What does it have that all the mp3 players that cane out before and cost less lack?
Ease of use and style. Unfortunately, these things mean very little to some of Slashdot's technocentric readership, so they are constantly overlooked as unimportant, or, at times, it is implied that anyone who chooses ease of use and style over maximum features and geek cred is stupid.
The iPod succeeds because it tackles a very narrow set of problems very well. It makes managing and listening to large music (and now video) libraries very, very easy. It doesn't try to pack in a lot of the bells and whistles which would detract from its primary purpose. Because of this, the people who designed the hardware and software were able to focus their efforts on a very few tasks instead of trying to tie together several separate and disparate functions on one machine. Why is this important?
Because most consumers want a device which is 1) easy to understand and 2) easy to use. The technofetishism which attracts a lot of the serious geek crowd is of no value to them. So, while the iPod wasn't the first mp3 player, and it lacks features found on some other players, the combination of the iPod, iTunes and good industrial design makes for a killer combo. My technologically clueless brother can use his iPod with no problems and no confusion. He doesn't have to read much of a m anual to use one, or pop through a lot of mensnus in a creaky interface. He can simply copy all his playlists from iTunes to the iPod and listen. The reason for the iPod's success us that the Nomad is a device. The iPod is a well thought out product.
He's not going to benchmark filesystems (if he even knows what one is), he's not going to look into the granularity of file permissions, he's going to look at the surface and compare it to his favourite OS (which he most likely loves due to the "ohhs and ahhs" portions).
And 'cause he's a Windows user, so he's not going to include a review of the seven anti-virus and firewall programs he needs to patch the gaping security holes in the system. Nor will he mention the seven hours it took to get his digital camera to work, the three days he loses every month when WGA decides his machine isn't authorized any more, the install DVDs he keeps next to his machine for the monthly reinstalls, cause the best way to solve problems on a Windows box is to just reinstall the thing.
And he isn't a Linux user, so we don't have to hear him brag that he built a dual Opteron machine with a 2 TB RAID for only $6.50. Nor do we have to hear him tell us he can't believe anyone would ever pay for an operating system, even though he had to spend nine days crawling through endless Linux forums to find the obscure, cryptic shell command which will let his sound card work at full volume most of the time. And he will never brag that he feels sorry for people who are tied to programs like Office or Photoshop when there are open source programs out there which work almost almost as well for professional needs, such as making the posters of fat chicks in Sailor Moon outfits he prints out to cover the basement walls of his home.
And, yes, I know my generalizations are as stupid as yours. But my grammar's better.
Of course. I've worked in print production for 15 years. I've run departments. Are you seriously trying to tell me that all of the album artwork in the 60s, 70s and 80s was printed with spot colors?
Never seen a print made with unusual inks like flouroescent or metallic?
Of course I have. But that's not what you said. You said "then we would still have decent artists making album covers, not shitty process CMYK reproductions" which, to me, implied that CMYK was not used to print those old covers at all. I don't know if that's what you meant, but that's what it sounded like to me.
How do they reproduce colours that can't be made with CMYK inks?
You don't seem to understand print production. "Continuous tone" means, essentially, pictures. There is only one way to print pictures on an offset press, and that is using CMYK.* So, all those great album covers you like were printed with CMYK on offset presses, simply because no other technology existed, or exists.
His science is far from "stellar". Often, it's quite poor.
The show's not called ScienceBusters. Neither of them are portrayed as scientists or experts in science. They are, just as the intro says, special effects guys, which means they're jacks of all trades who know enough science and engineering (more engineering) to do their jobs well. And the show isn't about science. It's about testing the plausibility of urban myths, which they do a pretty good job at. For me, half the fun is watching them go through the process of building and testing their machines.
The other half is watching shit blow up. Now THAT'S entertainment!
Their "vetting" is a PASSIVE one - if it contradicts their teachings, it just doesn't get published
And if you read the paper, you will see that isn't even true any more. Christian Science is a metaphysical religion and doesn't believe that sickness is real. Its members believe, among other things, that sickness is a manifestation of one's thinking. Yet the CSM publishes articles on disease all the time. They cover cancer, AIDS, and all of the other wonderful ways there are to get sick. The paper also publishes articles on research in the possibility of a historical Jesus, theological controversies, and other things which disagree with the teaching of the church. It's actually one of the best papers in the country, and Christian Scientists are about the least annoying Christians you will ever meet.
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Unfortunately, it is a 12-incher. And I wasn't quite clear: what I mean to highlight wasn't that taking apart a laptop is impossible, but that my brother, because of his lack of clue, thinks that you can take apart the magic box like you could take apart something far simpler. He thought it might take half an hour and be no big deal.
OK, thanks for pointing those out. Now we can board the boats and steal them.
Anyone who wants to use this information to steal one of the boats already knows this. They have followed the program's progress, read articles about the testing and very probably surveilled the boats themselves. This man's point is not that the information isn't available, but that Lockheed Martin and the government are refusing to fix a problem which any trained assailant could spot through normal intelligence channels. Finding out that the boats have a blind spot would be easy: photograph the boats at anchor and carefully study the photographs.
