So having this gap in the market for corporate mac support really opens up the possibilities for businesses to spring up and take advantage of these needs. Apple authorizes repair shops so they can repair systems under applecare... one problem is that a lot of things aren't supported under applecare and applecare is only valid for 3 years after the purchase date.
All it would take is a shop to stock up on parts, offer extended care, data recovery and on-site services. In Manhattan there are a couple of shops that offer some of this, but they are mostly targetting users who don't want to ship their machine to apple or need a quick answer for unsupported systems (TekServe and others), but I don't feel that they are taking advantage of the corporate market.
I, being one of two apple users in my department, have realized that although apple has added the capability to join a windows domain, the SSO support is lacking and there are a couple of shortcomings in their implementation. Running a mac in a windows environment isn't quite as seemless in some critical places (SSO, as I said, but also browsing the network, connecting to sharepoint and if the network is flakey or goes down, logging back into the machine can take a long time if the machine has trouble communicating with the directory server). OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does... Although you can have it "show login window" from the fast users witching menu, activating that with the keyboard requires 3rd party add-ons. I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option.
Well, the short answer is no. Primarily because they're really not that good anymore. If they offered their pre-load content online in a non-restricted format at a decent bitrate (256+kbps) and with decent extras (pdfs of booklets, album art on the tracks, etc), I might consider it.
Although they have become deuches in the last decade+, I still feel that their earlier work is spectacular. The attitude they had at the beginning towards napster and later with their whole superiority complex has had minimal impact on how I feel about their music. The fact is that they really haven't put out any decent material since the black album.
I did purchase the NIN album (both the digital MP3 tracks and the physical CD; although I was forced to get the digital tracks through an alternative method since their site couldn't handle the load and they never allowed me to download the album) and I paid 8 pounds sterling for In Rainbows out of support for their cause, not because I'm a big radiohead fan.
Metallica jumping on this trend is nothing more than a poser move for a [now] poser band trying to squeeze an extra dollar for themselves. (they're a poser band due to the fact that they're in it for the money, not for the music... I wish they'd just retire already)
ahhh, yes... I remember PEEK and POKE... I remember my friend showing me how I could use those commands to communicate with a joystick and control LEDs on the computer.
You really don't realize how good today's programmers have it until you try to run relatively modern applications on older hardware. Hell, even websites require relatively fast systems just to use.
Try using a 'killer' machine from 1999 (500mhz, 512MB RAM running windows98 or MacOS 8.5) to surf today's web. Sites like amazon.com bring it to its knees. The amount of code in the page, the javascript, the CSS... it kills.
I've got a vaio pcg-505tx that I'm using as a super mobile laptop right now. It's a 300mhz Pentium1 with 128MB RAM (it's maxed out). I even upgraded it with a 8GB SSD with the hopes of making swap happen faster. I've got Xubuntu installed on it with many services disabled and I have almost no RAM available to myself (about 25MB free). When I log into gmail with firefox, the machine swaps like crazy and I get an error that the javascript is taking too long to run and it wants to kill it.
Back in those days, you didn't have high-resolution, 32-bit icons everywhere, buttons were simple line art as were window decorations.
Low memory systems are not ideal for using hardly ANY modern applications. Even the overhead from the encryption when transferring files over SSH can overload slower machines.
It boggles my mind when I think about how the old console games used so little RAM and so little space for the executable code. Programming on the arduino has taught me how little space 8K really is. Creating a usable bitmap alphabet for a dot-matrix character display nearly maxes that out.
With today's limitless resources (CPU/RAM/storage), no one keeps an eye on optimizations unless it's to squeeze out an additional frame per second or render that additional polygon, and even then, optimizations aren't being used to their full potential.
The way I see it, a proper coder is someone who can write complex programs that work, are secure and can fail gracefully (or better yet, recover from errors). It doesn't matter if you're writing Java, PHP, C or VB.
I've seen some pretty amazing things done in VB, and I've also seen some pretty amazing things done with nothing but C and the standard library without any kind of GUI (MP3 encoders, etc).
When I first started coding and I was using various BASICs (QBASIC, REALbasic, VB), I didn't consider myself to be a true programmer... when I learned C/C++, I still didn't consider myself a real programmer because I couldn't write something with a GUI. When I learned Obj-C, PERL, Python, Ruby, Applescript, et al, I started to realize what programming was and what it meant to be a programmer.
It wasn't until I started seeing how poorly many applications are written and how hard it really is to write good software. No matter what language you're using, no matter what tools you use, whether you use Eclipse, vi, emacs, wordpad, or textmate... if the end product isn't solid, you're not a good programmer.
