The fact that three million people watched the sci-fi channel is pretty amazing, considering these guys can't seem to ever get their head and their neck wired straight- especially when it comes to original programming. Out of the viewing base, how many are actual fans of the book? How many have read the entire series? (hint to Lynch fans who've only read the first book- read the rest of the series and parts of the movie will make a LOT more sense!) Anyone notice that the TV version, in addition to commercials, has more per capita innacuracies than the initial CNN reports on the Florida elections?
Dune is too complicated and epic a story to give to a television budget and system of Producers. I personally feel that a director such as David Fincher would be best cut out to create an interesting, accurate version of Dune, or perhaps Dune: Messiah.
Ehn. Sorry. PowerBook, Y2k / Firewire / Pismo series. It doesn't like anything less than nine. Though there ARE a lot of extensions and CPs I'm not using, you never know- especially in the mobile environment I'm in- when you're going to need things like the zip drivers or Novel Netware...As it stands, she tops at 37.6 at the moment, which, IMHO, is far more RAM than an OS should occupy. If I had less than 128 of RAM, I'd be pretty pissed.
I've gotten a Nine install down to about twenty -five megs on a New World system (re- no ROMs on the mobo), and I had 8.6 stripped to fifty megs of space and about twenty of RAM (the roms, again) on an iMac... but that was for a kiosk with functionality being completely unnecessary.
And oh, the niftiness that is the extensions manager.... how do Linux users get shite out of the kernel, if they decide they don't need it? Boot another one?
Hey man, I LOVED os8. I creamed in my pants at the pop-up folders and all of the other gooey goodness it had to offer. The application switcher in 8.5 was the last signifigant UI innovation, and the stability of nine is great.... But.
System 7 takes like four megs of RAM.
OS 8 takes ten....
8.5 takes 15-18 on old world systems, 25-30 on new world....
and 9 is taking up jsut under FORTY on my powerbook.
You can probably run DOS on your spankin' new AMD Athlon, can't you? Win3.1 for those of you sick enough to run it? GEOS?
I can't run anything LOWER than nine on my powerbook. It's my only option. MacOS is not forward compatable, though the applications certianly are. Nine, stripped, takes up around 100 megs... 150-225 with moderate functionality, 250-300 fully loaded and customized with a shitload of preferences and cache files counted, not to mention fonts.
I can live with that, even though I get miffed when I look at my OS 8 system folder and realize I can slap that- all of it- and Norton Utilities on a zip and boot from it.
But OSX has ONE install option- full - and eats EIGHT HUNDRED MEGS. So much for rescue disks and backups. Maybe some hacker will whack aqua and replace it with System 7, when collapable folder windows were amazingly sweet. That should lop a fw hundred megs off of the snud you need to run the damned thing.
The ability to change quickly- a one-generational transition to bring in USB, another for Firewire... both of which work great, neither of which is still globally supported on Wintel or Lintel.
Painless upgrades and driver installation.
True application portability (install on one machine, grab the parts and move them to another... no recompile, no registry)
It may be a small town, but a lot of us HAVE been to the "City"... which is why so very many Mac fans are willing to shoot you ignorant jerks on sight.
I grew up in the sticks. I took BASIC on a 386 network in 1996. The smalltown analogy does NOT apply. If anything, the so-called "Mac World" would be a wealthy suburb of a major city- the kind with a hardcore neighborhood watch.
I personally feel that Aqua is, as others have stated, a marketing ploy. I fiddled with the beta for awhile- crunching away at it felt like I was sitting at a slicked-up Xterm. The functionality and grace of the MacOS were completely stripped out, in favor of....what? And it ran like ass on my G3/400 desktop with 512 megs of RAM.
Same on my powerbook, the only difference being that the bettery meter told me how long a charge was going to take when I plugged into the wall.... I'm not trading the big stack of features I love the MacOS for in exchange for one itty bit of convenience.
The Mac has always been hackable- and one up on everything else, you can hack a COMPILED binary. This is great, and I'll miss Resedit if I EVER get around to using OSX.
Users want the Apple Menu. They want the Desktop (a LOT.) They want tabbed folders, they want the control strip.... and out of the handful of Pittsburghers that have tried the Beta, not one of us has anything positive to say about functionality. The menu windows are bulky and ugly, universal drag and drop is a joke, and there are so many things just fundamentally WINDOWS in the way the system now handles that I'm sure more than one crossplatformer is tearing his hair out in anger.
I am totally in favor of hacking this sucker for useability. I've tried a few of the add-ons, but I really don't like the idea of having to boot my apple menu after I boot my OS. I'm not digging tacking an extra 64 megs onto RAM useage in order to boot Photoshop.
Whoever can hack Aqua and replace it with a useable interface- for example, the OS 9 front end (finder windows, apple menu, desktop, control strip, and NO FRIGGIN DOCK) will probably be hailed as a hero in the Mac community.
Mac users want current MacOS functionality, if they wanted NeXT, they would have bought NeXT cubes when the company was still around. Aqua fails to deliver in every area so far, with the possible exception of Colorsync.
Between the Cubes and MacOSX, it looks like NeXT shall rise again... rather the present Mac user base likes it or not.
Swap the cute little KDE throbber for the ubiquitous "E" and, um.... it looks like Windows. It's pretty, but how is this a Good Thing? KDE and Gnome both handle a lot like Windows Explorer, and no amount of flash, however nifty it looks, is going to change the inherent clunkiness of an Explorer ripoff.
Anyone interested in laying aside prettiness for a bit and actually concentrating on >functionality ? I stick with the MacOS for four very simple core reasons:
1. Global location of File / Edit / View / etc. - whatever app I run, they're all there, they're all in the SAME DAMNED PLACE. Yeah.
2. The Control Strip. You can flame me for being a Mac boy, but this is a biggie. I have the controls for energy saving, battery life, file sharing, my web connection, quicktime, sound, my CDROM drive, and monitor resolution/depth on a quick-access strip that can be hidden with a keystroke. Basic system preferences available in the open without having to dig through *anything*.
3. Pop-up folders. I can keep the folder "Bork", where "Bork" is, for example, "hard drive/devcontent/sites/bigsite/images/processed/re ady/Bork" at the bottom of my desktop at all times, without ever having to dig for it.
4. The ability to "hide" an application. NOT minimize it. NOT collapse the window. HIDE the thing so that it's only visible from the Finder menu. Out of sight, out of mind.
