you're defining growth as an increase in marketshare.
I'm defining growth as rate of increase of new users.
my point is that even if their marketshare growth slows, it doesn't mean that their growth is necessarily slowing. this month's lower marketshare growth percentage could be affected by the sharp increase in (detected) web surfers this time of year.
it's possible to have the rate of new users (growth) increase relative to the past month(s), yet have their marketshare growth appear to decrease relative to the past month(s).
yeah, the main reason I don't use firefox normally is that the cross-platform consistency causes you to lose some platform-specific features.
some of those features really don't matter (like, who really cares if the buttons or scrollbars use the OS's decor or whatever)... but what about editfield behavior (ie- spell checking and text drag/drop)?
of the problematicness in firefox, my main peev is that the tabs don't have exclusive closebuttons like safari does. I understand you can rightclick and say "close tab" but I wanna click the tab to close it in one shot.
does Camino support rich text in input fields? I don't know of any sites that use it, so I can't test it out, myself.
the number of web users is still growing rather rapidly. Even if their marketshare stays steady for many months, especially this time of year (I'll get to that in a sec), it still means that their userbase is growing.
This time of year, school is starting. people are getting new computers or their first computers for themselves (finally, a computer that's not shared by the family!). There's a distinct spike in computer purchases around now. Firefox's 1% gain this month is a very good thing. it means that even though their marketshare growth is remaining constant, they're making up for it in volume.
also, does their marketshare count only for windows installations? or does it count for all platforms? I mean, I know a bunch of mac users who , for some reason (usually because they're coming from windows), prefer firefox over safari.
personally, I use firefox for testing on the mac. but that's about it. I still think safari is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of just the usability factor. firefox just feels like a windows app. Camino's ok, but feels a bit strange sometimes.
was there anything that was on both SNES and Genesis?
mortal kombat.
and I believe, NBA Jam.
*thinks...*
you gotta remember... until recently, game system programming consisted of mostly (if not entirely) ASM code and the controllers for each system diverged quite a bit.
I mean, you've got the original NES with the A and B buttons, and I think the sega master system had 2 buttons, too... and TG16 had 2 buttons. but the genesis had 3 (and there was the 6 button controller) and the SNES had 6 buttons to start. programming for different systems was usually handled by different companies.
now, you've got full SDKs for games. high level programming languages. you can usually code the core part of the game and bring that right from system to system, or system to computer or vice versa. Dreamcast had the advantage in that it was windowsCE based, and I assume it was rather trivial to port Quake3 to it.
With AJAX, most of the application logic remains on the server side. This drastically improves the ease of implementation.
reminds me of thinclients...
sounds like the return of shared computer time! As ajax gets more robust, we'll start having x-like remote GUI sessions where we can log in to a remote system to access applications.
I wonder how long it will be before someone makes an x11 firefox plugin.
I wonder how long it will be before someone creates a web-based desktop service (email client, movable windows, etc). I can totally see the beginnings of that to be like windows 1.0. No overlapping windows, much like today's webpages. Eventually it will evolve into overlapping <div> tags with window decorations and we'll have re-invented the desktop OS in a browser window.
that actually sounds kinda neat.
I've got an NCD thinclient box in my closet that I acquired from my friend. I could totally see desktop computers getting phased out and turned into gaming consoles. lots of graphics power but not much general purpose processing power. Keep costs down. Lots of video ram and a little regular ram. media-based games (CD/DVD/etc). log into microsoft.com for use of office and outlook and visual studio. pay subscription services. XBoxLive turns into XBoxMediaLive. uh oh.
...as did some of the enhanced memory sticks from sony.
you're thinking of MagicGate(TM) on the MemoryStickPro.
I'm not sure what, if any, product supports it, but it's there. the logo is proudly displayed on my PSP's MemoryStick.