Speaking from my own experience, I've never really had any issues switching back and forth between windows and macOS. ]
I never really liked windows, but had to use a windows box when started working at a screenprinter. They were an all-windows shop and after about 2 months, I was able to switch back and forth between holding ctrl and holding cmd for photoshop/illustrator's move tool.
At my current job, I was on an XP machine for my desktop up until about 2 months ago when they finally got me a mac (I need to do a lot of unixy stuff and windows just wasn't cutting it... cygwin didn't work as well as terminal.app).
I'm extremely proficient with OSX, windows and linux and know them all inside and out from the systems side (although I'm weakest in windows)...
For normal day to day stuff, I don't see any huge differences between the OSs, especially for a graphics shop. The main hurdles that a mac user would have going over to PC is how cumbersome it is to work with the filesystem and navigate using Explorer. Going from windows to a mac feels much more natural because the windows users are already missing most of the shortcuts (eg for creating new folders).
So, I don't see exactly how being a windows user allowed you to hold onto your job. Not taking an art job because of the platform they use is childish, especially since the vast majority of applications are available for both. Using Macs in a design environment, to me, makes the most sense mostly because of the ability to do some incredible things with automation. I've learned VBA and have created scripts for photoshop using javascript, VBA and applescript, but JS and VBA just didn't give me as rich of an experience.
Although, I am curious... is there a decent solution for font management in the windows world? I used to use ATM, but was never completely satisfied with it. The mac side, I was always a huge fan of Suitcase until OSX came along... now I'm into FontAgent Pro.
Please keep in mind that the cocoa framework has changed significantly in every release of OSX since the beginning. It wasn't until the last couple of years that it started stabilizing and applications remained compatible with new releases of the OS.
They're still adding new features and improving the way things work internally, and applications, although they run, have some weird glitches with new OS features; namely, older applications sometimes behave strangely when one uses Spaces.
I agree, adobe should have seen the writing on the wall, but they were kinda like a dear in headlights, not knowing what the fuck to do and just watching the semi barreling down on them.
At least they decided to go to cocoa. At least they didn't drop 64-bit support for OSX or worse yet, drop the creative suite altogether.
At my old job, I worked in the art department doing production work and created a whole range of applications for CS2, Office, Mail.app and Transmit using PERL and Applescript. There's a whole workflow that's been built around the products they use on the platform that they use (OSX).
The guys in charge of purchasing hardware/software know little about the details of technology, although they gloss over eWeek and read the Technology section of the Times. Inevitably, they will read about this and try to convince the art department that maybe they should put Vista on the MacPros, or maybe get some standard PCs (if they decide to upgrade the hardware).
this news is especially relevant to that shop since they frequently get 2GB and 3GB files (and that's compressed!).
The good news is that the majority of their clients are running OSX, as well, and this lack of 64-bit photoshop should not cause them to start sending in even larger files... however, I do know that many of the larger clients get whatever the latest and greatest Mac is and max it out. This means that they could just get a copy of Vista and use Bootcamp.
Apple kinda shot itself in the foot with this one. Shops that can, may install Vista and get CS4 for windows just to keep up with incoming work. If MS gets Vista's usability up, and can offer a competitive experience, users may get used to it and stick with the platform... although I seriously find that highly unlikely.
The whole original premise of Firefox was that it was lightweight, fast, and actually worked. Because of this, I think they should keep the firefox brand as-is... make it smaller, faster and more lightweight, but no reason to go fill it up with these features.
I think they should fork development into a new product. Basically going in the direction that they are discussing with version 4. These features look like they could be a great idea. A lot of really progressive and great things look stupid on paper, but once you see them and use them, they can surprise you, at times.
Personally, I think they need to make firefox even moreminimalistic. Something that will have the absolute smallest memory footprint after being launched and be snappy and responsive. Modern websites have a TON of code ([x]html/css/javascript) and graphics so it's understandable that the footprint would grow when you have 30 tabs open; but on slower hardware such as the eeepc or older laptops, I'd like the browser to not impact the system quite as much in the memory department.
We've started using Rails for our internal applications at my job. Frontends to more complex systems and systems management (inventory/snmp) are some examples of what I've been involved in.
I've found that although you probably wouldn't want to make slashdot in Rails, it's very, very handy for blogs, portfolios, resume sites, intranet applications and proof of concept applications.
It does solve most of the problems relating to quality of data (prevents corruption, truncation, etc), and typically the tags are better. I have downloaded albums from torrents that had the tags filled with information about the distributor (eg "RiPPed bY FeeZZeeRr") either in the comments section or the album name. More frequently the filenames are tagged with information about the guy who ripped it.
