All jokes aside (as I am sure many "two daddy trailerpark" jokes are immanent) but this is indeed quite an advancement in biotech, because we may see future developments arrive in the development of cloning endangered species back from the brink of extinction; now species threatened from a lack of suitable mates, could be quite possibly saved, with the proper funding. The hard part would be digging deeper gene pools, enabling a true future for endangered species (although, I guess that's next week on/., right CmdrTaco?). Also, I wonder if it's possible to grow offspring with only two male subjects.
There is a distinct dichotomy between the way voting should be handled, and the reality of the situation. Voting should be handled by the elderly ladies, with all their honesty and good faith, yet the gravity of the situation is that these ladies have become obsolete, due to the fact that they can easily be fooled now by those with a great deal of technological prowess. Sadly, these bastions of hope can't possibly keep up with the weasels who abuse power.
We need to utilize the honesty from these wonderful proctors, and harness that in whatever system of voting is brought forward. We need an auditing system that is open to the public, so that the votes can be quickly check-sum'd and factored by poll. Our votes should be accessible online so that we can check to make sure our vote has not been changed by wrong-doers.
The iTunes DRM'd AAC file is ALREADY degraded, yet is very, very high quality and nearly indistinguishable from a CD copy, even with professional-level biamplified stereo monitors. Double-blind tests have proven this over and over. Same with nearly every other audio compression scheme w/ sufficient bitrate. Today's technology is that good.
If you don't mind Commercial CD -> OGG/MP3, you're surely not going to mind iTMS AAC -> OGG/MP3. It's a matter of logic.
If it's the ORIGINAL loss of quality that you have a huge problem with, then you're barking up the wrong tree. Tell them to distribute uncompressed AIFF and/or CD data.
If not, well, then I don't see what the problem is. iTunes' DRM is perfectly acceptable. It's just there to prevent wholesale copying between anonymous parties.
And just keep reusing the same disc for conversion?
Apple is just trying to keep the music industry happy, Jobs himself said in a Rolling Stone magazine interview that DRM for music is "not possible". They need to pay lip service to the industry but I think it's fairly clear (no pun intended) that they are advocates of fair use.
The fact that you can burn limitless CDs for your friends of the music you have purchased is proof enough for me.
AAC may be lossy by nature of its compressive storage (as you say, and is common knowledge), but converting from AAC to CD is not lossy. Lossy AAC - that's what you bought in the first place. If you don't like that fact, then I think the argument should be "iTunes itself is selling a lossy product."
The second step, from CD to OGG/MP3, is something you deal with every day, with every legitimate or illegitimate MP3 you have. No matter where it came from. People extol the virtue of OGG and its wonderful compression and low-loss nature, don't they? It's practically the same.
Apple's 128kbps AAC's quality is very good, about the same as a 192kbps mp3. You can burn AAC to CD - that's allowed by the iTunes DRM scheme with no problems.
The AAC -> CD data conversion has no quality loss associated with it. The data, on the CD, is sonically identical to how you bought it from Apple.
If people rip commercial CDs to OGG (or any other format) without complaining about quality loss, I don't see how it's anything but hypocrisy to say that converting from AAC -> CD -> OGG/whatever is some kind of huge hindrance to their fair use. There's only one loss of quality, which is tiny, in that chain of events, and it happens EVERYWHERE else you convert CD data to a compressed music format.
Where is this mysterious and show-stopping quality loss happening?
1000% written as a decimal factor is 10.00, or a 10-fold improvement. When dealing with latency times measured in milliseconds, that's not too out of the ordinary. I'm no expert, but look at this situation: (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
Say, if a block is read on one end of the platter, then 10 subsequent reads are read in close proximity at the other end, followed by an 11th read at the beginning again, a predictive seeker could re-prioritize the 11th seek to be right after the first. That would cut down on quite a bit of head movement, as well as improve the seek time for that 11th block without negatively affecting the others too much.
And I'm the one that got called a Nazi and a prick. Personally I find typical polite and fruity Slashdot banter to be kind of lame. I'm just trying to inject a little spice into everyone's day!
p.s. If you read my other posts, you'll see I fully understand why he hasn't tagged his MP3s, or they didn't come tagged (he pirated a boatload of them, and now is too lazy to fix it, just like I did/was many years ago - come on, the situation isn't exactly hard to figure out), and offer suggestions in two (2) separate posts.
