I'll admit I haven't bought any DRM'ed WMA tunes from music stores online, but I can attest to the ability to play WMA-format songs I put together a long time ago on my PC on my new iBook. My husband was totally surprised that I even had a copy of windows media player for OS X. Just an FYI that it might not be as big a problem as you might expect.
While we are busy making assumptions, please do not assume me to be 'man enough to admit' anything. I'm female.
Your post did NOT imply, at least to my reading, that you were only specifically speaking about the very first release, in terms of the fact that Apple tends to rapidly improve on questionable first offerings. If you cannot understand the idea behind the versioning of a product and individual versions of that version, then that is your problem. I'm not going to bother with this any more. If I hurt your feelings or wounded your pride, seriously, I apologize. I didn't intend this to be the giant slugfest it turned into, but apparently you feel very strongly about this.
This is what I get for responding to such a trolling statement as the one you made, anyway.
I maintain that the product is merely called OS X, and unless you were only specifically discussing the very first release of that product, then your usage was incorrect. Please see my responses to the other responding comment to my post.
Let me simplify. "OS X" is all you need to describe the current nature of the Macintosh OS, in comparison to previous incarnations. As a product, that's the full name. Sure, you can make the name longer if you need to be more specific, but that was not the usage of the post.
I maintain that the X stands for 10, and the product name is just OS X. It is the tenth Mac OS, and they chose X to signify that. The X stands for 10, all on its own, and the version number is superfluous in regular communication. While there are version numbers that have been introduce to indicate updates to the software, its usually written by Apple in the form of "OS X v 10.4". Very rarely do you ever see anyone referring to the product (as the gp post was doing) with the version number, unless they are outlining differences between the updates.
I do not recall ever seeing Apple materials broadcasting "Mac OS X 10.0". If the poster's intent was to talk about the first release of OS X specifically, and not the product, then I guess I should apologize. My rant had a lot more to do with the fact that I see "Mac OS X 10.0" a lot from people who have no idea that that is not current or appropriate.
I don't want to sound like I'm harping on this, but seriously, its OS X. No 10.0 afterwards. The version number is the X, which stands for 10, you know, like as a roman numeral.
Although I get the feeling your whole statement was engineered as a troll, how it got modded insightful I am unsure.
Seriously, this is just a marketing move by these networks. In no way is this service different than what subscribers could already do with the equipment necessary to participate in the new service, except now they have the option of paying for it. I really hope people don't take too much advantage of this, so that the iTunes version of business can shine more brightly. Then again, there are a lot of idiots paying ridiculous prices for digital cable these days, what's a few more $0.99's tacked on top?
I think its entirely possible either these deals were in the works before the iTVS went public, so they just seem late, or else they are bids by these networks to have firmer footing in negotiations with Steve Jobs to offer their content through iTunes. Although why they would go with a lower pricepoint, I have no idea. I guess this scheme would have made more sense if they'd gone for a larger price. The article I read did not indicate how DRM'ed to death the episodes would be (as far as expiration and portability) but that might be a factor for negotiations. They may be opting for a 'but we already have an on-demand contract that works just fine for us' approach in order to get a larger percentage cut of the profit.
I 'switched' this year when I had to replace my PC laptop. I use the laptop pretty much exclusively, we do have a PC in the closet mostly for legacy purposes that we never directly used (one of these days, when I have more 'time', I will turn it into a proper fileserver with a proper OS...). Anyway, I'm typing this entry from my iBook. PowerBooks were a bit outside my price range for a home machine, but the iBook had everything I wanted, including software, and no extras I didn't want to pay for (except maybe bluetooth, but I'd rather have that than not, I just don't use it now). It is both small and light, making it portable (I travel frequently enough to care). The price was excellent for the processor/memory/drives combination, especially when compared to Dell. The Dell competitors were a little less, but I have never been satisfied with the engineering that Dell puts (or doesn't put) into their laptops. The iBook feels much, much more solid.
This is my first Apple, and I used to make a lot of fun of Macs (especially when they came out with all the fruity colors...). But with OS X and the excellent software traditions, this thing really rocks! I'm even enjoying the development tools - which, unlike Visual Studio - come WITH THE OS. Including all the reference material I could ever want. What a joy!
