The problem with Quicktime is that it's proprietary nagware that is required to view a lot of content.
Apple's Quicktime software is proprietary, but the QT format itself is open and fully documented. Of course the content in a QT can use proprietary codecs, but the "standard" is now MPEG-4.
Basically, it's the same problem as with WMP, except that Quicktime nags more and that Apple thumbs their nose at other people's UI conventions
If it's any consolation, Apple also regularly thumbs their nose at their own UI conventions (e.g. making Safari use brushed metal).
Those compaints are from before 10.3 came out, which is when the OS X Finder took several leaps forward.
The 10.3 Finder sucks less, but it still sucks. In addition to the excessive blocking already mentioned, there's the Aqua/metal schizophrenia, ridiculously huge grid spacing in icon view which makes it unusable, the inability to sort by anything other than name in column view, and several other annoyances which lead me to do most file manipulation from a terminal.
Because the investment market demands it, there will never be a limit to how far companies will go, tacking on additional costs.
Yes, that certainly explains why computers have tripled in price over the last decade.
ATMs - when was the last time you went "off-network" and DIDN'T pay an ATM fee?
ATM machines are not free to install and maintain, nor is it free to communicate with other networks. And nearly every bank will give you free 24/7 access to your account over the Internet; do you think that infrastructure materialized out of nowhere or do banks do it to keep their customers happy?
Ring Tones - Want an annoying song on your phone? Pay $2 and we'll give it to you for three months. How do they get away with this? There are no alternatives.
An alternative that works great for me is *not* having annoying songs on my phone. Seriously, I don't know why I would pay even a quarter for them. But if some people do want to spend/waste their money on ringtones, who are you to stop them?
Credit cards - Everyone knows it's evil to raise someone's interest rate quietly from 10% to 30% because that person was late on a phone bill. And that's just the tip of the iceberg for that slimy sector. And yet it continues to happen, and for some reason the "free market" hasn't stepped in to stop it.
Credit cards are great. Like lotteries, they're a tax on the stupid. Get a card that gives you rebates, pay off your balance every month, and it's free money.
Corporations are consumers' enemies
This is just silly. Yes, corporations want to make money, but unlike governments they can't forcibly take it from you. (Although they can be dangerous when they team up with governments and get special-interest laws passed). Thus, they have to produce products that people are actually willing to pay for. And if all the corporations are in a secret cabal to increase prices and screw over all the little people, they're doing a spectacularly inept job of it.
If the TV stations found a way to scramble or encrypt the broadcasts, making taping difficult or impossible, they would not be violating any ones rights.
Absolutely. And if somebody found a way around that, it wouldn't have been illegal. Absent unbalanced laws like the DMCA, both sides are allowed to use technology to pursue their interests.
In other words, copyright holders or media vendors do not have to enable your fair use rights, but they cannot hold you liable if you are able to exercise them provided you don't break other laws in order to exercise those rights.
And that's the goal of the DMCA: to shred fair use and first sale rights, not by explicitly revoking them (which would at least be honest), but by by making it impossible to exercise them without violating it.
I work in gov't contracting, we write specialized code for a specific use. In that sense it's *LIVE* programming, I'm not building something to resell to other people, I get paid for my time and work and even if it was open source I'd still be paid for my time and work.
In fact, this is how most developers get paid. In-house development is much more common than building software intended for resale. Copyright could be completely abolished and there would still be demand for developers. (Not that I recommend doing so).
Our business sells and repairs IBM computers and it would look a little silly trying to sell IBM type PC's when the computer I am using myself is an Apple.
Amusingly IBM no longer makes PCs, but they do make the G5 processors in Macs.
My coworker has a Mac, and it freezes on him probably 2 times a week.
Your coworker has a hardware problem. It is definitely not normal for OS X to crash like that. My G5 tower had similar behavior last year, and it turned out one of the CPUs was bad.
But, based on past products, does anyone know how soon Apple traditionally releases follow-on products?
Apple usually does around 9-12 month update cycles, so I wouldn't expect a mini update anytime soon. Maybe there will be one near the end of the year, but I wouldn't count on it. IMO the best time to buy is as soon as they start shipping with Tiger.