There are literally dozens of utilities written for every platform to go through any number of mp3s and take information from the filename and construct usable ID3 tags out of it. Again, just because you didn't know about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Ignorance is funny like that. They're fairly smart in the translation, too, in case you're going to say some shit like "all my mp3 files are named in a different format with different symbols separating all the artists and titles and blah blah oh my god it's hopeless."
I'm simply suggesting that you FIX YOUR PROBLEM, instead of resorting to ridiculous methods of kludgingly organizing your masses of broken files into a semi-useable format, and then criticizing well-designed software for not supporting your horrible method of organization.
As for having a life - yes, I've got one, and I don't spend it organizing my thousands of mp3s into neat little directories on disk. Although that's what I used to do _six_ years ago, and I feel your pain.
I'm not an Apple nazi, I'm a misinformation nazi. I do the same thing with Linux and BSD when I run across people who really just don't know what they're talking about. I like to play this game to see how rude and arrogant I can be with ignorant people that are obviously wrong before they get so pissed off that they start calling me names.
I also use folders to make a custom nested format which separates songs by language, style, and year.
Yes, that's nice, iTunes does that too. What if you want to change your separations? Spend an entire afternoon moving "thousands" of mp3s around? That's your business, I guess.
You can't do that with playlists.
Actually, yes you can do that, and much, much more. In other words, HE WAS WRONG. <---- MAIN POINT OF MY ORIGINAL POST, HERE!
A final plus for me is that browsing by folder avoids using ID3 tags, many of which aren't present on the the thousands of foreign language mp3s I have. The original ipod firmware lists a lot of songs as Unknown for me - I have to play them to figure out what the songs are - how useful is that?
There are many utilities that can take a filename and convert it into meaningful ID3 data. You can kill two birds with one stone, and use the features in your iPod to boot.
Did I make it clear enough for you what I was trying to point out?
As long as we're talking about the original poster here, the original poster said iTunes' functionality lacked the ability to do things HE wanted.
Except he was WRONG, it has the exact functionality he wanted, plus the functionality he said DIDN'T exist.
Does this make any sense to you at all? My god. To recap:
iTunes functionality includes his "custom" scheme of presentation, as well as MUCH MUCH more. He was complaining that iTunes' organizational functionality EXCLUDED the way he does things.
Of course you can dream up of some inefficient, inflexible custom bullshit solution and complain that your solution doesn't exist in commercial software. That's the very definition of a strawman argument, which is what I'm trying to expose here.
I'm not going to berate your old school ways of doing things (I wrote perl and bash scripts to parse and organize my mp3 library back in.. uhh, maybe 1998, but I've moved on from that morass of bullshit and settled down in the modern world now) but I _AM_ going to correct assumptions made that are totally wrong!
You know nothing, and presume everything.
on
Linux for iPod Matures
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Here's a suggestion: use the software you criticize, before you criticize it.
iTunes' smart playlists are automatically synchronized with the iPod, and boast features that your "custom nested format" wouldn't ever dream of achieving.
You can have:
Normal, every-day playlists, with playback order sorted by name, artist, time, album, genre, last played, rating, or random.
Or, you can have DYNAMIC, automatically synced playlists that update themselves based on any combination or exclusion of the following criteria:
Album, artist, song BPM, bitrate, comment, compilation membership, composer, date added, modified, genre, grouping, kind, last played, my rating, play count, sample rate, size, song number, time, track number, year.
That's a few more options than your "separates songs by language, style, and year" now isn't it?
The grouping and contextual modifiers are the following: contains, does not contain, is, is not, starts with, ends with.
This is presented as an arbitrary number and combination of graphical pull-down menus, easy enough for a novice user to use, yet powerful enough for someone versed in a language like SQL to understand and exploit to its fullest capabilities. What iTunes is doing is abstracting the presentation of your songs from the storage, which is what an mp3 player SHOULD do. The filesystem isn't smart, it isn't dynamic, and it isn't flexible. If you don't agree with this, then you're in denial. The very existence of playlists is proof positive that the abstraction is appropriate.
Your "case" is a strawman argument. You made this wild scheme of organizing mp3s because your software had no decent way of organizing music and organizing your playlists. Now that you have this half-baked limp solution for organization, you don't realize that better functionality has been designed into other players from the beginning. You're in the dark, buddy. Step into the 21st century. You want to browse by folders? Browse the Library on disk and double click to play your selected mp3. You want it organized some other way? Use dynamic smart playlists.
