IME, having spoken with many Mac users, they fall into two categories: 1) those whose main platform is/was Mac OS <=9: those for whom it was their first or primary platform for a long period, and 2) everyone else.
People in 1) generally love the Mac OS <=9 desktop and way of doing things, and don't like anything else as much, not even OS X. People in 2) usually can't see what the fuss was about earlier Mac OS, and tend to like Mac OS X a lot.
I'm firmly in 2), loving X and finding 9 frustrating. I grew up with GEM and MagiC, and used X/Motif and various Windows a lot at work, though I'd also used RISC OS and other systems too. I then spent about a year largely using Mac OS 9, and it felt like a fight all the way. Nothing behaved as I expected or wanted: folder windows never opened where I wanted, files kept opening with the wrong app, managing many windows at once just wasn't intuitive (especially with several apps), and there was no comfortable command line to escape to. I did try to get the hang of it, but even after many months when I knew what to expect, it still felt like hard work. OS X, on the other hand, just felt natural right from the start; it felt like it was working for me, not for itself.
I'm not saying X is better or worse than 9 (partly coz I don't want to be modded down as Troll:), but 9, with its 'spatial metaphor' does seem to work in a fundamentally different way from, well, every other GUI I know, and the ease with which people from other OSs can switch to OS X and love it does tend to indicate that it's not fundamentally worse as an OS from 9, just different.
The point here is that Tog, like many reviewers, has a Mac OS 9 mindset, so he'll naturally find it harder to get into the OS X mindset than non-Mac-OS-9-users. So we should bear that in mind when reading his thoughts.
Well said. The USA as a country seems to live on fear. It has to find or invent new 'enemies' every couple of years; advertising and marketing is driven by insecurity and fear; journalism works by shock and fear; entertainment is filled with conflict and anxiety; fear is used in political campaigns and decisions, and now even in the travel industry...
(Sorry to mention it again, but that's one thing Michael Moore got right.)
I don't think it can entirely be a coincidence that the word 'enlightened' has 'lighten' at its core... Lighten up, guys!
The danger with spending lots on the effects is that it then becomes about the effects. The producers want something to show for all that money, and the technical people want to show off. And in a movie where the effects are the thing, that can be great.
But HHGG isn't about the effects. The double head, like the third arm, was originally just a throw-away gag in the radio series, a few extra words at no cost. HHGG, like all good science fiction (and I know DNA didn't really consider HHGG as proper science fiction, but I do), is about ideas. (And gags.) As long as the effects are there to serve the story, it'll work. The moment they work the other way around, it'll fail.
(In fact, I often find low-budget productions more satisfying than high-budget ones. Lack of money forces people to think about how to tell their story: they get creative. And that sometimes gives far better results than simply throwing money at a problem.)
People said similar things about the TV version. And in a way, they were right: the pictures weren't as good as the radio version. But it worked nonetheless, because it introduced new things (notably, the Guide sequences) which made up for that. The result was something that wasn't the same as the radio series (or book, or LP, or computer game), but something good in its own right.
And if they make a film, the same might apply. It won't be quite like any of the previous versions, but it could still work well by doing something different.
I'm prepared to wait and see. On the one hand, I doubt that they'll have the guts to make it as dark and different as it'd need to be; a version that played it as safe and as conventional as films usually do would ruin it. But on the other, it's good to see English actors used, and films like LOTR have shown that it's still possible to take a single vision through the complexities and committees of film-making, so the final result might still bear something of the late DNA's imagination.
Well, yes, the spec may be quite impressive for its size, but for actual usability and usefulness, it doesn't look like a match for my outdated but much-loved and vital Psion 5mx...
You might think this is OT, but I find it strange that everyone seems to be using the word 'Lego' in a different way from that I've always heard.
Maybe it's a nationality thing (I'm in the UK), but I've always heard 'Lego' as a mass noun - one like 'snow' or 'flour' that doesn't have a plural form. I'd talk of 'playing with my Lego', 'borrowing some Lego', &c. If we needed to talk of the individual pieces, we'd call them 'Lego bricks'.
