Of the two places that I purchase from regularly, one requires a hardware purchase of any type, and they'll actually call you and ask if you'd like a $5 mouse or a $3 y power adaptor added to your order.
The other (not naming names, but they're rather ovoid) doesn't seem to give two shits if you buy anything else in your order at all, at least with the countless XP SP2 OEM discs I've bought from them when building PCs or gutting existing machines for family & friends.
I've bought one Vista OEM from them (home premium), and it was all alone on the invoice. Vista was (and remains) so excessively terrible for the three things that I use that machine for (3d illustration & animation, media center with nForce 4 chipsets and an nVidia Quadro as the cherry on top) that one would have to hold a gun to my head to get me to install Vista on any machine I have to support or work with on a regular basis.
Mind you, I don't have any moral dilemma whatsoever torrenting the OS for personal use. The fine details of the license agreement are pretty much insignificant to me UNLESS I'm installing it on a business machine or I'm being paid for support, in which case I'm 100% legit at all times. My gaming rig and the in-law's machine? No guilt whatsoever about sharing a single (valid) XP SP2 x64 license.
Methinks sophisticated buyers will simply continue buying a $5 mouse from their favorite online retailer, thus fulfilling the vendor's "must be bundled with hardware" requirement for a $169 OEM Vista Ultimate full version instead of a $199 boxed upgrade in which you have to jump through hoops for a clean install.
I posit that there's one market for those boxed upgrades on the shelf at BestBuy, Target Etc... and "sophisticated" they ain't.
MD5 crypt hashes produce characters that need escaping if you're going to insert or test against a DB entry ($, ', ", \ etc) , so yes. In this particular case it's necessary.
Secondly, if you're writing an app that's intended to be distributed everywhere, it's best not to rely on magic quotes and just escape stuff manually, but to each their own.
I'll have to concur with this approach. A lot of times with web apps on shared hosts, you don't have the option of saving your config files (with your database config) somewhere 100% secure, and many of the more ghetto Win-based shared hosts give global read permissions on everything for every account on the box, even if you've got a home directory to save to outside of public_html/ or whatever.
Anyhow, what this leads to is you have to assume that your database config isn't even vaguely secure unless you've got root access on your own box for deployment, and it's best not even to make that assumption then. So, we don't save passwords in human-readable format.
If you were paying attention above, if the config file is readable, that means your functions for obfuscating the stored passwords in the database aren't secure either... so it's best not to store the password at all -- store an md5 or crypt hash of the password and check against that.
So, something like:
<?
// set encryption key for user passwords - format MUST begin with $1$ // followed by 8 characters and end with $ to correctly create an MD5 signature. // don't lose track of your salt key, or you're pretty much screwed.
$my_encsalt = '$1$MyEncKey$';
// read in submitted password, not relying on register_globals, because // it's really, really evil, even if it's convenient. makes for very injection-prone code.
I didn't strip tags, add slashes or anything that you should really do as standard procedure on ALL user input (assume it's all hostile) in that example for sake of getting the idea across clearly.
I've actually got a boxed copy of Photoshop 3.0 for SGI Irix, so it's not like they'd be starting from scratch if Adobe ever decided to port Photoshop to Linux, but they'd probably have to worry about the myriad of headaches that Maya users have to worry about....
- Do you have the correct nvdrvx64 v5.27 for your kernel? Oh, you say that one conflicts with your XOrg install? - Oh, you seem to have Ububtu Lusty Leper 12.3 -- we're sorry but that combination of OS and your eMachines 2100x5v aren't on our HCL and aren't supported. You'll need to purchase a Dell Dimension 52X and install Fedora Core 3 with XOrg 2.17, kernel 7.25 and the nVidia 32-bit 5.21 drivers for us to even speak with you on the phone as you're working within an unsupported environment. Have you considered virtualizing the win32 version?
Yes, silly made up numbers and versions, but think of this from an artist's or phone tech's point of view -- the literally hundreds of flavors of linux out there and support would be an absolute nightmare, even with the resources at Adobe's disposal.
The only working Linux pipelines I've seen in professional graphics/CG environments have been supported 90% by extremely competent, on-site staff, which aren't exactly at the disposal of the majority of people that buy photoshop. People who can custom compile binaries to match the kernel they're using and pick and choose their hardware extremely carefully. i.e. not your average Photoshop user who wants a double-click and it just works install.
Wow, that's a tangent from the original point of the post...