As far as ID3 tags go, it's nobody's fault but your own that your mp3s don't have that information in them. Another strawman argument. All of my mp3s have up-to-date ID3 information, either from CDDB or me typing in the info when I import something. Just because huge amounts of pirated mp3s don't contain correct information isn't a valid argument against the use of a useful technology like ID3.
Many people have commented on the fact that Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have been implementing these systems for many years now.
The obvious observation here is that Japan and Taiwan are island countries with limited real estate and space and spatial efficiency is at a much higher premium there than it is here. Hong Kong has a similar predicament; it is landlocked by the rest of China on three sides and an ocean on the other, and has actively secured borders. (i.e., they can't just annex land or start building strip malls and boulevards like most cities in the US and Europe)
The only American analog I can think of off the top of my head is Manhattan, NYC, but I suspect that instead of being luddites, their motives against implementing such systems are economic in nature as they are the exception to the general American rule in terms of availability of real estate to build parking garages. Being an island nation definitely has influence on cultural and technological development.
Anyway, I suspect that entire graduate theses can be written on such a topic.
Most everyone who switches to OS X and actually takes the time to familiarize themselves with the way things work find that their productivity increases. Don't confused "eye candy" with "consistency", as a lot of people do. Just because everything looks the same doesn't mean it's gratuitous.
How long did it take you to learn all the flags to ls, cp, ps, netstat, ifconfig, df, du, man, vi, emacs and be able to type them off the top of your head at nearly 100wpm? Let alone the intricacies of being able to bang out a 100-line bash, tcsh, perl or python script at a moment's notice. It takes YEARS, my friend. And I'm not even talking about serious development - I'm talking about being able to organize your mp3s, or something equally mundane.
Hmm, took me the better part of 5 years before I was totally comfortable and at full productivity at the command line. Now, 10 years later, I'm at home in OS X, where the GUI is there to help me get certain things done fast, and the terminal is there to help me get other certain things done fast.
The beauty of OS X is that a 10-year UNIX veteran feels just at home in it as does a 10-year old computer neophyte.
If you can't grasp this simple concept, I suggest you go ditch the Mac and go learn UNIX-like operating systems until you _really_ get it. Because right now you obviously don't.
For $50 more you can get nearly FOUR TIMES THE STORAGE! 4GB is not NEARLY enough for me!
It's too expensive! $250 is going to price it right out of the market!
Nobody with a brain would buy this thing. Now excuse me while I go drink this Mt. Dew while reconfigure the BIOS settings on my overclocked AMD motherboard with water cooling for the 15th time in a week while entertaining my own delusions of technological consumer superiority and grandeur on Slashdot.
At least with Trinitron tubes, if you use Windex to clean up and aren't very thorough with your drying, it will eat through the anti-glare coating (or whatever it is on there) and leave a nasty, permanent discoloring swirl pattern or streak on your monitor.
In fact, any cleaning solution that contains ammonia will do the same thing. This is also why they strongly caution you against using Windex against aftermarket (sticky film) tinted windows (like in cars or living rooms).
The damage won't be instantaneous, but I've seen plenty of examples including several very expensive monitors that have been scarred for life.:(
From the Federal Reserve board of directors' website
http://www.federalreserve.gov/faq.htm
Who owns the Federal Reserve?
The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution. Instead, it is an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects.
I don't much agree with $500 jackets and $200 jeans, as I am not a fan of fashion, but buying a nice computer isn't exactly the same thing as looking good for the sake of looking good, especially when one's livelihood depends on the amount of productivity (and least headache) one can get out of one's main workstation. And having something that looks nice never hurt anyone, either. Basically everything you buy these days short of toilet paper is designed to look aesthetically appealing (humans are visual animals... you don't prefer looking at ugly stuff, do you?), and the retail price reflects the development put into that.
Going by your logic, everyone should buy marginally acceptable computers that are *just able* to run the critical applications needed on a day to day basis, like the $10 T-Shirt and $20 jeans. That drop in demand would prevent new development, slowing the pace of technological advance in the computer industry. This principle is basically applicable to every other tech-influenced industry, as well.
If people never bought Apple (or other "luxury", as you put it, brands), the consumer adoption of GUIs, mice, "office" productivity suites, large-capacity mp3 players, laser printers, (I could go on...) would have been much slower than it was. And you could argue that these things would have been developed and adopted anyway, but that's neither here nor there, and total conjecture. There's always the cheaper alternative.
