It doesn't require a credit card. You can have an iTunes store account without a credit card and fund it entirely through purchased iTunes gift cards that you can buy with cash in a store.
Details on setting up are left as an exercise to the reader with access to google and about 15 seconds of spare time.
I'm starting to wonder if the lady doth protest too much.
You might want to start from the premise that not everyone who writes something critical about something you like is a fanboy or paid shill of the "opposition". That level of cynicism speaks volumes about the fragility of your own belief in the thing you are "protecting".
Yes, because it's a sensible, rational line of thought that looks at the picture as a whole. It is totally unsurprising to me that it can be fitted to almost any discussion that gets media coverage, generally because the media (or people with an agenda like anti-nuke/anti-windfarm/anti-healthcare etc) like to go for sensationalist reporting and disinformation. It's no wonder that defensive rhetoric from proponents of the various targets of this propaganda is broadly similar in style.
Start with a dish full of bacteria, and then put an antibiotic on there that kills most of them, then allow it to grow back to the original size of the colony. Now see what that antibiotic does when you treat the same colony.
Observing it on a single-cell timescale just speeds things up, but you don;t have to do that. If you isolate two macro-sized populations you can observe the same effect - for example, mammals who started as a common species that diverged to take advantage of their local environments after being separated by a geological shift (island gets suddenly cut off, etc). It takes longer to observe, but it can be seen.
Quicker to see with populations that breed extremely quickly though.
DRM made it potentially very costly to leave the iPod ecosystem.
I assume by that you mean the £2.50 it cost for a stack of CD-Rs to strip the DRM from your iTunes Store tracks from within iTunes itself (as Apple strongly suggested you do every time you downloaded something).
That was until they removed all the DRM of course, making it a non issue.
It seems we're in the same position as we were back when IE was the "standard" for the web, and using an alternative (standards compliant) browser would run you into roadblocks, especially on things like banking and commercial sites.
I didn't see slashdot complaining back then when the move was to try and push actual standards compliance over a proprietary single-vendor standard.
We've just replaced "Trident vs Gecko" with "Flash vs HTML5".
I remember when flash was the devil around here, but when Apple decided to drop it on iOS ostensibly for performance reasons, but also to say "HTML5 is the future", suddenly flash became the darling child that no slashdotter seems to be able to live without. Funny that, given its extremely spotty history on Linux.
And, if you're going to lump "Apple tablets" as having to "require constant excuses" for Flash, then I'm afraid that Android tablets are also going to have to join in with that too. How's Flash going for you on the Xoom? What's the real world performance of Flash like on the other Android devices that have managed to get it running?
(Not the Op but)...for the financial success of MS you need to looks at
a) right product to come along at the right time on PCs when they exploded in popularity b) lack of decent competition and some silly moves from them c) illegal business practices (like strong arming OEMs into not selling rival OSes with threats of increased cost of Windows licences etc, and the intentional breaking of standards and the use of closed formats.
Their primary income source was (and is) Office and Windows. Office was originally a Mac software suite, then along came the success of Windows and away they went.
In other markets they are facing the issues pointed out by the commenter above - in the console market it took them a long time and a *vast* amount of money and running the division at a loss to get themselves up into a contender position against Sony and Nintendo, and it helped them enormously with the silly things both of its main competitors did. MS certainly didn't get to where they were in the console market by using the current methods of the Android tablets.
Consider their phone business (or rather, their phone OSes) - this shows strong evidence of "hyped turd".
Look at the Zune.
The only real markets Microsoft has managed to branch into and actually make money are hardware like keyboards and mice (MS mice are actually pretty nice - I'm using one with my iMac as we speak, and it's not my first purchase of one) - which I believe they managed by buying a hardware company, and the Xbox 360, which the managed by massive, massive losses in the long, hard slog to acceptability.
Right, so when these "wive, mothers, sisters and brothers-in-law" call out the AA, they show up and say.... "oh, the fuse is blown, I'll have to tow you home because I cannot fix that at the roadside".
OP's quote:
No vacuum powered brakes and no way to fix them is a tow-away for the AA.