So all the posts mentioning 'Legos' or 'Lego are...' look very strange to me. Is it just me?
Anyway, to get back on topic, I don't remember being much into Lego when young, but got really into Technical Lego around age 9 or 10. That's the stuff with cogs, axles, gears, wheels, and all that stuff; we used to love that stuff, and would make up the cars, forklift trucks, bulldozers &c from instructions, and also make up other designs. We learnt a huge amount about how engines &c work (both car designs had working gearboxes, for example), so they were very useful as well as being great fun. Anyone else use Technical Lego?
it's generally accepted that 22khZ is the most we can hear
Yes, BUT... To store sound at 44kHz, you need to cut off absolutely everything above 22kHz, and it's impossible to do that without having an effect lower frequencies too (phase changes, attenuation, and other artefacts). That's why some folks are looking at sample rates of 96kHz and even 192kHz - they allow much gentler filtering, so that by the time you get down to audible frequencies, there'll be little or no change.
I don't have golden ears (128 AAC sounds fine to me, but then I'm a musician, not an audiophile), so I wouldn't bother myself, but it does seem to make mathematical sense.
I guess the upshot is that 'perfect' sound is impossible today. A lot of stuff comes fairly close, though - how close you want, and how much you're prepared to pay for storage and reproduction, is a compromise we all must decide for ourselves.
Absolutely. I don't know why this keeps coming up...
Well all know that many techies want a decent OS like Mac OS X on their x86 hardware. But wishful thinking ain't gonna make it happen.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. What good would it do them to remove one of the main advantages to using their hardware? All the brand recognition in the world can't help you if no-one needs to buy your product.
Considering that an Apple would most likely be on every desktop if they had allowed licensing of their products in the 1980s like IBM did...
Maybe. But where would it get them? They're primarily a hardware company, remember. A small market they can make money from is better than a large one they can't. How much does IBM benefit now from their machine being so popular? Not a lot.
It might have been good for you folks, but Apple's not a charity.
(I don't include myself, as I'm quite happy using Mac OS X at the moment, thank you. In fact, I'm probably better off for it not being the majority platform - it means that Apple are still working really hard on making it better than the majority platform, that I don't get all the worms and viruses that go round, and many other benefits.)
Well not licencing MacOS back in the day was obviously one of the major causes of Apple nearly falling off the face of the planet.
Er, yeah. Coz IBM made an absolute mint licensing their PC, didn't they?
Or rather, M$, Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and just about everyone else in the industry made fortunes...
Anyway, as other posters have observed, this isn't entirely comparable. I reckon Apple's probably doing the right thing this time, but partly for practical economies-of-scale reasons, and partly to keep the relatively-open AAC format popular and preserve a level playing field -- giving M$ an audio format monopoly would be bad for everyone.
Actually, that's one of our pet peaves as a tiny ISP; those guys run losses so heavy we can't make money in this business or we look outrageously expensive.
So, basically, you're saying that ISPs either need to misrepresent their packages, or fund them from other business? Aren't both those alternatives on dodgy legal, or at least moral, ground?
(P.S. Can't resist: s/peaves/peeves/. Sorry. But I won't complain about the stray "it's", coz you did get another one right.)
"Hey, we can't prove there's illicit code in Linux, so we've changed the game: now you have to prove there isn't! Hee hee! -- Erm, what's that? 'Why?', you ask? Coz we say so, that's why! Now pay Melchie his 85..."
Sorry for stating what may be obvious to many people, but it looks like the message hasn't reached everyone yet...
Plain AAC files are not encrypted. They're very like MP3s, really - licensed in a similar fashion (AAC is the audio layer from MPEG-4, just as MP3 was from MPEG-1). Just more advanced, with better quality for a given bitrate. The format isn't owned by Apple or limited to them in any way; there's no need to have a key to play it, or any other restrictions. If you rip songs to AAC yourself, or find.m4a files on the net, then this is what you're getting.
