hmm. I have 140 tunes on my 2gb (1.8gb without the marketing speak) Nano at it's full. 8 of those tunes are 1 hour long each so I suppose they can count as 10 tunes each. All at around 192kbps.
I wish I can put this another way, but your math stinks.
Apple states clearly that "song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding". Your one-hour long tunes do not count as ten, but 22.5 ((60 min / 4 min) * (192 kbps / 128 kbps)). Each of your 4-minute 192 kbps songs would also count as 1.5 each. So, let's say you have 132 4-minute 192 kbps songs and 8 60-minute 192 kbps songs, that's 378 "Apple songs". We can make a more accurate estimate if you provide a more accurate account of the songs you're loading.
In any case, you can argue that an "Apple song" is an unrealistic measure (it is, by the way, a bitrate reasonable enough to sell one billion songs in) or whatever else you want to complain about, but loading longer and higher bitrate songs and whining that you can't get the advertised song count really just means you either refuse to read or can't perform arithmetic.
Also, I suggest you avoid playing your iPod at full volume to protect your hearing, not to mention get better battery life out of your iPod.
what if I work for the cleaning service and watch one of your late-night employees get up and go to the bathroom. I simply get to his/her machine before the screensaver timeout and plug in. Boom in 2 minutes I have 60Gig of goodies that my employer hired me to gather from the competition.
The real question is, on what I/O port did you manage to get 4 Gbps of data rate?:)
Besides, your threat scenario is easily defeated, just like arresting anybody carrying a red lightsaber in the Star Wars universe. Just arrest all janitors with iPods, they're not paid that much money.
The non-technical customer can provide the programming team with "stories" about how they would like their software to function, and rate these stories based on priority. It is up to the programming team to figure out how to do the technical work in the software to accomplish make the story (or use case) a functional part of the software.
Nice theory.
The non-technical user, by definition, does not know what is practical for the software to accomplish, and will likely overestimate or underestimate what it can do. They are also frequently unsure of their feature requirements, nevermind relative priorities. What you almost always need is somebody who can understand what the user needs (even if they can't articulate it) as well as technical limitations: a designer.
Old story: lots of users say they want software to help them manage personal finances, yet few actually buy the software when written, and even fewer actually use it. It's a lot more tedious than they imagine, for a lot less real benefit than they imagine. Users "lie" like this all the time.
Maybe we should be able to override the OS so that no matter what icon the executable file says it wants to display, the OS always shows an icon clearly depicting the fact that the file is an executable.
...so that when you look in the Applications directory, you see a hundred identical icons?
it will definitely bite many naive mac users who think they are invulnerable, and don't realize that the Finder's default behavior, though a convenience for the computer illiterate, is very dangerous precisely because it allows executable trojans to masquerade as data files such as graphics, etc.
Even if it was clearly marked as an executable, how many of these naive users do you think will run it anyway given the promise of free porn or something?
You people invented modern democratic society and civil rights, and you've been happily flushing it down the drain, piece by piece, ever since the end of WWII. (Would you really be any worse off at this point if the Nazis had won?)
Depends. Are you Jewish? If so, you're likely going to be somewhat worse off. Is it possible to be angry at the loss of freedoms in the UK or the US without resorting to hyperbole?
I would'nt expect them to have to obey ALL of the laws of the U.S. and the localality where they are setting up shop,
Why not? Are US laws so unreasonable?
Some of them are, when applied outside the context they were written for. You would not expect US minimum wage laws to apply in a foreign country. You have to account for different business practices, such as when a gift turns into a bribe. Asking US companies to obey US equal opportunity laws is pointless in countries where women aren't even allowed to work. And then there are just the silly things, like giving Thanksgiving Day off when nobody in the country celebrates it.
Asking US companies to follow all US laws when abroad is to limit them to US-like countries.
they should compensate every person who did good work for them. That would be fair. As it stands, for every chosen one, there will be many wringing their hands, angry that their hard work goes unappreciated and uncompensated.
So if a particular hardware manufacturer sent Linus Torvalds or another specific Linux contributor some shiny new hardware and documentation in the hopes that it will gain support in the next version of Linux, any Linux contributor who didn't get one will be "wringing their hands, angry that their hard work goes unappreciated and uncompensated"?
I fear you underestimate the motives of volunteers.
If the iPod came with a Power Adapter to charge it without a computer like other brands include with theirs, base price might be a valid comparison. But otherwise you'd have to add $30 to the price for the same functionality.
Not for a repeat customer. Like I said, the products are not comparable feature-for-feature, just as I'm not counting whatever value the UI and integration with iTunes has to the customer. I'm just saying that if what's in the box is good for you, you can actually have an iPod for less money out of the pocket.