Excepting item one, it seems that MacOSX has dropped these critical features... they are perfect functionality enhancements that I have yet to see anywhere else because, apparently, Microsoft didn't rip them off first.
Howzabout some innovation, instead of redoing something someone else has already done?
I care more about Windows than I do the Olympics... and as a dedicated Linux advocate and Mac user, that says a lot. I've tried very hard to ignore the olympics since the Tanya Harding thing made figure scating the only thing you could watch on CBS for about two years straight.
With this in mind, from what I've picked up, it seems to me that the IOC is being quite basatrdly in its tactics. A >TEN year ban on material transmission? The legal equivalent of anally raping anyone who uses the olympic logo other than themselves?
I watched about an hour of the summer olympics. And I caught a lot of the diving because it happened to be on in the bars when I was getting off work, and it beats the piss out of Buffy. It seems to me that the Olympics is nothing more than one long photo op for the so-called "journalists" that are hosting it... twenty minutes of sob story human interest filler, twenty minutes of commercials, fifteen minutes of the commentator showing off his dental work and blowing shit out his mouth, and five minutes of event.
The IOC and NBC are obviously making a killing off of the advertising. By restricting rebroadcast of the footage, even on the web, they effectively keep some enterprising soul who's taped the whole thing from letting the world know that after commercials, commentary, human interest, ceremonies and credits, the olympic games lasted about six and a half hours.
Think anyone's going to care in ten years? I doubt it- we'll be busy bitching about how much Star Wars Episode Three sucks.
That USB problem you have? It happens. On revision A systems. On B systems. On the towers. On Powerbooks. I could go off at length about the problems with USB, but you've already noticed them.
Linux bit:
IMHO, the best way to get a newbie into Linux is to have a distro with an installer that Just Works. RedHat accomplished this nicely on the bastardized demon engine of a PC I tried it on at work- though it failed to recognize my 3com 3C509 NIC as a 3com 3C509 NIC, which pissed me off a bit.
The MacOS doesn't come with a manual- it doesn't need to. There ARE help files for the woefully inept, but they're about as useful as a "* for Dummies". I know enough about the bash to type "man [whatever]" and take notes when I have problems....but it really helps if I can GET to the bash first!
I've fiddle dee-deed with Be, MacOS (6-9), OSX Server and the Beta. I've piddled with IRIX and Debian, and I've successfully installed Red Hat (wow. I'm so cool.) . I've installed- and more importantly, UN-installed Windows in various flavors...
LinuxPPC is the only OS I've attempted to use that wouldn't even reach an install screen, and that gives it ALL the points off in my book. Everything I've ever installed on PPC architecture has been painless, and Be needed a bit of manual-reading to make it all go properly, but after that, I was home free and off in geekland.
The only way Linux is going to make a dent in wintel market share (aside from getting more games) is to make installing, upgrading, and maintaining something that your friend the Art Fag can do without having to ask you too many annoying questions. If this distro can't do something every other OS I've ever used CAN, then the problem is with this distro, not with everything else.
Oh, final note for Commander Taco (on the off chance he reads this and doesn't know already)- your favorite flavor, Debian, is available on the PPC. So there.
Save your money, at least for awhile. While I'm not a command-line junky, I had a bitch of a time with the OSX beta, and I dumped it off of my system after a week. Loading a 64 meg app just to load Simpletext? Uh? WAITING for windows to redraw? No control strip? No pop-up folders? Can someone tell me HOW this is an improvement?
While I'm not a *nix-head, my chances of being such are practically zero at the moment- LinuxPPC, IMHO, SUCKS FLAMING HORSE COCK. This is a biased an uninformed opinion formed by attempted installation of the latest version (linuxPPC 2000) on a G3/400 powerbook and a G3/300 tower. Even after formatting the powerbook EXACTLY according to the suggested spec, the thing still errored out on boot. I got lucky once, and instead of a repeated string of HDA errors, I got a kernel panic. Yay. Not to mention that the boot control panel included for MacOS use fucks up applescript.
Better luck with the G3 tower- I actually got into a graphical prompt, apparantly at which point the distribution decided that it really didn't like my mouse and completely hung. Solid.
HOW, in ANY CAPACITY, can an OS that has to be installed in a VERY EXACTING (re: unmeetable if you have bad sectors on your hard drive, or if you're not already formatted to spec) fashion, one of the requirements being formatting the drive from ANOTHER OS, be ANY sort of improvement over a system that Just Works?
Another point in favor of the existing MacOS:
I had backed the contents of my powerbook to my firewire disk prior to the reformat. Reboot, reformat, reboot again with the linuxPPC disk in the drive. I figured I wouldn't need to hold down the C key..... and the system booted from the firewire drive, just fine, completely operational, everything intact... (when the device does not, and never has, showed up in the System Disk CP) after getting really pissed of at the installation attempt on LinuxPPC and repartitioning my system again, I booted from a custom rescue disk and copied the entire system back over... booted back into it... and it's like the first three hours of my day hadn't happened at all. I even got rid of the legacy of scrud the MOSX beta install left behind. Yay.
My points:
MacOSX is a mess from what I've seen of it. I can't make any real judgements until it's been optimized and has gone out of beta, but the UI- the thing that keeps a lot of Mac users around- is so radically different from the classic environment... so totally like >EVERYTHING ELSE (sans Dock) that it makes me sick.
At least I can install it on a random partition- the only requirement is that your system is a G3 with 128 megs of RAM and 800 free megs of hard drive somewhere.
When apps get carbonized and useable without having to boot classic, OSX will be useable. Not nearly as functional, however- looking at it as a unix instead of the MacOS, however, it is quite exemplary from a GUI standpoint.
Linux PPC was completely unbootable- despite having read and followed the instructions EXACTLY, to the point of digging through my archives and pulling out an older version of Toast. The bootloader fucks with existing system processes on the MacOS and defaults to linux- meaning if your experience has been anything like mine, your system could look aud infinitum if you walk away from it during an attempted install. The hard drive has to be formatted in a very particular structure, which looks to be extremely arcane and unintuitive... and it really, really hates bad sectors, HFS+, and probably a lot of other things to boot.
As of the moment, the (unbootable) LinuxPPC and the (unoptimized, slow as fuck, RAM-hogging) MOSX are not even options for productivity. I'll stick with MOS9, as it's cheaper than shelling out for PC hardware that actually has linux support.