My problem with this is, working in automotive systems, we regularly see this requirement, and it's more of a "spec" thin
My dad worked for Lockheed for 20+ years and dealt with MIL-SPEC a lot. The specifications are there for a reason: the same weapon or system has to work exactly as well no matter the conditions. And, as this is very literally a matter of life and death, the systems must work every time. These cutters aren't cars. They're weapons systems meant to protect us. These cutters may have to help protect the equally-imparied SBX radar in the Bering Strait in that -40 degree weather and fog.
This one is a bit ridiculous, and shows his paranoia.
If you go back and watch the video, he says that the unshielded cables are only part of the problem with the communications systems. As the system is a classified he can't really discuss it, be he clearly said that 1) the system did not pass "tests" and that 2) he believes the system is insecure. My dad's an engineer. When your engineers tell you that something is wrong, you listen.
puts our Coast Guards at much greater jeopardy than the things he's addressing!
You miss the point: the Coast Guard is ALREADY at risk. As I said, anyone who wants to attack or steal these boats already knows this, because the development process of weapons systems is public record (dreary and boring public record, but public nonetheless). What he is trying to do is move Lockheed Martin and the government to fix the problem before some takes advantage of it.
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Slashdot is a really bad filter to try and descern how Apple products are perceived, just look at the iPod when it came out. You can almost delcare Slashdot a comically bad judge of Apple products to the extent the direction of groupthink here is probably always the opposite of what the general market thinks.
I think you can go further: Slashdot is a horribly bad predictor of the success of technology meant for the average computer user, because no one who posts here is an average computer user, me included. When I think of average computer users I think of my brother, who asked me if I would help him fix his Powerbook. He had dropped the thing from a good height more than once and had so bent the case that he couldn't plug in the power cord. His idea of 'fixing' the thing was to take to computer completely apart, take a hammer and bang the case back into shape. I tried to explain to him that taking apart a laptop is not a small thing and that banging the case back into shape was no easy thing. I told him to take the thing to Tekserve and have them do it, because I wasn't going to take on the responsibility of possibly ruining someone else's computer.
The difference, I think, is that the average computer user thinks of the machine as a monolithic thing: it's a magic electronic box. When something goes wrong with the machine, it's universal. It's not that the USB has fried, or that a software update has choked, but that the whole magic box is now sick. This explains a couple of things. It is why people throw out perfectly good computers after two or three years rather than upgrade; if you think of the computer like a microwave (the principle of which most people don't understand) then there's no way you'd ever think of upgrading one. It explains why Slashdot was dead wrong on the success of the iPod; Apple created the mp3 player as magic electronic box, something your average user could relate to. Attach to computer, manage in iTunes, music appears on iPod. It's monolithic and, for someone who thinks of technology that way, simple.
And it explains the success of Apple's ads, and the displeasure they cause here. Apple is selling the computer as magic monolithic box and saying, essentially, our magic box is easier to use than someone else's. Most on Slashdot know that computers aren't magic boxes. Many here take great pride in how deep that knowledge runs, and take great joy in delving deep into the guts of their machines and OSes. But your average computer user doesn't want to, and doesn't care. That is the target audience for these ads, and for devices like the iPod. Beyond that, your average computer user wants a magic electronic box, something which functions more as an information appliance than anything else.
Most Slashdot readers don't want a magic box. But Slashdot users are the minority.
I've found the same thing. At any one time, the amount of music I'm listening to is pretty small: maybe a gigabyte. Maybe. I could probably do fine with a Nano.
Well, ya got me there. I dont actually have statistical evidence that Mac users are elitist. However, the Mac users I've encountered in real life have tended to be elitist as have the Mac users I've encounter on Slashdot. Seriously, even if I did have statistics, wouldn't you just attack the word "elitist" as being so dificult to define as to be unprovable? Yet, all the same, the PC users I've know who have helped out Mac users have a strong tendency to use this word. I think there's a lot of truth to it.
My anecdotal evidence goes against yours: I have known more than one elitist Windows user. My girlfriend's brother is such Windows elitist he won't consider the Mac or Linux, despite my trying to explain to him that Linux has gotten much more user friendly since he tried to install it on his Frankencomputer four years ago. Which is back to my point: there are elitists in any community. I personally don't find more among Mac users.
The users don't have to be mentioned. They show "the PC guy" as slightly uptight bafoon who wears ugly, ill-fitting clothes, while they show "the Mac guy" as cool, smart and relaxed. You could watch the ads without any sound at all and you'd know they're making fun of PC users.
Then we see the ads very differently.
Apple insinuates you can be John Lennon.
And the current HP ads insinuate you can be Jay Z. Par for the course with electronics ads.
If you really want to understand the Apple elitism then all you have to do is talk to a few Mac users about PCs.