But my primary complaint about BitTorrent and most other P2P services is that they are easily monitored by "the man," and are a risk to use. I'm not totally comfortable with these new extensions that are being added that add encryption and other features because I still think it would be trivial to monitor.
I mean, there are ways to get around Tor. It's possible to track where traffic comes from, so Tor's method of anonymization is NOT foolproof.
And about your whitelist... what's to stop someone who's monitoring from actually doing distribution and getting on the whitelist? Private torrents just slow the onset of getting caught.
This brings me to a theory that I could see happening to detect modded game consoles... Considering that the Xbox360's mod involves flashing the firmware of the DVD drive itself to improperly report burned disks as 360 games, the only way to detect it would be to put rogue ISOs on the various distribution sites which are 100% functional. Wait 6 months and anyone whose unit played one of those disks must be modded. If they did that with Halo 3, I guarantee they'd pick up some 95% of modded consoles and be able to ban them from live. The question is... is there a way around that?
My point is that P2P's main risk, no matter what service you use, is that it still involves connecting to a supplier to download content. Because of this, it becomes easy to discover who has said content, and no matter how you try to obfuscate it, you can't reliably hide where the data is coming from.
I dunno... for $5 a month, all you can eat? That could work for me, and I'm sure it would work for a lot of other people, too.
I'm not saying I'd stop getting music elsewhere. As you say about random qualities, names, etc, that comes with the territory. Use P2P all I want without fear or lawsuits for $5 a month???? psh. Dude. That's a steal (no pun intended)!
Of course, the labels would be fools to accept this. I'm sure that would eat into their profits significantly. Users that are paying a flat $5 per month for all they can download vs. paying $10 per album (iTunes; or like what, $15+ for a physical CD?)... that's suicide.
Plus, if P2P became as widespread as it was in the height of the napster/limewire days, the corrupt, truncated and mis-labeled files will once again be kings of their realm. It's a terrible situation for all parties involved.
Early stereotypical P2P applications (Napster, etc) were designed to distribute files. Napster was designed almost exclusively to distribute copyrighted works.
It's true, the labels cried foul, maybe overreacted a bit. It was very similar to the way that they freaked out when people started creating mix tapes for each other, but it has only gotten worse. Sure, there was a very high demand for music and no legit way to purchase music online. People wanted to get their music from an online source and only recently has it really become a viable option.
Much of today's P2P apps aren't designed with the express purpose to trade music or movies, but rather to ease the burdens of today's bandwidth requirements. Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute patches for World of Warcraft. Linux distros use it to distribute their new releases. Swarming and distributed transfers really showcase the power of P2P and demonstrate legit applications of the technology.
Banning P2P outright is completely wrong. In fact, banning it at all is wrong.
There are risks involved with almost all technologies and many of them are not immediately apparent until it has been around for a while. People need to see these risks and decide that, yeah, maybe they should stay away from services like Limewire because of security concerns. If you're gonna download illegal files, you should realize how easy it is for a movie studio to see who's downloaded the latest episode of Rome. All of the current popular apps have issues like this.
Overall, I think P2P is going to die because of these inherent weaknesses. There are some services that seem to be getting it right (I won't name them here), but they introduce encryption and obfuscation techniques to prevent people from snooping on their traffic. I saw one that was like the bastard child of BitTorrent and Limewire with a healthy coating of encryption and basically turned all files shared on all users' systems into a giant torrent so everything can be swarmed. It would take chunks from random files on the network and store them on your system, encrypted. Pretty neat.
Personally, I'm sick of the whole P2P thing. I miss the days of getting files off FTP, Hotline and other repositories where the files are sometimes meticulously sorted and checked for defects. Limewire et al have a high concentration of corrupt, truncated and damaged files, and when you get files that don't swarm, frequently, it's from a user on a slow connection.
Maybe the future is going to be private networks, again. P2P, but select groups of people. Yeah, that's the ticket.
yeah, I like NIN, but I've never purchased an album from until this one. I wouldn't really call myself a fan, but I've always enjoyed his music. I bought it out of support for the whole cause. @ $5, it's totally worth it, and I probably would have wound up aquiring it at a later date anyway.
Back when CDs were cheaper, I used to buy them if I liked just one song or I liked the cover art or heard them mentioned by another band I liked. A lot of the time, it would turn out that the albums were pretty good and I'd get into that band (The Residents are a great example of this, who I got into because I saw Les Claypool of Primus wearing a Residents shirt). Now, with CDs costing between $15 and $20, and digital tracks costing too much for an inferior product, I find myself only buying music that I know I'll like; most of the time after I've already acquired the album and really like it, and I still feel ripped off.