I really don't see the point of this tech, since these memorycards are DESIGNED to be used to transfer data. If it's used to restrict data, I assume it's only to appease the various IP hordes (RI/MPAA).
until that keyboard control panel, I stumbled upon the shortcuts by accident when I was hitting keys.
my point was that there needs to be better support for keyboard navigation. If keyboard navigation was a priority, it would be easy to access no matter what. my recommendation would be to have it be something similar to command-uparrow (although that's for going up in the file hierarchy), since your hand is going to be on the arrowkeys anyway if you're gonna be arrowing around the menus. and there should be no need to hold down extra keys on the powerbook.
i'm opposed to the one-key solution, since accidently hitting said key (windows key) is one of the most annoying accidental keypresses. almost as bad as accidently hitting the help key in OS9 when you mean to hit delete.
and, like I said, I really don't care for keyboard navigation. it's useless most of the time and keyboard shortcuts better serve the purpose anyway. but that keyboard controlpanel is fucken awesome. it's nice to finally be able to change some of those settings. I never really played with it, but checking it out, now, it's pretty neat how it's trivial to make something be command-control-uparrow.
another complaint I have (and yes, I realize I can change them) is that keyboard navigation uses all of the damned Fkeys. apple should have thought about the term "intelligent defaults" when implementing full keyboard access. or at least had a way of cycling through the views on a window (ie drawer->toolbar->mainview) or something.
For the most part, OS X is an ingenious, very user-friendly operating system, arguably the best implementation out there of a desktop Unix.... Perhaps Apple would have noticed that issue in usability testing if they had included more keyboard navigation users, and specifically, people who spent much time doing keyboard navigation in Windows.
I couldn't agree with you more, on both points. I can't live without the terminal. If windows had a full 100% POSIX layer / terminal / etc, I may consider getting a windows machine an option.
To my windows-using friends, who complain that OSX is confusing and they can't get used to it, I never understood it. but one of my friends recently applied for a job administering a school's network of macs (running OSX Tiger) and had to take a crashcourse in it. I loaned him my powerbook and had him use it, I wanted to see him run with it and enjoy it.
The first 20 minutes was spent watching him struggle to use the keyboard for everything and trying to get used to this "menu bar thing" at the top of the screen. at that point I realized that there is virtually no system-level keyboard navigation. Sure, for me, I use keyboard shortcuts for everything, but he uses the arrow keys to get through the menus. On a powerbook, accessing the menubar from the keyboard is a pain in the ass, since the function keys double as brightness/volume/etc and you need to add the fn key to the mix.
I use windows like a mac, except for the fact that I find myself rightclicking a hell of a lot more. After spending 5 years flopping back and forth between using windows at work and my mac at home for graphics work, I was beginning to think that it really didn't matter, from a strictly application-based standpoint. I thought anyone could learn either without issues since they were finally both so similar.
In the past year, though, I have realized that I could never use windows for real work, and it's almost unusable. I attribute that to the fact that there's no applescript. I can't create folder actions, I can't create droplets, and it's a pain in the ass to script illustrator and photoshop using javascript or even VBA.
I'm more of a "Honkey Reduction" guy but I will check out Beastial Machinery.
Beastial machinery is Vol. 1 of their full discography. it's mostly stuff that's pre-honky reduction (in fact, I think it's everything before honky). 2 disks. some 150 tracks. amazingly good.
i've got a really hard time finding that kind of stuff at regular stores. I almost never enter target/walmart/bestbuy/etc unless I'm with someone who's going there anyway, and can almost never find anything I'm looking for. Even when I do see the occasional band I like, it's unlikely I'll see anything beyond their latest album.
90% of the time, I pick up CDs when I see the band. then it's 5-10$ and the $ goes right to one of the guys (since they're usually the ones hawking their own merch). either that, or I buy online at lumberjack or verydistro.
Tell you what. Let's go variable then. Songs older than 5 yrs are 50 cents. More recent non-top 100 tunes are 99 cents, and top 100 are $1.50.
per-song, that's a pretty good deal, considering bandwidth costs and whatnot... however, buying in bulk (ie- buying an album) is still a complete and total ripoff.
I was in a store (I forget which. target or walmart or something. one of those) the other day with my friend so he could get the new disturbed CD (yuck), and they had some kind of deal where a lot of the albums were about 10$. I was amazed. it's been years since I've seen popular music sold on physical CDs sold for that price.
The advantage of purchasing physical CDs is that not only do you get media that's got slightly better life than a CDR/DVDR, but you get packaging for it so you don't lose it and can easily identify it and you get some content in the packaging (like lyrics and art and whatnot).