There are also encrypted AACs, which wrap the plain AAC in a FairPlay wrapper. This what you get when you download files from the iTunes Music Store (if it's available in your country, grump, grump), or if you find.m4p files on the net. Presumably, what the article is referring to is the ability to decrypt the.m4p file and extract plain AAC from it.
Anyway, I'll just repeat the point to make it blindingly obvious: you can wrap AACs in an encryption layer, but plain AACs are NOT encrypted. Thank you for your time.
Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection.
(Here, have a spare question mark: '?')
Erm, because they don't make a 90GB iPod? (And no, that's not FLACs or high-bitrate files that could be stripped, that's mostly 128kbps files.)
But yes, your other point about capacity stands: I don't need to change what's on my iPod more than every few months, if that. A smaller drive would be an annoyance. Still much better than its predecessor, my MD player, though.
Yes, but what you see is only 2 of them. (There's one join in the middle; but there is no other camera trickery or effects; it's all physically happening as you see it. Quite an achievement.)
Firstly, what if companies aren't giving anything back? Do open source projects stand to lose anything? No, of course not. How could they?
But merely by using open source, companies ARE giving something back indirectly. They're advertising it to their staff and contacts. If they're paying for support, they're adding to the open source economy, and maybe even causing fixes to be made. They're probably using open file formats and standards, and maybe asking their contacts to do the same.
And, maybe just as importantly, by doing so, they're NOT using proprietary products, advertising them, supporting them, promoting their file formats, &c.
Yes, of course it would be nice if companies directly contributed code, money, kit, &c to projects. But even if they don't, we still benefit. A world where every company uses a particular open source project, but only a handful actively contribute, is still better than one where a few more contribute but most companies use a proprietary product instead.
But even if he was desperate, he picked a bad set of files. If it were me, I'd have made a subtle but unambiguous reference to some really complex, gnarly part of the system. And then, when the open source community has run around for weeks trying desperately to rewrite it from scratch, I'd reveal that it wasn't those files after all. Repeat as necessary.
Seriously, until we hear it in court, delivered under oath, I wouldn't believe a word of it Maybe not even then.
No, it's not just you! I'm 100% with you here. My Psion currently has about 74MB of compressed text files (mostly novels and short stories, with some tech stuff and some religious stuff). Most of my reading is now from there instead of dead trees (with the major exception of loo reading!). I don't have to remember to take a book with me, or mess around with bookmarks, &c. I don't even have to turn the light on to read in bed. I find the Psion's screen easy enough to read from, and once I get into a story, I'm only marginally aware of the medium anyway, whether paper or screen.
My stuff is from many sources; much is from Fictionwise, some from Gutenberg and other sites, and some is from, er, elsewhere. All is plain text, which gives me the control I need: I can store in the most appropriate format (in my case, PDB), I can edit as needed (e.g. converting to British English spellings, fixing dodgy formatting, &c), and I can copy and paste as needed (e.g. when quoting).
I'm not saying that ebooks will completely replace paper ones. Just that they're not dead, or useless. I know not everyone finds current screens comfortable to read from, and I know that many types of dedicated ebook hardware are limited and awkward. But these are merely implementation problems; there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of ebooks. Some of us find them jolly useful already, and I expect that as technology improves, many more will do so.
I hadn't heard of that, but... Is the best solution really to take a complex page-layout-based format, and then to add in even more complexity to work around its own major design issues?
PDF is wonderful at one thing: laying out pages. I've used it myself, not least for sending music manuscript to someone with a different machine/OS/apps. But text that flows is something quite different, and there are already perfectly good formats for that: plain text, HTML, RTF, &c. HTML in particular was designed for almost exactly this; of course, many of the more recent additions aren't so suited, but the basics of styled text, images, and tables are just what's needed AFAICS, so why use something bigger and heftier? KISS.