I said that changing the fuse was what was needed (from the article). The instructions for changing fuses are in the car's manual (certainly every car I've ever owned), and would also be a trivial fix for the AA (at least, I'd hope so).
So, they stopped working, but not to the point that the AA would need to tow the car, as the OP was insinuating. There are different levels of "broken" - some easier to fix than others. This level of "broken" was an easily fixed one, either by the end user or in about 5 minutes by the AA at the roadside (including the time it takes to rummage around in his box of bits for the right size of fuse).
If by "no way to fix them" you mean "change the fuse", then yes.
They certainly are broken if the fuse fails, but they were certainly not irreparably broken - it was fixed on the day, as mentioned in the article, with a change of fuse.
You just made his point for him, unless you're claiming your own post makes no sense.
Multiple manufacturers selling Android-based phones, vs one manufacturer selling the iPhone, in a market that has Blackberry's OS, iOS, Android and WP7 as the major operating systems.
If Android was even half decent (ie, better than Blackberry and WP&, which it is), then it will overtake iPhone marketshare by eating into other smartphone maker's shares (and with new users coming on board).
Both Android and iOS [in iPhone 4 guise only, ignoring iPad for now] are continuing to grow - the smartphone market as a whole is growing. It's hardly surprising, especially since you can get much cheaper Android phones than the iPhone (that are pretty naff to be honest, but you get what you pay for), as well as much nicer Android phones that are actually comparable to the iPhone 4.
It's what happened to the PC industry, and Apple have had experience with that too. They're quite happy to keep shipping iPhones (and iPads) as fast as they can make them because they are remarkably profitable. They don;t have to be number one in marketshare to do that.
No, but the parts that Japan's damaged factories can no longer make were vital to the construction of the iPad. That is what the sentence means. It doesn't mean that iPads themselves are "vital".
It's also talking about a wider context, covering a large number of electronic devices - Japan makes a significant number of components for all sorts of things.
As far as I have ever experienced (and I haven;t set up a recent MBP with Windows on it, only earlier ones and various iMacs, so YMMV), Apple included drivers for all the internals, so the trackpad, isight, bluetooth and wifi hardware etc all works exactly as it does on OS X. It is all installed (and the list of drivers it includes, including things like thermal control and so on is very extensive) via an install wizard that is included on the OS X install DVD, and all the specific software disks that come with a new Mac.
And what about the trackpad? With the driver installed it works just like it does under OS X.
It gives you options. I know someone who is "stuck" on windows (their career relies on specific bits of Windows-only software) but liked the form factor of the iMac for his offices, so he has the whole office set up with iMacs running Windows.
They have a smaller footprint than the old machines (tower + monitor), look nicer and run more quietly. Doubtless he could have found something in the Windows world that was similar, but he saw my iMac (after I brought it over to do some on site work for him) and said "aha, that fits the bill for new machines... but can you put windows on it?"
Similarly for Apple Laptops. Say what you will about them, but they are nice, hardware wise - all-aluminium unibody construction, small, light, good battery life, good screen, second-to-none trackpad.
If you have to run windows, or you simply prefer it, there choice is there.
He already has the Macbook - all he needs is cheap copy of Windows to put on it. It doesn't even need to be Win 7. There are legit copies on ebay for £20 here.
Much cheaper than buying a whole new "cheap" laptop.
A Macbook makes a great Windows laptop, and since you already have it it'll be more cost effective to just buy a copy of Windows.
Set up a bootcamp partition (Apps > Utils > Boot Camp Assistant) and give it the lion's share of the disk if it's going to be her primary OS and then install.
Once you have Windows on there, the OS X software disks that came with it (or the ones for your MBP) have all the necessary drivers that are set up via install wizard - just pop it in after Windows boots for the first time.
They didn;t make one from scratch - there are lots of cross licenced patents going on inside - the GSM hardware is an off-the-shelf part, for example, as used by several other manufacturers. Same with things like memory chips and LCD screens etc.