I do talk to them: I are one. And, with the exception of one friend of mine who has a visceral hatred of PCs, I don't find elitism. I find people who prefer their Macs, but preference!=elitism. They don't think using a Mac makes them better. They just like 'em.
Now, as another thought as to why Apple's advertising may be elitist. If we assume it is, then we ask why. And the 'why' is answered right here: mindshare. How many conversations about Dell's ads do you see on Slashdot? If Apple's advertising is elitist, and if that's for a reason, it seems to be working very well.
It's a fine line, but Apple is so far over that line it's not even funny. Whether you call them elitists, fan-boys, or "the Mac Faithful", it all boils down to Apple catering to a group of people who's default position is that everything Apple and all apple users are awesome while everything launched out of Microsoft and all microsoft users couldn't possibly be as good.
Could you please link me to these Apple fans you're talking about? And I don't mean Slashdot trolls, I mean real people. And, could you please show me that this group is a statistically significant percentage of the 19 million OS X users Jobs talked about? Cause I don't think you can.
Every group of people, whether they're Mac users, Yankees fans, Mustang owners or Windows users will have its extremists whose identity is tied up with what they own or use. But I'm a long-term Mac user and I don't particularly care what OS people use. In fact, I dual boot Linux on my Powerbook (or did, until it died) to have something else to mess around with. Most of the Mac users I know aren't particularly extreme or even Mac-centric. They use Macs for the same reason most Windows users do: it works for them and meets their needs. The IT people I know who use Macs, or have started using them, do it in large part because the BDSishness of OS X makes their lives easier.
However, their recent ads have been designed to make PC users look like bafoons while Apple users bask in, really, an entirely different plane of computer use. I can't think of a more classic definition of elitism.
Actually, if you had paid attention you would've seen that the recent ads make Wintel machines look harder to use than Macs. Users are never mentioned. Don't believe me? Watch the ads yourself and see how many times users are mentioned.
Macs are featured as being used by people smarter, hipper and better looking than you or me (well, me anyway). These people are elite. If Apple ever want's to be considered anything but elitist, they can start by showing ads of a receptionist using a Mac. Or is that just too... common?
Every tech ad you see shows these people because it is assumed that these people are the ones with the disposable income to buy computers and gadgets. HP currently has ads showing rich and famous rappers using their products. Amp'd mobile has ads showing hip, young urban things using their phones. Motorola shows older, yet still hip, urban folks using the Razr. HP also shows Perfect Suburban Families using their cameras and printers, etc. The issue here isn't whether Apple is running an "elitist" ad campagn (they're not) but the assumptions in our society as to which lifestyles are preferred, and, therefore, which lifestyles you want to associate your product with. Jaguar doesn't show the insurance salesman from Fort Wayne using their car to drive to and from work. They show images of people who represent (to them) the ideas of youth, wealth and sexiness.
It's our culture. Many people want to be rich and oversexed. Very few want to be a receptionist.
I agree with this. I've said it before-- the main reason you hear more quality complaints from Mac users isn't that the quality is lower than Dell, but because the users expect more. Macintosh users tend to be picky, and Apple raises the bar for themselves by hyping their systems as being somehow "flawless".
Take the example of the Powerbook Ti, which had a tendency for a small amount of paint to flake off. If you looked at the forums on Mac news sites, you'd think it was the end of the world. On the other hand, how many models of Dell/Sony laptops have had some sort of problem where you could scrape off some paint, or the casing became discolored at some point? Pretty much all of them.
I agree with ya. I've seen people complaining on Mac boards about problems I didn't even see as if they were life and death.
1) Apple most assuredly designed the new Mac Pros, as they are an evolution of the G5 case. Beyond that, Apple co-designed the motherboard, as I don't think Intel makes one with Firewire 800;
2) Apple is most assuredly are a hardware company, as they make most of their money selling hardware, just as Dell does. Dell doesn't design their systems, either: they buy in bulk, toss it into a box and sell it. Apple actually does much more industrial design than does Dell;
3) Very few large companies are really make their own stuff these days. Fr'instance, almost any car you buy will be made of components and subassemblies manufactured in twenty different locations and assembled at a central point;
4) And none of that includes the iPods or laptops, which Apple most assuredly designs and manufactures.
1. Work Created.
2. Copyright acquired.
3. Work sits quite nicely on the third shelf waiting for something to happen.
4. Creator grudgingly enters a contract with a Major Label, who rakes them over coals. Label acquires work, sells some copies, then buries it the following year. No one ever sees work again.
5. Artist is lucky to receive a pittance for their effort.
You're conflating copyright and distribution, which aren't the same, although both are equally fucked in their own ways. The dividing line is 3/4: the artist doesn't have to sign with a major label or publisher. There are other options.
If the ARTISTS AND BUYERS unite, then the DRM media companies will croak.
Not really. Even if I self-publish, I will would like a way to be remunerated for my work, and to make sure I am the only legal owner. So, I don't know if the DRM media companies will 'croak', although there may be a much-needed realignment.
