While I'm sure the pink ones are indeed selling principally to women (though even with pink, I'm sure there are at least a few men who are getting it), I don't think that's their thinking behind the mini overall. Mainly, I think pink is just a fairly natural color choice for a consumer product that one intends to have in five different colors. I bet if you go shopping for, say, phones, or notebooks (not laptops, but the things that hold paper), or any of numerous other products offered in different colors, a lot of the selections will be pink.
You're looking at this in very much the same way I do (though a little differently, since I have less music than you do). In particular, this part:
2. If I can't have all of it, what is the difference between 4 gigs and 15? It takes almost no time to resynchronize the ipod, and with smart playlists my favorites are always there, as are a wide range of random stuff.
In my case, I have over 20 GB but under 40 GBs, so the 40 would hold my entire library, and that's therefore the one I want. However, my second choice is actually not the one closest to the 40, but the one farthest removed from it, the mini. My reasoning is that for any current model other than the 40, I'll still have to do at least some picking and choosing what I'll take with me for a given day/week/whatever. As long as I'm going to do that anyway, I might as well go for the mini, since it'll still hold more music than I'm going to listen to in a span of a couple days and is also smaller, lighter, and cheaper than any other iPod (and as a bonus, comes in my favorite color).
I'm therefore in the seemingly odd position of having my two top picks be the two least like each other, but it makes perfect sense for me. I can either save up $500 and get an iPod that holds all my tunes, with room to grow, or save up half as much and get one that holds all my favorites and a good bit besides, and is incidentally even more portable (and comes in green).
I wanted the extra space, true, but I am also offended that Apple thinks they can get away with giving us less for our money because it is "pretty".
Asssuming by "us" you meant "female geeks" (or just women generally, geek and non-geek alike), what indication do you have that Apple does think that (aside from the fact they are, in fact, selling scads of them, whether disproportionately to women or not)? They don't say anything in their marketing about them being "girl" iPods or anything like that; they show people of both sexes using them (albeit more or less entirely young, attractive people, but hey, that's marketing for you). If Apple does indeed consider them "iPod mini: iPod for women," they haven't said anything about it (and you can be sure they've sold more than a few of those 100k to men, and are just as happy to take men's money as they are women's).
I'm male, and I still would love a mini, myself (oddly, it's my second choice after the 40 GB - my ideal iPod is the most capacious, but my second choice is the least, before either the 20 or 15).
There are some notable differences. First of all, where the Wal-Mart terms say you can download to 1 computer and back up to 2 others, they mean this:
What computer should I use to download my music?
You should download your music to the one computer where you keep your digital music. Once you play a song, it can be played, burned or transferred to a portable player from that computer only, based on the usage rights for that song.
By comparison, any of the three machines you put iTunes music on has full privileges for burning CDs, transferring to iPods, streaming over a network, and/or using music in your iMovies, iPhoto slideshows, and iDVDs (a whole type of usage absent from most other services, AFAIK). If you buy Wal-Mart downloads, you can only burn CDs and transfer to portables from your primary machine, and you can't change it. Not only do you get full usage on each of the three machines with iTunes, but you can deauthorize a comp and authorize another in its place - very useful for upgrades. With Wal-Mart, a song is forever tied to that one computer you downloaded it on, and the first two you backed it up on - when you move to your next box, the music doesn't go with you.
Also, there's a very important distinction between "Make 10 burns to a CD" (Wal-Mart) and "burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each" (iTunes). With the former, a given song can only be burned 10 times, ever. With the latter, it's just that a particular playlist can be burned ten times before you have to change it. Any individual song can be burned to CD as many damn times as you please - and even a playlist can be burned more than ten times, so long as you change it every ten burns. This can be as simple as changing a single track (adding one, deleting one, changing order, whatever) - and you can then change it right back if you like. Effectively, then, you can even burn the same whole playlist as many times as you like; you simply have to intervene at least once every ten burns. This is just so you don't set a machine to mass duplicate 100 copies or whatever of a playlist and walk off, come back, and start handing out copies of that playlist to a hundred strangers. You can still do essentially that, but you have to at least intervene; apparently that's considered just enough of an annoyance factor that they don't worry about people doing it.
Between those two things, the iTunes service is ultimately much less restrictive - you can burn songs as many times as you like (as opposed to just ten), and you can have whatever three computers you want each have full privileges for the music, and can change them around whenever you like (as opposed to having full privs on just one of the three machines, and being unable to change the machines when you replace one).