Anyhow, considerable development effort was put into a *nix flavored photoshop back in the mid-90s, and it was shelved either because of support headaches, or companies laughed in Adobe's face when they asked $14,000 per seat for the SGI version of a $750 app. I forget the specifics, but I seem to remember most SGI software purchase prices being ludicrously high to encourage annual leases with support contracts instead of outright purchase.
Crashes happen too, and I'm currently on a rampage against the "checkpoint for a false sense of save security but only allow you to save and quit instead of quicksave" thing that Halo loves.
I replayed the last two hours of Halo 3 twice due to:
- Jump the warthog into the Dawn, cutscene starts loading and "This disc is unreadable, please press A to restart your console"
I mean seriously, how much trouble would it be to add a quicksave at checkpoints instead of making me restart the entire game each time I try and save? I was pretty much was in the moment between the gravemind and the conclusion of the game, and having to quit out every so often just destroys the immersion.
For the record my achievements for campaign complete weren't awarded the first time out and I think that the game gave itself the console equivalent of a divide by zero error when it tried to determine which ending (ie extra 9 or so seconds of legendary cutscene) to play based on listed achievements and the disc read error was utter nonsense.
Add that to Halo 3 flat out refusing to honor my saves until I deleted all Halo related datafiles from my profile and start over and I'm just about ready to say the Windows gaming mantra of "have you installed the update?" is beginning to take hold on the console side too.
I've actually used this process on a couple of projects that I've worked on, and every time I walk through the exhibit hall at Siggraph I find myself hoping that a desktop model will reach somewhere around $1k soon.
Currently, it's an imprecise science -- you have to make certain that your model is "watertight" -- meaning that it registers as a solid object when passed to the fab software. You also have to thicken things like teeth, swords etc because the glue process makes thin items rather brittle.
Depending on the fabricator, you might have to paint the model after the fact, and on a whole lot of these you actually need to sand and prime the finished figure as many of the fabricators leave a sort of "fuzzy" surface that needs to be smoothed to look good.
Anyhow, it's a really cool tech for concept art and rapid prototyping, and if you've got the skillset to watertight models you create, you can have your 3DS/Maya etc models printed pretty reasonably ($45-150ish depending on bounding box volume).
Hate to be pedantic, but I must say that I thought C&C III, which came about after EA's dismantling of Westwood, was a fantastic game, and the closest thing to a hardcore RTS I've seen in years. In addition, that was the catalyst to finally get the C&C franchise back on the Mac. Maybe it's nostalgia from seeing Kane, or all the genre actors hamming it up, but I thought it played brilliantly and nailed the tone of the originals.
That said, I thought Generals was crap... but my take is that it was more akin to a tech demo for the engine, like Doom 3.
I can't believe I just defended EA, so I'll have to write more to atone:
EA is in the business of establishing franchises and milking them until their udders dry up. Annually.
It just so happens that the last 10 years, they've put so much focus on pretty-fying games, dumbing them down for the console 'tards, then porting them with the gamepad-required mentality to the PC (no offense meant to any console folks in the audience), and shortening the average playtime to completion to right about 10 hours. As a result, other developers have been following suit (I'm looking at you, Ubi, for starters... Lionhead too).
Anyhow, I've long felt that EA has moved into the business of making games that are meant to be looked at, and not played, then tossed back into the used bin while they still fetch top-ish resale price. Here's hoping that Bioware makes it out of this with their personality and standards intact.
I'll withhold judgement until I see the fruits of this unholy alliance.
I'm now wondering what happens to Obsidian, who generally produces all of Bio's sequels?
"Up until Panther, each version of OSX ran faster than the previous one. But Tiger is definitely slower than Panther. Looks like Leopard will continue the trend."
Huh, wha?
Actually Tiger is much faster overall than Panther (excepting several finder actions... previewing images/.movs in column view, for instance), and as a fellow ADC member I can tell you that the new finder smokes. No more 5 minute lockouts if you forget to disconnect the laptop from the server before you leave the office. A NICE, extremely usable network browser.... lots of little polishy-bits. I'm hoping that the stacked dock icons make it back into the GM. I loved having all my office and CS3 icons in a single pile, not taking up huge amounts of real estate.
I'm not exactly buying into Apple's "entirely new finder" party line, but the improvements they've made are nice and snappy in the last several builds I've tested.
No idea why anyone would want to view a folder in cover flow mode, but whatever. It works, it's fast and Quicklook is mega-handy.
Can't really go into more detail for a couple more weeks, but if you follow the builds on the rumor sites you can see that Leopard is quickly approaching a solid release state.
And all of my Windows games run great on Ubuntu when I use WINE. So see, with Ubuntu I get the Vista experience and the Mac OS X experience, all for basically $0!