I think iTMS and other download-based music stores should give you more when you purchase an album, whether it's giving you access to download the files again in case you lose them (like amazon does with ebooks), giving you some kind of tangible item (maybe a small CD binder with a sweet iTMS logo on it?), or something even more creative. In fact, they should have a deal on a 96 disk binder with 96 CDRs so you can burn stuff and give top spenders a discount on said product.
at least when I buy a real CD, I know that if my HD crashes or my backup DVD breaks, I can just re-rip the CD. And when another format comes along that suits my needs, I can re-rip the music to that format.
as an aside... I recently picked up the new Agoraphobic Nosebleed CD Beastial Machinery and it's got some sweet cover art. Nearly every CD I've purchased in the last couple years have come from bands and labels that seem to have some really talented artists and designers working with them (Relapse comes to mind).
The crap that IslandDefJam, Sonymusic, Columbia, and the like are pumping out is visual (and audible) feces.
You can just get the song you want rather than the whole album. It's rare today to actually like all the songs on an album
although that's true, I have frequently bought CDs (the physical kind) because I liked one song by the band and wound up liking the entire CD. I've also purchased CDs and wound up only liking one song and not picking the CD up again for an extended period of time.
The one great thing about the massive CD collection I've amassed (450 or so, at last count) is that since I've got them all MP3'd, when I put large sections into a playlist, I hear a lot of songs that I've never heard/never listened to/don't recognize.
Sometimes you rediscover a band years after you bought the CD because at that moment, a song sounded really good to you.
I kinda see that not happening as often in the future as the industry pushes singles more and more (and the quality of the bands goes down the drain). Most mainstream bands nowadays seem to have 2 or 3 songs that are well produced and well written and another 8 tracks that are either filler, crap, skits, or a combination of the above.
from the summary: "Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."
the legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market is that so many developers think their designers. And so many people who have absolutely no concept of good design think their designers.
I've seen this first hand, far too often. Working in the digital prepress field, the ratio of jobs coming in from design firms/ professional designers compared to Janine working out of her basement on her shiny new dell has radically shifted.
We're stuck getting low res RGB Jpegs placed in powerpoint, RGB blacks that convert to horrible CMYK and customers who don't know what resolution is and don't even own photoshop.
We've even received the occasional paintshop pro file. the guy was a 19 year old kid who was trying to have business cards and mailers printed to advertise his webgraphics talents. After talking to him for 5 minutes, I realized he had no clue. No idea what resolution was. No idea what the difference between CMYK and RGB was. He also thought that PaintshopPro did everything that photoshop did. I was ready to kick his ass.
but now I'm getting off my point...
my point: The problem with the industry is lack of design skills with the designers, whether they're developer-gone-designer or designers with no skills.
then why doesn't windows ship with a simple calendar program (I don't mean outlook). Just... something like the date/time control panel with maybe a couple holidays strewn about.
In fact, I'd be happy even with a simple commandline cal implimentation.
but still, I think when you doubleclick the time in the taskbar, it should open the window and only give you the permission denied error if you try to actually change it.
Is there any way of checking the timezone or anything (for sanity's sake of making sure you're in EST when you live in NY) outside of that?
A limited user windows XP account is not a full lockdown.
we've got a win2k3 active directory server and all kinds of snazzy security whatnot. I'm the guy in charge of the macs and I take care of the PCs so they don't have to call in the 100$/hour guys. the've done all kinds of voodoo. ever since they locked down the machines, a lot of files can't be moved or renamed or anything, even when I log in as admin and explicitly set the permissions to read/write for all. When I called the guys to see how to get around that (some lady's personal files were locked with no access at all. she couldn't even burn a CD of them), they told me that she shouldn't be doing that, anyway.
It's not a built-in calendar. It is merely a graphical device to let you change the current system date. A lot of administrators don't want their users changing the system date willy nilly. Thus it is locked down for standard users
then why can't it give the permission denied error when the user clicks ok/apply!?! or have some kind of error in there. or something!!!
If the Apple and Windows userbases suddenly became equal, you'd see copy protection for both platforms. Why spend an equal amount of money for copy protection that's only going to affect 3% of your consumers vs 95%?
same idea as spyware.
i've got a question, though (being as I don't use windows and I've had the opportunity to rip several protected CDs for other people)...