I'm not saying that the two are mutually exclusive (they aren't) but eight other babies could have been saved with the same number of organs, or with the same amount of money a starving village could have been fed for a month.
In theory, sure, perhaps, but realistically, there probably weren't eight other individuals who each needed a different one of those eight infant-sized organs at the same exact time; at least some of the donor's organs would probably have been wasted otherwise. I also very much doubt the money spent on this surgery would otherwise have gone to feeding a starving village.
Is it fair that if you're born with a whole load of problems but your parents have the money, we can fix you up, whereas if you're born with nothing wrong with you but your parents can't even afford to feed you, you should die?
No, it's not, but not because it's unfair that some people have enough money to take care of things like this; it's unfair because not everyone does. Just because this kind of thing can't be done for everyone who needs it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done for anyone. That wouldn't be any more fair than doing it for only some.
The child's "so many" problems were all really just one problem affecting eight organs. What about her long-term chances of survival? They still might not be great compared to yours or mine, but they're sure as hell a lot better than if she hadn't had the surgery, right?
So, are you saying it would be better if the child were simply allowed to die? How? Her quality of life, however bad, is going to be a hell of a lot better now than if she were dead.
At $.25 a track they'd almost certainly be losing money - the bandwidth, infrastructure, etc. all costs money, you know, and the artists have to get something if someone else is going to sell or "sell" their work.
You know, jukeboxes have been at least $.25 to play a song one time for as long as I can remember, back to the '70s, and these days they're often more like $.50 (or $1 for 3 songs, whatever). If it's not outrageous pricing to pay $.25 or more to play a song one time (and plenty of people have been doing just that for decades, since back when a quarter was worth more than it is now), is $.99 for a copy of a song you can keep indefinitely and play as many times as you like really so egregiously overpriced?
The big question is, however, if it isn't time for the extension of the definition of print.
does Usenet count as print? some would say yes, some no, but the point remains is that it's an archived form of communication, in text form. the OED needs to figure out, soon, what they're going to do about electronic text- and about how they're going to reference it, and potentially cache those referencing pages. the conservatism of british academics is almost cliched; good or bad, it at least ensures continuity.
For that matter, what about extending the criteria to accomodate any verifiable use of a word, not just in a broader definition of "print," but in spoken usage as well? Sound recordings didn't even exist when the OED was conceived of, but they're an indispensible resource for study of language evolution for that part of history for which they're available, and if it's known from such sources a word clearly existed at a certain time even though the earliest print citation dates from much later, isn't it misleading to think of the print source as the earliest citation?
If you're getting really crummy battery life on an iPod only six months old, it should be covered by warranty. Apple should fix it for you if you notify them.
I'm pretty sure you've got that turned around. The iMac less on ROM (again, if I remember correctly; I could be wrong) than previous Macs. The Toolbox ROM was moved to a file called Mac OS ROM on the hard disk, in the System Folder.
Argh - you're right. Thanks for catching that. Somebody mod parent up as Informative; it's at least as informative as my own post it was responding to.
Now that you've set me straight on that, I think I remember the rest of it correctly. IIRC (please don't hesitate to let me know;) , 3 MB of Toolbox ROM was taken out of ROM and moved to disk, so that it loaded into RAM at bootup; this increased boot times (d'oh!), and also made the OS take up 3 MB more RAM than it would have otherwise, but slightly increased system responsiveness after bootup, since the Toolbox routines could be accessed from RAM more quickly than from the slower ROM. Do I have that right?
This happens all the time with all sorts of movies, and isn't by any stretch limited to Terminator 2 or George Lucas movies.
All four Alien films, half the Star Trek movies, most of Stanley Kubrick's movies, Thelma & Louise, Casablanca, My Fair Lady, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Gremlins, Amadeus, The Color Purple, The Right Stuff, This is Spinal Tap, Big Trouble in Little China, and far more others than I can begin to count have all gotten two DVD releases apiece. Time Bandits, Brazil, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and others have had 3 releases. Each of the Evil Dead movies has had at least 4 DVD versions, with an amazing 6 editions for Army of Darkness - it's had a new DVD release for almost every year DVDs have existed!!
