There is nothing to "snatch": these are applications implemented in a non-Microsoft toolkit using an open language standard.
Maybe so, but it's far easier for MS to embrace and extend their own 'standards' than other people's... After all, they've already done the 'embrace' bit. And it's not as if they haven't shown time and time again that they're ready, willing, and able to do so. It's their main flippin' business plan!
All the fuss about Mono and C# makes me very sad. It's as if developers are saying "Well, maybe MS have used every single previous language and platform to promote their Windows monopoly unfairly, but maybe it's different this time! And even if they -- Oooh, look! Shiny things!"
A UI doesn't stand alone; it's a means for getting things done, and can only be judged in relation to that.
So, before you even think about the UI, work out what people will be doing with the software. What things are they trying to achieve? Be specific. (This is where use cases can be very helpful.)
Then you can look at a UI, and judge how best people can do those things, with the UI getting in the way as little as possible.
So your request for a flash, impressive UI is pointless: the best UI will be one that you're not even aware of! And one which seems completely obvious -- but only after you've seen it...
it was really disappointing to see Apple trying to exact its revenge on those who love it the most.
It's not a matter of revenge. It's a matter of trying to find out who in their own organisation is leaking information in breach of their NDA. Isn't that a more reasonable aim?
It's also a matter of trying to prevent the more gratuitous rumours spreading. You can argue all you want that rumours are good for Apple, and maybe some are, but they're a double-edge sword, and one that Apple has no control over. For example, an over-optimistic rumour, or even a completely true but mistimed one, could easily cause large numbers of people to hold off buying one particular model in the false expectation that something better was about to be released. That sort of thing could do quite serious damage.
While the rumour sites are just guesswork and good-natured speculation, then they're relatively harmless; but when they get a reputation for inside information and lots of people start trusting them, then I don't think they're doing anyone any good in the long run, not even Apple fans.
I don't see anything preventing them from releasing this for free, installing it as the default everywhere, and making it impossible to disable and/or play nice with any other anti-spyware software. Then, when all the others are out of business, either letting the product rot, or charging for it. Or both.
I mean, it's not as if they've never done that before, is it?...
And yet look at those TNG credits. Hardly a duff episode there, and so many of my favourites ('best' is so subjective): Cause and Effect, Frame of Mind, Schisms, Eye of the Beholder, Timescape... Real SF storylines, drama, mystery, almost Philip K. Dick-ian in places.
I didn't keep up with the later shows; what went wrong?
Things have changed in some ways, at least. The Mac OS X version of their player seems very well-behaved: doesn't spy, doesn't install anything untoward, doesn't grab any file associations without asking, doesn't do anything other than play Real files and streams when you tell it to. It's big (15MB), but most of that seems to be the core functionality, codecs, &c,
OTOH, though I've never installed a Windows version of their player, if it was as bad as people say then I can understand your suspicions...
Maybe we should distinguish what you might call 'strong' Creationism -- that the world was created at 9am on the 23rd of October 4004 BC, complete with dinosaur fossils to mislead us, or however the exact line goes -- which an awful lot of non-Americans think is rubbish, from 'weak' Creationism -- that God created the universe, and somehow caused this planet to exist and bring forth life -- which a good number of people (including myself) believe, and which isn't really in any serious disagreement with the scientific viewpoint of origins in general and the generally-accepted understanding of evolution in particular.
I think they're talking about a physical format, i.e the medium (CD, MiniDisc, cassette, vinyl, 78, DCC, DAT, audio DVD, &c), not a data format (digital PCM, MP3, analogue line, &c).
This sort of mixup with words isn't new. Another common one is audio 'compression', which can mean either data compression (FLAC, MP3, AAC, &c) or level compression (an audio process which reduces the loud parts and boosts the quiet ones to narrow the dynamic range -- to allow for louder mastering or broadcasting, or to adjust the character of voices or instruments).
Another is 'remix', which used to mean generating a new master from an existing multi-track tape (or the digital equivalent); and now means creating an entirely new and usually worthless track borrowing almost nothing from an existing one...
I think this oft-repeated argument that "All we want is one or two songs off each album" is overstated.
Certainly, it's true for many people as regards mainstream pop and rock, but that's far from all the music there is, and far from everyone who listens to it.