In Ubuntu (or anything that defaults to KDE, actually), right click the menu bar or task bar at the bottom of the screen. Click close by mistake.
From here you're booting into terminal mode, sudo hacking xorg.conf files to reset your desktop so you can launch anything through the GUI.
So, no. You're not getting anything close to the OS X experience, and you're not even approaching Vista either.
But have fun with the Aqua theme and all. Fairly certain it was called Agua due to legal issues the last time I checked.
RMAs are all well and good until you wait a month or so for "last minute driver issues" to be sorted out, and no one's going to RMA an open, activated OEM Vista.
I think my point was more that Vista itself is an utter, inexcusable mess and MS hasn't even owned up to that... much less even attempted to make things right (make it right? there's no problem!) amongst its customer base. I was contrasting the level of service you come to expect from companies you deal with.
I bought two: an 8gb for myself and a 4gb for the wife, and we stood in line on opening day.
I honestly believe that the phones were worth every penny that we paid for both of them ($499/$599 retail).
For the record, my wife let her phone slip while she was walking out of her parking garage, and smacked it at the pavement while flailing to catch it. The sleep/wake button got jammed inside the buckled aluminum, and we had to bring the phone in for service.
Apple took the phone back, offered us a loaner ($25ish, IIRC... we didn't take it), and had a *brand*new*phone* shipped to us the very next morning. Priority overnight Fedex, 7:45am, I might add. For a phone that my wife admitted to beating up and was ready to pay for repairs.
So, that was two weeks ago, now Apple offers us $100 apiece for being early adopters.
You just don't get that kind of service in the technology industry anywhere else these days that I've experienced.
I mean, I bought a Vista OEM copy and an nVidia "Vista Ready" mobo on launch day (it's my job to know how to support *everything*, turd or not). You don't see MS or nVidia offering to make things right because little things like on-board sound and networking don't function...at all...nVidia passes the buck to MS, and MS passes the buck to nVidia, and eight months later now, I still have to use USB dongles on that particular mobo for sound and ethernet. And neither of those companies have any intention of making things right. And that's just driver issues. Let's not even get into Vista quality (utter pile of refuse, kthanxbye). No rebate, no exchange for something that actually functions as described. Not even an option to downgrade to XP from MS.
Anyhow, I contrast that experience with something like buying my iPhone, Macbook Pro or any of the dozens of other Apple products I've purchased over the years and there's just no comparison. The iPhone is a *killer* product, and they're going to gain a ton more goodwill out of a gesture that they didn't have to make.
Long story short, the wife is now an absolutely fanatical Apple supporter just from these experiences.
Blogging Whiners are whining because they paid a premium to be an early adopter? Well, duh. I had no illusions that it wouldn't be substantially cheaper by EU launch or the holidays.
Battlestar Galactica is the only NBC/Universal show that I watch, and the wife watches Heroes.
We don't get cable anymore, over the air broadcast is too weak in our area to be an enjoyable experience.
We've been willingly paying for iTunes versions of these shows because they're available within hours of the broadcast, mostly so we can chat with our friends who watch them over the air or via TiVO. Sure, I can go and grab a torrent, but iTunes is convenient and the price point is currently just fine. Honestly, the water cooler social aspect of these shows is timely and something you miss out on with the DVD set, usually released after the season (or in 1/2 season increments for a 200% premium over "normal" DVD sets in BSG's case).
Anyhow, back to the matter at hand. I couldn't get BSG over the air if I wanted to, and whatever DRM-laden crap Universal comes up with on their own probably won't work on the Mac, so what recourse does that leave me?
If NBC/Universal is going to be greedy (digital downloads for a 300% premium over DVD sets? fuck that), and hostile to fans of their shows, I have no moral quandry whatsoever in firing up Azureus at 11:15pm est and jumping in a torrent swarm.
According to the rationale that you either pay for it legitimately or watch the ads, I've been a pirate for the last six years having watched all of my shows (before we canceled cable) via TiVO and skipping the commercials.
Yeah, I'm greedy and willing to be a criminal to support the one TV show that I watch. The networks are just as greedy, and they don't have good intentions toward me either. I'm willing to pay for convenience and deal fairly, but they seem hellbent on not giving me that opportunity.
If they'd provide the same service I'm receiving for a reasonable price, that I can watch on my Mac and have the same lax DRM freedoms that I currently have (up to 5 licensed machines, unlimited iPods/iPhones) I'd be willing to pay. It's really that simple.