One of the main problems with windows, in terms of reasons for lack of stability and the like, is that there is so much crap being installed on a regular basis (spyware, adware, and not to mention actual real software), what's to stop all this crap from conflicting and bringing down the system?
at my job, they just locked down all of the windows computers. Software cannot be installed without an administrator password. hell, you can't even look at the built-in calendar without loggin in as an admin (doubleclick the time in the taskbar).
how are office peons supposed to listen to music, now?
this also brings up another issue. Earlier on slashdot, there was an article about the 6 stupidest ideas for security. the author proposed a whitelist for executing software on a machine, rather than a blacklist. Having audio CDs require installation of software just to listen to music completely shatters his idea of keeping a clean system. Suddenly, you go from knowing exactly what you need to run (excel, word, minesweeper, adobe reader, etc) to saying "sonydrmdaemon32.exe? columnbiaprotect_win32.exe... wtf is that crap?"
I can see it now. in 2 years when nearly every audioCD comes with their own flavour of software DRM, the next wave of security exploits are going to involve that software.
problem is that I had grabbed 2 other books off project gutenberg (albeit, at least a year or 2 ago) and it was riddled with typos and some paragraphs that were nearly indecipherable.
Make them as light, as reader friendly and as durable as normal books...
Considering you can fit even the largest e-book (no pictures) onto the smallest USB thumb drive, you can. The problem arrises when you want to read it. when you're out and about.
I just bought Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs" from Amazon.com in ebook format the other night.
I was actually forced into buying the ebook version, since the hardcover was over 40$ (even used), and the softcover was overpriced, as well.
The ebook was under 10$ and had no need to be shipped. I just downloaded it. Apparently, it's also available in my Digital Locker on amazon.com forever, so if I loose the file, I should be able to download it again... assuming amazon.com doesn't go under.
the damned book weighs in at over 400 pages, so printing it out and taking it with me isn't really an option, and I don't really have so much time to read when I'm home. I popped it on my powerbook and I've been reading it on the train everyday. It's a bit of a hastle to carry around the 15" model just to read a damned story, though.
What the world needs is a portable device with a sharp/ bright enough screen to read large amounts of text like that. the higher end palm devices cost too much $ to make it worth it just for ebooks, and there's no real solution on the PSP or DS, yet.
My dream device for such a thing would be a color iPod with a full-face, high-res, touchscreen LCD with a scroll wheel on the side of it. (needs some kind of clie-like flip cover to protect the screen)
With enough power to play video, enough HD space to hold a dozen movies and a mobile collection of music and huge amount of ebooks (think around 40-80GB), I'd be willing to drop 3-400$ on such a device.
let's not forget that M$'s definition of "cross-platform" is "multiple versions of windows."
They've pulled stuff like this in the past. saying things are a standard (when they're a standard part of windows), creating a cross-platform application (that works in the desktop and portable versions of their OS), and cross-platform programming languages (visual basic will work as a application development language as well as scripting for applications like VBA).
M$ is all about marketing and it's obvious from the way they present their products and technologies with so much drivel.
there's also the awesome trick where you tie wallnut shells onto the kitty's feets and stick it on a tile floor.
it's quite entertaining to watch the cat slip and slide all over the floor and run in place. 'specially when yer stoned.
let's also not forget the ol' piece of duct tape on the tail... my cat almost bit my hand off when I tried to remove it, though. wouldn't let me come close enough to it.
or if you feed it tinsel, when it comes out, it usually gets stuck in its ass pucker. The damned thing flies around and the faster it runs, the more the wind resistance tugs on the dangling dingleberry encrusted tinsel. quite funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, 20 years from now...
in the year 2525... if Bill is still alive... if Google can survive... they may find....
If I was more creative (read: had my coffee already), I'd probably be able to crank out a parody. oh well.
=)
you're defining growth as an increase in marketshare.