No! And that was one of the reasons I was surprised/curious. I doubt he'll make it out of academia, really. Now I could see Dr. Gugel doing something like this...
I met my husband in a one-two IRC-website punch, it was a channel devoted to fans of a website (which is still up, but isn't as strong as it used to be: http://conversatron.com/
Come to think of it, the vast majority of men I dated in my life (all but one, I think) I met either through chatting (IRC/BBS/whatever) or through someone I met while chatting.
I tell myself this doesn't make me a total nerd.. really...
Bless Aspyr. They were one of the reasons 'switching' to a Mac for my most recent laptop purchase was feasible. I am not a heavy gamer, but I like to have access to a few here and there, and I don't mind waiting, but I do prefer titles I'm familiar with. Any expectations of compatibility difficulties for team play with nonMac players?
You're assuming the limitation of the treatment to those that can afford it wouldn't cause a huge riot... if you examine the health care systems of most industrialized/'civilized' countries, you'll find that most make death-preventing treatment available to all in one way or another. It would be political suicide to limit treatment to the elite, unless the political system wasn't based on voting of the masses...
Seriously, human society will never be able to tolerate considerable anti-aging treatments until the general populace is accepting of birth control measures.
I started 'programming' as a kid, in the form of DOS batch files and some BASIC, just to do funny things (like make people think that they were reformatting their harddrive by replacing an.exe file with a file that put info on the screen that looked like a drive reformat... silly, I know, but I was like 8!).
If you have any *nix available at home (and if you're a tinkerer and you want to get into programming, you should be able to get your hands on at least one computer set up this way, if only for geek cred.. if you just run windows, try Cygwin!), a really good way to start would be learning shell programming. This is both immediately useful to you as a user, as well as being a great introduction into programming concepts like variable scoping and loop structures. It also lends itself to coming up with something useful to program, which is helpful when you're learning programming. Most shell syntax/commands (depending on the shell) are similar to (or are actually) the C language, which would give you a solid foundation. There's also plenty of resources at the library and on the net for free, or you could pick up a book (I have this one) to serve as a reference.
What it won't teach you very well is object-oriented approaches to programming. An easy (and cheap!) way to get more information on this sort of thing is to look for free books on the internet. There's a lot of hotness to be found in The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide to programming in Ruby; the text is all online and covers both 'the good way' as well as serving as a language reference. Everything you need to get started with Ruby (and then some) are free, too! Then again, most of the necessary tools for any language are easily available and typically free, but might take some hunting.
A lot of people have probably suggested Java and all its cross-platform goodness. Personally, I think it would be much better to start with a language with less of an entry hurdle - it can be difficult for a total newbie to do all the 'extra stuff' like linking to libraries and all the class structure right out of the gate. All that stuff makes Java more powerful (and cumbersome), but much harder to just dive into than scripting or Ruby.
I've been mulling over whether or not to cancel my sat TV service and just go with bit torrent stuff or Netflix DVDs.
My husband and I just did this a couple of months ago when we moved across town. We both work full time and have projects at home (including getting settled in), and we haven't missed TV at all. We save a ton of money every month, too, even with the NetFlix subscription. Unless you like sports, are addicted to TV news, or work in an environment where it might be handy to be up with whatever is happening in the latest show, I doubt you'll miss it. Really the biggest thing I miss is probably the Daily Show, but its not worth the $50 or so a month, really, is it?
The new video download service from iTunes is a legitimate alternative, I suppose, but 2 things need to happen. One, lower the price for god sakes, at least offer some sort of subscription or a la carte system (pay $50/mo for unlimited shows, or $50 one time for 100 shows?) And two, get lots and lots of good content, although if the service pans out like the music service did, then this will solve itself in a few months.