Furthermore, anyone who's ever studied economics knows that revenue and profits do not scale directly with price. "Budget" goods produced and sold in quantity routinely outpace luxury items in terms of sales, revenues, and profit. Who's worth more - Toyota or Ferrari? Toyota - by an order of magnitude or two, I'd imagine. But Ferrari makes a badass machine that can be yours for six figures. WORTH is the amount of money that a commodity can be sold for on the open market. It has nothing to do with your personal financial situation and your personal tastes and preferences. You're basically inconsequential. The market determines worth, NOT you.
It seems as if you have a fundamental problem with the principles of capitalism and how differences in price & economies of scale drive innovation and adoption. I suggest you check out a isolated economy that produces nothing but common goods for general consumption. Something like... North Korea.
I definitely agree with your points, but I'd like to point out that in recent years Slashdot has moved mainly toward a Windows-centric user base. It started out as heavily Linux biased (CmdrTaco frequented IRC channel #linux96 and #linuxos on EFNet). But as soon as it got popular, it started attracting the general computergeek crowd, which as we all know, is Windows users.
UNIX users may be a very vocal minority, but the vast majority of people use Windows around here.
As an aside, I'm a "born-again" Macintosh user, having ditched Mac OS after being sucked into the x86 world during the early 90s. After using Linux and BSD exclusively as desktop machines for the better part of a decade, I moved to OS X and couldn't be happier.
Sometimes, the human brain has enough cognitive ability to appropriately deduce the contextual (or non-contextual) humor in a passage.
There are entire literary genres based on this fundamental characteristic of written language and how it relates to human communication and situational context.
Perhaps you've heard (or even read!) a satire? Read a passage with irony? Sarcasm? Wit?
Or, maybe you have, but just DIDN'T FUCKING REALIZE IT.
Slashdot Mirror
All jokes aside (as I am sure many "two daddy trailerpark" jokes are immanent) but this is indeed quite an advancement in biotech, because we may see future developments arrive in the development of cloning endangered species back from the brink of extinction; now species threatened from a lack of suitable mates, could be quite possibly saved, with the proper funding. The hard part would be digging deeper gene pools, enabling a true future for endangered species (although, I guess that's next week on /., right CmdrTaco?). Also, I wonder if it's possible to grow offspring with only two male subjects.
There is a distinct dichotomy between the way voting should be handled, and the reality of the situation. Voting should be handled by the elderly ladies, with all their honesty and good faith, yet the gravity of the situation is that these ladies have become obsolete, due to the fact that they can easily be fooled now by those with a great deal of technological prowess. Sadly, these bastions of hope can't possibly keep up with the weasels who abuse power.
We need to utilize the honesty from these wonderful proctors, and harness that in whatever system of voting is brought forward. We need an auditing system that is open to the public, so that the votes can be quickly check-sum'd and factored by poll. Our votes should be accessible online so that we can check to make sure our vote has not been changed by wrong-doers.
The iTunes DRM'd AAC file is ALREADY degraded, yet is very, very high quality and nearly indistinguishable from a CD copy, even with professional-level biamplified stereo monitors. Double-blind tests have proven this over and over. Same with nearly every other audio compression scheme w/ sufficient bitrate. Today's technology is that good.
If you don't mind Commercial CD -> OGG/MP3, you're surely not going to mind iTMS AAC -> OGG/MP3. It's a matter of logic.
If it's the ORIGINAL loss of quality that you have a huge problem with, then you're barking up the wrong tree. Tell them to distribute uncompressed AIFF and/or CD data.
If not, well, then I don't see what the problem is. iTunes' DRM is perfectly acceptable. It's just there to prevent wholesale copying between anonymous parties.
And just keep reusing the same disc for conversion?
Apple is just trying to keep the music industry happy, Jobs himself said in a Rolling Stone magazine interview that DRM for music is "not possible". They need to pay lip service to the industry but I think it's fairly clear (no pun intended) that they are advocates of fair use.
The fact that you can burn limitless CDs for your friends of the music you have purchased is proof enough for me.
AAC may be lossy by nature of its compressive storage (as you say, and is common knowledge), but converting from AAC to CD is not lossy. Lossy AAC - that's what you bought in the first place. If you don't like that fact, then I think the argument should be "iTunes itself is selling a lossy product."
