I've DLed iTunes, and I also found some irksome OSXs.
The most annoying is that you can't resize from any window edge like standard windows apps, you can only resize from the lower right corner.
The ability to maximize the window is noticably absent. To add injury to insult, the iTunes window can not be dragged to full window size (it leaves a 1/16 to 1/8 gap on the right hand side)
The other one I've noticed is that in the small player mode, the ovular green bar is present, but doesn't function like its large-mode counterpart, in the large version, there is a progress slider to skip to different parts of the song, its gone in the small mode. Every single media player I have ever used has a time slider and it is annoying to be missing one). The biggest UI faux pas is that the the oval is the same otherwise. A friend tells me on OSX, both mini version and large mode have the time slider. Grrr....
Another minor irritation is the inability to tell the length and number of multiple selections. When using the basic windows UI, selecting multiple items will show that x number of items are selected as well as the size of the total selection. In Winamps playlist/file browser, the total playing time for multiple selections is given as well as the number of songs. On iTunes, selections must be added to a new playlist to see number of selections and total time of selections. On the fly ala winamp is much preferred.
On the plus side, the ID tag labeling system is awesome. Tabbed completion should be a requirement for apps like this.
Apple really needed to develop this as a windows app and approach it as one, using the windows UI guidelines. iTunes feels exactly like the Quicktime player; out of place.
I have charter also, and on friday my service jumped from 512K/128/ to 2Mb/128K...for no apparent reason. Charter is generally crappy as far as price and service goes (just try and get them to admit a line speed issue was their fault), but it is nice that they are standing up to the RIAA.
It's great to see so many people excited about the things they accomplished at Apple. The things we did were wonderful, they improved people's lives, and they are worth celebrating.
But I think we should not lose sight of the fact that Apple Computer as a whole was a massive failure. Our fundamental goal, if you remember, was to transform the world by setting people free from bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates. "The Computer for the Rest of Us," we promised.
Today "the rest of us" are a passionate but small personal computing clique. The company is treated as the eccentric uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer as powerful or dangerous at it once was.
Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has ground to a stop. The operating system most computers users work with every day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years.
Why? Because they don't have to change. Because there's no effective competition. Because Apple failed.
Those of us who use Windows every day at work are reminded constantly of our company's failure. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is being punished along with us.
Yet no one takes responsibility for what happened. In fact, most of the people who were at Apple claim passionately that the company's collapse wasn't their fault. Some have written whole books to prove that they had no blame for what happened.
It's a terrible gap in company's history that no one takes responsibility for its fall. So let me fill in that gap and let you know who was responsible.
I did it. I killed Apple Computer.
Of course you helped too, if you worked there. Sure, we were assisted by a number of feckless executives, and by venal behavior at Microsoft. But more than anything else, Apple -- the old Apple we knew and loved, the one we're celebrating here -- was destroyed by its own diseased and dysfunctional culture. By the time Steve Jobs returned to the scene, very little could be saved. I salute him for what he accomplished; I don't think anyone else on this Earth could have pulled it off. And maybe the new Apple he's building will someday have the same authority and heft as the old one. But let's not lose sight of the fact that he had to burn the old company to the ground in order to salvage something viable out of it.
What went wrong?
The story of Apple from the late 1980s to the late 1990s is, in my opinion, a story of individual brilliance and group stupidity. From the moment I joined the company in 1987, I was amazed by the energy and intelligence of the people around me. Never in my career have I worked with brighter, more interesting, more capable people. Probably I never will again. And yet, despite all our braininess, as a team we were the Keystone Kops of computing.
For every innovation we brought to market, a dozen great ideas were strangled in the labs. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent?(1) Kaleida?(2) Jaguar?(3) OpenDoc?(4) The list is almost endless. Even today, the PC world has yet to fully deploy innovations that we worked on and failed to bring to market in the 1990s, things like component software and the advanced user interface ideas in the Sybil(5) project.