Many of my own CDs, for example have seamless music, whether that's chill-out collections, electronic music (Jarre, Andy Pickford, Ian Boddy &c), live albums, shows, or whatever. Others have tracks which are closely related and don't work properly apart, such as classical or spoken word. And most of the rest have a majority of tracks that I want anyway.
So although I also have lots of individual tracks (mostly bought from allofmp3), the vast majority of my music is complete albums.
In short, the song isn't always the natural unit of music. Please don't assume that everyone's experience with music is the same.
It's a prerequisite because I suspect most people don't just use one keyboard; and some of those are likely to be used by other people.
It's much harder to switch between different layouts than it is to make do with one, even if it's not optimal. (I speak from experience.) And if you have to use a keyboard where your preferred layout isn't available, or where someone else needs it to be standard, then you're pretty much stuck with it.
So unless a layout is overwhelmingly better than QWERTY, it's likely to be popular only with the few people who use only their own keyboard.
And on standard systems (Mac OS X, Windows, &c), there is also the complication of control keys. Do you move Ctrl+C to the same key as C, keeping the mapping, or do you leave it where in the QWERTY position, which keeps the relationship with Ctrl+X &c too? And so on.
This isn't just a matter of me-too-ism, of irrational or lazy resistance to change. I think the standard QWERTY keyboard is so pervasive, so tied into software and systems, so interoperable, and so ingrained in people, that (for better or worse) we're pretty much stuck with it.
Flight was not regarded as quakery by those who understood some simple science.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
-- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895
(I think this is a bad example, and your main point still stands. Most people would indeed behave much more rationally if they understood and applied just a little of the scientific method in their lives. As a Christian, I don't believe science has the ultimate answers to absolutely everything, but it's about the best tool we have for finding things out for ourselves.)
Erm... 'less random'? Does this phrase ring alarm bells with anyone else too?
Either they mean 'random' in the information-theoretical sense, in which case they've clearly done a huge amount of work on various compression techniques and suchlike, or they're probably using it wrongly.
When most people use 'random', what they really mean is 'randomly-generated'. For example, here's a random number: 43. Is that really random? How could you tell??? Maybe I picked my house number, maybe I pressed keys at random, maybe that's my favourite number...
As books like The Bible Code, the work of Nostradamus, and umpteen others have shown: you can find significance and meaning in anything if you look hard enough! The knack is to find it when you don't know what results you're looking for; to make successful predictions. Without that, the whole project seems a bit 'random' to me...
Sorry, but this is wrong. Using and copying are two different actions:
Using software. If software had no licence, then the default legal position is that you're free to use it as you see fit. There's no need to 'grant' that right in a licence, because you already have it!
Licences like the GPL and BSD ones say nothing about using software, so you're back to that legal position of being able to use it how you like. OTOH, companies like Oracle and Microsoft make you agree to a licence before you can use the software, so they restrict that right. Those licences are contracts, so if there's a problem, it's a matter of contract law.
Secondly, there's copying. As you might expect, this falls under copyright law: you're not allowed to make copies of software (unless you own the copyright, or have a licence from someone who does).
Proprietary software licences don't usually give you the right to copy software (apart from backup purposes), but the GPL and BSD licences do. So they're adding rights, not taking them away. If you don't comply with them, you're back to the default legal rights, so you're still free to use the software how you like; you just can't copy it (which would violate copyright law).
Do you see why different laws apply in the two cases? If you're just using software, then that has nothing to do with copyright law because you're not copying it.
You're not the only poster to suggest that, but it seems a little naive to me.
Once Wikipedia is making full use of the extra bandwidth and server capacity, it won't be so easy to go back -- especially if it means disabling a reinstated site search, and/or if greater popularity would overload the previous hosting arrangements.
In that sort of situation, a not-particularly-intrusive 'request' from Google, such as, I dunno, tweaking Google's page to remove some unfair bias without it appearing in the history, or, say, including Google links in Wikipedia pages, or whatever, wouldn't be easy to resist. (And from there, further requests would be even harder to resist.)
I'm not suggesting Google is interested in anything underhand here, just that Wikipedia should be aware of the consequences.
Me too. I moved from an Atari to a Mac several months before Mac OS X became available. I tried to like OS 9, I really did, but it just annoyed me in so many ways: not just the instability, but the way that I never knew where a folder window would open, or the way that umpteen windows would all come to the front when I clicked on just one. But most of all, the way that all the important tools were missing: I couldn't get around the Finder by using a command shell, I couldn't kill a misbehaving process, I couldn't write C programs or shell script, I couldn't even download and build any of the usual tools.