By comparison, in the seven or so years DVDs have been out, not one George Lucas movie has gotten multiple DVD releases (unless you count separate widescreen and "fullscreen" versions of otherwise identical editions). American Graffiti? One DVD release to date. More American Graffiti? One DVD release to date. Radioland Murders? One DVD release to date. Willow? One DVD release to date. Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace? One DVD release to date. Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones? One DVD release to date. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? One DVD release of each to date, in a boxed set combining the three. THX 1138 and the original Star Wars trilogy? We're still waiting, though all those should be released this year. The only George Lucas or Lucasfilm production to get multiple DVD releases is Labyrinth, and that's principally a Jim Henson movie, not a George Lucas one, and not controlled by either of them (since Henson is now dead). Yeah, there used to be lots of versions of everything Lucas in the days of VHS and laserdisc, but that era's over, and so far in the DVD era, none of Lucas' films have gotten multiple DVD versions for fans to buy and then buy again when the better versions come out.
People are always complaining about George Lucas inundating fans with successive upgraded video releases, but Lucas has nothing on Sam Raimi in this regard, given all those squintillions of Evil Dead discs...
Apple developed their own special monitor connector so that the studio display cannot be connected to a PC without buying an additional adapter from Apple at premium price.
Not quite. Apple developed its own special monitor connector to reduce cable clutter, reflecting its obsession with elegant design - the display gets not only video but also a USB signal and power through the same cable, instead of the three cables it used to take. Apple didn't begin offering its adapter until long after it started using this connector (ADC), and in fact a third party company, Dr. Bott, offered its own DVI->ADC adapter much earlier than Apple did (Apple even sold Dr. Bott's adapter at its store, and would even include it in custom computer configurations). It has also been suggested that ADC was a way to lock people who buy Macs into buying Apple displays to go with them, which isn't true; every Mac with a video card with an ADC output has also had a more conventional output (either VGA or DVI, and the ones with ADC and DVI came with a DVI->VGA adapter so one can use any old regular monitor).
As far as the ROMs go, they do serve some purpose besides simply locking the Mac OS to Apple hardware. Certain OS elements are kept in the ROMs (IIRC, the original iMac moved certain things that used to load off disk at bootup to the ROMs, and cut the startup time as a result). One very old Mac model even had a whole (albeit stripped-down) version of the Mac OS in its ROM, and could be booted from it, without a disk.
For example I have excellent karma, meta moderate daily, and it has been over two years since I have gotten moderation points.
Really? How peculiar. I have excellent karma as well, and I meta-moderate only sometimes, but I've had mod points multiple times this year already.
No, I don't think my karma is "better" or anything; I think there must be something messed up in Slashdot somewhere (yeah, I know, that's a setup for some joke about obviousness...)
Exactly, which is all the more reason to delay the Oscars a few years. There's probably no way to strip the awards completely of extraneous considerations that shouldn't matter but affect them anyway like Hollywood politics and commerce, but I think the effects would be diminished. I'd certainly think a lot of Kubrick's films (to use your example) would have done a lot better at the AAs if the awards were given after a ten-year period.
Well, the winning pictures you mentioned obviously aren't flying off video store shelves, but they do continue to get some attention these days, and certainly more than most films of those years that didn't win.
I do think Citizen Kane should have won for '41, but I've got both it and How Green Was My Valley in my DVD library, FWIW.
That said, I agree with the main thrust of your argument. I think the Oscars would be more credible if they weren't given just a few months after the year for which they're given, but instead were awarded 10 years, say, after the release year honored. For example, Forrest Gump did indeed seem pretty amazing in 1994, but if that year's awards were being given out today instead of in '95, I doubt it would have won. Other films from that year are better standing the test of time.
A year after the release of any film, no matter how good, is perhaps just too soon to provide a really good assessment of its merits and its overall standing in the body of cinema. I'm sure lots of Oscar picks would be much different if they weren't so close to the years they note.
I think everyone is forgetting that Star Wars won Best Picture back in 1975.
Well, that's because it didn't. The original Star Wars came out in 1977, not '75, and though it was nominated for Best Picture, it didn't win; that went to Annie Hall (for '77; for '75 it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
Except that similar discussions have previously emerged; this is just the latest.
Here, for example, is an article from September of 2002 on the same thing. That was more than two years before this year's election. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has cropped up before, not by a long shot; it's not even the first time it's come up on Slashdot (see this, or this, or this (referring to the article I referenced above).
Slashdot Mirror
Lately??
While I'm sure the pink ones are indeed selling principally to women (though even with pink, I'm sure there are at least a few men who are getting it), I don't think that's their thinking behind the mini overall. Mainly, I think pink is just a fairly natural color choice for a consumer product that one intends to have in five different colors. I bet if you go shopping for, say, phones, or notebooks (not laptops, but the things that hold paper), or any of numerous other products offered in different colors, a lot of the selections will be pink.