I currently avoid both Ipods, and all but the essential paid music. I am content for the moment with free tracks, remix communities, and I'm studying Emusic.
I don't know why you avoid iPods, unless you do so because you don't want any attachment to a company which uses DRM. My iPod is about 95% DRM-free music, which the 5% the few albums I have bought off of the iTMS. Like you I download mostly from the remix community, although not for any political reasons. It's just the music I'm listening to right now.
No, your argument is meaningless because you are falling into the logical trap of assuming that the-law-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the only way maximising society's benefit. That's flat out wrong.
It's clear to me you didn't read my post very well, because I said, " you had said the application of the copyright laws have become more and more restrictive an in favor of corporations, I would have agreed with you." So, given you haven't paid attention to what I said, I don't know why you're responding, other than to hear yourself speak.
Incidentally, who says you should be able to make a living from it?
I do. As does capitalism, which you attempt to reference with your solipsistic 'supply and demand' reference. Artists have as much a right to make a living from their work as does anyone else who works for a living, including yourself. Let's see you work for free for a while. However, I see there is no need to go forward, as I am talking to a wall. Anyone who claims that the law is solely a "creation of the mind" is living on their own, lonely planet.
There is no such thing as intellectual property, the intellect is unlimited.
That's an absolutely ridiculous statement. Your logic is off, as well, because you're conflating the idea of copyright with the execution of the laws.
There is absolutely a need for copyright, because there has to be a way for artists to protect the results of their effort, which is what art is. Every movie, book or song you like is the result of the work of an artist, or a group of artists. Without some legal form of protection which ensures the benefits accrued from that effort will go back to remunerating the artist(s), producing that art becomes much more difficult. I am a writer, which means (for now, hopefully) that I have to balance paying work and writing. Should I get published, I would very much like my writing to pay my bills, so I can devote more time to writing. Without copyright, that becomes much more difficult, as anyone can publish my work as their own and reap the benefits of my toil. Without some legal framework to ensure that I can be compensated for what I have created, it becomes very difficult for me to make a living.
As a fr'instance, suppose you had spent the last three years writing a movie script. Suppose you had been lucky enough to get interest from a producer and begin the production process. Now, suppose someone steals your script and makes the movie. The last three years of your life just went up in smoke. IN y our logic, there is 1) nothing you can do and 2) nothing you should do.
If you had said the application of the copyright laws have become more and more restrictive an in favor of corporations, I would have agreed with you. But saying that there is no need for copyright is plain silly.
because they've got something the vanity publishing houses usually don't: A stable of very experienced (and bloodthirsty) editors.
Speaking as a writer, that's not so true any more. As large(r) corporations have bought up a lot of the smaller or formerly independent publishing houses, the culture has changed. While in the past editors would actually spend a lot of their time editing, nowadays it is much more of a sales/marketing position, with most of the actual editing being done by agents and their staffs. Editors at large publishing houses are now much more worried about how they can market the book: what genre does it fit into?; can it possibly be made into a movie?; are there any spin-off possibilities?; etc. One of the more troubling results of this is vastly increased pressure on writers to have a "successful" book. where the demands of successful have been ratcheted up by the appearance of the blockbuster novel in the 1970s. It is rarer and rarer to find a publisher who will stick with a promising novelist as s/he builds up a base of readership or improves his or her craft, and it is much more common to be dropped by a major published for failing to meet sales expectations. From this perspective, the opportunity of POD opens up new avenues to writers who may find themselves not fitting into the new, corporate publishing world in much the same way that the birth of digital music and downloading has opened up new avenues to musicians and bands.
As to the "self-published authors suck" argument: walk into your closest Barnes & Noble or Borders and pick ten fiction books at random. Read the first few pages. You will probably find that eight or nine of them are somewhere between mediocre and terrible, which is to say that 1) "good" writing is entirely subjective and 2) most books published, now and in the past, have been somewhere between mediocre and terrible. Just because you're published doesn't mean you're a good writer. I know a guy who has published two novels with a respectable publisher. He's not a terribly good writer, but he is related to an agent through marriage, and that was his in. He knows how to work the system, and this is the reason for his success.
Will a writer benefit from a good editor? Absolutely. Is it absolutely necessary? No. And, given the increasingly corporate culture writers now face, the importance of an alternative avenue is more important than ever. In other words, I would rather read a somewhat rough novel written by someone with passion and talent than a well-polished turd by someone writing another novel of the month.
Adobe cares about their professional customers and those people are having Quad or Dual G5 workstations with massive SCSI arrays etc right now.
Adobe doesn't give two shits about its customers anymore, and hasn't for a while. Adobe cares about forcing people to upgrade by releasing ever more bloated versions of its core apps in which the feature to boat ratio is dismal. The best synopsis I've ever seen comes from Daring FIreball:
Rather than expand into untapped creative markets, Adobe seems hell-bent on expanding into the jerks-wearing-suits market, a market that's completely at odds with the creative market they've dominated for nearly two decades.