This NIN album and Radiohead's In Rainbows were both cheap enough that I didn't feel cheated even if I don't like the album enough to listen to it more than once or twice.
I'm downloading the lossless version now. Mr Reznor is more than welcome to my 5 bucks.
I bought the album on monday when it was announced on here. The site was under such heavy load that I couldn't get the download to complete... I got about 1MB and would get disconnected, then I would get another MB and get disconnected...
by the time I got 75MB, it booted me saying that I downloaded the album already; it sucked.
so this morning I realized that if I change some of that random garbage part (/secure/RANDOM_GARBAGE/filename.zip), I could download the file today (it was going nice and fast... 1.2MB/sec on my 10mbit line)... also... they are using predictable filenames, so you can change "mp3" to "flac" and it will work... terribly insecure.
They should have whitelisted each block of random garbage and tagged it with the user's name in their database, then when the download was completed, blacklist it so no one else can use it. Instead, it seems they're just blacklisting after it's used (probably to save space in the DB?). Kinda lame, but nice because I was able to get both the mp3 version and the FLAC version.
consider yourself lucky to be able to download the album WHEN you bought it instead of several days later.
erm... stupid me. I meant ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless). At work, we've referred to it as ALC on the occasions that we refer to it that way, but I don't think we keep tracks in that format on hand, ever.
Considering that lossesslossless won't (definitely should not) affect audio quality, I think I'll go with what has better support for my current needs. I can always move to FLAC later if/when the ipod supports it. Although part of me thinks I should just keep everything at 256 or 320kbit mp3s since it's the most compatible (everything reads it). I don't totally like the idea of needing to maintain 2 separate music libraries; one that's lossless that's my primary archive and one that's compressed which I pull from for audio players and jukebox applications.
the mush sound hits close to home. I've had people give me copies of their itunes purchased music by burning an audio CD, then ripping the tracks as mp3. The difference is very noticeable and they get offended when I tell them "thanks but no thanks." When tracks are re-encoded or even mastered improperly (I've seen this occur with several albums in the last few year), they become a chore to listen to, and that's not the point of music.
I've got an old 3G ipod that I"ve got ipod linux on, but the drive failed a couple weeks ago.
My current ipod is the 80GB classic which rockbox doesn't yet support. Kinda sucks having the latest and greatest when hacks don't work. Linux on the ipod had an option to boot the original firmware by holding down the middle button. When my model is supported I'll probably check it out. In mp3 format, I've only got about 20GB of music that I actually like.
I understand the concept of going lossless for purposes of re-encoding at a later date... I may actually do that now that you mention it. Since I pretty much use iTunes and the iPod exclusively, I might stick with ALC for now... I could always transcode later to FLAC or some other lossless format. With the fact that 750GB SATA drives are down to around $150 a piece, I actually just picked up 4 of them and set them up in a RAID0+1 configuration for 1.4TB of usable storage that's protected. About half of it is used up with my music collection. I think I'm gonna have to build a NAS for this stuff since I'd prefer having my data in a separate box from my desktop machine.
Unfortunately FLAC doesn't play on the ipod. I'd have to do ALC... but I hate using a format that's not universally supported. Once (if ever?) FLAC is supported in iTunes/iPod, I'll have to go through my 400 or so CDs and re-encode, yet again- I just re-encoded everything at 256kbps a couple months ago.
I got my hands on some uncompressed versions of some tracks that I never heard except in 192kbps mp3 and m4p and didn't realize how much I was missing. There's so much sound that you lose. And it's so much more obvious that I'm losing quality on iTunes purchases than tracks I download from the more questionable sources. And the feature films that the iTMS has for purchase are much, much lower quality than the DVD, which is practically the same price, now.
Gotta check if FLAC plays on the PS3 and the 360, too...
personally, I need physical media. I don't trust having only a digital copy, especially if I can't go and download another copy whenever I feel the need.
the first thing I do when I buy a CD is rip it at 256kbps and then put the disk in my booklet. I've had too many CDRs, DVD-Rs, and HDs go bad on me to be able to live with only a single digital copy. I need something permanent to store somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
So having this gap in the market for corporate mac support really opens up the possibilities for businesses to spring up and take advantage of these needs. Apple authorizes repair shops so they can repair systems under applecare... one problem is that a lot of things aren't supported under applecare and applecare is only valid for 3 years after the purchase date.
All it would take is a shop to stock up on parts, offer extended care, data recovery and on-site services. In Manhattan there are a couple of shops that offer some of this, but they are mostly targetting users who don't want to ship their machine to apple or need a quick answer for unsupported systems (TekServe and others), but I don't feel that they are taking advantage of the corporate market.