As shitty as it sounds, you don't have Apple's written permission. And since you got the file from them, you're not allowed to use their version of the track that way.
Actually, it's the other way around. Apple doesn't have permission to give you that track, because it doesn't know about that "written permission". Now, in an ideal world, you'd show Apple the permission letter, and Apple would let you download an unprotected AAC. The problem, as anybody can imagine, is that Apple derives so little benefit (20 cents?) and incurs quite a bit of hassle (like having to verify signatures on that letter) that it'll likely refuse to be the middleman.
One can blame Apple for a lot of things, but this one is just whiny.
the iPod has no features that are as big a selling point as its sweet ergonomic UI
How about price?
The cheapest Dell DJ Ditty (512 MB) sells for $99. The 512 MB iPod Shuffle (which has no screen) sells for $69. Your Pez player (512 MB) appears to cost $99.99, and also doesn't have a screen. The most expensive DJ Ditty (still just 512 MB) sells for $156, while the iPod Nano 1 GB sells for $149 with a color screen (but no FM transmitter or three color cases). The Creative Zen Vision M (30 GB) sells for $329.99, and probably has some additional features, but the 30 GB iPod sells for $299.
I'm not saying that the other players are not worth the money. I'm saying that if you don't really care about those additional features, the iPod can actually be cheaper. Of course, you could load up the iPod feature-for-feature and compare prices again, which is what the typical Mac defender would say. That's right, too, but for a specific given feature set the iPod can be the cheaper choice.
right now there are applications that can run on BOTH platforms (Intel and PPC). So, why not just keep the option open and have applications be Universal and then it doesn't matter what Chip is inside.
Because that at least doubles testing costs for software developers, having to test under an additional platform as well as interoperability (whether data files written by the PPC version can be read by the Intel version, etc.) If the universal binary won't fit on a CD/DVD, then there will be additional packaging costs for the second CD/DVD. It increases training costs for tech support, having now to support an additional platform.
This isn't off-topic. Without scientific research, everybody would "know" that the earth is flat. The fact that a particular research confirms what was "pretty obvious" doesn't make it useless.
This is good for QA folk who eventually want to migrate into development, as they'll gain valuable skills along the way.
The ideal QA person is one who actually enjoys breaking stuff, and will hone his or her skills at it for years to come. One who already wants to migrate to development can have the wrong frame of mind (as to what their job should be), as well as conflicts of interest (don't piss off the development manager). I say this as a developer who has great respect for good, professional QA people.
What is more disturbing is the trend that if you walk down the street and are required to present identification by police.
Where does it say you have the right to walk down the street without being asked to present identification? Now, I understand the need for security on airliners. I'm just wondering why you seem to think that there's a fundamental difference between the two modes of transportation.
Put another way, if the government can check identification for air travel because of terrorist threats, then they can check identification for foot travel if terrorists on foot become a problem. Lots of Palestinians have to cross checkpoints daily to get to work in Israel.
If politicians (on both sides, mind you) ever worried about their own words coming back to haunt them, they'd be a lot quieter and more careful when they open their mouths. There is always some watershed event (Pearl Harbor, Cold War, 9/11 attack, etc) since you said it to justify why you think differently now. The situation is always different now.
Part of that problem is that cell phone providers reuse the same frequency in non-adjacent cells. When your airborne cell phone talks to one such cell and is assigned a frequency for a call, your signal can actually be picked up by multiple cells that are also using the same frequency. It may interfere with another user on the ground who was assigned that same frequency by another cell.
I just hope that they bump up the bitrates of iTMS music sometime; not that it matters much in the situations I listen to my iPods (driving in my car, using an adapter that lets the iPod act as a cd changer), or on mid-grade headphones ($200 or so), I can't tell the difference anyway...
So why bump it up and both slow down your download and take up more disk space?
Even if you never touch the OO side of C++ and stay procedural, it makes C considerably easier. Let's see..
Stronger typing Better casting
How so? Without inheritance, the only significant difference that comes to mind is the different handling of "void *", hardly a useful feature.
Pass by reference
Without the needs of OO, I don't agree with this one. One potential problem of pass by reference is that you can significantly change the meaning of code at the caller side without changing any code there. Pass by value requires any such change to be propagated to the caller side as well, which at least means a human would look at the code to see if it breaks anything.
The responsible thing for the WINE developer(s) to do is to tell Microsoft about this serious hole, and not implement it until there is a sufficient need. Even then, it should be enabled only in a "quirks" or bug-compatibility mode, because it is dangerous. I can't believe the developer(s) are being complimented ("speaks highly of them") for quietly implementing a security hole.