You have to love the Mac, in the literal emotional sense, or it's just not going to work. Period. I'm running 9.0.4 on my powerbook and my G3 workstation, and the workstation, in spite of suffering under a heavy Photoshop/After Effects / Quicktime load, stopped crashing after I ditched the multiple system folders and got anything system or VM off of the SCSI drive. It goes down when I WANT it to now. Ditto the powerbook, unless you're talking useage of Napster (a shitty port if I've EVER seen one), Yahoo utilities, Real Player, or poorly implemented Java. Aside from that, they're both champs.
I also run a pair of 7100s and an iMac, all with 8.6. The 7100s take a shit with nine and run like champs with their existing systems, as long as you leave them alone and let them handle whatever it is you're making them do on their own terms. The iMac loves me. The only time the little darling has thrown a fit within the last year was when my NT-mongering, Mac-hating roommate had to use the scanner.
Ten hangs in thirty minutes. TEN.
Why? He hates them too much to figure out how to use them properly. I've been using Macs for three years, and wintel boxen for six.... I've never had any problems with either, with few, VERY few exceptions- invariably Netscape, driver conflict, or f$cked peripherals.
Either I'm really lucky, or I've learned enough about the Mac to make her sing....
Most of the problems you'll have with a Mac can be chalked up to the above reasons, or simply not having enough hands-on with the OS.
If Gates is the devil, then Steve Woznaik would have to be the heir-apparant for the title of God (tm). The man hand-built the early Apple computers, coded the BASIC into ROM straight out of his HEAD without using an Assembler, and in general is singlehandedly responsible for bringing low-cost computers to the masses.
To top it, he's humble- check www.woz.org to see what I mean. He's not a money-grubbing "innovator" looking to screw users with restrictive EULAs and high prices... in fact, quite the opposite: the original Apple and Apple ][ encouraged a great deal of free software and home-brew computing.
If ANYONE should get ANY form of respect in the computing field, it is Steve Wozniac.
There's really not much point to it in linux, and there probably won't be a demand for it for quite some time. Seriously- how many Linux / UNIX users use their systems for graphics? (I would be interested to see what IRIX has in the way of calibration utilities).
If you're looking to do serious graphics work and monitor calibration is a MUST, forget linux and Windows. Macintosh has lasted this long because of colorsync and the fact that Photoshop seems to run a hell of a lot smoother on a RISC processor. If Adobe, Macromedia and Quark ceased support for the Mac, Apple would be a ghost within a year.
The Mac was DESIGNED for content creation, with a huge emphasis on making the UI a tool for the artist instead of an obstacle.
Windows has become more of an entertainment medium, and IRIX handles the super-high-end 3d on the SGI systems.
Linux does everything else quite nicely, but as a SERIOUS graphics tool, it's a joke. Until either X gets a boost or a better open-source / free windowing system comes along, accept the fact that Linux simply can NOT fill EVERY need for EVERY person who uses a computer in the course of a days work.
... or lack thereof with regards to writing Dune prequels. Much like Star Wars- the potential for going back further is there, and because it's there, greed drives people to crank out a shit product because they KNOW the masses will buy (House Atreides, Phantom Menace).
I for one have not and WILL not read anything allegedly "Dune" beyond the six books that Herbert wrote. The man put years into the development of Arrakis and the Fremen, and developed a quite remarkable political system, between the Bene Gesserit (sp?), the Tleilaxu, the Guild and the ruling class... all of that depth and detail would naturally have involved some backstory to work from, rough plot notes and so forth about where to start, what happened to bring the elements of Dune together, and so on.
The fact that Herbert did NOT write or release a book similar to House Atreides / House Harkonnen is testament to the lasting quality of a well-developed setting. The work he has done served to make the novel much more realistic and flavorful. Anderson is doing nothing more than making a quick buck with Herbert's successor's approval (as he's more than likely getting a cut).
Dune stands on its own and does NOT need this sort of backstory or exploration- it is thoroughly unnecessary and serves to corrupt the quality of Herbert's efforts.
Dune is one of my favorite novels of all time- one of the best reads of my life. And much like Star Wars, I refuse to let an unnecessary prequel by a shoddy writer tarnish what has come before- one of the greatest fictional works of the twentieth century.
I'm really regretting the fact that I didn't register at the moment. I haven't exactly followed the race until recently, and I've ignored politics ever since the government shut down a few years ago, the results of which affected me not at all.
The way I see it, if Bush gets in, we're completely fucked. All of us- not just the states. The man is a complete idiot that would be handed the reigns to the largest armed force and nuclear arsenal in history- culpable enough to serve as puppets for a republican controlled congress.
Whoever gets it is going to be appointing several supreme court justices, meaning we'll be dealing with the legacy for the next twenty to thirty years, if not longer.
Republicans in the house and senate.. a republican president... a republican supreme court... Fruit of the Reagan/Bush era come back to haunt us.
If Gore gets it, whoop. I'll breath a sigh of relief, wake up and drink my breakfast. Life goes on.
But really, the idea of Bush getting the crown and being handed the keys to the empire... with the world situation being what it is, the shift in social structure brought on by greed, technology and pending regulation.... the best years of our lives may very well be behind us.
Do we really want Big Government in control of our lives?
In four years, will we even have the capacity to object?
Because I LIVE in pittsburgh, and the Area 51 nightclub is on Penn Ave. There is no area 51 nightclub in state college, sorry- the crowbar just doesn't measure up. The address is right- so he said streat instead of avenue?
And regardless of cost, the first company that makes an email client (for Mac) with the following will have my undying loyalty:
Better than Block Sender would be a feature that accepts ONLY messages sent by those listed in your address book, or from a list of @domain.com. Hence, users with private email accounts who like to break things when Spammed could implement the option and save themselves a hell of a lot of stress.
So you're getting paid a decent wage to do absolutely nothing? Get access to the company bandwidth and make friends with Napster. Everyone's favorite app has helped me pass many a boring day at work. Or go to www.sodaplay.com and stay there until thhe boss hands down some work.
Or, use company gear to work on personal projects. As long as it looks reasonably official and you're keeping busy, few people will bother to ask you questions.
Personally, I thought it was everyone's dream job to get the position that looks great on a resume and effectively boils down to getting paid to sit on your ass and find a more exciting job. That's me, and I'm loving it. The work, what there is of it, gets done and done quickly.
I don't know about the rest of the tech crowd, but I have a personal life, a novel I'm working on, and some multimedia gook that I'm trying to ifnd an animator to assist me with. Work pays the bill and that's all it does for me- the less I see of it, the happier I am.