The second step, from CD to OGG/MP3, is something you deal with every day, with every legitimate or illegitimate MP3 you have. No matter where it came from. People extol the virtue of OGG and its wonderful compression and low-loss nature, don't they? It's practically the same.
Consider this.
Apple's 128kbps AAC's quality is very good, about the same as a 192kbps mp3. You can burn AAC to CD - that's allowed by the iTunes DRM scheme with no problems.
The AAC -> CD data conversion has no quality loss associated with it. The data, on the CD, is sonically identical to how you bought it from Apple.
If people rip commercial CDs to OGG (or any other format) without complaining about quality loss, I don't see how it's anything but hypocrisy to say that converting from AAC -> CD -> OGG/whatever is some kind of huge hindrance to their fair use. There's only one loss of quality, which is tiny, in that chain of events, and it happens EVERYWHERE else you convert CD data to a compressed music format.
Where is this mysterious and show-stopping quality loss happening?
You want a Jimi Hendrix song and a Jimi/Morrison to be under Jimi Hendrix?
Put the two songs into a playlist. Organize at your desire.
Your "MENTAL ORGANIZATION" doesn't need to stop just because you start using ID3 tags. Get over it.
1000% written as a decimal factor is 10.00, or a 10-fold improvement. When dealing with latency times measured in milliseconds, that's not too out of the ordinary. I'm no expert, but look at this situation: (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
Say, if a block is read on one end of the platter, then 10 subsequent reads are read in close proximity at the other end, followed by an 11th read at the beginning again, a predictive seeker could re-prioritize the 11th seek to be right after the first. That would cut down on quite a bit of head movement, as well as improve the seek time for that 11th block without negatively affecting the others too much.
It's just the internet. It's nothing personal.
And I'm the one that got called a Nazi and a prick. Personally I find typical polite and fruity Slashdot banter to be kind of lame. I'm just trying to inject a little spice into everyone's day!
p.s. If you read my other posts, you'll see I fully understand why he hasn't tagged his MP3s, or they didn't come tagged (he pirated a boatload of them, and now is too lazy to fix it, just like I did/was many years ago - come on, the situation isn't exactly hard to figure out), and offer suggestions in two (2) separate posts.
Your analogy is pretty bogus.
There are literally dozens of utilities written for every platform to go through any number of mp3s and take information from the filename and construct usable ID3 tags out of it. Again, just because you didn't know about it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Ignorance is funny like that. They're fairly smart in the translation, too, in case you're going to say some shit like "all my mp3 files are named in a different format with different symbols separating all the artists and titles and blah blah oh my god it's hopeless."
I'm simply suggesting that you FIX YOUR PROBLEM, instead of resorting to ridiculous methods of kludgingly organizing your masses of broken files into a semi-useable format, and then criticizing well-designed software for not supporting your horrible method of organization.
As for having a life - yes, I've got one, and I don't spend it organizing my thousands of mp3s into neat little directories on disk. Although that's what I used to do _six_ years ago, and I feel your pain.
I'm not an Apple nazi, I'm a misinformation nazi. I do the same thing with Linux and BSD when I run across people who really just don't know what they're talking about. I like to play this game to see how rude and arrogant I can be with ignorant people that are obviously wrong before they get so pissed off that they start calling me names.
Have a nice day.
Yes, that's nice, iTunes does that too. What if you want to change your separations? Spend an entire afternoon moving "thousands" of mp3s around? That's your business, I guess.
You can't do that with playlists.
Actually, yes you can do that, and much, much more. In other words, HE WAS WRONG. <---- MAIN POINT OF MY ORIGINAL POST, HERE!
A final plus for me is that browsing by folder avoids using ID3 tags, many of which aren't present on the the thousands of foreign language mp3s I have. The original ipod firmware lists a lot of songs as Unknown for me - I have to play them to figure out what the songs are - how useful is that?
There are many utilities that can take a filename and convert it into meaningful ID3 data. You can kill two birds with one stone, and use the features in your iPod to boot.
Did I make it clear enough for you what I was trying to point out?
As long as we're talking about the original poster here, the original poster said iTunes' functionality lacked the ability to do things HE wanted.
Except he was WRONG, it has the exact functionality he wanted, plus the functionality he said DIDN'T exist.