I'm defining growth as rate of increase of new users.
my point is that even if their marketshare growth slows, it doesn't mean that their growth is necessarily slowing. this month's lower marketshare growth percentage could be affected by the sharp increase in (detected) web surfers this time of year.
it's possible to have the rate of new users (growth) increase relative to the past month(s), yet have their marketshare growth appear to decrease relative to the past month(s).
yeah, the main reason I don't use firefox normally is that the cross-platform consistency causes you to lose some platform-specific features.
some of those features really don't matter (like, who really cares if the buttons or scrollbars use the OS's decor or whatever)... but what about editfield behavior (ie- spell checking and text drag/drop)?
of the problematicness in firefox, my main peev is that the tabs don't have exclusive closebuttons like safari does. I understand you can rightclick and say "close tab" but I wanna click the tab to close it in one shot.
does Camino support rich text in input fields? I don't know of any sites that use it, so I can't test it out, myself.
if you've got 7% of 10,000 users and the userbase grows to 10,000,000 and you're marketshare grows to 8%, that's still a tremendous gain.
talking strictly a 1% marketshare increase doesn't take into account the 100,000% increase in users during the same period (using my example above).
I mean...
the number of web users is still growing rather rapidly. Even if their marketshare stays steady for many months, especially this time of year (I'll get to that in a sec), it still means that their userbase is growing.
This time of year, school is starting. people are getting new computers or their first computers for themselves (finally, a computer that's not shared by the family!). There's a distinct spike in computer purchases around now. Firefox's 1% gain this month is a very good thing. it means that even though their marketshare growth is remaining constant, they're making up for it in volume.
also, does their marketshare count only for windows installations? or does it count for all platforms? I mean, I know a bunch of mac users who , for some reason (usually because they're coming from windows), prefer firefox over safari.
personally, I use firefox for testing on the mac. but that's about it. I still think safari is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of just the usability factor. firefox just feels like a windows app. Camino's ok, but feels a bit strange sometimes.
was there anything that was on both SNES and Genesis?
mortal kombat.
and I believe, NBA Jam.
*thinks...*
you gotta remember... until recently, game system programming consisted of mostly (if not entirely) ASM code and the controllers for each system diverged quite a bit.
I mean, you've got the original NES with the A and B buttons, and I think the sega master system had 2 buttons, too... and TG16 had 2 buttons. but the genesis had 3 (and there was the 6 button controller) and the SNES had 6 buttons to start. programming for different systems was usually handled by different companies.
now, you've got full SDKs for games. high level programming languages. you can usually code the core part of the game and bring that right from system to system, or system to computer or vice versa. Dreamcast had the advantage in that it was windowsCE based, and I assume it was rather trivial to port Quake3 to it.
With AJAX, most of the application logic remains on the server side. This drastically improves the ease of implementation.
reminds me of thinclients...
sounds like the return of shared computer time! As ajax gets more robust, we'll start having x-like remote GUI sessions where we can log in to a remote system to access applications.
I wonder how long it will be before someone makes an x11 firefox plugin.
I wonder how long it will be before someone creates a web-based desktop service (email client, movable windows, etc). I can totally see the beginnings of that to be like windows 1.0. No overlapping windows, much like today's webpages. Eventually it will evolve into overlapping <div> tags with window decorations and we'll have re-invented the desktop OS in a browser window.
that actually sounds kinda neat.
I've got an NCD thinclient box in my closet that I acquired from my friend. I could totally see desktop computers getting phased out and turned into gaming consoles. lots of graphics power but not much general purpose processing power. Keep costs down. Lots of video ram and a little regular ram. media-based games (CD/DVD/etc). log into microsoft.com for use of office and outlook and visual studio. pay subscription services. XBoxLive turns into XBoxMediaLive. uh oh.
...as did some of the enhanced memory sticks from sony.
you're thinking of MagicGate(TM) on the MemoryStickPro.
I'm not sure what, if any, product supports it, but it's there. the logo is proudly displayed on my PSP's MemoryStick.
I really don't see the point of this tech, since these memorycards are DESIGNED to be used to transfer data. If it's used to restrict data, I assume it's only to appease the various IP hordes (RI/MPAA).
I put....
The X-Box 360 the best thing since...