If Napster goes subscription, they're not getting any cash from me- with bandwidth backing me I have my collection to the point where it will never get stale... and if Napster goes away, I'll just do what I've always done before it was even a conceptual wet dream- hit the FTP servers. The recording industry might kill Napster, but they can't stop a million guys with broadband and FTP server software from sharing their collections.
The pipes that plug into the carnegie are MASSIVE, to put it mildly. Multiple T3 connections feed both the museum and the university with the bandwidth from hell - two gigs off of Napster in one work shift.
Seriously though, their robotics program is the BOMB. I met a guy who used to work for Acclaim, then came here to get his PHD in robotics, and a friend of mine had some design work in I.D., one of the robotics trades. It's no surprise that someone figured out how to wire one up....
You should have seen the test of one of the museum robots being controlled through a gigabit ethernet pipe via remote by a guy at the robotics faccility- I'm surprised THAT wasn't posted, it was quite impressive...
[Let's assume this is a valid idea for a moment- I've seen posts claiming otherwise, but then again, I watched my roommate pull 530 megs from a zip disk with recovery tools, so anything is possible.]
I mean, if you could crunch a DVD onto a CD and retain any sort of quality, would the software driver used to read the CD with the information be the same as the DVD drivers? Not likely- it would have to deal with some pretty intense decompression, I should think... As such, what's to keep the Open Source Community from devising some sort of driver for this process? Since it's no longer DVD, it shouldn't be a serious problem....
If I remember, there's a federal law that stipulates you are allowed one [1] backup of any piece of software you own on the basis that it be used to restore/replace the original in the event of its destruction or loss, etceteras. I don't think it specified a change in media, or in the tools necessary to read that data- but it DOES mean that I'm legally allowed to back up any DVDs I might buy.
Yes, standard PC hardware is cheaper- but with all of the options come support nightmares and driver conflicts that would drive the most stable person into the loony bin [what in the HELL is an IRQ, ANYWAY?!]- yes, it's more upgradeable and you have more choices, but after the initial build, how often do you switch things around?
Linux in cluster mode on a bunch of iMacs is a great idea- not only is it aesthetically pleasing [arranged in a circle, they'd look quite eye-catching compared to the average beige boxen], yon iMac currently goes for about 800$ at the minimum end. That's eight hundred bucks for a machine with four external parts [box, power cord, keyboard, mouse], runs on a PPC chip [WAY cooler, far more stable, need I go on?], is a quick setup and, at the bottom end, is running Linux on Apple hardware, ackowledged by many as some of the best parts out there.
It's the cheapest reliable computer package out there, and you're never going to have to worry about hardware driver conflicts or a thousand other setup nightmares common to the PC end of things. - but good luck keeping those CDR drives closed! The iMac is great for this: it doesn't NEED a big screen, and the machines really, honestly, suck ass as kiosks without extensive internal surgery [which is really not easy to do, I can tell you that!]
Huzzah. Now someone who can code needs to port more *nix apps to PPC architecture- I'd be running linux right now were it for a few minor details such as that.
So Windows users can be tracked- who cares? Anyone smart enough to care is running something else, or uses their browser in such a fashion that it doesn't really matter in the end anyway. But if it affects the Macintosh as well?
I'm sorry folks, say what you will, but after three years of Macintosh useage, after running AOhelL, Lynx, Navigator 3-4, Communicator 4.XXX, IE 3, IE 4, Mozzila PR14 [I ran it three times, it crashed twice and refused to get past startup once], iCab, and iCab 2.x, Mac IE5 is the ONLY browser that meets my needs both aesthetically and from a work environment standpoint. And to have that comprimised? Hell, I may as well get a job in a steel mill or shoot myself in the head.
With as little privacy as I have on the net, I'm starting to wonder why my phyiscal life is so empty.
Any programming language that consisted of giving a little turtle command to do stuff is alright by me- and if you didn't like the turtle, you could change him into a dump truck, or a helicoptor.....
Seriously, a beautiful way to teach programming to grade school kids: I learned it on an Apple ][ in fourth grade, and it was a blast.
Could you program your DJ to interrupt a ten song set between every song to say that he's playing a ten song set with no interruptions, like they do in RL?
Call me a freak, but the only entertainment media that I use are a dish for a couple of hours a week (HBO original programming and Babylon 5), and my laptop, on a 32.2 connection thanks to the area wiring.
Even if I wanted to expend ALL of my bandwidth listening to something that I already have on my hard drive, why would I want to include the second most annoying element of radio- the DJ?
When you're online for half of the day, the weather is a click away- www.accuweather.com- no halfassed weather channel "local" forecast that shows you Iowa for ten seconds. The only thing you'd need a DJ for is song recaps, and with something along the lines of Winamp, you can read those already, so the dude is completely phased out. Though I'd rather have him thant the ten hours of Ads he's forced to play.
Then try Spinner for the PC- I don't know if it's available for other platforms or not. It's effectively "net radio". A friend of mine uses it to listen to ambient music excessively....
One problem with radio and MTV is commercials- even more of a bother on the FM than the dish, more pervasive and annoying in my opinion. And I'm sure the lot of us start reading Slashdot right below the ad banner and don't even look at the danged thing, do we?
Another IS the format problem- like someone else on the board said, you're looking for Madonna and you get Lopez. Woopee. What if your tastes are a little less Top Forty? I for one listen to Anthrax, Therion, Coil, Death, Pro-Pain and Throbbing Gristle, among others. Under format restrictions you would NEVER happen across any of these save Anthrax, and if you're partial to a particular era of the band, forget it. I love the randomness of having a six hundred song playlist- and the fact that I personally selected EVERY song, from Rage Against the Machine to Einsterzende Neubauten, is what makes it worth listening to. Split things into genres and all of a sudden you lose out on the selectability of what you're looking for- and in the world of steaming audio, you lose out on quality and choice completely: I stopped listening to radio because I think POD, korn, Kitty, and 3 Doors Down are tortuous to listen to- and anything else I may like is so overplayed as to spoil the experience.
I can agree on including a "Genre" pulldown in the search selections, however, it would only make sense of you could search in excess of a hundred (the Macster limit). Most rippers include tagging options- and you can still search for music in other ways if they don't- the Napster search criteria are in need of some serious improvements, and this option could easily be one of them.