I, being one of two apple users in my department, have realized that although apple has added the capability to join a windows domain, the SSO support is lacking and there are a couple of shortcomings in their implementation. Running a mac in a windows environment isn't quite as seemless in some critical places (SSO, as I said, but also browsing the network, connecting to sharepoint and if the network is flakey or goes down, logging back into the machine can take a long time if the machine has trouble communicating with the directory server). OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does... Although you can have it "show login window" from the fast users witching menu, activating that with the keyboard requires 3rd party add-ons. I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option.
Well, all the more reason to use deniable encryption. At least you have something to give them rather than just denying having anything.
--give them a password to some portions of data, but not others, etc. If they're going to keep torturing you anyway, it doesn't matter.
Hell, they could just torture the password out of the prisoner
this is what deniable encryption is all about.
Well, the short answer is no. Primarily because they're really not that good anymore. If they offered their pre-load content online in a non-restricted format at a decent bitrate (256+kbps) and with decent extras (pdfs of booklets, album art on the tracks, etc), I might consider it.
Although they have become deuches in the last decade+, I still feel that their earlier work is spectacular. The attitude they had at the beginning towards napster and later with their whole superiority complex has had minimal impact on how I feel about their music. The fact is that they really haven't put out any decent material since the black album.
I did purchase the NIN album (both the digital MP3 tracks and the physical CD; although I was forced to get the digital tracks through an alternative method since their site couldn't handle the load and they never allowed me to download the album) and I paid 8 pounds sterling for In Rainbows out of support for their cause, not because I'm a big radiohead fan.
Metallica jumping on this trend is nothing more than a poser move for a [now] poser band trying to squeeze an extra dollar for themselves. (they're a poser band due to the fact that they're in it for the money, not for the music... I wish they'd just retire already)
ahhh, yes... I remember PEEK and POKE... I remember my friend showing me how I could use those commands to communicate with a joystick and control LEDs on the computer.
You really don't realize how good today's programmers have it until you try to run relatively modern applications on older hardware. Hell, even websites require relatively fast systems just to use.
Try using a 'killer' machine from 1999 (500mhz, 512MB RAM running windows98 or MacOS 8.5) to surf today's web. Sites like amazon.com bring it to its knees. The amount of code in the page, the javascript, the CSS... it kills.
I've got a vaio pcg-505tx that I'm using as a super mobile laptop right now. It's a 300mhz Pentium1 with 128MB RAM (it's maxed out). I even upgraded it with a 8GB SSD with the hopes of making swap happen faster. I've got Xubuntu installed on it with many services disabled and I have almost no RAM available to myself (about 25MB free). When I log into gmail with firefox, the machine swaps like crazy and I get an error that the javascript is taking too long to run and it wants to kill it.
Back in those days, you didn't have high-resolution, 32-bit icons everywhere, buttons were simple line art as were window decorations.
Low memory systems are not ideal for using hardly ANY modern applications. Even the overhead from the encryption when transferring files over SSH can overload slower machines.
It boggles my mind when I think about how the old console games used so little RAM and so little space for the executable code. Programming on the arduino has taught me how little space 8K really is. Creating a usable bitmap alphabet for a dot-matrix character display nearly maxes that out.
With today's limitless resources (CPU/RAM/storage), no one keeps an eye on optimizations unless it's to squeeze out an additional frame per second or render that additional polygon, and even then, optimizations aren't being used to their full potential.
I agree.
The way I see it, a proper coder is someone who can write complex programs that work, are secure and can fail gracefully (or better yet, recover from errors). It doesn't matter if you're writing Java, PHP, C or VB.
I've seen some pretty amazing things done in VB, and I've also seen some pretty amazing things done with nothing but C and the standard library without any kind of GUI (MP3 encoders, etc).
When I first started coding and I was using various BASICs (QBASIC, REALbasic, VB), I didn't consider myself to be a true programmer... when I learned C/C++, I still didn't consider myself a real programmer because I couldn't write something with a GUI. When I learned Obj-C, PERL, Python, Ruby, Applescript, et al, I started to realize what programming was and what it meant to be a programmer.
It wasn't until I started seeing how poorly many applications are written and how hard it really is to write good software. No matter what language you're using, no matter what tools you use, whether you use Eclipse, vi, emacs, wordpad, or textmate... if the end product isn't solid, you're not a good programmer.
Verizon: Two dollars per megabyte?!
.02 cents is really 2 cents according to verizon. hehe.
actually... verizon would think it was 2 cents per MB...
