ (I haven't heard it, but Logic's EQ's are already pretty good, and from its description this is a bona fide mastering EQ), and Match EQ (
In fact this is why the Mac, up until OS X 10.2, never really "supported" MIDI in any way. MIDI Apps from third-party vendors could not talk to each other without extensions such as the open-source OMS, originally from now-defunct Opcode (R.I.P.)
There was a great article in Keyboard magazine during the late 1980's in which an Apple exec was asked about why Apple doesn't do something to solve MIDI-related issues with the Mac. He cited the then-small audio market (a fraction of a percent of all users) making it cost-ineffective while Apple was struggling with layoffs, and I believe they he also mentioned the Apple Corps. contract.
Ironically, I'll bet there's a Mac running Pro Tools at Abby Road right now!
I can't imagine why McCartney and company are so hell-bent on damaging that achievement.
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) it's because there's a shitload of money to be made.
I may be missing something here, but is there anything new on the evil Microsoft master plan known as 'Palladium'? Is this ultimately what's under investigation?
Seems to me that Palladium is the uber-DRM trump card that Microsoft has up its sleeve - just far enough off that it doesn't warrant "investigation" (yet), but still close enough that it makes me worry for the future of personal computing.
This is like saying, I'll support the clips they play in the beginning of movies... you pay to go see a movie, not to go see 15 to 30 minutes of ads.
The difference is that you're paying to see that movie. Your ticket money (expensive enough to begin with) goes to the theatre and to the movie makers. For them, showing ads to a captive audience is just an additional cash grab.
Web browsing is different because the only thing you're paying for is your bandwidth. Even your browser is free, and it runs on a computer you're likely using for other stuff.
Somebody earlier made a much better comparison to leafing through a trade magazine, looking at ads that you want to know about, because those ads are for stuff you're interested in.
The main reason why I wouldn't use this isn't because I object to advertising, it's the wasted bandwidth and screen real estate that annoys me. Imagine buying a TV with an ad marquee along the bottom of the picture. UGH!
At this risk of sounding overly ignorant in this field, what kind of attacks are possible with "outgoing port access"?
As a home user (and obviously no data security expert) I have often assumed I'm pretty safe behind a NAT router provided I have no ports forwarded... ?
FWIW my G3 iBook (500) was open on the passenger seat of my car when I had to come to an abrupt stop. It wasn't wearing a seatbelt so it collided with the dash before it fell on the floor.
Didn't miss a beat. It left a mark on my dash, but the iBook was unscathed. The only problem I ever had with my iBook was when my roommate spilled beer into its keyboard. Hooray for extended Applecare!
Note: I bought that extended warranty for a lot of $, thinking that I would be able to use it to replace the battery once the laptop was a few years old and the battery didn't hold a charge for long any more. Well as luck would have it, the thing is two months shy of the end of its 3-year warranty, and the battery still pretty much acts like new.
You hit the nail right on the head. Speaking as an RF technician I can verify despite some others' opinions that 900 MHz will almost always propogate better than 2.4 GHz.
Apart from seeming more impressive numerically (after all, a 2.4 GHz phone is 1.5 GHz more than a 900 MHz phone), there is NO advantage to 2.4 GHz.
The 2.4 band has been set aside for unlicenced, low-power, public spread-spectrum use. Blutetooth uses it too.
I think it's only a matter of time before the cordless phones talk directly to WiFi routers anyway via VoIP, and then this whole thing will be moot - and phone companies will be very upset.
Don't plan on using this stuff any time soon to block people from sitting outside your house and downloading porn - unless you want to spend £500 UKP (about $1000 USD) per square metre to coat your front wall.
iPhoto isn't so much a photo manipulation tool as a way to store and organize your pictures. The iPhoto directory is in ~/Pictures. There is a command in iPhoto to reveal the pic you're looking at in the Finder, so that you can edit in Photoshop or other full-featured editor.
The default behaviour of iTunes is the same: double-click a music file, and iTunes will launch and copy the file into ~/Music/iTunes. I used to fight this, and now I kinda like it, because it automatically puts my music files into folders, by artist. The tough part was wrapping my head around the fact that once I have played my music in iTunes, I can trash the original file because iTunes now "owns" its own copy.
IMHO the rationale behind this is that tools like iTunes and iPhoto are better ways to organize media by its specific metadata than the all-purpose Finder can provide. The Finder is not geared to show us song lengths, or to create playlists, photo albumbs or music CDs.
I have bought one copy-protected audio CD (Kraftwerk - Tour De France Sountracks) and it is a pain in the ass. It won't play in my iBook, and it won't play in 95% of computers I have put it in.
It comes with a Windows player installer that wants to copy multiple files to the HD, and a buggy Mac player that crashes my iBook in 9.2 and quits as soon as it is launched in Panther.