The phalic demon in my pants. Although it has yet to prove itself. the xbox360, not my phalice.
until that keyboard control panel, I stumbled upon the shortcuts by accident when I was hitting keys.
my point was that there needs to be better support for keyboard navigation. If keyboard navigation was a priority, it would be easy to access no matter what. my recommendation would be to have it be something similar to command-uparrow (although that's for going up in the file hierarchy), since your hand is going to be on the arrowkeys anyway if you're gonna be arrowing around the menus. and there should be no need to hold down extra keys on the powerbook.
i'm opposed to the one-key solution, since accidently hitting said key (windows key) is one of the most annoying accidental keypresses. almost as bad as accidently hitting the help key in OS9 when you mean to hit delete.
and, like I said, I really don't care for keyboard navigation. it's useless most of the time and keyboard shortcuts better serve the purpose anyway. but that keyboard controlpanel is fucken awesome. it's nice to finally be able to change some of those settings. I never really played with it, but checking it out, now, it's pretty neat how it's trivial to make something be command-control-uparrow.
another complaint I have (and yes, I realize I can change them) is that keyboard navigation uses all of the damned Fkeys. apple should have thought about the term "intelligent defaults" when implementing full keyboard access. or at least had a way of cycling through the views on a window (ie drawer->toolbar->mainview) or something.
For the most part, OS X is an ingenious, very user-friendly operating system, arguably the best implementation out there of a desktop Unix. ... Perhaps Apple would have noticed that issue in usability testing if they had included more keyboard navigation users, and specifically, people who spent much time doing keyboard navigation in Windows.
I couldn't agree with you more, on both points. I can't live without the terminal. If windows had a full 100% POSIX layer / terminal / etc, I may consider getting a windows machine an option.
To my windows-using friends, who complain that OSX is confusing and they can't get used to it, I never understood it. but one of my friends recently applied for a job administering a school's network of macs (running OSX Tiger) and had to take a crashcourse in it. I loaned him my powerbook and had him use it, I wanted to see him run with it and enjoy it.
The first 20 minutes was spent watching him struggle to use the keyboard for everything and trying to get used to this "menu bar thing" at the top of the screen. at that point I realized that there is virtually no system-level keyboard navigation. Sure, for me, I use keyboard shortcuts for everything, but he uses the arrow keys to get through the menus. On a powerbook, accessing the menubar from the keyboard is a pain in the ass, since the function keys double as brightness/volume/etc and you need to add the fn key to the mix.
I use windows like a mac, except for the fact that I find myself rightclicking a hell of a lot more. After spending 5 years flopping back and forth between using windows at work and my mac at home for graphics work, I was beginning to think that it really didn't matter, from a strictly application-based standpoint. I thought anyone could learn either without issues since they were finally both so similar.
In the past year, though, I have realized that I could never use windows for real work, and it's almost unusable. I attribute that to the fact that there's no applescript. I can't create folder actions, I can't create droplets, and it's a pain in the ass to script illustrator and photoshop using javascript or even VBA.
I'm more of a "Honkey Reduction" guy but I will check out Beastial Machinery.
Beastial machinery is Vol. 1 of their full discography. it's mostly stuff that's pre-honky reduction (in fact, I think it's everything before honky). 2 disks. some 150 tracks. amazingly good.
i've got a really hard time finding that kind of stuff at regular stores. I almost never enter target/walmart/bestbuy/etc unless I'm with someone who's going there anyway, and can almost never find anything I'm looking for. Even when I do see the occasional band I like, it's unlikely I'll see anything beyond their latest album.
90% of the time, I pick up CDs when I see the band. then it's 5-10$ and the $ goes right to one of the guys (since they're usually the ones hawking their own merch). either that, or I buy online at lumberjack or verydistro.
Tell you what. Let's go variable then. Songs older than 5 yrs are 50 cents. More recent non-top 100 tunes are 99 cents, and top 100 are $1.50.
per-song, that's a pretty good deal, considering bandwidth costs and whatnot... however, buying in bulk (ie- buying an album) is still a complete and total ripoff.
I was in a store (I forget which. target or walmart or something. one of those) the other day with my friend so he could get the new disturbed CD (yuck), and they had some kind of deal where a lot of the albums were about 10$. I was amazed. it's been years since I've seen popular music sold on physical CDs sold for that price.
The advantage of purchasing physical CDs is that not only do you get media that's got slightly better life than a CDR/DVDR, but you get packaging for it so you don't lose it and can easily identify it and you get some content in the packaging (like lyrics and art and whatnot).