Speaking from my own experience, I've never really had any issues switching back and forth between windows and macOS. ]
I never really liked windows, but had to use a windows box when started working at a screenprinter. They were an all-windows shop and after about 2 months, I was able to switch back and forth between holding ctrl and holding cmd for photoshop/illustrator's move tool.
At my current job, I was on an XP machine for my desktop up until about 2 months ago when they finally got me a mac (I need to do a lot of unixy stuff and windows just wasn't cutting it... cygwin didn't work as well as terminal.app).
I'm extremely proficient with OSX, windows and linux and know them all inside and out from the systems side (although I'm weakest in windows)...
For normal day to day stuff, I don't see any huge differences between the OSs, especially for a graphics shop. The main hurdles that a mac user would have going over to PC is how cumbersome it is to work with the filesystem and navigate using Explorer. Going from windows to a mac feels much more natural because the windows users are already missing most of the shortcuts (eg for creating new folders).
So, I don't see exactly how being a windows user allowed you to hold onto your job. Not taking an art job because of the platform they use is childish, especially since the vast majority of applications are available for both. Using Macs in a design environment, to me, makes the most sense mostly because of the ability to do some incredible things with automation. I've learned VBA and have created scripts for photoshop using javascript, VBA and applescript, but JS and VBA just didn't give me as rich of an experience.
Although, I am curious... is there a decent solution for font management in the windows world? I used to use ATM, but was never completely satisfied with it. The mac side, I was always a huge fan of Suitcase until OSX came along... now I'm into FontAgent Pro.
Please keep in mind that the cocoa framework has changed significantly in every release of OSX since the beginning. It wasn't until the last couple of years that it started stabilizing and applications remained compatible with new releases of the OS.
They're still adding new features and improving the way things work internally, and applications, although they run, have some weird glitches with new OS features; namely, older applications sometimes behave strangely when one uses Spaces.
I agree, adobe should have seen the writing on the wall, but they were kinda like a dear in headlights, not knowing what the fuck to do and just watching the semi barreling down on them.
At least they decided to go to cocoa. At least they didn't drop 64-bit support for OSX or worse yet, drop the creative suite altogether.
At my old job, I worked in the art department doing production work and created a whole range of applications for CS2, Office, Mail.app and Transmit using PERL and Applescript. There's a whole workflow that's been built around the products they use on the platform that they use (OSX).
The guys in charge of purchasing hardware/software know little about the details of technology, although they gloss over eWeek and read the Technology section of the Times. Inevitably, they will read about this and try to convince the art department that maybe they should put Vista on the MacPros, or maybe get some standard PCs (if they decide to upgrade the hardware).
this news is especially relevant to that shop since they frequently get 2GB and 3GB files (and that's compressed!).
The good news is that the majority of their clients are running OSX, as well, and this lack of 64-bit photoshop should not cause them to start sending in even larger files... however, I do know that many of the larger clients get whatever the latest and greatest Mac is and max it out. This means that they could just get a copy of Vista and use Bootcamp.
Apple kinda shot itself in the foot with this one. Shops that can, may install Vista and get CS4 for windows just to keep up with incoming work. If MS gets Vista's usability up, and can offer a competitive experience, users may get used to it and stick with the platform... although I seriously find that highly unlikely.
The whole original premise of Firefox was that it was lightweight, fast, and actually worked. Because of this, I think they should keep the firefox brand as-is... make it smaller, faster and more lightweight, but no reason to go fill it up with these features.
I think they should fork development into a new product. Basically going in the direction that they are discussing with version 4. These features look like they could be a great idea. A lot of really progressive and great things look stupid on paper, but once you see them and use them, they can surprise you, at times.
Personally, I think they need to make firefox even moreminimalistic. Something that will have the absolute smallest memory footprint after being launched and be snappy and responsive. Modern websites have a TON of code ([x]html/css/javascript) and graphics so it's understandable that the footprint would grow when you have 30 tabs open; but on slower hardware such as the eeepc or older laptops, I'd like the browser to not impact the system quite as much in the memory department.
A friend of mine actually used Wubi a couple days ago- it was the first I'd heard of it.
/dev, but rather /media/wubi
Installation went without a hitch. It basically created a couple of disk-image type files on his C: partition and Ubuntu boots from that.
It's pretty neat because when you look at the output from the 'df' command, your drives aren't mounting from
We've started using Rails for our internal applications at my job. Frontends to more complex systems and systems management (inventory/snmp) are some examples of what I've been involved in.
I've found that although you probably wouldn't want to make slashdot in Rails, it's very, very handy for blogs, portfolios, resume sites, intranet applications and proof of concept applications.
what will get hurt is artist's royalties
And in turn, the consumer will get hurt by good bands fading away and more crap being released.