(It plays just like any other CD in my Sawtooth G4's stock DVD-ROM drive).
Don't these people realize that a lot of people nowadays use a computer instead of a standard CD player to listen to their music?
If I had an iPod and the iTunes Music Store was available in my country (Canada! cmon Apple!) , I would have bought the album online, paid less money, and I'd be able to listen to it anywhere.
Copy protection on audio CD's is far worse than Apple's DRM. If I were Apple I'd let the people doing the copy protection futz around trying to make their product actually work, while the iTMS model continues to gain momentum as a better way to buy music.
Processor supply is the issue. More specifically, supply of G5 processors that don't produce too much heat.
Re:That would be very handy...
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 1
You're on to a really interesting idea - an alternate arrangement of windows invoked by function key. The only problem: the whole concept of exposé is that it shrinks your windows and moves them just enough that none overlap each other.
That in itself is really useful, because you get to see everything you're doing, at any time, and bring a different task back to the front.
What if it could be invoked with a modifier key, so that (for example) hitting command-f9 the first time causes all windows to shrtink just as if you had hit f9 by itself. But if you continue to hold command you can move and resize the shrunken windows. As soon as you click in a window without the modifier key, they restore to normal size and the window you clicked comes to the front. Hitting command-f9 again would put the shrunken windows back the way you left them, even if they overlapped a little.
The same modifier could apply to f10 (perform this operation on foreground app only).
The only problem with this whole scheme is what happens if you have opened new windows since you last invoked this feature. Does it find a tiny space to stick the new windows in? Does it forget all your changes and just act like you hit it with no modifier?
I'm really excited about this possibility, and I hope somebody from Apple sees this and thinks it's exciting too. To paraphrase The Steve, the Mac is about simplicity on the surface, although power is within your reach when you need it.
Artists who have their songs all over commercials and radio are the ones least victimized by music piracy.
While it is technically stealing, as you point out, if I really wanted a Britney Spears song I would download it, and not feel remoreseful for not helping finance her third Lamborghini.
The artists hurt the most are the indies and the little guys, who must finance their own studio time and production in the hopes of recouping that money from their label - and that only happens when there are enough sales (after the label takes their cut).
If you hear a pop song in an airline commercial, that artist has "made it", and will have received HUGE kickbacks for its use.
Slashdot Mirror
What you fail to acknowledge is Apple's lineage - the Apple I ushered in an era where you bought the box, and the box's operating system was unique to that brand of box.
Whether in 1978-1982 you had an Apple, a TRS-80, a PET, a ZX80, a TI99, an Atari 800, or whatever, the platform was the box.
The Mac continued to follow that model, as it was conceived during that era, and still follows that mentality even in this age of common commodity parts like hard disks, PCI cards and RAM.
Few of those old machines even saw attempts at third-party operating systems (C64 GEOS comes to mind), but even still, those attempts were unique to the hardware. Apple probably saw MS-DOS as a product just as ill-fated as CP/M, and didn't want to destroy their platform by watering it down so that any crappy hardware could run it. (Do you remember installing 3.1, before "plug-and-play", where you had to worry about IRQs and address space?)
Today, most of the problems associated with a common Wintel platform have been solved, but nagging issues remain - the interface inconsistency across Windows apps, crappy and poorly supported drivers for fly-by-nighters' hardware, etc.
This stuff becomes really apparent when you try to get power management working right on most Windows notebooks after installing a new OS. Or resizing a window to find redraw artifacts left behind by the crappy video card driver. Or mouse drivers that cause scrolling to occur at lightspeed when selecting cells in a column of a spreadsheet. Or UI abominations like MS Word.
Sound petty? Sure, but issues like that affect me every day as I regularly use 4 different Windows computers at work (each with their own "issues").
I come home and I feel that my old G4/350, while slower than any of my work computers, is somehow in tune with me. I can move around the file hierarchy way faster, my apps behave as I expect them to, and my OS has gone from 9.0.4 through every step up to 10.3.whatever. I don't want cheaper hardware. I don't want more software choices. I just want my computer to work like THIS one does.
While I respect peoples' choice to run whatever OS they want, I would much rather pay a little more for what I have. If you offered me a 3 GHz x86-based machine in trade for my slow old G4, I would decline. Looking now at its shiny graphite case, the thought almost makes me wince, in the same way I got choked up when I gave up my old minibike.
Getting back to what you said: "if Apple had won." As I see it there was never really a fight. Yes, Apple's personal computer marketshare has fallen when compared to other manufacturers' Windows-compatible boxes, but the Mac continues to exist, and as of recently, the gloom-sayers have been silenced in their "Apple is donna die unless they do this and this and this" tripe. Apple didn't do any of it, and they continue to be in the top ten brands of computers sold.