In my case, I have over 20 GB but under 40 GBs, so the 40 would hold my entire library, and that's therefore the one I want. However, my second choice is actually not the one closest to the 40, but the one farthest removed from it, the mini. My reasoning is that for any current model other than the 40, I'll still have to do at least some picking and choosing what I'll take with me for a given day/week/whatever. As long as I'm going to do that anyway, I might as well go for the mini, since it'll still hold more music than I'm going to listen to in a span of a couple days and is also smaller, lighter, and cheaper than any other iPod (and as a bonus, comes in my favorite color).
I'm therefore in the seemingly odd position of having my two top picks be the two least like each other, but it makes perfect sense for me. I can either save up $500 and get an iPod that holds all my tunes, with room to grow, or save up half as much and get one that holds all my favorites and a good bit besides, and is incidentally even more portable (and comes in green).
Asssuming by "us" you meant "female geeks" (or just women generally, geek and non-geek alike), what indication do you have that Apple does think that (aside from the fact they are, in fact, selling scads of them, whether disproportionately to women or not)? They don't say anything in their marketing about them being "girl" iPods or anything like that; they show people of both sexes using them (albeit more or less entirely young, attractive people, but hey, that's marketing for you). If Apple does indeed consider them "iPod mini: iPod for women," they haven't said anything about it (and you can be sure they've sold more than a few of those 100k to men, and are just as happy to take men's money as they are women's).
I'm male, and I still would love a mini, myself (oddly, it's my second choice after the 40 GB - my ideal iPod is the most capacious, but my second choice is the least, before either the 20 or 15).
My state (Florida) has Apple Stores as well, but I don't pay sales tax on iTMS downloads.
Also, there's a very important distinction between "Make 10 burns to a CD" (Wal-Mart) and "burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each" (iTunes). With the former, a given song can only be burned 10 times, ever. With the latter, it's just that a particular playlist can be burned ten times before you have to change it. Any individual song can be burned to CD as many damn times as you please - and even a playlist can be burned more than ten times, so long as you change it every ten burns. This can be as simple as changing a single track (adding one, deleting one, changing order, whatever) - and you can then change it right back if you like. Effectively, then, you can even burn the same whole playlist as many times as you like; you simply have to intervene at least once every ten burns. This is just so you don't set a machine to mass duplicate 100 copies or whatever of a playlist and walk off, come back, and start handing out copies of that playlist to a hundred strangers. You can still do essentially that, but you have to at least intervene; apparently that's considered just enough of an annoyance factor that they don't worry about people doing it.
Between those two things, the iTunes service is ultimately much less restrictive - you can burn songs as many times as you like (as opposed to just ten), and you can have whatever three computers you want each have full privileges for the music, and can change them around whenever you like (as opposed to having full privs on just one of the three machines, and being unable to change the machines when you replace one).
Sure, both shows are cool, but really, Slashdot types ought to know him best as National Security Advisor Smirnoff.
:D
In theory, sure, perhaps, but realistically, there probably weren't eight other individuals who each needed a different one of those eight infant-sized organs at the same exact time; at least some of the donor's organs would probably have been wasted otherwise. I also very much doubt the money spent on this surgery would otherwise have gone to feeding a starving village.
No, it's not, but not because it's unfair that some people have enough money to take care of things like this; it's unfair because not everyone does. Just because this kind of thing can't be done for everyone who needs it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done for anyone. That wouldn't be any more fair than doing it for only some.So the money spent on this girl would otherwise have gone to those thousands?
So, are you saying it would be better if the child were simply allowed to die? How? Her quality of life, however bad, is going to be a hell of a lot better now than if she were dead.
Most likely those organs would have gone to waste anyway had Alessia not needed them.
Would you feel the same way if you, not your child, were the one needing eight new organs?
You know, jukeboxes have been at least $.25 to play a song one time for as long as I can remember, back to the '70s, and these days they're often more like $.50 (or $1 for 3 songs, whatever). If it's not outrageous pricing to pay $.25 or more to play a song one time (and plenty of people have been doing just that for decades, since back when a quarter was worth more than it is now), is $.99 for a copy of a song you can keep indefinitely and play as many times as you like really so egregiously overpriced?
For that matter, what about extending the criteria to accomodate any verifiable use of a word, not just in a broader definition of "print," but in spoken usage as well? Sound recordings didn't even exist when the OED was conceived of, but they're an indispensible resource for study of language evolution for that part of history for which they're available, and if it's known from such sources a word clearly existed at a certain time even though the earliest print citation dates from much later, isn't it misleading to think of the print source as the earliest citation?