Adobe's best and core products are their oldest, and they are graphics products: PostScript, the Adobe Type Library, Illustrator, and Photoshop. InDesign is relatively new but genuinely fits alongside these products. This is why Adobe's core customers -- who still use and love many of their products -- are dismayed and confused by the company's direction in recent years. But is it any surprise that a company that is run by jerks-wearing-suits is now targeting the jerks-wearing-suits software market?
I make my money doing production and pre-press, and have for the last fifteen or so years. The last five years of Adobe's product upgrades have been the most bug- and problem-ridden I have ever seen. For me, the straw which broke the camel's back was the InDesign launch. Adobe promised a program which would revolutionize desktop publishing. Instead we got a program which fell somewhere between PageMaker and older versions of Quark, a program which came nowhere near Adobe's promises. I think Adobe felt the animus against Quark would be enough for them to take over the market. Much to their surprise, but not to mine, it hasn't happened. To add insult to injury, the latest version of ID still isn't feature complete with Quark and has one of the worst interfaces I have ever seen for a typography program.
So, while I agree that there's no reason for me to upgrade my G5 until the next round of dtp programs are Intel-native, I have no illusions as to why Adobe is delaying the release of CS3. It's all about profit, all the time.
Professionals does not throw out $20k mission critical workstations because Steve Jobs became Intel fanboy recently.:)
Actually, we upgrade whenever the workload demands it. If I started to get a lot of heavy Photoshop work you bet your bippy I would go out and buy a pimped out dual dual-core G5, because the machine would pay for itself pretty quickly.
Only works if you want to run Linux as your main OS. For someone like me who uses OS X as their main OS on a PPC machine, there seem to be no virtualization options. I would love to run Linux as a guest OS, but I have been searching and searching and have found nothing. Q will allow you to run a 2.4.x kernel only, and Mac-on-Mac is very alpha software.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't need an off switch. Turns itself off automaticaly after a few minutes of inactivity.
As for the rest of your comment, where's the "recycled rant" tag when I need it?
Ease of use and style. Unfortunately, these things mean very little to some of Slashdot's technocentric readership, so they are constantly overlooked as unimportant, or, at times, it is implied that anyone who chooses ease of use and style over maximum features and geek cred is stupid.
The iPod succeeds because it tackles a very narrow set of problems very well. It makes managing and listening to large music (and now video) libraries very, very easy. It doesn't try to pack in a lot of the bells and whistles which would detract from its primary purpose. Because of this, the people who designed the hardware and software were able to focus their efforts on a very few tasks instead of trying to tie together several separate and disparate functions on one machine. Why is this important?
Because most consumers want a device which is 1) easy to understand and 2) easy to use. The technofetishism which attracts a lot of the serious geek crowd is of no value to them. So, while the iPod wasn't the first mp3 player, and it lacks features found on some other players, the combination of the iPod, iTunes and good industrial design makes for a killer combo. My technologically clueless brother can use his iPod with no problems and no confusion. He doesn't have to read much of a m anual to use one, or pop through a lot of mensnus in a creaky interface. He can simply copy all his playlists from iTunes to the iPod and listen. The reason for the iPod's success us that the Nomad is a device. The iPod is a well thought out product.
None whatsoever. No product activation. No serial number to enter. Just an install DVD.
And 'cause he's a Windows user, so he's not going to include a review of the seven anti-virus and firewall programs he needs to patch the gaping security holes in the system. Nor will he mention the seven hours it took to get his digital camera to work, the three days he loses every month when WGA decides his machine isn't authorized any more, the install DVDs he keeps next to his machine for the monthly reinstalls, cause the best way to solve problems on a Windows box is to just reinstall the thing.
And he isn't a Linux user, so we don't have to hear him brag that he built a dual Opteron machine with a 2 TB RAID for only $6.50. Nor do we have to hear him tell us he can't believe anyone would ever pay for an operating system, even though he had to spend nine days crawling through endless Linux forums to find the obscure, cryptic shell command which will let his sound card work at full volume most of the time. And he will never brag that he feels sorry for people who are tied to programs like Office or Photoshop when there are open source programs out there which work almost almost as well for professional needs, such as making the posters of fat chicks in Sailor Moon outfits he prints out to cover the basement walls of his home.
And, yes, I know my generalizations are as stupid as yours. But my grammar's better.
The Iranians also use them as AWACs.
Of course. I've worked in print production for 15 years. I've run departments. Are you seriously trying to tell me that all of the album artwork in the 60s, 70s and 80s was printed with spot colors?
Of course I have. But that's not what you said. You said "then we would still have decent artists making album covers, not shitty process CMYK reproductions" which, to me, implied that CMYK was not used to print those old covers at all. I don't know if that's what you meant, but that's what it sounded like to me.
Hexachrome, baby!
Let Wikipedia guide you.
* There are some other, enhanced CMYK models out now, like Hexachrome, but they didn't exist when all those album covers were printed.