I think iTMS and other download-based music stores should give you more when you purchase an album, whether it's giving you access to download the files again in case you lose them (like amazon does with ebooks), giving you some kind of tangible item (maybe a small CD binder with a sweet iTMS logo on it?), or something even more creative. In fact, they should have a deal on a 96 disk binder with 96 CDRs so you can burn stuff and give top spenders a discount on said product.
at least when I buy a real CD, I know that if my HD crashes or my backup DVD breaks, I can just re-rip the CD. And when another format comes along that suits my needs, I can re-rip the music to that format.
as an aside... I recently picked up the new Agoraphobic Nosebleed CD Beastial Machinery and it's got some sweet cover art. Nearly every CD I've purchased in the last couple years have come from bands and labels that seem to have some really talented artists and designers working with them (Relapse comes to mind).
The crap that IslandDefJam, Sonymusic, Columbia, and the like are pumping out is visual (and audible) feces.
You can just get the song you want rather than the whole album. It's rare today to actually like all the songs on an album
although that's true, I have frequently bought CDs (the physical kind) because I liked one song by the band and wound up liking the entire CD. I've also purchased CDs and wound up only liking one song and not picking the CD up again for an extended period of time.
The one great thing about the massive CD collection I've amassed (450 or so, at last count) is that since I've got them all MP3'd, when I put large sections into a playlist, I hear a lot of songs that I've never heard/never listened to/don't recognize.
Sometimes you rediscover a band years after you bought the CD because at that moment, a song sounded really good to you.
I kinda see that not happening as often in the future as the industry pushes singles more and more (and the quality of the bands goes down the drain). Most mainstream bands nowadays seem to have 2 or 3 songs that are well produced and well written and another 8 tracks that are either filler, crap, skits, or a combination of the above.
If you can't read something because of a typo, I don't understand how you've managed to read enough to actually recognise them.
The world is riddled with typos.
I agree 100%.
from the summary: "Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."
the legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market is that so many developers think their designers. And so many people who have absolutely no concept of good design think their designers.
I've seen this first hand, far too often. Working in the digital prepress field, the ratio of jobs coming in from design firms/ professional designers compared to Janine working out of her basement on her shiny new dell has radically shifted.
We're stuck getting low res RGB Jpegs placed in powerpoint, RGB blacks that convert to horrible CMYK and customers who don't know what resolution is and don't even own photoshop.
We've even received the occasional paintshop pro file. the guy was a 19 year old kid who was trying to have business cards and mailers printed to advertise his webgraphics talents. After talking to him for 5 minutes, I realized he had no clue. No idea what resolution was. No idea what the difference between CMYK and RGB was. He also thought that PaintshopPro did everything that photoshop did. I was ready to kick his ass.
but now I'm getting off my point...
my point: The problem with the industry is lack of design skills with the designers, whether they're developer-gone-designer or designers with no skills.
indeed.
;)
then why doesn't windows ship with a simple calendar program (I don't mean outlook). Just... something like the date/time control panel with maybe a couple holidays strewn about.
In fact, I'd be happy even with a simple commandline cal implimentation.
but still, I think when you doubleclick the time in the taskbar, it should open the window and only give you the permission denied error if you try to actually change it.
Is there any way of checking the timezone or anything (for sanity's sake of making sure you're in EST when you live in NY) outside of that?
can you tell I don't run windows at home?
A limited user windows XP account is not a full lockdown.
we've got a win2k3 active directory server and all kinds of snazzy security whatnot. I'm the guy in charge of the macs and I take care of the PCs so they don't have to call in the 100$/hour guys. the've done all kinds of voodoo. ever since they locked down the machines, a lot of files can't be moved or renamed or anything, even when I log in as admin and explicitly set the permissions to read/write for all. When I called the guys to see how to get around that (some lady's personal files were locked with no access at all. she couldn't even burn a CD of them), they told me that she shouldn't be doing that, anyway.
heh.
It's not a built-in calendar. It is merely a graphical device to let you change the current system date. A lot of administrators don't want their users changing the system date willy nilly. Thus it is locked down for standard users
then why can't it give the permission denied error when the user clicks ok/apply!?! or have some kind of error in there. or something!!!
sheesh. horrible UI design.