If you watch enough TV that the pricepoint for iTunes is too expensive, then you should just keep your cable service. I did the math on ours, and it ended up that with the money we saved from cable/tivo, minus the money we spent on NetFlix, we could purchase 18 shows PER MONTH from iTunes (assuming they offered more shows). That's like following 4 weekly shows and a couple more, and without any commercials. This seems reasonable! Our service was just basic cable, too, no digital or satellite or extra channels or anything. iTunes does need to expand their catalog, but that is why I am supporting/voting with my dollar by obtaining Desperate Housewives this season on a weekly basis (plus it helps when talking to my mom on the phone, since she watches the show). Hopefully show producers will take notice of this distribution channel and be more accepting of it in the future. Hopefully, also, the cable affiliates (local channels) don't go totally apeshit like it looks like they might, for 'being cut out of the profit'. Guh!
My husband recently ran into this predicament, but with a different set of daily pocket inhabitants. Anyway, we ended up at the Army/Navy surplus store one day, and he ended up getting a WWII re-creation "Map Case". It holds anything he could possibly want to carry OTHER than his laptop, which lives in a rugged laptop case anyway. Map cases are like mini messenger bags, with a hard back, heavy duty canvas construction, a division in the main pocket and a small pocket on the front for pens and things, and a flap that covers the whole thing. It's also very.. masculine. His is black, but it comes in a few other colors (khaki and olive khaki, I think) and was $10. If you want tons of little pockets its not for you, but if you just want a big exterior pocket, it works really well.
I think we have at least another decade of googley goodness to look forward to. If you spend some time studying great systems and corporations that were started by idealistic people, you will find that they continue to behave in a wonderful way until the leadership is taken over by someone with a shark mind (which happens a lot to businesses.. once they become successful, and then experience some retirement or something of key leaders, they replace them with 'equivalents' from the sector, which are usually very bottom-line minded sociopathic CEOs).
It's unfortunate. But at least as long as the groupthink at Google stays the way it is, we should be ok:)
Another source of UFOs for people to complain about. I mean, how do we know they aren't coming up with this whole plan to just cover up the hovering ships of our new alien overlords? I mean really! We should all start constructing heavy duty tin foil hats, with additional plating up top to protect from this high-altitude threat!!!
Well, redudancies are always good in a critical system... especially ones that have been manufactured to be the same, but at different facilities... but yeah. Mostly I just wanted to point out that the Russians have had a/lot/ to do with the success (?) of the ISS.
While it will be nice to sit around wanking ourselves and dreaming that this will cause the major cell phone companies to lash out at the patent office, I think the more likely outcome will be this:
"Due to increased cost of doing business, your minutes now cost 2.5 cents more per minute. Making a phone call or otherwise using our wireless services implies your agreement to this amendment of your usage agreement."
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I'll admit I haven't bought any DRM'ed WMA tunes from music stores online, but I can attest to the ability to play WMA-format songs I put together a long time ago on my PC on my new iBook. My husband was totally surprised that I even had a copy of windows media player for OS X. Just an FYI that it might not be as big a problem as you might expect.
While we are busy making assumptions, please do not assume me to be 'man enough to admit' anything. I'm female.
Your post did NOT imply, at least to my reading, that you were only specifically speaking about the very first release, in terms of the fact that Apple tends to rapidly improve on questionable first offerings. If you cannot understand the idea behind the versioning of a product and individual versions of that version, then that is your problem. I'm not going to bother with this any more. If I hurt your feelings or wounded your pride, seriously, I apologize. I didn't intend this to be the giant slugfest it turned into, but apparently you feel very strongly about this.
This is what I get for responding to such a trolling statement as the one you made, anyway.
I maintain that the product is merely called OS X, and unless you were only specifically discussing the very first release of that product, then your usage was incorrect. Please see my responses to the other responding comment to my post.
Let me simplify. "OS X" is all you need to describe the current nature of the Macintosh OS, in comparison to previous incarnations. As a product, that's the full name. Sure, you can make the name longer if you need to be more specific, but that was not the usage of the post.
I maintain that the X stands for 10, and the product name is just OS X. It is the tenth Mac OS, and they chose X to signify that. The X stands for 10, all on its own, and the version number is superfluous in regular communication. While there are version numbers that have been introduce to indicate updates to the software, its usually written by Apple in the form of "OS X v 10.4". Very rarely do you ever see anyone referring to the product (as the gp post was doing) with the version number, unless they are outlining differences between the updates.