Does this make any sense to you at all? My god. To recap:
iTunes functionality includes his "custom" scheme of presentation, as well as MUCH MUCH more. He was complaining that iTunes' organizational functionality EXCLUDED the way he does things.
Of course you can dream up of some inefficient, inflexible custom bullshit solution and complain that your solution doesn't exist in commercial software. That's the very definition of a strawman argument, which is what I'm trying to expose here.
I'm not going to berate your old school ways of doing things (I wrote perl and bash scripts to parse and organize my mp3 library back in.. uhh, maybe 1998, but I've moved on from that morass of bullshit and settled down in the modern world now) but I _AM_ going to correct assumptions made that are totally wrong!
Here's a suggestion: use the software you criticize, before you criticize it.
iTunes' smart playlists are automatically synchronized with the iPod, and boast features that your "custom nested format" wouldn't ever dream of achieving.
You can have:
Normal, every-day playlists, with playback order sorted by name, artist, time, album, genre, last played, rating, or random.
Or, you can have DYNAMIC, automatically synced playlists that update themselves based on any combination or exclusion of the following criteria:
Album, artist, song BPM, bitrate, comment, compilation membership, composer, date added, modified, genre, grouping, kind, last played, my rating, play count, sample rate, size, song number, time, track number, year.
That's a few more options than your "separates songs by language, style, and year" now isn't it?
The grouping and contextual modifiers are the following: contains, does not contain, is, is not, starts with, ends with.
This is presented as an arbitrary number and combination of graphical pull-down menus, easy enough for a novice user to use, yet powerful enough for someone versed in a language like SQL to understand and exploit to its fullest capabilities. What iTunes is doing is abstracting the presentation of your songs from the storage, which is what an mp3 player SHOULD do. The filesystem isn't smart, it isn't dynamic, and it isn't flexible. If you don't agree with this, then you're in denial. The very existence of playlists is proof positive that the abstraction is appropriate.
Your "case" is a strawman argument. You made this wild scheme of organizing mp3s because your software had no decent way of organizing music and organizing your playlists. Now that you have this half-baked limp solution for organization, you don't realize that better functionality has been designed into other players from the beginning. You're in the dark, buddy. Step into the 21st century. You want to browse by folders? Browse the Library on disk and double click to play your selected mp3. You want it organized some other way? Use dynamic smart playlists.
As far as ID3 tags go, it's nobody's fault but your own that your mp3s don't have that information in them. Another strawman argument. All of my mp3s have up-to-date ID3 information, either from CDDB or me typing in the info when I import something. Just because huge amounts of pirated mp3s don't contain correct information isn't a valid argument against the use of a useful technology like ID3.
Many people have commented on the fact that Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have been implementing these systems for many years now.
The obvious observation here is that Japan and Taiwan are island countries with limited real estate and space and spatial efficiency is at a much higher premium there than it is here. Hong Kong has a similar predicament; it is landlocked by the rest of China on three sides and an ocean on the other, and has actively secured borders. (i.e., they can't just annex land or start building strip malls and boulevards like most cities in the US and Europe)
The only American analog I can think of off the top of my head is Manhattan, NYC, but I suspect that instead of being luddites, their motives against implementing such systems are economic in nature as they are the exception to the general American rule in terms of availability of real estate to build parking garages. Being an island nation definitely has influence on cultural and technological development.
Anyway, I suspect that entire graduate theses can be written on such a topic.
This will be all fun and games until the first subpoena.
Hey, imagine this, troll:
A _NEW OPERATING SYSTEM_ takes TIME to LEARN!
Most everyone who switches to OS X and actually takes the time to familiarize themselves with the way things work find that their productivity increases. Don't confused "eye candy" with "consistency", as a lot of people do. Just because everything looks the same doesn't mean it's gratuitous.
How long did it take you to learn all the flags to ls, cp, ps, netstat, ifconfig, df, du, man, vi, emacs and be able to type them off the top of your head at nearly 100wpm? Let alone the intricacies of being able to bang out a 100-line bash, tcsh, perl or python script at a moment's notice. It takes YEARS, my friend. And I'm not even talking about serious development - I'm talking about being able to organize your mp3s, or something equally mundane.
Hmm, took me the better part of 5 years before I was totally comfortable and at full productivity at the command line. Now, 10 years later, I'm at home in OS X, where the GUI is there to help me get certain things done fast, and the terminal is there to help me get other certain things done fast.