Fictionwise also sell a lot of stuff in open formats (not actually ASCII, but PDB for one can be directly converted to/from ASCII). Unfortunately, they also sell in restricted formats, and most of their big name material falls into the latter category. But there's still a lot of good stuff in open formats, so kudos to them for that.
I think the balance of power, combat, and international discussion is vital to keeping the world safe from the threat of nuclear war.
Oh yes, we all agree with that - but what you mean by 'balance of power' probably depends on where you are. If you're in the US, you probably mean "making sure we have more weapons than everyone else put together"...
True. One reason is that money can form a good way of telling how much people want something. It's a terribly unequal and unfair way, but in some cases it's still the best (or rather the least bad) - the 'free market' is based on it, for example.
Sorry, but I've always meant to ask: what is a 'heaping spoon'? It sounds like something you might use to rearrange compost or scrap...
OTOH, if it's what we here call a heaped spoon(ful), then do you use it when making a packing lunch? Maybe with some boiling egg and chopping liver sandwiches, washed down with some nice icing tea? Or maybe a toasting sandwich topped with grating cheese?
Slashdot Mirror
People in 1) generally love the Mac OS <=9 desktop and way of doing things, and don't like anything else as much, not even OS X. People in 2) usually can't see what the fuss was about earlier Mac OS, and tend to like Mac OS X a lot.
I'm firmly in 2), loving X and finding 9 frustrating. I grew up with GEM and MagiC, and used X/Motif and various Windows a lot at work, though I'd also used RISC OS and other systems too. I then spent about a year largely using Mac OS 9, and it felt like a fight all the way. Nothing behaved as I expected or wanted: folder windows never opened where I wanted, files kept opening with the wrong app, managing many windows at once just wasn't intuitive (especially with several apps), and there was no comfortable command line to escape to. I did try to get the hang of it, but even after many months when I knew what to expect, it still felt like hard work. OS X, on the other hand, just felt natural right from the start; it felt like it was working for me, not for itself.
I'm not saying X is better or worse than 9 (partly coz I don't want to be modded down as Troll :), but 9, with its 'spatial metaphor' does seem to work in a fundamentally different way from, well, every other GUI I know, and the ease with which people from other OSs can switch to OS X and love it does tend to indicate that it's not fundamentally worse as an OS from 9, just different.
The point here is that Tog, like many reviewers, has a Mac OS 9 mindset, so he'll naturally find it harder to get into the OS X mindset than non-Mac-OS-9-users. So we should bear that in mind when reading his thoughts.
(Sorry to mention it again, but that's one thing Michael Moore got right.)
I don't think it can entirely be a coincidence that the word 'enlightened' has 'lighten' at its core... Lighten up, guys!
But HHGG isn't about the effects. The double head, like the third arm, was originally just a throw-away gag in the radio series, a few extra words at no cost. HHGG, like all good science fiction (and I know DNA didn't really consider HHGG as proper science fiction, but I do), is about ideas. (And gags.) As long as the effects are there to serve the story, it'll work. The moment they work the other way around, it'll fail.
(In fact, I often find low-budget productions more satisfying than high-budget ones. Lack of money forces people to think about how to tell their story: they get creative. And that sometimes gives far better results than simply throwing money at a problem.)
And if they make a film, the same might apply. It won't be quite like any of the previous versions, but it could still work well by doing something different.
I'm prepared to wait and see. On the one hand, I doubt that they'll have the guts to make it as dark and different as it'd need to be; a version that played it as safe and as conventional as films usually do would ruin it. But on the other, it's good to see English actors used, and films like LOTR have shown that it's still possible to take a single vision through the complexities and committees of film-making, so the final result might still bear something of the late DNA's imagination.
Well, yes, the spec may be quite impressive for its size, but for actual usability and usefulness, it doesn't look like a match for my outdated but much-loved and vital Psion 5mx...