Most of the folks who've used a Mac seem to fall into two groups: those who started with it, who generally love OS
Certainly, when OS X came out, it was a real breath of fresh air. I'd have used it full-time immediately if all my hardware had been supported; as it was, that took several months. But almost immediately felt much more at home and in control with it, even though 10.0 was slow and incomplete.
If it hadn't been for (the prospect of) OS X, I expect I'd have gone for a Linux box instead of a Mac... and I'd probably have wasted hundreds of ours since then messing about with it instead of getting real things done!
It's just struck me that the Altivec unit in this 'ere PowerMac is actually a little similar to the Blitter chip that my old Atari STE used to have.
The exact function may be slightly different -- a vector processor is far more flexible -- but it's still a special-purpose unit that drastically speeds up a few simple operations on reasonably large amounts of data, often used for graphical operations.
Interesting how so many ideas in computing are just developments of previous ones...
Please don't think that everyone dislikes anti-aliased fonts. Personally, I love 'em; I find 'em much easier on my eyes. Non-AA fonts may be 'sharper', but that sharpness is just an artefact of the rasterisation. To me, they look gritty, awkward and uneven; AA fonts are much smoother and easier to read, even at fairly small sizes. (At least, here on OS X.) And they're a more accurate representation of the glyphs.
As others have said, you can usually disable AA on your fonts; but if you're running at a reasonably high resolution, on a reasonable quality monitor, with a reasonable font renderer, then it's worth giving them a second try.
(It's about a different place and time, but I hope you can see the relevance.)
SIR HUMPHREY: Bernard, what is the purpose of our defence policy?
BERNARD WOOLLEY: To defend Britain.
SIR HUMPHREY: No, Bernard. It is to make people believe Britain is defended.
BERNARD WOOLLEY: The Russians?
SIR HUMPHREY: Not the Russians, the British! The Russians know it is not...
I wasn't redefining it, simply trying to explain what science fiction is -- at least, as it's found in books and magazines.
Look through issues of Analog or Asimov's or Interzone, or books by some of their authors. You'll find that although it's mostly billed as science fiction, and its writers are known for that genre, it often doesn't deal with technology, aliens, &c. It's my opinion that what connects the better SF stories is that they're concerned with big ideas, however obliquely they deal with them.
Of course, this doesn't often make the transfer to 'science fiction' as seen in the movies or TV... But then, judging science fiction by what you see on screen is as misleading as judging classical music from what you hear on mobile phones...
BTW, Encarta's definition goes on to say "More precisely, science fiction deals with events that did not happen or have not yet happened; it considers these events rationally in terms both of explanation and of consequences; and it is concerned with the impact of change on people, often with its consequences for the human race." which captures it pretty well I think.
No crackles, whistles, or other artefacts of bad ripping or encoding.
Properly named with the right artist and title.
Fully tagged, maybe with artwork too.
Not just the first 30 seconds repeated, or other fake files.
Not truncated.
Downloadable directly, in one attempt.
Easily browsable and searchable.
Enough to be going on with?
If the iTMS and other online stores offered nothing at all over P2P files, then they wouldn't do such good business. But it's these differences which make them so popular.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe so, but it's far easier for MS to embrace and extend their own 'standards' than other people's... After all, they've already done the 'embrace' bit. And it's not as if they haven't shown time and time again that they're ready, willing, and able to do so. It's their main flippin' business plan!
All the fuss about Mono and C# makes me very sad. It's as if developers are saying "Well, maybe MS have used every single previous language and platform to promote their Windows monopoly unfairly, but maybe it's different this time! And even if they -- Oooh, look! Shiny things!"
So, before you even think about the UI, work out what people will be doing with the software. What things are they trying to achieve? Be specific. (This is where use cases can be very helpful.)
Then you can look at a UI, and judge how best people can do those things, with the UI getting in the way as little as possible.
So your request for a flash, impressive UI is pointless: the best UI will be one that you're not even aware of! And one which seems completely obvious -- but only after you've seen it...
It's not a matter of revenge. It's a matter of trying to find out who in their own organisation is leaking information in breach of their NDA. Isn't that a more reasonable aim?