It does solve most of the problems relating to quality of data (prevents corruption, truncation, etc), and typically the tags are better. I have downloaded albums from torrents that had the tags filled with information about the distributor (eg "RiPPed bY FeeZZeeRr") either in the comments section or the album name. More frequently the filenames are tagged with information about the guy who ripped it.
But my primary complaint about BitTorrent and most other P2P services is that they are easily monitored by "the man," and are a risk to use. I'm not totally comfortable with these new extensions that are being added that add encryption and other features because I still think it would be trivial to monitor.
I mean, there are ways to get around Tor. It's possible to track where traffic comes from, so Tor's method of anonymization is NOT foolproof.
And about your whitelist... what's to stop someone who's monitoring from actually doing distribution and getting on the whitelist? Private torrents just slow the onset of getting caught.
This brings me to a theory that I could see happening to detect modded game consoles... Considering that the Xbox360's mod involves flashing the firmware of the DVD drive itself to improperly report burned disks as 360 games, the only way to detect it would be to put rogue ISOs on the various distribution sites which are 100% functional. Wait 6 months and anyone whose unit played one of those disks must be modded. If they did that with Halo 3, I guarantee they'd pick up some 95% of modded consoles and be able to ban them from live. The question is... is there a way around that?
My point is that P2P's main risk, no matter what service you use, is that it still involves connecting to a supplier to download content. Because of this, it becomes easy to discover who has said content, and no matter how you try to obfuscate it, you can't reliably hide where the data is coming from.
I dunno... for $5 a month, all you can eat? That could work for me, and I'm sure it would work for a lot of other people, too.
I'm not saying I'd stop getting music elsewhere. As you say about random qualities, names, etc, that comes with the territory. Use P2P all I want without fear or lawsuits for $5 a month???? psh. Dude. That's a steal (no pun intended)!
Of course, the labels would be fools to accept this. I'm sure that would eat into their profits significantly. Users that are paying a flat $5 per month for all they can download vs. paying $10 per album (iTunes; or like what, $15+ for a physical CD?)... that's suicide.
Plus, if P2P became as widespread as it was in the height of the napster/limewire days, the corrupt, truncated and mis-labeled files will once again be kings of their realm. It's a terrible situation for all parties involved.
You have a great point.
Early stereotypical P2P applications (Napster, etc) were designed to distribute files. Napster was designed almost exclusively to distribute copyrighted works.
It's true, the labels cried foul, maybe overreacted a bit. It was very similar to the way that they freaked out when people started creating mix tapes for each other, but it has only gotten worse. Sure, there was a very high demand for music and no legit way to purchase music online. People wanted to get their music from an online source and only recently has it really become a viable option.
Much of today's P2P apps aren't designed with the express purpose to trade music or movies, but rather to ease the burdens of today's bandwidth requirements. Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute patches for World of Warcraft. Linux distros use it to distribute their new releases. Swarming and distributed transfers really showcase the power of P2P and demonstrate legit applications of the technology.
Banning P2P outright is completely wrong. In fact, banning it at all is wrong.
There are risks involved with almost all technologies and many of them are not immediately apparent until it has been around for a while. People need to see these risks and decide that, yeah, maybe they should stay away from services like Limewire because of security concerns. If you're gonna download illegal files, you should realize how easy it is for a movie studio to see who's downloaded the latest episode of Rome. All of the current popular apps have issues like this.
Overall, I think P2P is going to die because of these inherent weaknesses. There are some services that seem to be getting it right (I won't name them here), but they introduce encryption and obfuscation techniques to prevent people from snooping on their traffic. I saw one that was like the bastard child of BitTorrent and Limewire with a healthy coating of encryption and basically turned all files shared on all users' systems into a giant torrent so everything can be swarmed. It would take chunks from random files on the network and store them on your system, encrypted. Pretty neat.
Personally, I'm sick of the whole P2P thing. I miss the days of getting files off FTP, Hotline and other repositories where the files are sometimes meticulously sorted and checked for defects. Limewire et al have a high concentration of corrupt, truncated and damaged files, and when you get files that don't swarm, frequently, it's from a user on a slow connection.
Maybe the future is going to be private networks, again. P2P, but select groups of people. Yeah, that's the ticket.
the security is still there... the link they emailed me still tells me that I'm not authorized anymore.
yeah, I like NIN, but I've never purchased an album from until this one. I wouldn't really call myself a fan, but I've always enjoyed his music. I bought it out of support for the whole cause. @ $5, it's totally worth it, and I probably would have wound up aquiring it at a later date anyway.