Is Apple competing with Microsoft? Sure, except that Apple is selling a complete "platform in the box" while MS is selling a "platform in the software". Is Apple competing with Dell/HP/Gateway/whatever? Sure, except that those hardware makers really only compete on marketing and an "our nuts and bolts are tightened better than your nuts and bolts" angle ("Microsoft's products crash less on our machines than the competition").
A Mac is "A Mac" while anything else is (for example) a "2.4 GHz Dell running XP". Most consumers just don't realize the value of that. So let 'em have their PCs.
Does anybody else think the U2 iPod's colour scheme would make a great Emily iPod??
Kinda makes me want to get one just to paint some Emily artwork over the autographs!
iPod is a USB peripheral. Cameras are USB peripherals. USB peripherals can't talk to each other -- they can only talk to a "host" (i.e. a computer).
Chalk another one up for the superiority of FireWire, which requires no host. Too bad it never caught on for still cameras. Oh well, it's typical of the short-sighted weenies who design this stuff to ignore superior Apple technology.
Low and behold, the script is on my machine too! Now I know why my Power Mac 8500 was taking so long to copy that 30 meg file!
Music is not a manufactured commodity. It doesn't have feature sets, like computer software. Taste in music is subjective.
Aren't you in the least bit frustrated to tune through the FM dial and find the same artists on 3/4 of the stations?
Do you really believe that the reason independent artists are never played on the radio is that none of them are as good as commercial artists? The reason they get no airplay is because they can't afford to stuff the pockets of radio programmers. This system keeps the big labels happy, because they essentially own the FM radio band, and they use it as one big commercial for all their latest crappy music.
Word on the street is that the guitar amp was developed by Emagic after they were acquired by Apple.
I've been using Logic since version 2, and I have watched it evolve from a do-everything MIDI sequencer to a full-fledged DAW suite.
I'm frustrated to read so many negative comments from people who have obviously never used serious music software before, so I'm going to address a few things:
First, this is very relevant to apple.slashdot.org because Apple owns Logic, and a lot of us have been very eager to see just what Apple was going to do with Logic for version 7.
Is it anything like Fruity Loops or Garage Band? No, not really. You could probably pick up any of the above to create a piece of dance music, but Logic is the only one of the three that is wide open - if there's something a computer can do with audio, Logic Pro can probably do it.
I doubt Cubase is more popular than Logic in the studio. Once you get used to working in Logic, Cubase feels like a toy. I'll admit I haven't used it in a few years so maybe it has improved.
Somebody posted that Logic is unstable and doesn't draw right a lot of the time, but this has not been my experience - in fact version 6 has been rock-solid for me. I know that cracked copies of Logic tend to not work very well.
A few people have said that there aren't a lot of new featured, but I downloaded the Logic Overview PDF from the Apple site, and I see TONS of stuff:
That's just ridiculous! GeoWrite's all the word processing I could ever need.
Nobody could ever need more than 7.314 MHz of speed.
In fact this is why the Mac, up until OS X 10.2, never really "supported" MIDI in any way. MIDI Apps from third-party vendors could not talk to each other without extensions such as the open-source OMS, originally from now-defunct Opcode (R.I.P.)
There was a great article in Keyboard magazine during the late 1980's in which an Apple exec was asked about why Apple doesn't do something to solve MIDI-related issues with the Mac. He cited the then-small audio market (a fraction of a percent of all users) making it cost-ineffective while Apple was struggling with layoffs, and I believe they he also mentioned the Apple Corps. contract.
Ironically, I'll bet there's a Mac running Pro Tools at Abby Road right now!
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) it's because there's a shitload of money to be made.
OMG! WILLIAM SHATNER is on SLASHDOT!!!
You don't need to type "apple" into your browser to reach the iTunes page.
I worry, now that it's on Slashdot, a certain Visa search will end up on Zeitgeist for sure!
I may be missing something here, but is there anything new on the evil Microsoft master plan known as 'Palladium'? Is this ultimately what's under investigation?
Seems to me that Palladium is the uber-DRM trump card that Microsoft has up its sleeve - just far enough off that it doesn't warrant "investigation" (yet), but still close enough that it makes me worry for the future of personal computing.
Web browsing is different because the only thing you're paying for is your bandwidth. Even your browser is free, and it runs on a computer you're likely using for other stuff.
Somebody earlier made a much better comparison to leafing through a trade magazine, looking at ads that you want to know about, because those ads are for stuff you're interested in.
The main reason why I wouldn't use this isn't because I object to advertising, it's the wasted bandwidth and screen real estate that annoys me. Imagine buying a TV with an ad marquee along the bottom of the picture. UGH!
At this risk of sounding overly ignorant in this field, what kind of attacks are possible with "outgoing port access"?
As a home user (and obviously no data security expert) I have often assumed I'm pretty safe behind a NAT router provided I have no ports forwarded... ?