That is an entirely reasonable and logical view, which regrettably the courts disagree with. I find it baffling that clicking a button can retroactively transform a sale into a limited "license to use", but I guess that's why I'm not a lawyer.
Looking her up, one of the main fansites has some "exclusive" photos of her that are "un-copyable in any way" using some lame combination of javascript, html, and server checking.
Assuming you're referring to here, it's even dumber than that; the "image" is a table background. Plus the geniuses are apparently unaware that many operating systems have an advanced image capturing facility known as a "screenshot".
Yes and no. Something like Palladium could have many benefits if controlled by the user, which is of course not what MS and the **AAs have in mind. Really it comes down to much finer-grained access controls (e.g. my Quicken files are owned by me, but not every process running as me should be able to read them), and a usable interface to control them. The latter may be harder than the former.
If web browsing were simply browsing the web, ie: reading HTML and other files, rather than downloading and running indeterminate applications of dubious origin
Yeah, but you need some way to download software whether it's with a browser or something else. And software of dubious origin shouldn't have access to all your files. Probably even software of known origin shouldn't. One of Apple's iTunes updates had a bug in the installer that could erase entire partitions under certain conditions. The OS should be able to step in and recognize that an installer should probably not be doing that.
Ultimately, the client will always win. Unless something like Palladium becomes required by law, the client can always do one thing and tell the server it did something else.
I am NOT going to be nickeled and dimed to death with "micropayments" to every Tom Dick and Harry who thinks his useless two cents worth should be billed to the reader at that rate.
Right. Clay Shirky explained the basic problem with micropayments here:
Micropayments, like all payments, require a comparison: "Is this much of X worth that much of Y?" There is a minimum mental transaction cost created by this fact that cannot be optimized away, because the only transaction a user will be willing to approve with no thought will be one that costs them nothing, which is no transaction at all.
All it takes is one time for you to think that an application's installer is legitimate when it isn't and your machine gets pwn3d.
And you don't even need an installer; there's plenty of nasty stuff a user-level program could do without elevated privileges. Search your email and documents for interesting items and transmit the results to somewhere in Nigeria, for example.
what makes this even more scary is that it isn't technicially a bug.
Absolutely correct. And the only way these attacks will ever be stopped is with automatic sandboxing at the OS level. That's a very hard problem, but much easier than educating millions of users about the finer points of information security, when they don't care and shouldn't have to.
It's not like these strings tell you any useful information.
Sure they do. You're right that it's far from definitive proof that Apple will be releasing quad-core 970MP machines, but the probability is clearly increased.
somebody, please explain to me why the rumor sites are so popular?
Certainly. In the commodity PC market there are many competitors, so price/performance improves at a fairly steady rate. You can buy pretty much anytime and it's unlikely that something vastly better and/or cheaper will come out the next week. But Apple is the sole supplier of Macs, so their improvements come in bursts. This has two major implications:
- It's often worth waiting to buy a Mac if you think new models are coming out soon. You really wouldn't have wanted to buy a G4 tower right before the G5s were announced, for example. - Even for Apple fans who don't plan to buy in the near future, the infrequent but large advances are more interesting news. Intel going from 3.2 to 3.4GHz isn't terribly exciting, but Apple going from a dual 2.5GHz to (possibly) a quad 3.0 is.
Of course, it's fun to realize that if you lose 80% of your investment, you have to manage a gain of 400% to get back to even.
Not if you use dollar cost averaging. Because you buy more shares when the falls, your average price per share is lower and it's much easier to get back to even or better. I started investing near the peak of the bubble, and one of my aggressive mutual funds is about as volatile as the Nasdaq and went down around 80%. But it's subsequently doubled and I have a net gain from it, even though it's still only about a third of what it was when I started.
What about him? He's still being paid by the taxpayers, is not and will not be arrested, and may even get several million dollars if he agrees to leave. Not bad for spouting hate-filled idiocy. (And yes, I defend his right to do so).
As to other rights, I am amazed that Gov. Owens who fights against Quota's for race (Cool), is pushing to have Quota's at Universities based on Political Belief. Worse, he wants the Colorado Universities to only extend tenure to those who profess a conservative belief.
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"Slippery slope" is a logical fallacy
Not always
The problem with Quicktime is that it's proprietary nagware that is required to view a lot of content.