I don't understand this sentence. All that great LP artwork was CMYK, because that's the only way to offset print continuous tone images.
I rarely buy anything from the iTMS, but for a completely different reason: very little of the music I want to listen to is on the iTMS.
The show's not called ScienceBusters. Neither of them are portrayed as scientists or experts in science. They are, just as the intro says, special effects guys, which means they're jacks of all trades who know enough science and engineering (more engineering) to do their jobs well. And the show isn't about science. It's about testing the plausibility of urban myths, which they do a pretty good job at. For me, half the fun is watching them go through the process of building and testing their machines.
The other half is watching shit blow up. Now THAT'S entertainment!
And if you read the paper, you will see that isn't even true any more. Christian Science is a metaphysical religion and doesn't believe that sickness is real. Its members believe, among other things, that sickness is a manifestation of one's thinking. Yet the CSM publishes articles on disease all the time. They cover cancer, AIDS, and all of the other wonderful ways there are to get sick. The paper also publishes articles on research in the possibility of a historical Jesus, theological controversies, and other things which disagree with the teaching of the church. It's actually one of the best papers in the country, and Christian Scientists are about the least annoying Christians you will ever meet.
Unfortunately, it is a 12-incher. And I wasn't quite clear: what I mean to highlight wasn't that taking apart a laptop is impossible, but that my brother, because of his lack of clue, thinks that you can take apart the magic box like you could take apart something far simpler. He thought it might take half an hour and be no big deal.
Anyone who wants to use this information to steal one of the boats already knows this. They have followed the program's progress, read articles about the testing and very probably surveilled the boats themselves. This man's point is not that the information isn't available, but that Lockheed Martin and the government are refusing to fix a problem which any trained assailant could spot through normal intelligence channels. Finding out that the boats have a blind spot would be easy: photograph the boats at anchor and carefully study the photographs.
My dad worked for Lockheed for 20+ years and dealt with MIL-SPEC a lot. The specifications are there for a reason: the same weapon or system has to work exactly as well no matter the conditions. And, as this is very literally a matter of life and death, the systems must work every time. These cutters aren't cars. They're weapons systems meant to protect us. These cutters may have to help protect the equally-imparied SBX radar in the Bering Strait in that -40 degree weather and fog.
If you go back and watch the video, he says that the unshielded cables are only part of the problem with the communications systems. As the system is a classified he can't really discuss it, be he clearly said that 1) the system did not pass "tests" and that 2) he believes the system is insecure. My dad's an engineer. When your engineers tell you that something is wrong, you listen.
You miss the point: the Coast Guard is ALREADY at risk. As I said, anyone who wants to attack or steal these boats already knows this, because the development process of weapons systems is public record (dreary and boring public record, but public nonetheless). What he is trying to do is move Lockheed Martin and the government to fix the problem before some takes advantage of it.
I think you can go further: Slashdot is a horribly bad predictor of the success of technology meant for the average computer user, because no one who posts here is an average computer user, me included. When I think of average computer users I think of my brother, who asked me if I would help him fix his Powerbook. He had dropped the thing from a good height more than once and had so bent the case that he couldn't plug in the power cord. His idea of 'fixing' the thing was to take to computer completely apart, take a hammer and bang the case back into shape. I tried to explain to him that taking apart a laptop is not a small thing and that banging the case back into shape was no easy thing. I told him to take the thing to Tekserve and have them do it, because I wasn't going to take on the responsibility of possibly ruining someone else's computer.
The difference, I think, is that the average computer user thinks of the machine as a monolithic thing: it's a magic electronic box. When something goes wrong with the machine, it's universal. It's not that the USB has fried, or that a software update has choked, but that the whole magic box is now sick. This explains a couple of things. It is why people throw out perfectly good computers after two or three years rather than upgrade; if you think of the computer like a microwave (the principle of which most people don't understand) then there's no way you'd ever think of upgrading one. It explains why Slashdot was dead wrong on the success of the iPod; Apple created the mp3 player as magic electronic box, something your average user could relate to. Attach to computer, manage in iTunes, music appears on iPod. It's monolithic and, for someone who thinks of technology that way, simple.
And it explains the success of Apple's ads, and the displeasure they cause here. Apple is selling the computer as magic monolithic box and saying, essentially, our magic box is easier to use than someone else's. Most on Slashdot know that computers aren't magic boxes. Many here take great pride in how deep that knowledge runs, and take great joy in delving deep into the guts of their machines and OSes. But your average computer user doesn't want to, and doesn't care. That is the target audience for these ads, and for devices like the iPod. Beyond that, your average computer user wants a magic electronic box, something which functions more as an information appliance than anything else.
Most Slashdot readers don't want a magic box. But Slashdot users are the minority.
I've found the same thing. At any one time, the amount of music I'm listening to is pretty small: maybe a gigabyte. Maybe. I could probably do fine with a Nano.