The beauty of OS X is that a 10-year UNIX veteran feels just at home in it as does a 10-year old computer neophyte.
If you can't grasp this simple concept, I suggest you go ditch the Mac and go learn UNIX-like operating systems until you _really_ get it. Because right now you obviously don't.
The iPod Mini will be a flop!
For $50 more you can get nearly FOUR TIMES THE STORAGE! 4GB is not NEARLY enough for me!
It's too expensive! $250 is going to price it right out of the market!
Nobody with a brain would buy this thing. Now excuse me while I go drink this Mt. Dew while reconfigure the BIOS settings on my overclocked AMD motherboard with water cooling for the 15th time in a week while entertaining my own delusions of technological consumer superiority and grandeur on Slashdot.
At least with Trinitron tubes, if you use Windex to clean up and aren't very thorough with your drying, it will eat through the anti-glare coating (or whatever it is on there) and leave a nasty, permanent discoloring swirl pattern or streak on your monitor.
:(
In fact, any cleaning solution that contains ammonia will do the same thing. This is also why they strongly caution you against using Windex against aftermarket (sticky film) tinted windows (like in cars or living rooms).
The damage won't be instantaneous, but I've seen plenty of examples including several very expensive monitors that have been scarred for life.
Look it up on google...
http://www.federalreserve.gov/faq.htm
Who owns the Federal Reserve?
The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution. Instead, it is an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects.
C# is Db - D flat.
E#, however, is F. And Fb is E. Neither of which exist.
Doesn't sound like much of either.
I don't much agree with $500 jackets and $200 jeans, as I am not a fan of fashion, but buying a nice computer isn't exactly the same thing as looking good for the sake of looking good, especially when one's livelihood depends on the amount of productivity (and least headache) one can get out of one's main workstation. And having something that looks nice never hurt anyone, either. Basically everything you buy these days short of toilet paper is designed to look aesthetically appealing (humans are visual animals... you don't prefer looking at ugly stuff, do you?), and the retail price reflects the development put into that.
Going by your logic, everyone should buy marginally acceptable computers that are *just able* to run the critical applications needed on a day to day basis, like the $10 T-Shirt and $20 jeans. That drop in demand would prevent new development, slowing the pace of technological advance in the computer industry. This principle is basically applicable to every other tech-influenced industry, as well.
If people never bought Apple (or other "luxury", as you put it, brands), the consumer adoption of GUIs, mice, "office" productivity suites, large-capacity mp3 players, laser printers, (I could go on...) would have been much slower than it was. And you could argue that these things would have been developed and adopted anyway, but that's neither here nor there, and total conjecture. There's always the cheaper alternative.
Furthermore, anyone who's ever studied economics knows that revenue and profits do not scale directly with price. "Budget" goods produced and sold in quantity routinely outpace luxury items in terms of sales, revenues, and profit. Who's worth more - Toyota or Ferrari? Toyota - by an order of magnitude or two, I'd imagine. But Ferrari makes a badass machine that can be yours for six figures. WORTH is the amount of money that a commodity can be sold for on the open market. It has nothing to do with your personal financial situation and your personal tastes and preferences. You're basically inconsequential. The market determines worth, NOT you.
It seems as if you have a fundamental problem with the principles of capitalism and how differences in price & economies of scale drive innovation and adoption. I suggest you check out a isolated economy that produces nothing but common goods for general consumption. Something like... North Korea.
I definitely agree with your points, but I'd like to point out that in recent years Slashdot has moved mainly toward a Windows-centric user base. It started out as heavily Linux biased (CmdrTaco frequented IRC channel #linux96 and #linuxos on EFNet). But as soon as it got popular, it started attracting the general computergeek crowd, which as we all know, is Windows users.
UNIX users may be a very vocal minority, but the vast majority of people use Windows around here.
As an aside, I'm a "born-again" Macintosh user, having ditched Mac OS after being sucked into the x86 world during the early 90s. After using Linux and BSD exclusively as desktop machines for the better part of a decade, I moved to OS X and couldn't be happier.
Sometimes, the human brain has enough cognitive ability to appropriately deduce the contextual (or non-contextual) humor in a passage.
There are entire literary genres based on this fundamental characteristic of written language and how it relates to human communication and situational context.
Perhaps you've heard (or even read!) a satire? Read a passage with irony? Sarcasm? Wit?
Or, maybe you have, but just DIDN'T FUCKING REALIZE IT.