It's also a matter of trying to prevent the more gratuitous rumours spreading. You can argue all you want that rumours are good for Apple, and maybe some are, but they're a double-edge sword, and one that Apple has no control over. For example, an over-optimistic rumour, or even a completely true but mistimed one, could easily cause large numbers of people to hold off buying one particular model in the false expectation that something better was about to be released. That sort of thing could do quite serious damage.
While the rumour sites are just guesswork and good-natured speculation, then they're relatively harmless; but when they get a reputation for inside information and lots of people start trusting them, then I don't think they're doing anyone any good in the long run, not even Apple fans.
I don't see anything preventing them from releasing this for free, installing it as the default everywhere, and making it impossible to disable and/or play nice with any other anti-spyware software. Then, when all the others are out of business, either letting the product rot, or charging for it. Or both.
I mean, it's not as if they've never done that before, is it?...
I didn't keep up with the later shows; what went wrong?
Yes they do. They know it means 'dangerous subversive pinko commie leftist liberal atheist democracy-hating anti-American scum'.
Or at least, that's what it seems to mean to most Americans. Here in Europe, we don't necessarily see it quite that way...
Does that mean that the dangerous words 'add value' aren't in their thoughts at all?
OTOH, though I've never installed a Windows version of their player, if it was as bad as people say then I can understand your suspicions...
Maybe we should distinguish what you might call 'strong' Creationism -- that the world was created at 9am on the 23rd of October 4004 BC, complete with dinosaur fossils to mislead us, or however the exact line goes -- which an awful lot of non-Americans think is rubbish, from 'weak' Creationism -- that God created the universe, and somehow caused this planet to exist and bring forth life -- which a good number of people (including myself) believe, and which isn't really in any serious disagreement with the scientific viewpoint of origins in general and the generally-accepted understanding of evolution in particular.
I think they're talking about a physical format, i.e the medium (CD, MiniDisc, cassette, vinyl, 78, DCC, DAT, audio DVD, &c), not a data format (digital PCM, MP3, analogue line, &c).
This sort of mixup with words isn't new. Another common one is audio 'compression', which can mean either data compression (FLAC, MP3, AAC, &c) or level compression (an audio process which reduces the loud parts and boosts the quiet ones to narrow the dynamic range -- to allow for louder mastering or broadcasting, or to adjust the character of voices or instruments).
Another is 'remix', which used to mean generating a new master from an existing multi-track tape (or the digital equivalent); and now means creating an entirely new and usually worthless track borrowing almost nothing from an existing one...
Certainly, it's true for many people as regards mainstream pop and rock, but that's far from all the music there is, and far from everyone who listens to it.
Many of my own CDs, for example have seamless music, whether that's chill-out collections, electronic music (Jarre, Andy Pickford, Ian Boddy &c), live albums, shows, or whatever. Others have tracks which are closely related and don't work properly apart, such as classical or spoken word. And most of the rest have a majority of tracks that I want anyway.
So although I also have lots of individual tracks (mostly bought from allofmp3), the vast majority of my music is complete albums.
In short, the song isn't always the natural unit of music. Please don't assume that everyone's experience with music is the same.
It's much harder to switch between different layouts than it is to make do with one, even if it's not optimal. (I speak from experience.) And if you have to use a keyboard where your preferred layout isn't available, or where someone else needs it to be standard, then you're pretty much stuck with it.
So unless a layout is overwhelmingly better than QWERTY, it's likely to be popular only with the few people who use only their own keyboard.
And on standard systems (Mac OS X, Windows, &c), there is also the complication of control keys. Do you move Ctrl+C to the same key as C, keeping the mapping, or do you leave it where in the QWERTY position, which keeps the relationship with Ctrl+X &c too? And so on.
This isn't just a matter of me-too-ism, of irrational or lazy resistance to change. I think the standard QWERTY keyboard is so pervasive, so tied into software and systems, so interoperable, and so ingrained in people, that (for better or worse) we're pretty much stuck with it.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
-- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895
(I think this is a bad example, and your main point still stands. Most people would indeed behave much more rationally if they understood and applied just a little of the scientific method in their lives. As a Christian, I don't believe science has the ultimate answers to absolutely everything, but it's about the best tool we have for finding things out for ourselves.)
Erm... 'less random'? Does this phrase ring alarm bells with anyone else too?