It's easy to blame all these failures on the company's senior execs, but frankly, they weren't powerful enough to inflict damage this comprehensive. Far too often, the problem was that we didn't work together toward common goals. This was partly due to the usual politics you get in any large company, but in addition we all believed we were so smart that we were unwilling to compromise and follow the visions of others. We'd sit in meetings and smile and nod at the pla
IM services cost alot of money to run. That money is recouped either through banner ads or selling of information. Third party clients do not reinburse IM service providers. They steal (bandwidth, ad impressions, etc.) from MS, AOL, Yahoo, and ICQ and the owners are unhappy. AOL wouldn't give a flying fuck if you used some other IM client, as long as they aren't footing the bill for server and bandwidth. If GAIM wants to give away the client, thats fine, but they aren't entitled to give away MS/AOL/Yahoo/ICQs bandwith and server usage.
The IM service providers should be a little more upfront with the reasons behind the blockage, but even if they aren't, you still don't have any right to be pissed off.
I was wondering the same thing, WTF are the FFTA ad people thinking.
Probably the best game commercial would have to be for Xenosaga. Evidently the game sucked, but you never would have guessed that from the commercial. Zelda:Wind Waker had good commercials too.
The QNX NEUTRINO RTOS v6.2 and Embedded Linux Developer's Suite v1.1 were evaluated against the same criteria and test suite.
The QNX NEUTRINO RTOS v6.2 performed very well during this evaluation. None of the performance or stress tests revealed any problems and the RTOS was fast, predictable and reliable at all times. The QNX NEUTRINO RTOS is also the only RTOS that has a true message-based client-server architecture well equipped to handle today's requirements concerning distributed processing, high availability, etc. The Red Hat Embedded Linux Developer's Suite v1.1 (based on the Linux kernel 2.6) is clearly not foreseen to be used in a real-time environment. Linux is made as a GPOS and the test results illustrate this. The added value of the Embedded Linux Developer's Suite is questionable: it does not make it easier to generate a custom target platform.
Although the Linux kernel is royalty free, it comes with a price: documentation is poor and the API is not compatible with (POSIX) standards. The learning curve to get the kernel up and running on your custom target platform is steep.
But RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE never caused me any problems. Ever. X worked. The mouse worked. The sound worked. The NIC worked. The internal modem didn't work, but I knew that going into it (and external modems are cheap, anyways). For these distros, I had to modify precisely 0 config files. I had to specify precisely 0 hardware specs; the "hardest" thing I had to do was choose my desktop resolution, which you have to do for Windows too.
Thats just a personal experience. I had an old PC I attempted to install Mandrake on and it didn't work, but Beos installed and worked fine... Weird, huh?
No one will mod you up since oversensitive slashbots are usually the ones with mod points, but I found your post extremely funny and enjoyed a refreshing chuckle as a result. Thanks
In my case, I care more about Xiph than cancer research.
Yeah, royalty free audio codecs are much more important than a cure for a horrible painful disease that kills millions. I'd would gladly give up years of my life (spent with friends and family) to keep programmers from having to pay for use of an audio codec. WHEN YOU ARE BURNING IN HELL, REMEMBER TO REQUEST THAT YOUR SOULS SCREAMS ARE RECORDED IN A PATENT FREE FORMAT.
There are few things worse on slashdot than people that modify or continue a joke long past the point of being funny to make a serious statement regarding politics.
60,000 African American voters who were TURNED away on election day because they were incorrectly tagged as convicted felons by the state of Florida.
I don't see what you're upset about. If they are African Americans, they probably are convicted felons or they are criminals that haven't been caught yet. They should never be allowed to vote and the fact that 60,000 of them tried illegally is a sign that election officials need to be even more dilligent when dealing with African American voters.
I got modded as flamebait, so perhaps I was being a bit abrasive. Let me address this now.
RMS (and alot of his followers, me included) seeks to make proprietary software obsolete and non-existent.
When you make something non-existant, you destroy or remove it. I stated this and you reaffirmed it.
Does mean that noone can charge for software? No, it simply means that all software would be free as in freedom, price is mostly irrelevant.
This is the single biggest lie in the GNU/Free Speech movement. As long as software is "Free" (meaning modifyable or redistributable) it will always be "free-as-in-beer". Always. People don't pay for software that isn't given a redistributal liscence (Check Sharereactor), why will they ever pay for anything that can be given away freely? Lets say we are selling Linux. I sell you a copy for $25 and say it is redistributable. You then give away a million copies to anyone that asks. Am I ever going to sell another copy of Linux? Hell no, people will just get it off you for free. Now I know you're going to mention Redhat or IBM, but that's not the same. Redhat sells technical support - not very helpful if you're a coder with poor people skills. IBM does much the same except they sell complete hardware/software packages - kinda sucks if your program can't be linked to some special hardware.