If they're incapable of even thinking outside of the analog, real-time, ad-supported model, why don't THEY start seeding torrents with their ads intact for chrissakes?
As it currently stands, the networks and the record companies need to evolve quickly or become irrelevant... they're no longer the tastemakers OR the distribution mechanism of choice, and they'll be utterly irrelevant soon if they don't change their ways.
Those of us in areas where Comcast is the *only* game in town and use our lines to telicommute are pretty angry about this.
Never mind that we've got a view of this metro's skyline,the house we recently purchased is "outside DSL range" according to Bellsouth (now att). This being a lie, because we have friends behind us with DSL... It's just that the infrastructure in the (gentrifying) neighborhood is so bad that they've had 8 DSL modems fried in 6 months. Maybe theyve stopped selling new accounts until they get their voltage issues worked out.
What happens if we get cut off? Back to the dialup stoneage, I guess. I'm just waiting for a call from Comcast security, as I kept my copy of the contract that states clearly 8mb/768/unlimited. Im dead certain that this fud is meant to scare people like me into shape.
I'm a collector of tracts like this one, and I must say that's a classic of the genre.
So, remember kids: roll a cleric, end up in a cult, but gain real power against zombies and your dad!
Shame Elfstar didn't think of rezzing her friend that hung herself, what with all the real spells she can cast now.
I guess that would have derailed the narrative thread a touch though, huh?
As an aside, I have to remind myself from time to time that the people who settled in the US of A were generally persecuted because their beliefs rendered them too kooky to get along with the other kids. It's in our DNA, for better or worse.
Well, from my perspective, if being a member of the GOP defines you as a fundamentalist zealot, then the GOP perhaps needs to weed its garden, or the far-right contingent should create its own party and leave those who still believe in the modern day equivalent of the sun orbiting a flat earth behind.
The faith issue is nothing more than a marketing tactic in modern day elections, anyhow.
As a moderate lefty agnostic, I personally don't have any problem at all with a person of strong faith being elected to office. The problem lies in various fundamentalist agendas being pushed on behalf of blind faith instead of on reason... ID, creationism, end times, gay marriage, third crusade, abortion laws.
Your relationship with your god(s) is between you and them. Don't bring me, or my school age kids into it please.
I wouldn't want to be the client whose agency uses Nielsens as a pricing guide for my electronic media (they're utterly behind the times, and they set the standard rates for "worth" for broadcast placements). Hell, Nielsens are just about obsolete for broadcast TV as well, seeing as how time shifted viewers don't count. I might know, what, 3 people (?) that don't have some sort of DVR and time-shift absolutely everything they watch.
But, seriously... Google sets their own ad rates (via bidding), and Nielsens matter because?
As the owner of an iPhone, it would appear that "visual voicemail" is actually some type of push email service that delivers audio files to the phone, ie once a voicemail has been received, the phone can be in airplane mode (all radios off) and I can still listen to the messages.
I'd imagine that those unlocking the phone will have to sacrifice this part, no matter how clean and reliable the hack.
I actually see some omissions like dialing while driving and music as ringtones are Apple enforcing its taste and manners on the user. They think extremely deeply into the process of not only actually using the phone, but what the overall experience means to the user, and others around them. It's Apple's defining trait, actually, and it's shocking that very few in the technology industry really grok the human part of human interface.
I would put down money that both those omissions are 100% intentional, and good for Apple.
Someone needed to buck the norms of both the hardware and carrier aspects of mobile phones, and Apple's doing it in a big way. Maybe the thing won't take over the planet, but it'll certainly change the landscape for the better.
Side note: my current pet peeve is police officers surfing the web/emailing/whatever on dash-mounted laptops while driving. If you haven't seen one of these, be thankful. That soccer mom in the Caravan with 6 kids and a mobile to her ear won't look nearly as frightening once you experience THE LAW driving like they've just put away a quart of scotch.
I strongly believe that economy of motion is going to be key for usability on touch sensitive devices, and it's somewhat disappointing that you won't be able to drag or hold due to the scrolling gestures on the iPhone. In the back of my head, I'd started formulating a drag & drop form interface that would be clunky in a traditional browser, but very quick on small touchscreens.
I do think that segment is poised to explode over the next couple of years. Just take a look at your web logs on your sites... how many mobile users/pageviews do you have right now? Close to none? That's going to change very soon.
It strikes me as interesting that developing usable apps for the iPhone is remarkably similar to building pages for those with disabilities from a usability standpoint -- no hovers, no hover drill-down menus, large targets on click.