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The fact that three million people watched the sci-fi channel is pretty amazing, considering these guys can't seem to ever get their head and their neck wired straight- especially when it comes to original programming. Out of the viewing base, how many are actual fans of the book? How many have read the entire series? (hint to Lynch fans who've only read the first book- read the rest of the series and parts of the movie will make a LOT more sense!) Anyone notice that the TV version, in addition to commercials, has more per capita innacuracies than the initial CNN reports on the Florida elections?
Dune is too complicated and epic a story to give to a television budget and system of Producers. I personally feel that a director such as David Fincher would be best cut out to create an interesting, accurate version of Dune, or perhaps Dune: Messiah.
Ehn. Sorry. PowerBook, Y2k / Firewire / Pismo series. It doesn't like anything less than nine. Though there ARE a lot of extensions and CPs I'm not using, you never know- especially in the mobile environment I'm in- when you're going to need things like the zip drivers or Novel Netware...As it stands, she tops at 37.6 at the moment, which, IMHO, is far more RAM than an OS should occupy. If I had less than 128 of RAM, I'd be pretty pissed.
I've gotten a Nine install down to about twenty -five megs on a New World system (re- no ROMs on the mobo), and I had 8.6 stripped to fifty megs of space and about twenty of RAM (the roms, again) on an iMac... but that was for a kiosk with functionality being completely unnecessary.
And oh, the niftiness that is the extensions manager.... how do Linux users get shite out of the kernel, if they decide they don't need it? Boot another one?
Hey man, I LOVED os8. I creamed in my pants at the pop-up folders and all of the other gooey goodness it had to offer. The application switcher in 8.5 was the last signifigant UI innovation, and the stability of nine is great.... But.
System 7 takes like four megs of RAM.
OS 8 takes ten....
8.5 takes 15-18 on old world systems, 25-30 on new world....
and 9 is taking up jsut under FORTY on my powerbook.
You can probably run DOS on your spankin' new AMD Athlon, can't you? Win3.1 for those of you sick enough to run it? GEOS?
I can't run anything LOWER than nine on my powerbook. It's my only option. MacOS is not forward compatable, though the applications certianly are. Nine, stripped, takes up around 100 megs... 150-225 with moderate functionality, 250-300 fully loaded and customized with a shitload of preferences and cache files counted, not to mention fonts.
I can live with that, even though I get miffed when I look at my OS 8 system folder and realize I can slap that- all of it- and Norton Utilities on a zip and boot from it.
But OSX has ONE install option- full - and eats EIGHT HUNDRED MEGS. So much for rescue disks and backups. Maybe some hacker will whack aqua and replace it with System 7, when collapable folder windows were amazingly sweet. That should lop a fw hundred megs off of the snud you need to run the damned thing.
Let's not forget to add:
No computer viruses, unless you count M$ macros.
The ability to change quickly- a one-generational transition to bring in USB, another for Firewire... both of which work great, neither of which is still globally supported on Wintel or Lintel.
Painless upgrades and driver installation.
True application portability (install on one machine, grab the parts and move them to another... no recompile, no registry)
It may be a small town, but a lot of us HAVE been to the "City"... which is why so very many Mac fans are willing to shoot you ignorant jerks on sight.
I grew up in the sticks. I took BASIC on a 386 network in 1996. The smalltown analogy does NOT apply. If anything, the so-called "Mac World" would be a wealthy suburb of a major city- the kind with a hardcore neighborhood watch.
I personally feel that Aqua is, as others have stated, a marketing ploy. I fiddled with the beta for awhile- crunching away at it felt like I was sitting at a slicked-up Xterm. The functionality and grace of the MacOS were completely stripped out, in favor of... .what? And it ran like ass on my G3/400 desktop with 512 megs of RAM.
Same on my powerbook, the only difference being that the bettery meter told me how long a charge was going to take when I plugged into the wall.... I'm not trading the big stack of features I love the MacOS for in exchange for one itty bit of convenience.
The Mac has always been hackable- and one up on everything else, you can hack a COMPILED binary. This is great, and I'll miss Resedit if I EVER get around to using OSX.
Users want the Apple Menu. They want the Desktop (a LOT.) They want tabbed folders, they want the control strip.... and out of the handful of Pittsburghers that have tried the Beta, not one of us has anything positive to say about functionality. The menu windows are bulky and ugly, universal drag and drop is a joke, and there are so many things just fundamentally WINDOWS in the way the system now handles that I'm sure more than one crossplatformer is tearing his hair out in anger.
I am totally in favor of hacking this sucker for useability. I've tried a few of the add-ons, but I really don't like the idea of having to boot my apple menu after I boot my OS. I'm not digging tacking an extra 64 megs onto RAM useage in order to boot Photoshop.
Whoever can hack Aqua and replace it with a useable interface- for example, the OS 9 front end (finder windows, apple menu, desktop, control strip, and NO FRIGGIN DOCK) will probably be hailed as a hero in the Mac community.
Mac users want current MacOS functionality, if they wanted NeXT, they would have bought NeXT cubes when the company was still around. Aqua fails to deliver in every area so far, with the possible exception of Colorsync.
Between the Cubes and MacOSX, it looks like NeXT shall rise again... rather the present Mac user base likes it or not.
Swap the cute little KDE throbber for the ubiquitous "E" and, um.... it looks like Windows. It's pretty, but how is this a Good Thing? KDE and Gnome both handle a lot like Windows Explorer, and no amount of flash, however nifty it looks, is going to change the inherent clunkiness of an Explorer ripoff.
e ady/Bork" at the bottom of my desktop at all times, without ever having to dig for it.
Anyone interested in laying aside prettiness for a bit and actually concentrating on >functionality ? I stick with the MacOS for four very simple core reasons:
1. Global location of File / Edit / View / etc. - whatever app I run, they're all there, they're all in the SAME DAMNED PLACE. Yeah.
2. The Control Strip. You can flame me for being a Mac boy, but this is a biggie. I have the controls for energy saving, battery life, file sharing, my web connection, quicktime, sound, my CDROM drive, and monitor resolution/depth on a quick-access strip that can be hidden with a keystroke. Basic system preferences available in the open without having to dig through *anything*.
3. Pop-up folders. I can keep the folder "Bork", where "Bork" is, for example, "hard drive/devcontent/sites/bigsite/images/processed/r
4. The ability to "hide" an application. NOT minimize it. NOT collapse the window. HIDE the thing so that it's only visible from the Finder menu. Out of sight, out of mind.
Excepting item one, it seems that MacOSX has dropped these critical features... they are perfect functionality enhancements that I have yet to see anywhere else because, apparently, Microsoft didn't rip them off first.