Does it mean that all software would be forced out into the open for everyones grabbing? No, you're perfectly entitled to write your own private software and not show it to anyone. You're equally entitled to make a private branch of Emacs and do whith it what you will as long as you don't distribute.
Ok, here you've even further validated my point. What if I write software for a living? "Writing my own software and not showing it to anyone" won't put food on my table for very long. The biggest flaw with Stallman is that he hates a system he's never been involved with.
It is an order of magnitude easier to criticize non-free sofware when you have never had to rely on it for your living. Stallman has never had financial survival riding on how many copies of emacs were purchased, or when HURD is released. He makes a living hawking his ideas and getting people to buy into his utopian fantasies and donate money to the FSF which pays his salary. He's like Terry McAullife, he'll make his living peddling the products of other hard work. Terry McAullife will never fight against a Republican congress, but he'll collect a paycheck for telling you how great the Democrats are. Stallman will never make a living of free/Free software, but he'll do just fine telling you how good it is. I'm not bitter that he is able to make a living off the goodwill and donations of others, but he is the exception, not the rule.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Usually when a person trolls slashdot, they post a contrary view (MS is good, Linux sucks, music should be paid for, it is stealing, etc.). You have posted the exact opposite, a great tirade against congress breaking laws (by extending copyrights?), ignoring unjust laws, and then you finish up with the coup de grace "move to a socialist country comrade".
If this was indeed a troll, then you are the wunderkind, a god among mortals, the alpha and omega, the start of a new era, and the most clever trool evar. I salute you.
Slashdot Mirror
I've DLed iTunes, and I also found some irksome OSXs.
The most annoying is that you can't resize from any window edge like standard windows apps, you can only resize from the lower right corner.
The ability to maximize the window is noticably absent. To add injury to insult, the iTunes window can not be dragged to full window size (it leaves a 1/16 to 1/8 gap on the right hand side)
The other one I've noticed is that in the small player mode, the ovular green bar is present, but doesn't function like its large-mode counterpart, in the large version, there is a progress slider to skip to different parts of the song, its gone in the small mode. Every single media player I have ever used has a time slider and it is annoying to be missing one). The biggest UI faux pas is that the the oval is the same otherwise. A friend tells me on OSX, both mini version and large mode have the time slider. Grrr....
Another minor irritation is the inability to tell the length and number of multiple selections. When using the basic windows UI, selecting multiple items will show that x number of items are selected as well as the size of the total selection. In Winamps playlist/file browser, the total playing time for multiple selections is given as well as the number of songs. On iTunes, selections must be added to a new playlist to see number of selections and total time of selections. On the fly ala winamp is much preferred.
On the plus side, the ID tag labeling system is awesome. Tabbed completion should be a requirement for apps like this.
Apple really needed to develop this as a windows app and approach it as one, using the windows UI guidelines. iTunes feels exactly like the Quicktime player; out of place.
It is the brushed metal look, similar to the quicktime player.
Basic rule of selling things must be dont piss the customer off.
TO BE A CUSTOMER, YOU MUST PURCHASE SOMETHING.
After the Challenger blew up this year, I'd think that they wouldn't allow foam anywhere near a space-shuttle, much less the delicate tiles.
DO you have a direct link for this or some official thing from charter? I AM paying more than that per month and could definitely use a rate break.
I have charter also, and on friday my service jumped from 512K/128/ to 2Mb/128K...for no apparent reason. Charter is generally crappy as far as price and service goes (just try and get them to admit a line speed issue was their fault), but it is nice that they are standing up to the RIAA.
I hoping for no radiohead because they suck. HTH. HAND.
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It's great to see so many people excited about the things they accomplished at Apple. The things we did were wonderful, they improved people's lives, and they are worth celebrating.
But I think we should not lose sight of the fact that Apple Computer as a whole was a massive failure. Our fundamental goal, if you remember, was to transform the world by setting people free from bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates. "The Computer for the Rest of Us," we promised.
Today "the rest of us" are a passionate but small personal computing clique. The company is treated as the eccentric uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer as powerful or dangerous at it once was.
Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has ground to a stop. The operating system most computers users work with every day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years.
Why? Because they don't have to change. Because there's no effective competition. Because Apple failed.