Now, I don't think they should be blamed for not realizing the problem (the original authors did not, either). Being volunteers, they're also under no obligation to do anything. But ignorance or inaction is hardly a cause for compliment, is it?
Just imagine what you'd be saying if Microsoft found a security hole in POSIX, and quietly just implemented the hole to spec. Now imagine what you'd say if they didn't realize that there was a hole there. Would you be complimenting them for either case?
I don't know how many lines of code it is, but the last documentation tht I can find of a bug being found in the TeX source is from 1995. So while I don't know of any way to prove that a program is bug free, it is at least possible to make a very complex program sufficiently bug free that no one has found any in over 10 years.
TeX is legendary, but some of your impressions are overly rosy. A bug was fixed in version 3.141592, released in December of 2002. This latest version is 24,970 lines of text, a lot of which are comments. It remains highly useful, but is no longer a "very complex program" by today's standards.
I've heard many people, even programmers, claim that bugfree programs are impossible to write. They are not- they just cost far more in time and money than most companies can afford in this commercial climate.
In most cases, even if the additional money isn't the deal-breaker, the additional time would very much be. The war could be over by the time you fix the last bug in your jet fighter's avionics. Now, even though what you say has an element of truth in it, can you actually cite a program over one million lines long that was actually made bug-free? If not, how do you know they can be made bug-free?
No serious file system developer would monitor drive activity by peering through its window. They would most likely perform logging at the device driver level on events like head movement and read or write operations. These logs can then be subject to statistical analysis that would actually tell them about improvements or regressions.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I can put this another way, but your math stinks.
Apple states clearly that "song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding". Your one-hour long tunes do not count as ten, but 22.5 ((60 min / 4 min) * (192 kbps / 128 kbps)). Each of your 4-minute 192 kbps songs would also count as 1.5 each. So, let's say you have 132 4-minute 192 kbps songs and 8 60-minute 192 kbps songs, that's 378 "Apple songs". We can make a more accurate estimate if you provide a more accurate account of the songs you're loading.
In any case, you can argue that an "Apple song" is an unrealistic measure (it is, by the way, a bitrate reasonable enough to sell one billion songs in) or whatever else you want to complain about, but loading longer and higher bitrate songs and whining that you can't get the advertised song count really just means you either refuse to read or can't perform arithmetic.
Also, I suggest you avoid playing your iPod at full volume to protect your hearing, not to mention get better battery life out of your iPod.
The real question is, on what I/O port did you manage to get 4 Gbps of data rate? :)
Besides, your threat scenario is easily defeated, just like arresting anybody carrying a red lightsaber in the Star Wars universe. Just arrest all janitors with iPods, they're not paid that much money.
Nice theory.
The non-technical user, by definition, does not know what is practical for the software to accomplish, and will likely overestimate or underestimate what it can do. They are also frequently unsure of their feature requirements, nevermind relative priorities. What you almost always need is somebody who can understand what the user needs (even if they can't articulate it) as well as technical limitations: a designer.
Old story: lots of users say they want software to help them manage personal finances, yet few actually buy the software when written, and even fewer actually use it. It's a lot more tedious than they imagine, for a lot less real benefit than they imagine. Users "lie" like this all the time.
Even if it was clearly marked as an executable, how many of these naive users do you think will run it anyway given the promise of free porn or something?
Then I would say you deserve them. :)
Depends. Are you Jewish? If so, you're likely going to be somewhat worse off. Is it possible to be angry at the loss of freedoms in the UK or the US without resorting to hyperbole?
Some of them are, when applied outside the context they were written for. You would not expect US minimum wage laws to apply in a foreign country. You have to account for different business practices, such as when a gift turns into a bribe. Asking US companies to obey US equal opportunity laws is pointless in countries where women aren't even allowed to work. And then there are just the silly things, like giving Thanksgiving Day off when nobody in the country celebrates it.
Asking US companies to follow all US laws when abroad is to limit them to US-like countries.
So if a particular hardware manufacturer sent Linus Torvalds or another specific Linux contributor some shiny new hardware and documentation in the hopes that it will gain support in the next version of Linux, any Linux contributor who didn't get one will be "wringing their hands, angry that their hard work goes unappreciated and uncompensated"?
I fear you underestimate the motives of volunteers.
Not for a repeat customer. Like I said, the products are not comparable feature-for-feature, just as I'm not counting whatever value the UI and integration with iTunes has to the customer. I'm just saying that if what's in the box is good for you, you can actually have an iPod for less money out of the pocket.
Actually, it's the other way around. Apple doesn't have permission to give you that track, because it doesn't know about that "written permission". Now, in an ideal world, you'd show Apple the permission letter, and Apple would let you download an unprotected AAC. The problem, as anybody can imagine, is that Apple derives so little benefit (20 cents?) and incurs quite a bit of hassle (like having to verify signatures on that letter) that it'll likely refuse to be the middleman.