Howzabout some innovation, instead of redoing something someone else has already done?
./sarcasm
I care more about Windows than I do the Olympics... and as a dedicated Linux advocate and Mac user, that says a lot. I've tried very hard to ignore the olympics since the Tanya Harding thing made figure scating the only thing you could watch on CBS for about two years straight.
With this in mind, from what I've picked up, it seems to me that the IOC is being quite basatrdly in its tactics. A >TEN year ban on material transmission? The legal equivalent of anally raping anyone who uses the olympic logo other than themselves?
I watched about an hour of the summer olympics. And I caught a lot of the diving because it happened to be on in the bars when I was getting off work, and it beats the piss out of Buffy. It seems to me that the Olympics is nothing more than one long photo op for the so-called "journalists" that are hosting it... twenty minutes of sob story human interest filler, twenty minutes of commercials, fifteen minutes of the commentator showing off his dental work and blowing shit out his mouth, and five minutes of event.
The IOC and NBC are obviously making a killing off of the advertising. By restricting rebroadcast of the footage, even on the web, they effectively keep some enterprising soul who's taped the whole thing from letting the world know that after commercials, commentary, human interest, ceremonies and credits, the olympic games lasted about six and a half hours.
Think anyone's going to care in ten years? I doubt it- we'll be busy bitching about how much Star Wars Episode Three sucks.
/. sarcasm
(A score one with six replies? Hmmm....)
.but it really helps if I can GET to the bash first!
MacOS bit:
That USB problem you have? It happens. On revision A systems. On B systems. On the towers. On Powerbooks. I could go off at length about the problems with USB, but you've already noticed them.
Linux bit:
IMHO, the best way to get a newbie into Linux is to have a distro with an installer that Just Works. RedHat accomplished this nicely on the bastardized demon engine of a PC I tried it on at work- though it failed to recognize my 3com 3C509 NIC as a 3com 3C509 NIC, which pissed me off a bit.
The MacOS doesn't come with a manual- it doesn't need to. There ARE help files for the woefully inept, but they're about as useful as a "* for Dummies". I know enough about the bash to type "man [whatever]" and take notes when I have problems...
I've fiddle dee-deed with Be, MacOS (6-9), OSX Server and the Beta. I've piddled with IRIX and Debian, and I've successfully installed Red Hat (wow. I'm so cool.) . I've installed- and more importantly, UN-installed Windows in various flavors...
LinuxPPC is the only OS I've attempted to use that wouldn't even reach an install screen, and that gives it ALL the points off in my book. Everything I've ever installed on PPC architecture has been painless, and Be needed a bit of manual-reading to make it all go properly, but after that, I was home free and off in geekland.
The only way Linux is going to make a dent in wintel market share (aside from getting more games) is to make installing, upgrading, and maintaining something that your friend the Art Fag can do without having to ask you too many annoying questions. If this distro can't do something every other OS I've ever used CAN, then the problem is with this distro, not with everything else.
Oh, final note for Commander Taco (on the off chance he reads this and doesn't know already)- your favorite flavor, Debian, is available on the PPC. So there.
Save your money, at least for awhile. While I'm not a command-line junky, I had a bitch of a time with the OSX beta, and I dumped it off of my system after a week. Loading a 64 meg app just to load Simpletext? Uh? WAITING for windows to redraw? No control strip? No pop-up folders? Can someone tell me HOW this is an improvement?
While I'm not a *nix-head, my chances of being such are practically zero at the moment- LinuxPPC, IMHO, SUCKS FLAMING HORSE COCK. This is a biased an uninformed opinion formed by attempted installation of the latest version (linuxPPC 2000) on a G3/400 powerbook and a G3/300 tower. Even after formatting the powerbook EXACTLY according to the suggested spec, the thing still errored out on boot. I got lucky once, and instead of a repeated string of HDA errors, I got a kernel panic. Yay. Not to mention that the boot control panel included for MacOS use fucks up applescript.
Better luck with the G3 tower- I actually got into a graphical prompt, apparantly at which point the distribution decided that it really didn't like my mouse and completely hung. Solid.
HOW, in ANY CAPACITY, can an OS that has to be installed in a VERY EXACTING (re: unmeetable if you have bad sectors on your hard drive, or if you're not already formatted to spec) fashion, one of the requirements being formatting the drive from ANOTHER OS, be ANY sort of improvement over a system that Just Works?
Another point in favor of the existing MacOS:
I had backed the contents of my powerbook to my firewire disk prior to the reformat. Reboot, reformat, reboot again with the linuxPPC disk in the drive. I figured I wouldn't need to hold down the C key..... and the system booted from the firewire drive, just fine, completely operational, everything intact... (when the device does not, and never has, showed up in the System Disk CP) after getting really pissed of at the installation attempt on LinuxPPC and repartitioning my system again, I booted from a custom rescue disk and copied the entire system back over... booted back into it... and it's like the first three hours of my day hadn't happened at all. I even got rid of the legacy of scrud the MOSX beta install left behind. Yay.
My points:
MacOSX is a mess from what I've seen of it. I can't make any real judgements until it's been optimized and has gone out of beta, but the UI- the thing that keeps a lot of Mac users around- is so radically different from the classic environment... so totally like >EVERYTHING ELSE (sans Dock) that it makes me sick.
At least I can install it on a random partition- the only requirement is that your system is a G3 with 128 megs of RAM and 800 free megs of hard drive somewhere.
When apps get carbonized and useable without having to boot classic, OSX will be useable. Not nearly as functional, however- looking at it as a unix instead of the MacOS, however, it is quite exemplary from a GUI standpoint.
Linux PPC was completely unbootable- despite having read and followed the instructions EXACTLY, to the point of digging through my archives and pulling out an older version of Toast. The bootloader fucks with existing system processes on the MacOS and defaults to linux- meaning if your experience has been anything like mine, your system could look aud infinitum if you walk away from it during an attempted install. The hard drive has to be formatted in a very particular structure, which looks to be extremely arcane and unintuitive... and it really, really hates bad sectors, HFS+, and probably a lot of other things to boot.
As of the moment, the (unbootable) LinuxPPC and the (unoptimized, slow as fuck, RAM-hogging) MOSX are not even options for productivity. I'll stick with MOS9, as it's cheaper than shelling out for PC hardware that actually has linux support.