Regarding your sig, have you checked out Peter F Hamilton? I'd start with Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained a 2 novel series set in his Commonwealth universe. Alternatively, you could try Neal Asher and his Polity universe (start with Gridlinked [book 1 in the Agent Cormac series] or The Skinner [part 1 in the Spatterjay series]).
You seem to be under the illusion that iTunes is the only software that can write to the iPod, and confusing the time where Apple changed their protocols to more rigorously enforce checking of the USB vendor ID after a different company was spoofing Apple's ID (against the terms of their contract with the USB IF) in order to make their device appear to be an iPod so they could get around having to write any sync software (or licence a third party thing like The Missing Sync) for use with iTunes.
Yes, but there is no DRM on any music on the iTunes Store any more, and it's been that way for some time. Fairplay was never designed to be something that would spread - Apple had it out of necessity, but didn't want it to become a de facto standard.
Even when they were selling music with Fairplay DRM they included a feature in iTunes to strip it off (burn to audio CD) if you wanted it (although this meant quality loss if you then re-encoded it). The fiarplay converter isn't strictly needed, if you have any old files left over that have DRM - Apple has two methods to remove that DRM, one of which has always been there (burn audio CD), the other offered at the time they swapped to non-DRM files (a $0.20 per-track upgrade to download the new files).
But since they removed all the DRM, it is no longer an issue - the lawsuit seems to be about Fairplay, which hasn't been in use for some time, for this exact reason. They never wanted DRM in the first place, but had no choice due to the content owners demanding it. They removed it as soon as possible and made it extremely weak and trivial to defeat *within their own program* from the outset, strongly encouraging that you did so when you purchased music back then.
I didn't think you thought they were a monopoly, I was just clarifying a point.
As far as being any better or worse than MS bundling IE - it's the same, right up until they then do something illegal, like ship a deliberately broken JS engine, or rendering errors that make IE essentially run to a different standards clock to the rest of the web, thus squeezing out competitors. If IE (back in the day) played nice and faithfully implemented standards then no one would care that they bundled it - it was their use of a monopoly in one market to extort another market that was the issue.
The issue of control re: the App Store, is you know ahead of time that's what you're in for. The iOS devices aren't sold under any pretence that it'll be anything other than the App Store, so at the purchase of that device you are making your choice - either to be "in" the ecosystem, or to use something else. There's no abuse of control inside (at least, not in terms of Apple's ability to select what apps is carries) because the users have made a choice to be there.
The IE situation was a little different in that for some websites, due to the way MS had played the IE card you *had* to use Windows and IE to use them, with no choice.
The choice to buy into and use the iOS ecosystem is entirely voluntary - with all the benefits and drawbacks it brings - you make the choice at the start that Apple controls the sole official distribution channel.
And what does that have to do with what Apple's should be able to carry in its privately owned store?
The sole (official) source of apps (other than web apps - you know, the other thing that/. has been crying about recently with the hugely trollish register article claiming Apple had "crippled" them) is via the App Store, but this has no bearing on Apple's right to choose what it sells in that store. The iOS user knows ahead of time (ie, before they buy the device) that the App Store is the only official source to buy from, barring web apps.
Just because iOS can only buy from the App Store does not mean Apple should be forced to sell anything that is thrust at them. It is quite the opposite of freedom of choice - you are free to buy into the iOS ecosystem or not. Apple is free to choose what app it sells in its store.
I didn't get the BBC iPlayer web app from the app store, although they could quite easily have made one they chose to do it as a web app instead.
It does not "make them a monopoly in the legal sense" any more than Bruker is a "monopoly" because it's the only place to get software for the FTIR machine sitting next to me.
This still doesn't change the fact that it is *Apple's privately owned store*, whether or not iOS has other shopping areas - the availability of other app sources on iOS has nothing to do with Apple's store status.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't require a credit card. You can have an iTunes store account without a credit card and fund it entirely through purchased iTunes gift cards that you can buy with cash in a store.
Details on setting up are left as an exercise to the reader with access to google and about 15 seconds of spare time.
I'm starting to wonder if the lady doth protest too much.
You might want to start from the premise that not everyone who writes something critical about something you like is a fanboy or paid shill of the "opposition". That level of cynicism speaks volumes about the fragility of your own belief in the thing you are "protecting".