Back when CDs were cheaper, I used to buy them if I liked just one song or I liked the cover art or heard them mentioned by another band I liked. A lot of the time, it would turn out that the albums were pretty good and I'd get into that band (The Residents are a great example of this, who I got into because I saw Les Claypool of Primus wearing a Residents shirt). Now, with CDs costing between $15 and $20, and digital tracks costing too much for an inferior product, I find myself only buying music that I know I'll like; most of the time after I've already acquired the album and really like it, and I still feel ripped off.
This NIN album and Radiohead's In Rainbows were both cheap enough that I didn't feel cheated even if I don't like the album enough to listen to it more than once or twice.
I'm downloading the lossless version now. Mr Reznor is more than welcome to my 5 bucks.
I bought the album on monday when it was announced on here. The site was under such heavy load that I couldn't get the download to complete... I got about 1MB and would get disconnected, then I would get another MB and get disconnected...
by the time I got 75MB, it booted me saying that I downloaded the album already; it sucked.
so this morning I realized that if I change some of that random garbage part (/secure/RANDOM_GARBAGE/filename.zip), I could download the file today (it was going nice and fast... 1.2MB/sec on my 10mbit line)... also... they are using predictable filenames, so you can change "mp3" to "flac" and it will work... terribly insecure.
They should have whitelisted each block of random garbage and tagged it with the user's name in their database, then when the download was completed, blacklist it so no one else can use it. Instead, it seems they're just blacklisting after it's used (probably to save space in the DB?). Kinda lame, but nice because I was able to get both the mp3 version and the FLAC version.
consider yourself lucky to be able to download the album WHEN you bought it instead of several days later.
If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred.
I, for one, welcome our new japanese robot driver overlords.
but seriously, I take this as a hint as to what is to come in the future for japan.
erm... stupid me. I meant ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless). At work, we've referred to it as ALC on the occasions that we refer to it that way, but I don't think we keep tracks in that format on hand, ever.
Considering that lossesslossless won't (definitely should not) affect audio quality, I think I'll go with what has better support for my current needs. I can always move to FLAC later if/when the ipod supports it. Although part of me thinks I should just keep everything at 256 or 320kbit mp3s since it's the most compatible (everything reads it). I don't totally like the idea of needing to maintain 2 separate music libraries; one that's lossless that's my primary archive and one that's compressed which I pull from for audio players and jukebox applications.
the mush sound hits close to home. I've had people give me copies of their itunes purchased music by burning an audio CD, then ripping the tracks as mp3. The difference is very noticeable and they get offended when I tell them "thanks but no thanks." When tracks are re-encoded or even mastered improperly (I've seen this occur with several albums in the last few year), they become a chore to listen to, and that's not the point of music.
I've got an old 3G ipod that I"ve got ipod linux on, but the drive failed a couple weeks ago.
My current ipod is the 80GB classic which rockbox doesn't yet support. Kinda sucks having the latest and greatest when hacks don't work. Linux on the ipod had an option to boot the original firmware by holding down the middle button. When my model is supported I'll probably check it out. In mp3 format, I've only got about 20GB of music that I actually like.
I understand the concept of going lossless for purposes of re-encoding at a later date... I may actually do that now that you mention it. Since I pretty much use iTunes and the iPod exclusively, I might stick with ALC for now... I could always transcode later to FLAC or some other lossless format. With the fact that 750GB SATA drives are down to around $150 a piece, I actually just picked up 4 of them and set them up in a RAID0+1 configuration for 1.4TB of usable storage that's protected. About half of it is used up with my music collection. I think I'm gonna have to build a NAS for this stuff since I'd prefer having my data in a separate box from my desktop machine.
erm. oh yeah.
Unfortunately FLAC doesn't play on the ipod. I'd have to do ALC... but I hate using a format that's not universally supported. Once (if ever?) FLAC is supported in iTunes/iPod, I'll have to go through my 400 or so CDs and re-encode, yet again- I just re-encoded everything at 256kbps a couple months ago.
I got my hands on some uncompressed versions of some tracks that I never heard except in 192kbps mp3 and m4p and didn't realize how much I was missing. There's so much sound that you lose. And it's so much more obvious that I'm losing quality on iTunes purchases than tracks I download from the more questionable sources. And the feature films that the iTMS has for purchase are much, much lower quality than the DVD, which is practically the same price, now.
Gotta check if FLAC plays on the PS3 and the 360, too...
personally, I need physical media. I don't trust having only a digital copy, especially if I can't go and download another copy whenever I feel the need.
the first thing I do when I buy a CD is rip it at 256kbps and then put the disk in my booklet. I've had too many CDRs, DVD-Rs, and HDs go bad on me to be able to live with only a single digital copy. I need something permanent to store somewhere.