One can blame Apple for a lot of things, but this one is just whiny.
How about price?
The cheapest Dell DJ Ditty (512 MB) sells for $99. The 512 MB iPod Shuffle (which has no screen) sells for $69. Your Pez player (512 MB) appears to cost $99.99, and also doesn't have a screen. The most expensive DJ Ditty (still just 512 MB) sells for $156, while the iPod Nano 1 GB sells for $149 with a color screen (but no FM transmitter or three color cases). The Creative Zen Vision M (30 GB) sells for $329.99, and probably has some additional features, but the 30 GB iPod sells for $299.
I'm not saying that the other players are not worth the money. I'm saying that if you don't really care about those additional features, the iPod can actually be cheaper. Of course, you could load up the iPod feature-for-feature and compare prices again, which is what the typical Mac defender would say. That's right, too, but for a specific given feature set the iPod can be the cheaper choice.
Because that at least doubles testing costs for software developers, having to test under an additional platform as well as interoperability (whether data files written by the PPC version can be read by the Intel version, etc.) If the universal binary won't fit on a CD/DVD, then there will be additional packaging costs for the second CD/DVD. It increases training costs for tech support, having now to support an additional platform.
This isn't off-topic. Without scientific research, everybody would "know" that the earth is flat. The fact that a particular research confirms what was "pretty obvious" doesn't make it useless.
The ideal QA person is one who actually enjoys breaking stuff, and will hone his or her skills at it for years to come. One who already wants to migrate to development can have the wrong frame of mind (as to what their job should be), as well as conflicts of interest (don't piss off the development manager). I say this as a developer who has great respect for good, professional QA people.
Where does it say you have the right to walk down the street without being asked to present identification? Now, I understand the need for security on airliners. I'm just wondering why you seem to think that there's a fundamental difference between the two modes of transportation.
Put another way, if the government can check identification for air travel because of terrorist threats, then they can check identification for foot travel if terrorists on foot become a problem. Lots of Palestinians have to cross checkpoints daily to get to work in Israel.
If politicians (on both sides, mind you) ever worried about their own words coming back to haunt them, they'd be a lot quieter and more careful when they open their mouths. There is always some watershed event (Pearl Harbor, Cold War, 9/11 attack, etc) since you said it to justify why you think differently now. The situation is always different now.
Part of that problem is that cell phone providers reuse the same frequency in non-adjacent cells. When your airborne cell phone talks to one such cell and is assigned a frequency for a call, your signal can actually be picked up by multiple cells that are also using the same frequency. It may interfere with another user on the ground who was assigned that same frequency by another cell.
So why bump it up and both slow down your download and take up more disk space?
Stronger typing
Better casting
How so? Without inheritance, the only significant difference that comes to mind is the different handling of "void *", hardly a useful feature.
Pass by reference
Without the needs of OO, I don't agree with this one. One potential problem of pass by reference is that you can significantly change the meaning of code at the caller side without changing any code there. Pass by value requires any such change to be propagated to the caller side as well, which at least means a human would look at the code to see if it breaks anything.
The responsible thing for the WINE developer(s) to do is to tell Microsoft about this serious hole, and not implement it until there is a sufficient need. Even then, it should be enabled only in a "quirks" or bug-compatibility mode, because it is dangerous. I can't believe the developer(s) are being complimented ("speaks highly of them") for quietly implementing a security hole.
Now, I don't think they should be blamed for not realizing the problem (the original authors did not, either). Being volunteers, they're also under no obligation to do anything. But ignorance or inaction is hardly a cause for compliment, is it?
Just imagine what you'd be saying if Microsoft found a security hole in POSIX, and quietly just implemented the hole to spec. Now imagine what you'd say if they didn't realize that there was a hole there. Would you be complimenting them for either case?
Can't quite tell you who said this first, but testing can only show the presence of bugs, never its absence.
TeX is legendary, but some of your impressions are overly rosy. A bug was fixed in version 3.141592, released in December of 2002. This latest version is 24,970 lines of text, a lot of which are comments. It remains highly useful, but is no longer a "very complex program" by today's standards.
In most cases, even if the additional money isn't the deal-breaker, the additional time would very much be. The war could be over by the time you fix the last bug in your jet fighter's avionics. Now, even though what you say has an element of truth in it, can you actually cite a program over one million lines long that was actually made bug-free? If not, how do you know they can be made bug-free?
No serious file system developer would monitor drive activity by peering through its window. They would most likely perform logging at the device driver level on events like head movement and read or write operations. These logs can then be subject to statistical analysis that would actually tell them about improvements or regressions.