Maybe it's a nationality thing (I'm in the UK), but I've always heard 'Lego' as a mass noun - one like 'snow' or 'flour' that doesn't have a plural form. I'd talk of 'playing with my Lego', 'borrowing some Lego', &c. If we needed to talk of the individual pieces, we'd call them 'Lego bricks'.
So all the posts mentioning 'Legos' or 'Lego are...' look very strange to me. Is it just me?
Anyway, to get back on topic, I don't remember being much into Lego when young, but got really into Technical Lego around age 9 or 10. That's the stuff with cogs, axles, gears, wheels, and all that stuff; we used to love that stuff, and would make up the cars, forklift trucks, bulldozers &c from instructions, and also make up other designs. We learnt a huge amount about how engines &c work (both car designs had working gearboxes, for example), so they were very useful as well as being great fun. Anyone else use Technical Lego?
Yes, BUT... To store sound at 44kHz, you need to cut off absolutely everything above 22kHz, and it's impossible to do that without having an effect lower frequencies too (phase changes, attenuation, and other artefacts). That's why some folks are looking at sample rates of 96kHz and even 192kHz - they allow much gentler filtering, so that by the time you get down to audible frequencies, there'll be little or no change.
I don't have golden ears (128 AAC sounds fine to me, but then I'm a musician, not an audiophile), so I wouldn't bother myself, but it does seem to make mathematical sense.
I guess the upshot is that 'perfect' sound is impossible today. A lot of stuff comes fairly close, though - how close you want, and how much you're prepared to pay for storage and reproduction, is a compromise we all must decide for ourselves.
Well all know that many techies want a decent OS like Mac OS X on their x86 hardware. But wishful thinking ain't gonna make it happen.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. What good would it do them to remove one of the main advantages to using their hardware? All the brand recognition in the world can't help you if no-one needs to buy your product.
Maybe. But where would it get them? They're primarily a hardware company, remember. A small market they can make money from is better than a large one they can't. How much does IBM benefit now from their machine being so popular? Not a lot.
It might have been good for you folks, but Apple's not a charity.
(I don't include myself, as I'm quite happy using Mac OS X at the moment, thank you. In fact, I'm probably better off for it not being the majority platform - it means that Apple are still working really hard on making it better than the majority platform, that I don't get all the worms and viruses that go round, and many other benefits.)
Er, yeah. Coz IBM made an absolute mint licensing their PC, didn't they?
Or rather, M$, Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and just about everyone else in the industry made fortunes...
Anyway, as other posters have observed, this isn't entirely comparable. I reckon Apple's probably doing the right thing this time, but partly for practical economies-of-scale reasons, and partly to keep the relatively-open AAC format popular and preserve a level playing field -- giving M$ an audio format monopoly would be bad for everyone.
So, basically, you're saying that ISPs either need to misrepresent their packages, or fund them from other business? Aren't both those alternatives on dodgy legal, or at least moral, ground?
(P.S. Can't resist: s/peaves/peeves/. Sorry. But I won't complain about the stray "it's", coz you did get another one right.)
"Hey, we can't prove there's illicit code in Linux, so we've changed the game: now you have to prove there isn't! Hee hee! -- Erm, what's that? 'Why?', you ask? Coz we say so, that's why! Now pay Melchie his 85..."
Plain AAC files are not encrypted. They're very like MP3s, really - licensed in a similar fashion (AAC is the audio layer from MPEG-4, just as MP3 was from MPEG-1). Just more advanced, with better quality for a given bitrate. The format isn't owned by Apple or limited to them in any way; there's no need to have a key to play it, or any other restrictions. If you rip songs to AAC yourself, or find .m4a files on the net, then this is what you're getting.
There are also encrypted AACs, which wrap the plain AAC in a FairPlay wrapper. This what you get when you download files from the iTunes Music Store (if it's available in your country, grump, grump), or if you find .m4p files on the net. Presumably, what the article is referring to is the ability to decrypt the .m4p file and extract plain AAC from it.