You have to love the Mac, in the literal emotional sense, or it's just not going to work. Period. I'm running 9.0.4 on my powerbook and my G3 workstation, and the workstation, in spite of suffering under a heavy Photoshop/After Effects / Quicktime load, stopped crashing after I ditched the multiple system folders and got anything system or VM off of the SCSI drive. It goes down when I WANT it to now. Ditto the powerbook, unless you're talking useage of Napster (a shitty port if I've EVER seen one), Yahoo utilities, Real Player, or poorly implemented Java. Aside from that, they're both champs.
I also run a pair of 7100s and an iMac, all with 8.6. The 7100s take a shit with nine and run like champs with their existing systems, as long as you leave them alone and let them handle whatever it is you're making them do on their own terms. The iMac loves me. The only time the little darling has thrown a fit within the last year was when my NT-mongering, Mac-hating roommate had to use the scanner.
Ten hangs in thirty minutes. TEN.
Why? He hates them too much to figure out how to use them properly. I've been using Macs for three years, and wintel boxen for six.... I've never had any problems with either, with few, VERY few exceptions- invariably Netscape, driver conflict, or f$cked peripherals.
Either I'm really lucky, or I've learned enough about the Mac to make her sing....
Most of the problems you'll have with a Mac can be chalked up to the above reasons, or simply not having enough hands-on with the OS.
If Gates is the devil, then Steve Woznaik would have to be the heir-apparant for the title of God (tm). The man hand-built the early Apple computers, coded the BASIC into ROM straight out of his HEAD without using an Assembler, and in general is singlehandedly responsible for bringing low-cost computers to the masses.
To top it, he's humble- check www.woz.org to see what I mean. He's not a money-grubbing "innovator" looking to screw users with restrictive EULAs and high prices... in fact, quite the opposite: the original Apple and Apple ][ encouraged a great deal of free software and home-brew computing.
If ANYONE should get ANY form of respect in the computing field, it is Steve Wozniac.
There's really not much point to it in linux, and there probably won't be a demand for it for quite some time. Seriously- how many Linux / UNIX users use their systems for graphics? (I would be interested to see what IRIX has in the way of calibration utilities).
If you're looking to do serious graphics work and monitor calibration is a MUST, forget linux and Windows. Macintosh has lasted this long because of colorsync and the fact that Photoshop seems to run a hell of a lot smoother on a RISC processor. If Adobe, Macromedia and Quark ceased support for the Mac, Apple would be a ghost within a year.
The Mac was DESIGNED for content creation, with a huge emphasis on making the UI a tool for the artist instead of an obstacle.
Windows has become more of an entertainment medium, and IRIX handles the super-high-end 3d on the SGI systems.
Linux does everything else quite nicely, but as a SERIOUS graphics tool, it's a joke. Until either X gets a boost or a better open-source / free windowing system comes along, accept the fact that Linux simply can NOT fill EVERY need for EVERY person who uses a computer in the course of a days work.
... or lack thereof with regards to writing Dune prequels. Much like Star Wars- the potential for going back further is there, and because it's there, greed drives people to crank out a shit product because they KNOW the masses will buy (House Atreides, Phantom Menace).
I for one have not and WILL not read anything allegedly "Dune" beyond the six books that Herbert wrote. The man put years into the development of Arrakis and the Fremen, and developed a quite remarkable political system, between the Bene Gesserit (sp?), the Tleilaxu, the Guild and the ruling class... all of that depth and detail would naturally have involved some backstory to work from, rough plot notes and so forth about where to start, what happened to bring the elements of Dune together, and so on.
The fact that Herbert did NOT write or release a book similar to House Atreides / House Harkonnen is testament to the lasting quality of a well-developed setting. The work he has done served to make the novel much more realistic and flavorful. Anderson is doing nothing more than making a quick buck with Herbert's successor's approval (as he's more than likely getting a cut).
Dune stands on its own and does NOT need this sort of backstory or exploration- it is thoroughly unnecessary and serves to corrupt the quality of Herbert's efforts.
Dune is one of my favorite novels of all time- one of the best reads of my life. And much like Star Wars, I refuse to let an unnecessary prequel by a shoddy writer tarnish what has come before- one of the greatest fictional works of the twentieth century.
I'm really regretting the fact that I didn't register at the moment. I haven't exactly followed the race until recently, and I've ignored politics ever since the government shut down a few years ago, the results of which affected me not at all.
The way I see it, if Bush gets in, we're completely fucked. All of us- not just the states. The man is a complete idiot that would be handed the reigns to the largest armed force and nuclear arsenal in history- culpable enough to serve as puppets for a republican controlled congress.
Whoever gets it is going to be appointing several supreme court justices, meaning we'll be dealing with the legacy for the next twenty to thirty years, if not longer.
Republicans in the house and senate.. a republican president... a republican supreme court... Fruit of the Reagan/Bush era come back to haunt us.
If Gore gets it, whoop. I'll breath a sigh of relief, wake up and drink my breakfast. Life goes on.
But really, the idea of Bush getting the crown and being handed the keys to the empire... with the world situation being what it is, the shift in social structure brought on by greed, technology and pending regulation.... the best years of our lives may very well be behind us.
Do we really want Big Government in control of our lives?
In four years, will we even have the capacity to object?
Gore or Bush?
Let's put it in perspective:
Herpes or Syphallis?
Why?
Because I LIVE in pittsburgh, and the Area 51 nightclub is on Penn Ave. There is no area 51 nightclub in state college, sorry- the crowbar just doesn't measure up. The address is right- so he said streat instead of avenue?
So what? I'm going!
Let's not forget "Block Sender", shall we?
And regardless of cost, the first company that makes an email client (for Mac) with the following will have my undying loyalty:
Better than Block Sender would be a feature that accepts ONLY messages sent by those listed in your address book, or from a list of @domain.com. Hence, users with private email accounts who like to break things when Spammed could implement the option and save themselves a hell of a lot of stress.
So you're getting paid a decent wage to do absolutely nothing? Get access to the company bandwidth and make friends with Napster. Everyone's favorite app has helped me pass many a boring day at work. Or go to www.sodaplay.com and stay there until thhe boss hands down some work.
Or, use company gear to work on personal projects. As long as it looks reasonably official and you're keeping busy, few people will bother to ask you questions.
Personally, I thought it was everyone's dream job to get the position that looks great on a resume and effectively boils down to getting paid to sit on your ass and find a more exciting job. That's me, and I'm loving it. The work, what there is of it, gets done and done quickly.