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Of the two places that I purchase from regularly, one requires a hardware purchase of any type, and they'll actually call you and ask if you'd like a $5 mouse or a $3 y power adaptor added to your order.
The other (not naming names, but they're rather ovoid) doesn't seem to give two shits if you buy anything else in your order at all, at least with the countless XP SP2 OEM discs I've bought from them when building PCs or gutting existing machines for family & friends.
I've bought one Vista OEM from them (home premium), and it was all alone on the invoice. Vista was (and remains) so excessively terrible for the three things that I use that machine for (3d illustration & animation, media center with nForce 4 chipsets and an nVidia Quadro as the cherry on top) that one would have to hold a gun to my head to get me to install Vista on any machine I have to support or work with on a regular basis.
Mind you, I don't have any moral dilemma whatsoever torrenting the OS for personal use. The fine details of the license agreement are pretty much insignificant to me UNLESS I'm installing it on a business machine or I'm being paid for support, in which case I'm 100% legit at all times. My gaming rig and the in-law's machine? No guilt whatsoever about sharing a single (valid) XP SP2 x64 license.
Methinks sophisticated buyers will simply continue buying a $5 mouse from their favorite online retailer, thus fulfilling the vendor's "must be bundled with hardware" requirement for a $169 OEM Vista Ultimate full version instead of a $199 boxed upgrade in which you have to jump through hoops for a clean install.
I posit that there's one market for those boxed upgrades on the shelf at BestBuy, Target Etc... and "sophisticated" they ain't.
MD5 crypt hashes produce characters that need escaping if you're going to insert or test against a DB entry ($, ', ", \ etc) , so yes. In this particular case it's necessary.
Secondly, if you're writing an app that's intended to be distributed everywhere, it's best not to rely on magic quotes and just escape stuff manually, but to each their own.
Anyhow, what this leads to is you have to assume that your database config isn't even vaguely secure unless you've got root access on your own box for deployment, and it's best not even to make that assumption then. So, we don't save passwords in human-readable format.
If you were paying attention above, if the config file is readable, that means your functions for obfuscating the stored passwords in the database aren't secure either... so it's best not to store the password at all -- store an md5 or crypt hash of the password and check against that.
So, something like: I didn't strip tags, add slashes or anything that you should really do as standard procedure on ALL user input (assume it's all hostile) in that example for sake of getting the idea across clearly.
I've actually got a boxed copy of Photoshop 3.0 for SGI Irix, so it's not like they'd be starting from scratch if Adobe ever decided to port Photoshop to Linux, but they'd probably have to worry about the myriad of headaches that Maya users have to worry about....
- Do you have the correct nvdrvx64 v5.27 for your kernel? Oh, you say that one conflicts with your XOrg install?
- Oh, you seem to have Ububtu Lusty Leper 12.3 -- we're sorry but that combination of OS and your eMachines 2100x5v aren't on our HCL and aren't supported. You'll need to purchase a Dell Dimension 52X and install Fedora Core 3 with XOrg 2.17, kernel 7.25 and the nVidia 32-bit 5.21 drivers for us to even speak with you on the phone as you're working within an unsupported environment. Have you considered virtualizing the win32 version?
Yes, silly made up numbers and versions, but think of this from an artist's or phone tech's point of view -- the literally hundreds of flavors of linux out there and support would be an absolute nightmare, even with the resources at Adobe's disposal.
The only working Linux pipelines I've seen in professional graphics/CG environments have been supported 90% by extremely competent, on-site staff, which aren't exactly at the disposal of the majority of people that buy photoshop. People who can custom compile binaries to match the kernel they're using and pick and choose their hardware extremely carefully. i.e. not your average Photoshop user who wants a double-click and it just works install.
Wow, that's a tangent from the original point of the post...
Anyhow, considerable development effort was put into a *nix flavored photoshop back in the mid-90s, and it was shelved either because of support headaches, or companies laughed in Adobe's face when they asked $14,000 per seat for the SGI version of a $750 app. I forget the specifics, but I seem to remember most SGI software purchase prices being ludicrously high to encourage annual leases with support contracts instead of outright purchase.
Crashes happen too, and I'm currently on a rampage against the "checkpoint for a false sense of save security but only allow you to save and quit instead of quicksave" thing that Halo loves.
I replayed the last two hours of Halo 3 twice due to:
- Jump the warthog into the Dawn, cutscene starts loading and "This disc is unreadable, please press A to restart your console"
I mean seriously, how much trouble would it be to add a quicksave at checkpoints instead of making me restart the entire game each time I try and save? I was pretty much was in the moment between the gravemind and the conclusion of the game, and having to quit out every so often just destroys the immersion.