Either they mean 'random' in the information-theoretical sense, in which case they've clearly done a huge amount of work on various compression techniques and suchlike, or they're probably using it wrongly.
When most people use 'random', what they really mean is 'randomly-generated'. For example, here's a random number: 43. Is that really random? How could you tell??? Maybe I picked my house number, maybe I pressed keys at random, maybe that's my favourite number...
As books like The Bible Code, the work of Nostradamus, and umpteen others have shown: you can find significance and meaning in anything if you look hard enough! The knack is to find it when you don't know what results you're looking for; to make successful predictions. Without that, the whole project seems a bit 'random' to me...
-
Using software. If software had no licence, then the default legal position is that you're free to use it as you see fit. There's no need to 'grant' that right in a licence, because you already have it!
-
Secondly, there's copying. As you might expect, this falls under copyright law: you're not allowed to make copies of software (unless you own the copyright, or have a licence from someone who does).
Do you see why different laws apply in the two cases? If you're just using software, then that has nothing to do with copyright law because you're not copying it.Licences like the GPL and BSD ones say nothing about using software, so you're back to that legal position of being able to use it how you like. OTOH, companies like Oracle and Microsoft make you agree to a licence before you can use the software, so they restrict that right. Those licences are contracts, so if there's a problem, it's a matter of contract law.
Proprietary software licences don't usually give you the right to copy software (apart from backup purposes), but the GPL and BSD licences do. So they're adding rights, not taking them away. If you don't comply with them, you're back to the default legal rights, so you're still free to use the software how you like; you just can't copy it (which would violate copyright law).
Once Wikipedia is making full use of the extra bandwidth and server capacity, it won't be so easy to go back -- especially if it means disabling a reinstated site search, and/or if greater popularity would overload the previous hosting arrangements.
In that sort of situation, a not-particularly-intrusive 'request' from Google, such as, I dunno, tweaking Google's page to remove some unfair bias without it appearing in the history, or, say, including Google links in Wikipedia pages, or whatever, wouldn't be easy to resist. (And from there, further requests would be even harder to resist.)
I'm not suggesting Google is interested in anything underhand here, just that Wikipedia should be aware of the consequences.
Most of the folks who've used a Mac seem to fall into two groups: those who started with it, who generally love OS Certainly, when OS X came out, it was a real breath of fresh air. I'd have used it full-time immediately if all my hardware had been supported; as it was, that took several months. But almost immediately felt much more at home and in control with it, even though 10.0 was slow and incomplete.
If it hadn't been for (the prospect of) OS X, I expect I'd have gone for a Linux box instead of a Mac... and I'd probably have wasted hundreds of ours since then messing about with it instead of getting real things done!
Bingo!
(Er, yes, and sarcasm.)
The exact function may be slightly different -- a vector processor is far more flexible -- but it's still a special-purpose unit that drastically speeds up a few simple operations on reasonably large amounts of data, often used for graphical operations.
Interesting how so many ideas in computing are just developments of previous ones...
As others have said, you can usually disable AA on your fonts; but if you're running at a reasonably high resolution, on a reasonable quality monitor, with a reasonable font renderer, then it's worth giving them a second try.
Look through issues of Analog or Asimov's or Interzone, or books by some of their authors. You'll find that although it's mostly billed as science fiction, and its writers are known for that genre, it often doesn't deal with technology, aliens, &c. It's my opinion that what connects the better SF stories is that they're concerned with big ideas, however obliquely they deal with them.
Of course, this doesn't often make the transfer to 'science fiction' as seen in the movies or TV... But then, judging science fiction by what you see on screen is as misleading as judging classical music from what you hear on mobile phones...
BTW, Encarta's definition goes on to say "More precisely, science fiction deals with events that did not happen or have not yet happened; it considers these events rationally in terms both of explanation and of consequences; and it is concerned with the impact of change on people, often with its consequences for the human race." which captures it pretty well I think.
- No crackles, whistles, or other artefacts of bad ripping or encoding.
- Properly named with the right artist and title.
- Fully tagged, maybe with artwork too.
- Not just the first 30 seconds repeated, or other fake files.
- Not truncated.
- Downloadable directly, in one attempt.
- Easily browsable and searchable.
Enough to be going on with?If the iTMS and other online stores offered nothing at all over P2P files, then they wouldn't do such good business. But it's these differences which make them so popular.