I do not recall ever seeing Apple materials broadcasting "Mac OS X 10.0". If the poster's intent was to talk about the first release of OS X specifically, and not the product, then I guess I should apologize. My rant had a lot more to do with the fact that I see "Mac OS X 10.0" a lot from people who have no idea that that is not current or appropriate.
I don't want to sound like I'm harping on this, but seriously, its OS X. No 10.0 afterwards. The version number is the X, which stands for 10, you know, like as a roman numeral.
Although I get the feeling your whole statement was engineered as a troll, how it got modded insightful I am unsure.
Seriously, this is just a marketing move by these networks. In no way is this service different than what subscribers could already do with the equipment necessary to participate in the new service, except now they have the option of paying for it. I really hope people don't take too much advantage of this, so that the iTunes version of business can shine more brightly. Then again, there are a lot of idiots paying ridiculous prices for digital cable these days, what's a few more $0.99's tacked on top?
I think its entirely possible either these deals were in the works before the iTVS went public, so they just seem late, or else they are bids by these networks to have firmer footing in negotiations with Steve Jobs to offer their content through iTunes. Although why they would go with a lower pricepoint, I have no idea. I guess this scheme would have made more sense if they'd gone for a larger price. The article I read did not indicate how DRM'ed to death the episodes would be (as far as expiration and portability) but that might be a factor for negotiations. They may be opting for a 'but we already have an on-demand contract that works just fine for us' approach in order to get a larger percentage cut of the profit.
I 'switched' this year when I had to replace my PC laptop. I use the laptop pretty much exclusively, we do have a PC in the closet mostly for legacy purposes that we never directly used (one of these days, when I have more 'time', I will turn it into a proper fileserver with a proper OS...). Anyway, I'm typing this entry from my iBook. PowerBooks were a bit outside my price range for a home machine, but the iBook had everything I wanted, including software, and no extras I didn't want to pay for (except maybe bluetooth, but I'd rather have that than not, I just don't use it now). It is both small and light, making it portable (I travel frequently enough to care). The price was excellent for the processor/memory/drives combination, especially when compared to Dell. The Dell competitors were a little less, but I have never been satisfied with the engineering that Dell puts (or doesn't put) into their laptops. The iBook feels much, much more solid.
This is my first Apple, and I used to make a lot of fun of Macs (especially when they came out with all the fruity colors...). But with OS X and the excellent software traditions, this thing really rocks! I'm even enjoying the development tools - which, unlike Visual Studio - come WITH THE OS. Including all the reference material I could ever want. What a joy!
No! And that was one of the reasons I was surprised/curious. I doubt he'll make it out of academia, really. Now I could see Dr. Gugel doing something like this...
I'm glad I'm not the only one that made that connection, I was feeling a little foolish for providing all of /. with my gut reaction.
I had Gugel for MicroP and DL, and Lam for DD, but Schwartz was always involved in those classes. He had great office hours!
Here I was thinking, for a moment, that they were talking about UF's professor in the ECE department, but nope, the guy is from Princeton.
I met my husband in a one-two IRC-website punch, it was a channel devoted to fans of a website (which is still up, but isn't as strong as it used to be: http://conversatron.com/
Come to think of it, the vast majority of men I dated in my life (all but one, I think) I met either through chatting (IRC/BBS/whatever) or through someone I met while chatting.
I tell myself this doesn't make me a total nerd.. really...
ba-dum-ching!
If I had mod points left today, I would have modded this +1 Funny.
Bless Aspyr. They were one of the reasons 'switching' to a Mac for my most recent laptop purchase was feasible. I am not a heavy gamer, but I like to have access to a few here and there, and I don't mind waiting, but I do prefer titles I'm familiar with. Any expectations of compatibility difficulties for team play with nonMac players?
You're assuming the limitation of the treatment to those that can afford it wouldn't cause a huge riot... if you examine the health care systems of most industrialized/'civilized' countries, you'll find that most make death-preventing treatment available to all in one way or another. It would be political suicide to limit treatment to the elite, unless the political system wasn't based on voting of the masses...
Let the overpopulation commence!