For the record my achievements for campaign complete weren't awarded the first time out and I think that the game gave itself the console equivalent of a divide by zero error when it tried to determine which ending (ie extra 9 or so seconds of legendary cutscene) to play based on listed achievements and the disc read error was utter nonsense.
Add that to Halo 3 flat out refusing to honor my saves until I deleted all Halo related datafiles from my profile and start over and I'm just about ready to say the Windows gaming mantra of "have you installed the update?" is beginning to take hold on the console side too.
I grew up dreaming of being able to make my own action figures.
Over the last few years, a new category of 3D service bureaus has begun to pop up where you can place an order for model prints fairly quickly.
I've actually used this process on a couple of projects that I've worked on, and every time I walk through the exhibit hall at Siggraph I find myself hoping that a desktop model will reach somewhere around $1k soon.
Currently, it's an imprecise science -- you have to make certain that your model is "watertight" -- meaning that it registers as a solid object when passed to the fab software. You also have to thicken things like teeth, swords etc because the glue process makes thin items rather brittle.
Depending on the fabricator, you might have to paint the model after the fact, and on a whole lot of these you actually need to sand and prime the finished figure as many of the fabricators leave a sort of "fuzzy" surface that needs to be smoothed to look good.
Anyhow, it's a really cool tech for concept art and rapid prototyping, and if you've got the skillset to watertight models you create, you can have your 3DS/Maya etc models printed pretty reasonably ($45-150ish depending on bounding box volume).
Hate to be pedantic, but I must say that I thought C&C III, which came about after EA's dismantling of Westwood, was a fantastic game, and the closest thing to a hardcore RTS I've seen in years. In addition, that was the catalyst to finally get the C&C franchise back on the Mac. Maybe it's nostalgia from seeing Kane, or all the genre actors hamming it up, but I thought it played brilliantly and nailed the tone of the originals.
That said, I thought Generals was crap... but my take is that it was more akin to a tech demo for the engine, like Doom 3.
I can't believe I just defended EA, so I'll have to write more to atone:
EA is in the business of establishing franchises and milking them until their udders dry up. Annually.
It just so happens that the last 10 years, they've put so much focus on pretty-fying games, dumbing them down for the console 'tards, then porting them with the gamepad-required mentality to the PC (no offense meant to any console folks in the audience), and shortening the average playtime to completion to right about 10 hours. As a result, other developers have been following suit (I'm looking at you, Ubi, for starters... Lionhead too).
Anyhow, I've long felt that EA has moved into the business of making games that are meant to be looked at, and not played, then tossed back into the used bin while they still fetch top-ish resale price. Here's hoping that Bioware makes it out of this with their personality and standards intact.
I'll withhold judgement until I see the fruits of this unholy alliance.
I'm now wondering what happens to Obsidian, who generally produces all of Bio's sequels?
Huh, wha?
Actually Tiger is much faster overall than Panther (excepting several finder actions... previewing images/.movs in column view, for instance), and as a fellow ADC member I can tell you that the new finder smokes. No more 5 minute lockouts if you forget to disconnect the laptop from the server before you leave the office. A NICE, extremely usable network browser.... lots of little polishy-bits. I'm hoping that the stacked dock icons make it back into the GM. I loved having all my office and CS3 icons in a single pile, not taking up huge amounts of real estate.
I'm not exactly buying into Apple's "entirely new finder" party line, but the improvements they've made are nice and snappy in the last several builds I've tested.
No idea why anyone would want to view a folder in cover flow mode, but whatever. It works, it's fast and Quicklook is mega-handy.
Can't really go into more detail for a couple more weeks, but if you follow the builds on the rumor sites you can see that Leopard is quickly approaching a solid release state.
In Ubuntu (or anything that defaults to KDE, actually), right click the menu bar or task bar at the bottom of the screen. Click close by mistake.
From here you're booting into terminal mode, sudo hacking xorg.conf files to reset your desktop so you can launch anything through the GUI.
So, no. You're not getting anything close to the OS X experience, and you're not even approaching Vista either.
But have fun with the Aqua theme and all. Fairly certain it was called Agua due to legal issues the last time I checked.
So, the networking stack will get even slower in reduced functionality mode?
Who else here has yet to get Vista to come close to saturating a gigabit connection in full mode? Bueller?
RMAs are all well and good until you wait a month or so for "last minute driver issues" to be sorted out, and no one's going to RMA an open, activated OEM Vista.