If the Apple and Windows userbases suddenly became equal, you'd see copy protection for both platforms. Why spend an equal amount of money for copy protection that's only going to affect 3% of your consumers vs 95%?
same idea as spyware.
i've got a question, though (being as I don't use windows and I've had the opportunity to rip several protected CDs for other people)...
One of the main problems with windows, in terms of reasons for lack of stability and the like, is that there is so much crap being installed on a regular basis (spyware, adware, and not to mention actual real software), what's to stop all this crap from conflicting and bringing down the system?
at my job, they just locked down all of the windows computers. Software cannot be installed without an administrator password. hell, you can't even look at the built-in calendar without loggin in as an admin (doubleclick the time in the taskbar).
how are office peons supposed to listen to music, now?
this also brings up another issue. Earlier on slashdot, there was an article about the 6 stupidest ideas for security. the author proposed a whitelist for executing software on a machine, rather than a blacklist. Having audio CDs require installation of software just to listen to music completely shatters his idea of keeping a clean system. Suddenly, you go from knowing exactly what you need to run (excel, word, minesweeper, adobe reader, etc) to saying "sonydrmdaemon32.exe? columnbiaprotect_win32.exe... wtf is that crap?"
I can see it now. in 2 years when nearly every audioCD comes with their own flavour of software DRM, the next wave of security exploits are going to involve that software.
the future looks pretty dark.
yeah, I actually noticed that before I bought.
problem is that I had grabbed 2 other books off project gutenberg (albeit, at least a year or 2 ago) and it was riddled with typos and some paragraphs that were nearly indecipherable.
Make them as light, as reader friendly and as durable as normal books...
Considering you can fit even the largest e-book (no pictures) onto the smallest USB thumb drive, you can. The problem arrises when you want to read it. when you're out and about.
I just bought Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs" from Amazon.com in ebook format the other night.
I was actually forced into buying the ebook version, since the hardcover was over 40$ (even used), and the softcover was overpriced, as well.
The ebook was under 10$ and had no need to be shipped. I just downloaded it. Apparently, it's also available in my Digital Locker on amazon.com forever, so if I loose the file, I should be able to download it again... assuming amazon.com doesn't go under.
the damned book weighs in at over 400 pages, so printing it out and taking it with me isn't really an option, and I don't really have so much time to read when I'm home. I popped it on my powerbook and I've been reading it on the train everyday. It's a bit of a hastle to carry around the 15" model just to read a damned story, though.
What the world needs is a portable device with a sharp/ bright enough screen to read large amounts of text like that. the higher end palm devices cost too much $ to make it worth it just for ebooks, and there's no real solution on the PSP or DS, yet.
My dream device for such a thing would be a color iPod with a full-face, high-res, touchscreen LCD with a scroll wheel on the side of it. (needs some kind of clie-like flip cover to protect the screen)
With enough power to play video, enough HD space to hold a dozen movies and a mobile collection of music and huge amount of ebooks (think around 40-80GB), I'd be willing to drop 3-400$ on such a device.
let's not forget that M$'s definition of "cross-platform" is "multiple versions of windows."
They've pulled stuff like this in the past. saying things are a standard (when they're a standard part of windows), creating a cross-platform application (that works in the desktop and portable versions of their OS), and cross-platform programming languages (visual basic will work as a application development language as well as scripting for applications like VBA).
M$ is all about marketing and it's obvious from the way they present their products and technologies with so much drivel.
there's also the awesome trick where you tie wallnut shells onto the kitty's feets and stick it on a tile floor.
it's quite entertaining to watch the cat slip and slide all over the floor and run in place. 'specially when yer stoned.
let's also not forget the ol' piece of duct tape on the tail... my cat almost bit my hand off when I tried to remove it, though. wouldn't let me come close enough to it.
or if you feed it tinsel, when it comes out, it usually gets stuck in its ass pucker. The damned thing flies around and the faster it runs, the more the wind resistance tugs on the dangling dingleberry encrusted tinsel. quite funny.
also, don't forget that Nintendo's birthday is on 9/24 (116 years old this year).
jesus. Who woulda thunk that a videogame company would be older than consumer electronics?