FWIW my G3 iBook (500) was open on the passenger seat of my car when I had to come to an abrupt stop. It wasn't wearing a seatbelt so it collided with the dash before it fell on the floor.
Didn't miss a beat. It left a mark on my dash, but the iBook was unscathed. The only problem I ever had with my iBook was when my roommate spilled beer into its keyboard. Hooray for extended Applecare!
Note: I bought that extended warranty for a lot of $, thinking that I would be able to use it to replace the battery once the laptop was a few years old and the battery didn't hold a charge for long any more. Well as luck would have it, the thing is two months shy of the end of its 3-year warranty, and the battery still pretty much acts like new.
You hit the nail right on the head. Speaking as an RF technician I can verify despite some others' opinions that 900 MHz will almost always propogate better than 2.4 GHz.
Apart from seeming more impressive numerically (after all, a 2.4 GHz phone is 1.5 GHz more than a 900 MHz phone), there is NO advantage to 2.4 GHz.
The 2.4 band has been set aside for unlicenced, low-power, public spread-spectrum use. Blutetooth uses it too.
I think it's only a matter of time before the cordless phones talk directly to WiFi routers anyway via VoIP, and then this whole thing will be moot - and phone companies will be very upset.
Don't plan on using this stuff any time soon to block people from sitting outside your house and downloading porn - unless you want to spend £500 UKP (about $1000 USD) per square metre to coat your front wall.
iPhoto isn't so much a photo manipulation tool as a way to store and organize your pictures. The iPhoto directory is in ~/Pictures. There is a command in iPhoto to reveal the pic you're looking at in the Finder, so that you can edit in Photoshop or other full-featured editor.
The default behaviour of iTunes is the same: double-click a music file, and iTunes will launch and copy the file into ~/Music/iTunes. I used to fight this, and now I kinda like it, because it automatically puts my music files into folders, by artist. The tough part was wrapping my head around the fact that once I have played my music in iTunes, I can trash the original file because iTunes now "owns" its own copy.
IMHO the rationale behind this is that tools like iTunes and iPhoto are better ways to organize media by its specific metadata than the all-purpose Finder can provide. The Finder is not geared to show us song lengths, or to create playlists, photo albumbs or music CDs.
I have bought one copy-protected audio CD (Kraftwerk - Tour De France Sountracks) and it is a pain in the ass. It won't play in my iBook, and it won't play in 95% of computers I have put it in.
It comes with a Windows player installer that wants to copy multiple files to the HD, and a buggy Mac player that crashes my iBook in 9.2 and quits as soon as it is launched in Panther.
(It plays just like any other CD in my Sawtooth G4's stock DVD-ROM drive).
Don't these people realize that a lot of people nowadays use a computer instead of a standard CD player to listen to their music?
If I had an iPod and the iTunes Music Store was available in my country (Canada! cmon Apple!) , I would have bought the album online, paid less money, and I'd be able to listen to it anywhere.
Copy protection on audio CD's is far worse than Apple's DRM. If I were Apple I'd let the people doing the copy protection futz around trying to make their product actually work, while the iTMS model continues to gain momentum as a better way to buy music.
Processor supply is the issue. More specifically, supply of G5 processors that don't produce too much heat.
You're on to a really interesting idea - an alternate arrangement of windows invoked by function key. The only problem: the whole concept of exposé is that it shrinks your windows and moves them just enough that none overlap each other.
That in itself is really useful, because you get to see everything you're doing, at any time, and bring a different task back to the front.
What if it could be invoked with a modifier key, so that (for example) hitting command-f9 the first time causes all windows to shrtink just as if you had hit f9 by itself. But if you continue to hold command you can move and resize the shrunken windows. As soon as you click in a window without the modifier key, they restore to normal size and the window you clicked comes to the front. Hitting command-f9 again would put the shrunken windows back the way you left them, even if they overlapped a little.
The same modifier could apply to f10 (perform this operation on foreground app only).
The only problem with this whole scheme is what happens if you have opened new windows since you last invoked this feature. Does it find a tiny space to stick the new windows in? Does it forget all your changes and just act like you hit it with no modifier?
I'm really excited about this possibility, and I hope somebody from Apple sees this and thinks it's exciting too. To paraphrase The Steve, the Mac is about simplicity on the surface, although power is within your reach when you need it.
Artists who have their songs all over commercials and radio are the ones least victimized by music piracy.
While it is technically stealing, as you point out, if I really wanted a Britney Spears song I would download it, and not feel remoreseful for not helping finance her third Lamborghini.
The artists hurt the most are the indies and the little guys, who must finance their own studio time and production in the hopes of recouping that money from their label - and that only happens when there are enough sales (after the label takes their cut).
If you hear a pop song in an airline commercial, that artist has "made it", and will have received HUGE kickbacks for its use.
The current Konfabulator home page more than makes up for that. ("Cupertino, start your photocopiers")