Apple's Quicktime software is proprietary, but the QT format itself is open and fully documented. Of course the content in a QT can use proprietary codecs, but the "standard" is now MPEG-4.
Basically, it's the same problem as with WMP, except that Quicktime nags more and that Apple thumbs their nose at other people's UI conventions
If it's any consolation, Apple also regularly thumbs their nose at their own UI conventions (e.g. making Safari use brushed metal).
Those compaints are from before 10.3 came out, which is when the OS X Finder took several leaps forward.
The 10.3 Finder sucks less, but it still sucks. In addition to the excessive blocking already mentioned, there's the Aqua/metal schizophrenia, ridiculously huge grid spacing in icon view which makes it unusable, the inability to sort by anything other than name in column view, and several other annoyances which lead me to do most file manipulation from a terminal.
Because the investment market demands it, there will never be a limit to how far companies will go, tacking on additional costs.
Yes, that certainly explains why computers have tripled in price over the last decade.
ATMs - when was the last time you went "off-network" and DIDN'T pay an ATM fee?
ATM machines are not free to install and maintain, nor is it free to communicate with other networks. And nearly every bank will give you free 24/7 access to your account over the Internet; do you think that infrastructure materialized out of nowhere or do banks do it to keep their customers happy?
Ring Tones - Want an annoying song on your phone? Pay $2 and we'll give it to you for three months. How do they get away with this? There are no alternatives.
An alternative that works great for me is *not* having annoying songs on my phone. Seriously, I don't know why I would pay even a quarter for them. But if some people do want to spend/waste their money on ringtones, who are you to stop them?
Credit cards - Everyone knows it's evil to raise someone's interest rate quietly from 10% to 30% because that person was late on a phone bill. And that's just the tip of the iceberg for that slimy sector. And yet it continues to happen, and for some reason the "free market" hasn't stepped in to stop it.
Credit cards are great. Like lotteries, they're a tax on the stupid. Get a card that gives you rebates, pay off your balance every month, and it's free money.
Corporations are consumers' enemies
This is just silly. Yes, corporations want to make money, but unlike governments they can't forcibly take it from you. (Although they can be dangerous when they team up with governments and get special-interest laws passed). Thus, they have to produce products that people are actually willing to pay for. And if all the corporations are in a secret cabal to increase prices and screw over all the little people, they're doing a spectacularly inept job of it.
If the TV stations found a way to scramble or encrypt the broadcasts, making taping difficult or impossible, they would not be violating any ones rights.
Absolutely. And if somebody found a way around that, it wouldn't have been illegal. Absent unbalanced laws like the DMCA, both sides are allowed to use technology to pursue their interests.
In other words, copyright holders or media vendors do not have to enable your fair use rights, but they cannot hold you liable if you are able to exercise them provided you don't break other laws in order to exercise those rights.
And that's the goal of the DMCA: to shred fair use and first sale rights, not by explicitly revoking them (which would at least be honest), but by by making it impossible to exercise them without violating it.
I work in gov't contracting, we write specialized code for a specific use. In that sense it's *LIVE* programming, I'm not building something to resell to other people, I get paid for my time and work and even if it was open source I'd still be paid for my time and work.
In fact, this is how most developers get paid. In-house development is much more common than building software intended for resale. Copyright could be completely abolished and there would still be demand for developers. (Not that I recommend doing so).
Our business sells and repairs IBM computers and it would look a little silly trying to sell IBM type PC's when the computer I am using myself is an Apple.
Amusingly IBM no longer makes PCs, but they do make the G5 processors in Macs.
My coworker has a Mac, and it freezes on him probably 2 times a week.
Your coworker has a hardware problem. It is definitely not normal for OS X to crash like that. My G5 tower had similar behavior last year, and it turned out one of the CPUs was bad.
Until there is a port of Cocoa for other platform then it's useless for me.
That would be here.
But, based on past products, does anyone know how soon Apple traditionally releases follow-on products?
Apple usually does around 9-12 month update cycles, so I wouldn't expect a mini update anytime soon. Maybe there will be one near the end of the year, but I wouldn't count on it. IMO the best time to buy is as soon as they start shipping with Tiger.
I don't know if a third party monitor will work with an Apple-approved video card
It will. Any VGA or DVI monitor will work fine.