I think my point was more that Vista itself is an utter, inexcusable mess and MS hasn't even owned up to that... much less even attempted to make things right (make it right? there's no problem!) amongst its customer base. I was contrasting the level of service you come to expect from companies you deal with.
I'm with you on this one.
I bought two: an 8gb for myself and a 4gb for the wife, and we stood in line on opening day.
I honestly believe that the phones were worth every penny that we paid for both of them ($499/$599 retail).
For the record, my wife let her phone slip while she was walking out of her parking garage, and smacked it at the pavement while flailing to catch it. The sleep/wake button got jammed inside the buckled aluminum, and we had to bring the phone in for service.
Apple took the phone back, offered us a loaner ($25ish, IIRC... we didn't take it), and had a *brand*new*phone* shipped to us the very next morning. Priority overnight Fedex, 7:45am, I might add. For a phone that my wife admitted to beating up and was ready to pay for repairs.
So, that was two weeks ago, now Apple offers us $100 apiece for being early adopters.
You just don't get that kind of service in the technology industry anywhere else these days that I've experienced.
I mean, I bought a Vista OEM copy and an nVidia "Vista Ready" mobo on launch day (it's my job to know how to support *everything*, turd or not). You don't see MS or nVidia offering to make things right because little things like on-board sound and networking don't function...at all...nVidia passes the buck to MS, and MS passes the buck to nVidia, and eight months later now, I still have to use USB dongles on that particular mobo for sound and ethernet. And neither of those companies have any intention of making things right. And that's just driver issues. Let's not even get into Vista quality (utter pile of refuse, kthanxbye). No rebate, no exchange for something that actually functions as described. Not even an option to downgrade to XP from MS.
Anyhow, I contrast that experience with something like buying my iPhone, Macbook Pro or any of the dozens of other Apple products I've purchased over the years and there's just no comparison. The iPhone is a *killer* product, and they're going to gain a ton more goodwill out of a gesture that they didn't have to make.
Long story short, the wife is now an absolutely fanatical Apple supporter just from these experiences.
Blogging Whiners are whining because they paid a premium to be an early adopter? Well, duh. I had no illusions that it wouldn't be substantially cheaper by EU launch or the holidays.
Reminds me of a T-shirt I saw recently.
--d
Battlestar Galactica is the only NBC/Universal show that I watch, and the wife watches Heroes.
We don't get cable anymore, over the air broadcast is too weak in our area to be an enjoyable experience.
We've been willingly paying for iTunes versions of these shows because they're available within hours of the broadcast, mostly so we can chat with our friends who watch them over the air or via TiVO. Sure, I can go and grab a torrent, but iTunes is convenient and the price point is currently just fine. Honestly, the water cooler social aspect of these shows is timely and something you miss out on with the DVD set, usually released after the season (or in 1/2 season increments for a 200% premium over "normal" DVD sets in BSG's case).
Anyhow, back to the matter at hand. I couldn't get BSG over the air if I wanted to, and whatever DRM-laden crap Universal comes up with on their own probably won't work on the Mac, so what recourse does that leave me?
If NBC/Universal is going to be greedy (digital downloads for a 300% premium over DVD sets? fuck that), and hostile to fans of their shows, I have no moral quandry whatsoever in firing up Azureus at 11:15pm est and jumping in a torrent swarm.
According to the rationale that you either pay for it legitimately or watch the ads, I've been a pirate for the last six years having watched all of my shows (before we canceled cable) via TiVO and skipping the commercials.
Yeah, I'm greedy and willing to be a criminal to support the one TV show that I watch. The networks are just as greedy, and they don't have good intentions toward me either. I'm willing to pay for convenience and deal fairly, but they seem hellbent on not giving me that opportunity.
If they'd provide the same service I'm receiving for a reasonable price, that I can watch on my Mac and have the same lax DRM freedoms that I currently have (up to 5 licensed machines, unlimited iPods/iPhones) I'd be willing to pay. It's really that simple.
If they're incapable of even thinking outside of the analog, real-time, ad-supported model, why don't THEY start seeding torrents with their ads intact for chrissakes?
As it currently stands, the networks and the record companies need to evolve quickly or become irrelevant... they're no longer the tastemakers OR the distribution mechanism of choice, and they'll be utterly irrelevant soon if they don't change their ways.
Those of us in areas where Comcast is the *only* game in town and use our lines to telicommute are pretty angry about this.
Never mind that we've got a view of this metro's skyline,the house we recently purchased is "outside DSL range" according to Bellsouth (now att). This being a lie, because we have friends behind us with DSL... It's just that the infrastructure in the (gentrifying) neighborhood is so bad that they've had 8 DSL modems fried in 6 months. Maybe theyve stopped selling new accounts until they get their voltage issues worked out.