My anecdotal evidence goes against yours: I have known more than one elitist Windows user. My girlfriend's brother is such Windows elitist he won't consider the Mac or Linux, despite my trying to explain to him that Linux has gotten much more user friendly since he tried to install it on his Frankencomputer four years ago. Which is back to my point: there are elitists in any community. I personally don't find more among Mac users.
Then we see the ads very differently.
And the current HP ads insinuate you can be Jay Z. Par for the course with electronics ads.
I do talk to them: I are one. And, with the exception of one friend of mine who has a visceral hatred of PCs, I don't find elitism. I find people who prefer their Macs, but preference!=elitism. They don't think using a Mac makes them better. They just like 'em.
Now, as another thought as to why Apple's advertising may be elitist. If we assume it is, then we ask why. And the 'why' is answered right here: mindshare. How many conversations about Dell's ads do you see on Slashdot? If Apple's advertising is elitist, and if that's for a reason, it seems to be working very well.
Could you please link me to these Apple fans you're talking about? And I don't mean Slashdot trolls, I mean real people. And, could you please show me that this group is a statistically significant percentage of the 19 million OS X users Jobs talked about? Cause I don't think you can.
Every group of people, whether they're Mac users, Yankees fans, Mustang owners or Windows users will have its extremists whose identity is tied up with what they own or use. But I'm a long-term Mac user and I don't particularly care what OS people use. In fact, I dual boot Linux on my Powerbook (or did, until it died) to have something else to mess around with. Most of the Mac users I know aren't particularly extreme or even Mac-centric. They use Macs for the same reason most Windows users do: it works for them and meets their needs. The IT people I know who use Macs, or have started using them, do it in large part because the BDSishness of OS X makes their lives easier.
Actually, if you had paid attention you would've seen that the recent ads make Wintel machines look harder to use than Macs. Users are never mentioned. Don't believe me? Watch the ads yourself and see how many times users are mentioned.
Every tech ad you see shows these people because it is assumed that these people are the ones with the disposable income to buy computers and gadgets. HP currently has ads showing rich and famous rappers using their products. Amp'd mobile has ads showing hip, young urban things using their phones. Motorola shows older, yet still hip, urban folks using the Razr. HP also shows Perfect Suburban Families using their cameras and printers, etc. The issue here isn't whether Apple is running an "elitist" ad campagn (they're not) but the assumptions in our society as to which lifestyles are preferred, and, therefore, which lifestyles you want to associate your product with. Jaguar doesn't show the insurance salesman from Fort Wayne using their car to drive to and from work. They show images of people who represent (to them) the ideas of youth, wealth and sexiness.
It's our culture. Many people want to be rich and oversexed. Very few want to be a receptionist.
I agree with ya. I've seen people complaining on Mac boards about problems I didn't even see as if they were life and death.
1) Apple most assuredly designed the new Mac Pros, as they are an evolution of the G5 case. Beyond that, Apple co-designed the motherboard, as I don't think Intel makes one with Firewire 800;
2) Apple is most assuredly are a hardware company, as they make most of their money selling hardware, just as Dell does. Dell doesn't design their systems, either: they buy in bulk, toss it into a box and sell it. Apple actually does much more industrial design than does Dell;
3) Very few large companies are really make their own stuff these days. Fr'instance, almost any car you buy will be made of components and subassemblies manufactured in twenty different locations and assembled at a central point;
4) And none of that includes the iPods or laptops, which Apple most assuredly designs and manufactures.
You're conflating copyright and distribution, which aren't the same, although both are equally fucked in their own ways. The dividing line is 3/4: the artist doesn't have to sign with a major label or publisher. There are other options.
Not really. Even if I self-publish, I will would like a way to be remunerated for my work, and to make sure I am the only legal owner. So, I don't know if the DRM media companies will 'croak', although there may be a much-needed realignment.
I don't know why you avoid iPods, unless you do so because you don't want any attachment to a company which uses DRM. My iPod is about 95% DRM-free music, which the 5% the few albums I have bought off of the iTMS. Like you I download mostly from the remix community, although not for any political reasons. It's just the music I'm listening to right now.
It's clear to me you didn't read my post very well, because I said, " you had said the application of the copyright laws have become more and more restrictive an in favor of corporations, I would have agreed with you." So, given you haven't paid attention to what I said, I don't know why you're responding, other than to hear yourself speak.
I do. As does capitalism, which you attempt to reference with your solipsistic 'supply and demand' reference. Artists have as much a right to make a living from their work as does anyone else who works for a living, including yourself. Let's see you work for free for a while. However, I see there is no need to go forward, as I am talking to a wall. Anyone who claims that the law is solely a "creation of the mind" is living on their own, lonely planet.
That's an absolutely ridiculous statement. Your logic is off, as well, because you're conflating the idea of copyright with the execution of the laws.