Where does he state or even infer that?
Just wondering. He doesn't talk about what other CPU and GPU intensive processes do, he only mentions flash.
It seems you are inferring something about his understanding without any actual evidence.
Yes, because it's a sensible, rational line of thought that looks at the picture as a whole. It is totally unsurprising to me that it can be fitted to almost any discussion that gets media coverage, generally because the media (or people with an agenda like anti-nuke/anti-windfarm/anti-healthcare etc) like to go for sensationalist reporting and disinformation. It's no wonder that defensive rhetoric from proponents of the various targets of this propaganda is broadly similar in style.
Yes, trivially.
Any high school biology class will show you that.
Start with a dish full of bacteria, and then put an antibiotic on there that kills most of them, then allow it to grow back to the original size of the colony. Now see what that antibiotic does when you treat the same colony.
Observing it on a single-cell timescale just speeds things up, but you don;t have to do that. If you isolate two macro-sized populations you can observe the same effect - for example, mammals who started as a common species that diverged to take advantage of their local environments after being separated by a geological shift (island gets suddenly cut off, etc). It takes longer to observe, but it can be seen.
Quicker to see with populations that breed extremely quickly though.
DRM made it potentially very costly to leave the iPod ecosystem.
I assume by that you mean the £2.50 it cost for a stack of CD-Rs to strip the DRM from your iTunes Store tracks from within iTunes itself (as Apple strongly suggested you do every time you downloaded something).
That was until they removed all the DRM of course, making it a non issue.
Which site was this that was a dealbreaker?
It seems we're in the same position as we were back when IE was the "standard" for the web, and using an alternative (standards compliant) browser would run you into roadblocks, especially on things like banking and commercial sites.
I didn't see slashdot complaining back then when the move was to try and push actual standards compliance over a proprietary single-vendor standard.
We've just replaced "Trident vs Gecko" with "Flash vs HTML5".
I remember when flash was the devil around here, but when Apple decided to drop it on iOS ostensibly for performance reasons, but also to say "HTML5 is the future", suddenly flash became the darling child that no slashdotter seems to be able to live without. Funny that, given its extremely spotty history on Linux.
And, if you're going to lump "Apple tablets" as having to "require constant excuses" for Flash, then I'm afraid that Android tablets are also going to have to join in with that too. How's Flash going for you on the Xoom? What's the real world performance of Flash like on the other Android devices that have managed to get it running?
(Not the Op but) ...for the financial success of MS you need to looks at
a) right product to come along at the right time on PCs when they exploded in popularity
b) lack of decent competition and some silly moves from them
c) illegal business practices (like strong arming OEMs into not selling rival OSes with threats of increased cost of Windows licences etc, and the intentional breaking of standards and the use of closed formats.
Their primary income source was (and is) Office and Windows. Office was originally a Mac software suite, then along came the success of Windows and away they went.
In other markets they are facing the issues pointed out by the commenter above - in the console market it took them a long time and a *vast* amount of money and running the division at a loss to get themselves up into a contender position against Sony and Nintendo, and it helped them enormously with the silly things both of its main competitors did. MS certainly didn't get to where they were in the console market by using the current methods of the Android tablets.
Consider their phone business (or rather, their phone OSes) - this shows strong evidence of "hyped turd".
Look at the Zune.
The only real markets Microsoft has managed to branch into and actually make money are hardware like keyboards and mice (MS mice are actually pretty nice - I'm using one with my iMac as we speak, and it's not my first purchase of one) - which I believe they managed by buying a hardware company, and the Xbox 360, which the managed by massive, massive losses in the long, hard slog to acceptability.
Right, so when these "wive, mothers, sisters and brothers-in-law" call out the AA, they show up and say.... "oh, the fuse is blown, I'll have to tow you home because I cannot fix that at the roadside".
OP's quote:
No vacuum powered brakes and no way to fix them is a tow-away for the AA.
I said that changing the fuse was what was needed (from the article). The instructions for changing fuses are in the car's manual (certainly every car I've ever owned), and would also be a trivial fix for the AA (at least, I'd hope so).