If you're getting really crummy battery life on an iPod only six months old, it should be covered by warranty. Apple should fix it for you if you notify them.
Now that you've set me straight on that, I think I remember the rest of it correctly. IIRC (please don't hesitate to let me know ;) , 3 MB of Toolbox ROM was taken out of ROM and moved to disk, so that it loaded into RAM at bootup; this increased boot times (d'oh!), and also made the OS take up 3 MB more RAM than it would have otherwise, but slightly increased system responsiveness after bootup, since the Toolbox routines could be accessed from RAM more quickly than from the slower ROM. Do I have that right?
By comparison, in the seven or so years DVDs have been out, not one George Lucas movie has gotten multiple DVD releases (unless you count separate widescreen and "fullscreen" versions of otherwise identical editions). American Graffiti? One DVD release to date. More American Graffiti? One DVD release to date. Radioland Murders? One DVD release to date. Willow? One DVD release to date. Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace? One DVD release to date. Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones? One DVD release to date. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? One DVD release of each to date, in a boxed set combining the three. THX 1138 and the original Star Wars trilogy? We're still waiting, though all those should be released this year. The only George Lucas or Lucasfilm production to get multiple DVD releases is Labyrinth, and that's principally a Jim Henson movie, not a George Lucas one, and not controlled by either of them (since Henson is now dead). Yeah, there used to be lots of versions of everything Lucas in the days of VHS and laserdisc, but that era's over, and so far in the DVD era, none of Lucas' films have gotten multiple DVD versions for fans to buy and then buy again when the better versions come out.
People are always complaining about George Lucas inundating fans with successive upgraded video releases, but Lucas has nothing on Sam Raimi in this regard, given all those squintillions of Evil Dead discs...
Not quite. Apple developed its own special monitor connector to reduce cable clutter, reflecting its obsession with elegant design - the display gets not only video but also a USB signal and power through the same cable, instead of the three cables it used to take. Apple didn't begin offering its adapter until long after it started using this connector (ADC), and in fact a third party company, Dr. Bott, offered its own DVI->ADC adapter much earlier than Apple did (Apple even sold Dr. Bott's adapter at its store, and would even include it in custom computer configurations). It has also been suggested that ADC was a way to lock people who buy Macs into buying Apple displays to go with them, which isn't true; every Mac with a video card with an ADC output has also had a more conventional output (either VGA or DVI, and the ones with ADC and DVI came with a DVI->VGA adapter so one can use any old regular monitor).
As far as the ROMs go, they do serve some purpose besides simply locking the Mac OS to Apple hardware. Certain OS elements are kept in the ROMs (IIRC, the original iMac moved certain things that used to load off disk at bootup to the ROMs, and cut the startup time as a result). One very old Mac model even had a whole (albeit stripped-down) version of the Mac OS in its ROM, and could be booted from it, without a disk.
Really? How peculiar. I have excellent karma as well, and I meta-moderate only sometimes, but I've had mod points multiple times this year already.
No, I don't think my karma is "better" or anything; I think there must be something messed up in Slashdot somewhere (yeah, I know, that's a setup for some joke about obviousness...)
Exactly, which is all the more reason to delay the Oscars a few years. There's probably no way to strip the awards completely of extraneous considerations that shouldn't matter but affect them anyway like Hollywood politics and commerce, but I think the effects would be diminished. I'd certainly think a lot of Kubrick's films (to use your example) would have done a lot better at the AAs if the awards were given after a ten-year period.
I do think Citizen Kane should have won for '41, but I've got both it and How Green Was My Valley in my DVD library, FWIW.
That said, I agree with the main thrust of your argument. I think the Oscars would be more credible if they weren't given just a few months after the year for which they're given, but instead were awarded 10 years, say, after the release year honored. For example, Forrest Gump did indeed seem pretty amazing in 1994, but if that year's awards were being given out today instead of in '95, I doubt it would have won. Other films from that year are better standing the test of time.
A year after the release of any film, no matter how good, is perhaps just too soon to provide a really good assessment of its merits and its overall standing in the body of cinema. I'm sure lots of Oscar picks would be much different if they weren't so close to the years they note.
:D
Well, that's because it didn't. The original Star Wars came out in 1977, not '75, and though it was nominated for Best Picture, it didn't win; that went to Annie Hall (for '77; for '75 it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
Thanks for the links.
Here, for example, is an article from September of 2002 on the same thing. That was more than two years before this year's election. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has cropped up before, not by a long shot; it's not even the first time it's come up on Slashdot (see this, or this, or this (referring to the article I referenced above).