There is absolutely a need for copyright, because there has to be a way for artists to protect the results of their effort, which is what art is. Every movie, book or song you like is the result of the work of an artist, or a group of artists. Without some legal form of protection which ensures the benefits accrued from that effort will go back to remunerating the artist(s), producing that art becomes much more difficult. I am a writer, which means (for now, hopefully) that I have to balance paying work and writing. Should I get published, I would very much like my writing to pay my bills, so I can devote more time to writing. Without copyright, that becomes much more difficult, as anyone can publish my work as their own and reap the benefits of my toil. Without some legal framework to ensure that I can be compensated for what I have created, it becomes very difficult for me to make a living.
As a fr'instance, suppose you had spent the last three years writing a movie script. Suppose you had been lucky enough to get interest from a producer and begin the production process. Now, suppose someone steals your script and makes the movie. The last three years of your life just went up in smoke. IN y our logic, there is 1) nothing you can do and 2) nothing you should do.
If you had said the application of the copyright laws have become more and more restrictive an in favor of corporations, I would have agreed with you. But saying that there is no need for copyright is plain silly.
Speaking as a writer, that's not so true any more. As large(r) corporations have bought up a lot of the smaller or formerly independent publishing houses, the culture has changed. While in the past editors would actually spend a lot of their time editing, nowadays it is much more of a sales/marketing position, with most of the actual editing being done by agents and their staffs. Editors at large publishing houses are now much more worried about how they can market the book: what genre does it fit into?; can it possibly be made into a movie?; are there any spin-off possibilities?; etc. One of the more troubling results of this is vastly increased pressure on writers to have a "successful" book. where the demands of successful have been ratcheted up by the appearance of the blockbuster novel in the 1970s. It is rarer and rarer to find a publisher who will stick with a promising novelist as s/he builds up a base of readership or improves his or her craft, and it is much more common to be dropped by a major published for failing to meet sales expectations. From this perspective, the opportunity of POD opens up new avenues to writers who may find themselves not fitting into the new, corporate publishing world in much the same way that the birth of digital music and downloading has opened up new avenues to musicians and bands.
As to the "self-published authors suck" argument: walk into your closest Barnes & Noble or Borders and pick ten fiction books at random. Read the first few pages. You will probably find that eight or nine of them are somewhere between mediocre and terrible, which is to say that 1) "good" writing is entirely subjective and 2) most books published, now and in the past, have been somewhere between mediocre and terrible. Just because you're published doesn't mean you're a good writer. I know a guy who has published two novels with a respectable publisher. He's not a terribly good writer, but he is related to an agent through marriage, and that was his in. He knows how to work the system, and this is the reason for his success.
Will a writer benefit from a good editor? Absolutely. Is it absolutely necessary? No. And, given the increasingly corporate culture writers now face, the importance of an alternative avenue is more important than ever. In other words, I would rather read a somewhat rough novel written by someone with passion and talent than a well-polished turd by someone writing another novel of the month.
Adobe doesn't give two shits about its customers anymore, and hasn't for a while. Adobe cares about forcing people to upgrade by releasing ever more bloated versions of its core apps in which the feature to boat ratio is dismal. The best synopsis I've ever seen comes from Daring FIreball:
Rather than expand into untapped creative markets, Adobe seems hell-bent on expanding into the jerks-wearing-suits market, a market that's completely at odds with the creative market they've dominated for nearly two decades.
Adobe's best and core products are their oldest, and they are graphics products: PostScript, the Adobe Type Library, Illustrator, and Photoshop. InDesign is relatively new but genuinely fits alongside these products. This is why Adobe's core customers -- who still use and love many of their products -- are dismayed and confused by the company's direction in recent years. But is it any surprise that a company that is run by jerks-wearing-suits is now targeting the jerks-wearing-suits software market?
I make my money doing production and pre-press, and have for the last fifteen or so years. The last five years of Adobe's product upgrades have been the most bug- and problem-ridden I have ever seen. For me, the straw which broke the camel's back was the InDesign launch. Adobe promised a program which would revolutionize desktop publishing. Instead we got a program which fell somewhere between PageMaker and older versions of Quark, a program which came nowhere near Adobe's promises. I think Adobe felt the animus against Quark would be enough for them to take over the market. Much to their surprise, but not to mine, it hasn't happened. To add insult to injury, the latest version of ID still isn't feature complete with Quark and has one of the worst interfaces I have ever seen for a typography program.
So, while I agree that there's no reason for me to upgrade my G5 until the next round of dtp programs are Intel-native, I have no illusions as to why Adobe is delaying the release of CS3. It's all about profit, all the time.
Actually, we upgrade whenever the workload demands it. If I started to get a lot of heavy Photoshop work you bet your bippy I would go out and buy a pimped out dual dual-core G5, because the machine would pay for itself pretty quickly.
Only works if you want to run Linux as your main OS. For someone like me who uses OS X as their main OS on a PPC machine, there seem to be no virtualization options. I would love to run Linux as a guest OS, but I have been searching and searching and have found nothing. Q will allow you to run a 2.4.x kernel only, and Mac-on-Mac is very alpha software.