So, they stopped working, but not to the point that the AA would need to tow the car, as the OP was insinuating. There are different levels of "broken" - some easier to fix than others. This level of "broken" was an easily fixed one, either by the end user or in about 5 minutes by the AA at the roadside (including the time it takes to rummage around in his box of bits for the right size of fuse).
If by "no way to fix them" you mean "change the fuse", then yes.
They certainly are broken if the fuse fails, but they were certainly not irreparably broken - it was fixed on the day, as mentioned in the article, with a change of fuse.
How do you know? Perhaps the other 95% are better at keeping their secret spy planes actually secret? :p
You just made his point for him, unless you're claiming your own post makes no sense.
Multiple manufacturers selling Android-based phones, vs one manufacturer selling the iPhone, in a market that has Blackberry's OS, iOS, Android and WP7 as the major operating systems.
If Android was even half decent (ie, better than Blackberry and WP&, which it is), then it will overtake iPhone marketshare by eating into other smartphone maker's shares (and with new users coming on board).
Both Android and iOS [in iPhone 4 guise only, ignoring iPad for now] are continuing to grow - the smartphone market as a whole is growing. It's hardly surprising, especially since you can get much cheaper Android phones than the iPhone (that are pretty naff to be honest, but you get what you pay for), as well as much nicer Android phones that are actually comparable to the iPhone 4.
It's what happened to the PC industry, and Apple have had experience with that too. They're quite happy to keep shipping iPhones (and iPads) as fast as they can make them because they are remarkably profitable. They don;t have to be number one in marketshare to do that.
No, but the parts that Japan's damaged factories can no longer make were vital to the construction of the iPad. That is what the sentence means. It doesn't mean that iPads themselves are "vital".
It's also talking about a wider context, covering a large number of electronic devices - Japan makes a significant number of components for all sorts of things.
Ah, I see so it might be specific to that hardware. I've not done a Mac Pro with Windows, so I haven't run across it.
And Mac trackpads all have right click now - they have since they went multitouch back around the time of the intel switch.
As far as I have ever experienced (and I haven;t set up a recent MBP with Windows on it, only earlier ones and various iMacs, so YMMV), Apple included drivers for all the internals, so the trackpad, isight, bluetooth and wifi hardware etc all works exactly as it does on OS X. It is all installed (and the list of drivers it includes, including things like thermal control and so on is very extensive) via an install wizard that is included on the OS X install DVD, and all the specific software disks that come with a new Mac.
And what about the trackpad? With the driver installed it works just like it does under OS X.
It gives you options. I know someone who is "stuck" on windows (their career relies on specific bits of Windows-only software) but liked the form factor of the iMac for his offices, so he has the whole office set up with iMacs running Windows.
They have a smaller footprint than the old machines (tower + monitor), look nicer and run more quietly. Doubtless he could have found something in the Windows world that was similar, but he saw my iMac (after I brought it over to do some on site work for him) and said "aha, that fits the bill for new machines... but can you put windows on it?"
Similarly for Apple Laptops. Say what you will about them, but they are nice, hardware wise - all-aluminium unibody construction, small, light, good battery life, good screen, second-to-none trackpad.
If you have to run windows, or you simply prefer it, there choice is there.
He already has the Macbook - all he needs is cheap copy of Windows to put on it. It doesn't even need to be Win 7. There are legit copies on ebay for £20 here.
Much cheaper than buying a whole new "cheap" laptop.
The OP has a 2008 Macbook, which *does* have a right mouse button - it features the multitouch trackpad.
Other than that, you are correct that it has no numpad.
+1 to this.
A Macbook makes a great Windows laptop, and since you already have it it'll be more cost effective to just buy a copy of Windows.
Set up a bootcamp partition (Apps > Utils > Boot Camp Assistant) and give it the lion's share of the disk if it's going to be her primary OS and then install.
Once you have Windows on there, the OS X software disks that came with it (or the ones for your MBP) have all the necessary drivers that are set up via install wizard - just pop it in after Windows boots for the first time.