Those of us who use Windows every day at work are reminded constantly of our company's failure. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is being punished along with us.
Yet no one takes responsibility for what happened. In fact, most of the people who were at Apple claim passionately that the company's collapse wasn't their fault. Some have written whole books to prove that they had no blame for what happened.
It's a terrible gap in company's history that no one takes responsibility for its fall. So let me fill in that gap and let you know who was responsible.
I did it. I killed Apple Computer.
Of course you helped too, if you worked there. Sure, we were assisted by a number of feckless executives, and by venal behavior at Microsoft. But more than anything else, Apple -- the old Apple we knew and loved, the one we're celebrating here -- was destroyed by its own diseased and dysfunctional culture. By the time Steve Jobs returned to the scene, very little could be saved. I salute him for what he accomplished; I don't think anyone else on this Earth could have pulled it off. And maybe the new Apple he's building will someday have the same authority and heft as the old one. But let's not lose sight of the fact that he had to burn the old company to the ground in order to salvage something viable out of it.
What went wrong?
The story of Apple from the late 1980s to the late 1990s is, in my opinion, a story of individual brilliance and group stupidity. From the moment I joined the company in 1987, I was amazed by the energy and intelligence of the people around me. Never in my career have I worked with brighter, more interesting, more capable people. Probably I never will again. And yet, despite all our braininess, as a team we were the Keystone Kops of computing.
For every innovation we brought to market, a dozen great ideas were strangled in the labs. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent?(1) Kaleida?(2) Jaguar?(3) OpenDoc?(4) The list is almost endless. Even today, the PC world has yet to fully deploy innovations that we worked on and failed to bring to market in the 1990s, things like component software and the advanced user interface ideas in the Sybil(5) project.
It's easy to blame all these failures on the company's senior execs, but frankly, they weren't powerful enough to inflict damage this comprehensive. Far too often, the problem was that we didn't work together toward common goals. This was partly due to the usual politics you get in any large company, but in addition we all believed we were so smart that we were unwilling to compromise and follow the visions of others. We'd sit in meetings and smile and nod at the pla
And now, the real reason behind the blockage...
IM services cost alot of money to run. That money is recouped either through banner ads or selling of information. Third party clients do not reinburse IM service providers. They steal (bandwidth, ad impressions, etc.) from MS, AOL, Yahoo, and ICQ and the owners are unhappy. AOL wouldn't give a flying fuck if you used some other IM client, as long as they aren't footing the bill for server and bandwidth. If GAIM wants to give away the client, thats fine, but they aren't entitled to give away MS/AOL/Yahoo/ICQs bandwith and server usage.
The IM service providers should be a little more upfront with the reasons behind the blockage, but even if they aren't, you still don't have any right to be pissed off.
I was wondering the same thing, WTF are the FFTA ad people thinking.
Probably the best game commercial would have to be for Xenosaga. Evidently the game sucked, but you never would have guessed that from the commercial. Zelda:Wind Waker had good commercials too.
From the whitepaper...
The QNX NEUTRINO RTOS v6.2 and Embedded Linux Developer's Suite v1.1 were evaluated against the
same criteria and test suite.
The QNX NEUTRINO RTOS v6.2 performed very well during this evaluation. None of the performance or stress tests revealed any problems and the RTOS was fast, predictable and reliable at all times. The QNX NEUTRINO RTOS is also the only RTOS that has a true message-based client-server architecture well equipped to handle today's requirements concerning distributed processing, high availability, etc. The Red Hat Embedded Linux Developer's Suite v1.1 (based on the Linux kernel 2.6) is clearly not foreseen to be used in a real-time environment. Linux is made as a GPOS and the test results illustrate this. The added value of the Embedded Linux Developer's Suite is questionable: it does not make it easier to generate a custom target platform.
Although the Linux kernel is royalty free, it comes with a price: documentation is poor and the API is not compatible with (POSIX) standards. The learning curve to get the kernel up and running on your custom target platform is steep.
But RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE never caused me any problems. Ever. X worked. The mouse worked. The sound worked. The NIC worked. The internal modem didn't work, but I knew that going into it (and external modems are cheap, anyways). For these distros, I had to modify precisely 0 config files. I had to specify precisely 0 hardware specs; the "hardest" thing I had to do was choose my desktop resolution, which you have to do for Windows too.