The Apple web site does describe the ATI and nvidia video card options for each model of G5, and the prices for them.
Also ATI sells Mac 9800 and X800XT cards as upgrades.
1989 (Season 3) while Contact wasn't released until 1997.
The book was published in 1985.
There is no such thing as a click-wrap contract
That is an entirely reasonable and logical view, which regrettably the courts disagree with. I find it baffling that clicking a button can retroactively transform a sale into a limited "license to use", but I guess that's why I'm not a lawyer.
Looking her up, one of the main fansites has some "exclusive" photos of her that are "un-copyable in any way" using some lame combination of javascript, html, and server checking.
Assuming you're referring to here, it's even dumber than that; the "image" is a table background. Plus the geniuses are apparently unaware that many operating systems have an advanced image capturing facility known as a "screenshot".
That is all.
Lemme guess, you're a Palladium fan...
Yes and no. Something like Palladium could have many benefits if controlled by the user, which is of course not what MS and the **AAs have in mind. Really it comes down to much finer-grained access controls (e.g. my Quicken files are owned by me, but not every process running as me should be able to read them), and a usable interface to control them. The latter may be harder than the former.
If web browsing were simply browsing the web, ie: reading HTML and other files, rather than downloading and running indeterminate applications of dubious origin
Yeah, but you need some way to download software whether it's with a browser or something else. And software of dubious origin shouldn't have access to all your files. Probably even software of known origin shouldn't. One of Apple's iTunes updates had a bug in the installer that could erase entire partitions under certain conditions. The OS should be able to step in and recognize that an installer should probably not be doing that.
Ultimately, the client will always win. Unless something like Palladium becomes required by law, the client can always do one thing and tell the server it did something else.
Right. Clay Shirky explained the basic problem with micropayments here:
All it takes is one time for you to think that an application's installer is legitimate when it isn't and your machine gets pwn3d.
And you don't even need an installer; there's plenty of nasty stuff a user-level program could do without elevated privileges. Search your email and documents for interesting items and transmit the results to somewhere in Nigeria, for example.
what makes this even more scary is that it isn't technicially a bug.
Absolutely correct. And the only way these attacks will ever be stopped is with automatic sandboxing at the OS level. That's a very hard problem, but much easier than educating millions of users about the finer points of information security, when they don't care and shouldn't have to.
It's not like these strings tell you any useful information.
Sure they do. You're right that it's far from definitive proof that Apple will be releasing quad-core 970MP machines, but the probability is clearly increased.
somebody, please explain to me why the rumor sites are so popular?
Certainly. In the commodity PC market there are many competitors, so price/performance improves at a fairly steady rate. You can buy pretty much anytime and it's unlikely that something vastly better and/or cheaper will come out the next week. But Apple is the sole supplier of Macs, so their improvements come in bursts. This has two major implications:
- It's often worth waiting to buy a Mac if you think new models are coming out soon. You really wouldn't have wanted to buy a G4 tower right before the G5s were announced, for example.
- Even for Apple fans who don't plan to buy in the near future, the infrequent but large advances are more interesting news. Intel going from 3.2 to 3.4GHz isn't terribly exciting, but Apple going from a dual 2.5GHz to (possibly) a quad 3.0 is.
Of course, it's fun to realize that if you lose 80% of your investment, you have to manage a gain of 400% to get back to even.
Not if you use dollar cost averaging. Because you buy more shares when the falls, your average price per share is lower and it's much easier to get back to even or better. I started investing near the peak of the bubble, and one of my aggressive mutual funds is about as volatile as the Nasdaq and went down around 80%. But it's subsequently doubled and I have a net gain from it, even though it's still only about a third of what it was when I started.
Supply and demand have nothing to do with the record industry's prices.
Of course they do. Even if a producer is a monopolist, demand still decreases as price increases.
How about Churchill from CU?
What about him? He's still being paid by the taxpayers, is not and will not be arrested, and may even get several million dollars if he agrees to leave. Not bad for spouting hate-filled idiocy. (And yes, I defend his right to do so).
As to other rights, I am amazed that Gov. Owens who fights against Quota's for race (Cool), is pushing to have Quota's at Universities based on Political Belief. Worse, he wants the Colorado Universities to only extend tenure to those who profess a conservative belief.
Yeah, that's pretty dumb.