They didn;t make one from scratch - there are lots of cross licenced patents going on inside - the GSM hardware is an off-the-shelf part, for example, as used by several other manufacturers. Same with things like memory chips and LCD screens etc.
Regarding your sig, have you checked out Peter F Hamilton? I'd start with Pandora's Star /Judas Unchained a 2 novel series set in his Commonwealth universe. Alternatively, you could try Neal Asher and his Polity universe (start with Gridlinked [book 1 in the Agent Cormac series] or The Skinner [part 1 in the Spatterjay series]).
You seem to be under the illusion that iTunes is the only software that can write to the iPod, and confusing the time where Apple changed their protocols to more rigorously enforce checking of the USB vendor ID after a different company was spoofing Apple's ID (against the terms of their contract with the USB IF) in order to make their device appear to be an iPod so they could get around having to write any sync software (or licence a third party thing like The Missing Sync) for use with iTunes.
Yes, but there is no DRM on any music on the iTunes Store any more, and it's been that way for some time. Fairplay was never designed to be something that would spread - Apple had it out of necessity, but didn't want it to become a de facto standard.
Even when they were selling music with Fairplay DRM they included a feature in iTunes to strip it off (burn to audio CD) if you wanted it (although this meant quality loss if you then re-encoded it). The fiarplay converter isn't strictly needed, if you have any old files left over that have DRM - Apple has two methods to remove that DRM, one of which has always been there (burn audio CD), the other offered at the time they swapped to non-DRM files (a $0.20 per-track upgrade to download the new files).
But since they removed all the DRM, it is no longer an issue - the lawsuit seems to be about Fairplay, which hasn't been in use for some time, for this exact reason. They never wanted DRM in the first place, but had no choice due to the content owners demanding it. They removed it as soon as possible and made it extremely weak and trivial to defeat *within their own program* from the outset, strongly encouraging that you did so when you purchased music back then.
I didn't think you thought they were a monopoly, I was just clarifying a point.
As far as being any better or worse than MS bundling IE - it's the same, right up until they then do something illegal, like ship a deliberately broken JS engine, or rendering errors that make IE essentially run to a different standards clock to the rest of the web, thus squeezing out competitors. If IE (back in the day) played nice and faithfully implemented standards then no one would care that they bundled it - it was their use of a monopoly in one market to extort another market that was the issue.
The issue of control re: the App Store, is you know ahead of time that's what you're in for. The iOS devices aren't sold under any pretence that it'll be anything other than the App Store, so at the purchase of that device you are making your choice - either to be "in" the ecosystem, or to use something else. There's no abuse of control inside (at least, not in terms of Apple's ability to select what apps is carries) because the users have made a choice to be there.
The IE situation was a little different in that for some websites, due to the way MS had played the IE card you *had* to use Windows and IE to use them, with no choice.
The choice to buy into and use the iOS ecosystem is entirely voluntary - with all the benefits and drawbacks it brings - you make the choice at the start that Apple controls the sole official distribution channel.
And what does that have to do with what Apple's should be able to carry in its privately owned store?
The sole (official) source of apps (other than web apps - you know, the other thing that /. has been crying about recently with the hugely trollish register article claiming Apple had "crippled" them) is via the App Store, but this has no bearing on Apple's right to choose what it sells in that store. The iOS user knows ahead of time (ie, before they buy the device) that the App Store is the only official source to buy from, barring web apps.
Just because iOS can only buy from the App Store does not mean Apple should be forced to sell anything that is thrust at them. It is quite the opposite of freedom of choice - you are free to buy into the iOS ecosystem or not. Apple is free to choose what app it sells in its store.
You can use Web apps.
I didn't get the BBC iPlayer web app from the app store, although they could quite easily have made one they chose to do it as a web app instead.
It does not "make them a monopoly in the legal sense" any more than Bruker is a "monopoly" because it's the only place to get software for the FTIR machine sitting next to me.
This still doesn't change the fact that it is *Apple's privately owned store*, whether or not iOS has other shopping areas - the availability of other app sources on iOS has nothing to do with Apple's store status.