Thats just a personal experience. I had an old PC I attempted to install Mandrake on and it didn't work, but Beos installed and worked fine... Weird, huh?
No one will mod you up since oversensitive slashbots are usually the ones with mod points, but I found your post extremely funny and enjoyed a refreshing chuckle as a result. Thanks
In my case, I care more about Xiph than cancer research.
Yeah, royalty free audio codecs are much more important than a cure for a horrible painful disease that kills millions. I'd would gladly give up years of my life (spent with friends and family) to keep programmers from having to pay for use of an audio codec. WHEN YOU ARE BURNING IN HELL, REMEMBER TO REQUEST THAT YOUR SOULS SCREAMS ARE RECORDED IN A PATENT FREE FORMAT.
Sci-fi? Sorry, out of luck
Fallout 1 and 2 ??
There are few things worse on slashdot than people that modify or continue a joke long past the point of being funny to make a serious statement regarding politics.
60,000 African American voters who were TURNED away on election day because they were incorrectly tagged as convicted felons by the state of Florida.
I don't see what you're upset about. If they are African Americans, they probably are convicted felons or they are criminals that haven't been caught yet. They should never be allowed to vote and the fact that 60,000 of them tried illegally is a sign that election officials need to be even more dilligent when dealing with African American voters.
Anyway, i believe it's like telling people the difference in "hacker" and "cracker".
Yeah, one breaks in to computers and the other is a derogatory term for a white person or a dry food served with peanut butter or in soup.
The communists won.
The USSRians, the Koreans, and a few Berliners might disagree. But hey, that's disproving your argument so forget I said it.
You do know that you can remove the tray front off almost any drive so it doesn't catch on the swingdown bezel, right?
I got modded as flamebait, so perhaps I was being a bit abrasive. Let me address this now.
RMS (and alot of his followers, me included) seeks to make proprietary software obsolete and non-existent.
When you make something non-existant, you destroy or remove it. I stated this and you reaffirmed it.
Does mean that noone can charge for software? No, it simply means that all software would be free as in freedom, price is mostly irrelevant.
This is the single biggest lie in the GNU/Free Speech movement. As long as software is "Free" (meaning modifyable or redistributable) it will always be "free-as-in-beer". Always. People don't pay for software that isn't given a redistributal liscence (Check Sharereactor), why will they ever pay for anything that can be given away freely? Lets say we are selling Linux. I sell you a copy for $25 and say it is redistributable. You then give away a million copies to anyone that asks. Am I ever going to sell another copy of Linux? Hell no, people will just get it off you for free. Now I know you're going to mention Redhat or IBM, but that's not the same. Redhat sells technical support - not very helpful if you're a coder with poor people skills. IBM does much the same except they sell complete hardware/software packages - kinda sucks if your program can't be linked to some special hardware.
Does it mean that all software would be forced out into the open for everyones grabbing? No, you're perfectly entitled to write your own private software and not show it to anyone. You're equally entitled to make a private branch of Emacs and do whith it what you will as long as you don't distribute.
Ok, here you've even further validated my point. What if I write software for a living? "Writing my own software and not showing it to anyone" won't put food on my table for very long. The biggest flaw with Stallman is that he hates a system he's never been involved with.
It is an order of magnitude easier to criticize non-free sofware when you have never had to rely on it for your living. Stallman has never had financial survival riding on how many copies of emacs were purchased, or when HURD is released. He makes a living hawking his ideas and getting people to buy into his utopian fantasies and donate money to the FSF which pays his salary. He's like Terry McAullife, he'll make his living peddling the products of other hard work. Terry McAullife will never fight against a Republican congress, but he'll collect a paycheck for telling you how great the Democrats are. Stallman will never make a living of free/Free software, but he'll do just fine telling you how good it is. I'm not bitter that he is able to make a living off the goodwill and donations of others, but he is the exception, not the rule.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Usually when a person trolls slashdot, they post a contrary view (MS is good, Linux sucks, music should be paid for, it is stealing, etc.). You have posted the exact opposite, a great tirade against congress breaking laws (by extending copyrights?), ignoring unjust laws, and then you finish up with the coup de grace "move to a socialist country comrade".
If this was indeed a troll, then you are the wunderkind, a god among mortals, the alpha and omega, the start of a new era, and the most clever trool evar. I salute you.