What happens if we get cut off? Back to the dialup stoneage, I guess. I'm just waiting for a call from Comcast security, as I kept my copy of the contract that states clearly 8mb/768/unlimited. Im dead certain that this fud is meant to scare people like me into shape.
I can banish the X, then seduce the moon. Fear kite the rest.
First amendment = pwned!
Summary: Michael Bay is a bigger whore than anyone ever suspected. A decent sized troll as well.
I'm a collector of tracts like this one, and I must say that's a classic of the genre.
So, remember kids: roll a cleric, end up in a cult, but gain real power against zombies and your dad!
Shame Elfstar didn't think of rezzing her friend that hung herself, what with all the real spells she can cast now.
I guess that would have derailed the narrative thread a touch though, huh?
As an aside, I have to remind myself from time to time that the people who settled in the US of A were generally persecuted because their beliefs rendered them too kooky to get along with the other kids. It's in our DNA, for better or worse.
Um, what phone do you have? A synch is a synch and an email is an email.... both free.
The iPhone isn't a cure for cancer, but it's a damned nice phone, with reasonably priced data plans (comparatively speaking).
I can't think of one where you'd be paying for sending a photo anywhere, much less your own PC over a synch.
--d
Well, from my perspective, if being a member of the GOP defines you as a fundamentalist zealot, then the GOP perhaps needs to weed its garden, or the far-right contingent should create its own party and leave those who still believe in the modern day equivalent of the sun orbiting a flat earth behind.
The faith issue is nothing more than a marketing tactic in modern day elections, anyhow.
As a moderate lefty agnostic, I personally don't have any problem at all with a person of strong faith being elected to office. The problem lies in various fundamentalist agendas being pushed on behalf of blind faith instead of on reason... ID, creationism, end times, gay marriage, third crusade, abortion laws.
Your relationship with your god(s) is between you and them. Don't bring me, or my school age kids into it please.
I wouldn't want to be the client whose agency uses Nielsens as a pricing guide for my electronic media (they're utterly behind the times, and they set the standard rates for "worth" for broadcast placements). Hell, Nielsens are just about obsolete for broadcast TV as well, seeing as how time shifted viewers don't count. I might know, what, 3 people (?) that don't have some sort of DVR and time-shift absolutely everything they watch.
But, seriously... Google sets their own ad rates (via bidding), and Nielsens matter because?
As the owner of an iPhone, it would appear that "visual voicemail" is actually some type of push email service that delivers audio files to the phone, ie once a voicemail has been received, the phone can be in airplane mode (all radios off) and I can still listen to the messages.
I'd imagine that those unlocking the phone will have to sacrifice this part, no matter how clean and reliable the hack.
Right genre, wrong title IMO.
After playing with mine for the weekend, I'll be designing my own cover with "Don't Panic" written on it... in large, friendly letters.
Amen and testify.
I actually see some omissions like dialing while driving and music as ringtones are Apple enforcing its taste and manners on the user. They think extremely deeply into the process of not only actually using the phone, but what the overall experience means to the user, and others around them. It's Apple's defining trait, actually, and it's shocking that very few in the technology industry really grok the human part of human interface.
I would put down money that both those omissions are 100% intentional, and good for Apple.
Someone needed to buck the norms of both the hardware and carrier aspects of mobile phones, and Apple's doing it in a big way. Maybe the thing won't take over the planet, but it'll certainly change the landscape for the better.
Side note: my current pet peeve is police officers surfing the web/emailing/whatever on dash-mounted laptops while driving. If you haven't seen one of these, be thankful. That soccer mom in the Caravan with 6 kids and a mobile to her ear won't look nearly as frightening once you experience THE LAW driving like they've just put away a quart of scotch.
--d
Shameless plug, but I wrote a little more in-depth on this topic last week.
I strongly believe that economy of motion is going to be key for usability on touch sensitive devices, and it's somewhat disappointing that you won't be able to drag or hold due to the scrolling gestures on the iPhone. In the back of my head, I'd started formulating a drag & drop form interface that would be clunky in a traditional browser, but very quick on small touchscreens.
I do think that segment is poised to explode over the next couple of years. Just take a look at your web logs on your sites... how many mobile users/pageviews do you have right now? Close to none? That's going to change very soon.
It strikes me as interesting that developing usable apps for the iPhone is remarkably similar to building pages for those with disabilities from a usability standpoint -- no hovers, no hover drill-down menus, large targets on click.