Anyway, I'll just repeat the point to make it blindingly obvious: you can wrap AACs in an encryption layer, but plain AACs are NOT encrypted. Thank you for your time.
(Here, have a spare question mark: '?')
Erm, because they don't make a 90GB iPod? (And no, that's not FLACs or high-bitrate files that could be stripped, that's mostly 128kbps files.)
But yes, your other point about capacity stands: I don't need to change what's on my iPod more than every few months, if that. A smaller drive would be an annoyance. Still much better than its predecessor, my MD player, though.
Yes, but what you see is only 2 of them. (There's one join in the middle; but there is no other camera trickery or effects; it's all physically happening as you see it. Quite an achievement.)
Hey, anyone see that flare? Spurting out from Mars - bright green, drawing a green mist behind it. It's beautiful, but somehow disturbing...
Er, yes, but remember that they (like Tommy Flowers and Charles Babbage) aren't Americans and so, for most of your readership, don't exist...
But merely by using open source, companies ARE giving something back indirectly. They're advertising it to their staff and contacts. If they're paying for support, they're adding to the open source economy, and maybe even causing fixes to be made. They're probably using open file formats and standards, and maybe asking their contacts to do the same.
And, maybe just as importantly, by doing so, they're NOT using proprietary products, advertising them, supporting them, promoting their file formats, &c.
Yes, of course it would be nice if companies directly contributed code, money, kit, &c to projects. But even if they don't, we still benefit. A world where every company uses a particular open source project, but only a handful actively contribute, is still better than one where a few more contribute but most companies use a proprietary product instead.
Seriously, until we hear it in court, delivered under oath, I wouldn't believe a word of it Maybe not even then.
My stuff is from many sources; much is from Fictionwise, some from Gutenberg and other sites, and some is from, er, elsewhere. All is plain text, which gives me the control I need: I can store in the most appropriate format (in my case, PDB), I can edit as needed (e.g. converting to British English spellings, fixing dodgy formatting, &c), and I can copy and paste as needed (e.g. when quoting).
I'm not saying that ebooks will completely replace paper ones. Just that they're not dead, or useless. I know not everyone finds current screens comfortable to read from, and I know that many types of dedicated ebook hardware are limited and awkward. But these are merely implementation problems; there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of ebooks. Some of us find them jolly useful already, and I expect that as technology improves, many more will do so.
PDF is wonderful at one thing: laying out pages. I've used it myself, not least for sending music manuscript to someone with a different machine/OS/apps. But text that flows is something quite different, and there are already perfectly good formats for that: plain text, HTML, RTF, &c. HTML in particular was designed for almost exactly this; of course, many of the more recent additions aren't so suited, but the basics of styled text, images, and tables are just what's needed AFAICS, so why use something bigger and heftier? KISS.
Fictionwise also sell a lot of stuff in open formats (not actually ASCII, but PDB for one can be directly converted to/from ASCII). Unfortunately, they also sell in restricted formats, and most of their big name material falls into the latter category. But there's still a lot of good stuff in open formats, so kudos to them for that.
Oh yes, we all agree with that - but what you mean by 'balance of power' probably depends on where you are. If you're in the US, you probably mean "making sure we have more weapons than everyone else put together"...
True. One reason is that money can form a good way of telling how much people want something. It's a terribly unequal and unfair way, but in some cases it's still the best (or rather the least bad) - the 'free market' is based on it, for example.
Sorry, but I've always meant to ask: what is a 'heaping spoon'? It sounds like something you might use to rearrange compost or scrap...
OTOH, if it's what we here call a heaped spoon(ful), then do you use it when making a packing lunch? Maybe with some boiling egg and chopping liver sandwiches, washed down with some nice icing tea? Or maybe a toasting sandwich topped with grating cheese?
(Or maybe I'd be better off in a padding cell...)