I don't know about the rest of the tech crowd, but I have a personal life, a novel I'm working on, and some multimedia gook that I'm trying to ifnd an animator to assist me with. Work pays the bill and that's all it does for me- the less I see of it, the happier I am.
If Napster goes subscription, they're not getting any cash from me- with bandwidth backing me I have my collection to the point where it will never get stale... and if Napster goes away, I'll just do what I've always done before it was even a conceptual wet dream- hit the FTP servers. The recording industry might kill Napster, but they can't stop a million guys with broadband and FTP server software from sharing their collections.
The pipes that plug into the carnegie are MASSIVE, to put it mildly. Multiple T3 connections feed both the museum and the university with the bandwidth from hell - two gigs off of Napster in one work shift. Seriously though, their robotics program is the BOMB. I met a guy who used to work for Acclaim, then came here to get his PHD in robotics, and a friend of mine had some design work in I.D., one of the robotics trades. It's no surprise that someone figured out how to wire one up.... You should have seen the test of one of the museum robots being controlled through a gigabit ethernet pipe via remote by a guy at the robotics faccility- I'm surprised THAT wasn't posted, it was quite impressive...
[Let's assume this is a valid idea for a moment- I've seen posts claiming otherwise, but then again, I watched my roommate pull 530 megs from a zip disk with recovery tools, so anything is possible.]
I mean, if you could crunch a DVD onto a CD and retain any sort of quality, would the software driver used to read the CD with the information be the same as the DVD drivers? Not likely- it would have to deal with some pretty intense decompression, I should think... As such, what's to keep the Open Source Community from devising some sort of driver for this process? Since it's no longer DVD, it shouldn't be a serious problem....
If I remember, there's a federal law that stipulates you are allowed one [1] backup of any piece of software you own on the basis that it be used to restore/replace the original in the event of its destruction or loss, etceteras. I don't think it specified a change in media, or in the tools necessary to read that data- but it DOES mean that I'm legally allowed to back up any DVDs I might buy.
Yes, standard PC hardware is cheaper- but with all of the options come support nightmares and driver conflicts that would drive the most stable person into the loony bin [what in the HELL is an IRQ, ANYWAY?!]- yes, it's more upgradeable and you have more choices, but after the initial build, how often do you switch things around?
Linux in cluster mode on a bunch of iMacs is a great idea- not only is it aesthetically pleasing [arranged in a circle, they'd look quite eye-catching compared to the average beige boxen], yon iMac currently goes for about 800$ at the minimum end. That's eight hundred bucks for a machine with four external parts [box, power cord, keyboard, mouse], runs on a PPC chip [WAY cooler, far more stable, need I go on?], is a quick setup and, at the bottom end, is running Linux on Apple hardware, ackowledged by many as some of the best parts out there.
It's the cheapest reliable computer package out there, and you're never going to have to worry about hardware driver conflicts or a thousand other setup nightmares common to the PC end of things. - but good luck keeping those CDR drives closed! The iMac is great for this: it doesn't NEED a big screen, and the machines really, honestly, suck ass as kiosks without extensive internal surgery [which is really not easy to do, I can tell you that!]
Huzzah. Now someone who can code needs to port more *nix apps to PPC architecture- I'd be running linux right now were it for a few minor details such as that.
So Windows users can be tracked- who cares? Anyone smart enough to care is running something else, or uses their browser in such a fashion that it doesn't really matter in the end anyway. But if it affects the Macintosh as well?
I'm sorry folks, say what you will, but after three years of Macintosh useage, after running AOhelL, Lynx, Navigator 3-4, Communicator 4.XXX, IE 3, IE 4, Mozzila PR14 [I ran it three times, it crashed twice and refused to get past startup once], iCab, and iCab 2.x, Mac IE5 is the ONLY browser that meets my needs both aesthetically and from a work environment standpoint. And to have that comprimised? Hell, I may as well get a job in a steel mill or shoot myself in the head.
With as little privacy as I have on the net, I'm starting to wonder why my phyiscal life is so empty.
Any programming language that consisted of giving a little turtle command to do stuff is alright by me- and if you didn't like the turtle, you could change him into a dump truck, or a helicoptor.....
Seriously, a beautiful way to teach programming to grade school kids: I learned it on an Apple ][ in fourth grade, and it was a blast.
Could you program your DJ to interrupt a ten song set between every song to say that he's playing a ten song set with no interruptions, like they do in RL?
Call me a freak, but the only entertainment media that I use are a dish for a couple of hours a week (HBO original programming and Babylon 5), and my laptop, on a 32.2 connection thanks to the area wiring.
Even if I wanted to expend ALL of my bandwidth listening to something that I already have on my hard drive, why would I want to include the second most annoying element of radio- the DJ?
When you're online for half of the day, the weather is a click away- www.accuweather.com- no halfassed weather channel "local" forecast that shows you Iowa for ten seconds. The only thing you'd need a DJ for is song recaps, and with something along the lines of Winamp, you can read those already, so the dude is completely phased out. Though I'd rather have him thant the ten hours of Ads he's forced to play.
Then try Spinner for the PC- I don't know if it's available for other platforms or not. It's effectively "net radio". A friend of mine uses it to listen to ambient music excessively....
One problem with radio and MTV is commercials- even more of a bother on the FM than the dish, more pervasive and annoying in my opinion. And I'm sure the lot of us start reading Slashdot right below the ad banner and don't even look at the danged thing, do we?
Another IS the format problem- like someone else on the board said, you're looking for Madonna and you get Lopez. Woopee. What if your tastes are a little less Top Forty? I for one listen to Anthrax, Therion, Coil, Death, Pro-Pain and Throbbing Gristle, among others. Under format restrictions you would NEVER happen across any of these save Anthrax, and if you're partial to a particular era of the band, forget it. I love the randomness of having a six hundred song playlist- and the fact that I personally selected EVERY song, from Rage Against the Machine to Einsterzende Neubauten, is what makes it worth listening to. Split things into genres and all of a sudden you lose out on the selectability of what you're looking for- and in the world of steaming audio, you lose out on quality and choice completely: I stopped listening to radio because I think POD, korn, Kitty, and 3 Doors Down are tortuous to listen to- and anything else I may like is so overplayed as to spoil the experience.
I can agree on including a "Genre" pulldown in the search selections, however, it would only make sense of you could search in excess of a hundred (the Macster limit). Most rippers include tagging options- and you can still search for music in other ways if they don't- the Napster search criteria are in need of some serious improvements, and this option could easily be one of them.