Seriously, human society will never be able to tolerate considerable anti-aging treatments until the general populace is accepting of birth control measures.
I started 'programming' as a kid, in the form of DOS batch files and some BASIC, just to do funny things (like make people think that they were reformatting their harddrive by replacing an .exe file with a file that put info on the screen that looked like a drive reformat... silly, I know, but I was like 8!).
If you have any *nix available at home (and if you're a tinkerer and you want to get into programming, you should be able to get your hands on at least one computer set up this way, if only for geek cred.. if you just run windows, try Cygwin!), a really good way to start would be learning shell programming. This is both immediately useful to you as a user, as well as being a great introduction into programming concepts like variable scoping and loop structures. It also lends itself to coming up with something useful to program, which is helpful when you're learning programming. Most shell syntax/commands (depending on the shell) are similar to (or are actually) the C language, which would give you a solid foundation. There's also plenty of resources at the library and on the net for free, or you could pick up a book (I have this one) to serve as a reference.
What it won't teach you very well is object-oriented approaches to programming. An easy (and cheap!) way to get more information on this sort of thing is to look for free books on the internet. There's a lot of hotness to be found in The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide to programming in Ruby; the text is all online and covers both 'the good way' as well as serving as a language reference. Everything you need to get started with Ruby (and then some) are free, too! Then again, most of the necessary tools for any language are easily available and typically free, but might take some hunting.
A lot of people have probably suggested Java and all its cross-platform goodness. Personally, I think it would be much better to start with a language with less of an entry hurdle - it can be difficult for a total newbie to do all the 'extra stuff' like linking to libraries and all the class structure right out of the gate. All that stuff makes Java more powerful (and cumbersome), but much harder to just dive into than scripting or Ruby.
My husband and I just did this a couple of months ago when we moved across town. We both work full time and have projects at home (including getting settled in), and we haven't missed TV at all. We save a ton of money every month, too, even with the NetFlix subscription. Unless you like sports, are addicted to TV news, or work in an environment where it might be handy to be up with whatever is happening in the latest show, I doubt you'll miss it. Really the biggest thing I miss is probably the Daily Show, but its not worth the $50 or so a month, really, is it?
If you watch enough TV that the pricepoint for iTunes is too expensive, then you should just keep your cable service. I did the math on ours, and it ended up that with the money we saved from cable/tivo, minus the money we spent on NetFlix, we could purchase 18 shows PER MONTH from iTunes (assuming they offered more shows). That's like following 4 weekly shows and a couple more, and without any commercials. This seems reasonable! Our service was just basic cable, too, no digital or satellite or extra channels or anything. iTunes does need to expand their catalog, but that is why I am supporting/voting with my dollar by obtaining Desperate Housewives this season on a weekly basis (plus it helps when talking to my mom on the phone, since she watches the show). Hopefully show producers will take notice of this distribution channel and be more accepting of it in the future. Hopefully, also, the cable affiliates (local channels) don't go totally apeshit like it looks like they might, for 'being cut out of the profit'. Guh!
My husband recently ran into this predicament, but with a different set of daily pocket inhabitants. Anyway, we ended up at the Army/Navy surplus store one day, and he ended up getting a WWII re-creation "Map Case". It holds anything he could possibly want to carry OTHER than his laptop, which lives in a rugged laptop case anyway. Map cases are like mini messenger bags, with a hard back, heavy duty canvas construction, a division in the main pocket and a small pocket on the front for pens and things, and a flap that covers the whole thing. It's also very.. masculine. His is black, but it comes in a few other colors (khaki and olive khaki, I think) and was $10. If you want tons of little pockets its not for you, but if you just want a big exterior pocket, it works really well.
I think we have at least another decade of googley goodness to look forward to. If you spend some time studying great systems and corporations that were started by idealistic people, you will find that they continue to behave in a wonderful way until the leadership is taken over by someone with a shark mind (which happens a lot to businesses.. once they become successful, and then experience some retirement or something of key leaders, they replace them with 'equivalents' from the sector, which are usually very bottom-line minded sociopathic CEOs). It's unfortunate. But at least as long as the groupthink at Google stays the way it is, we should be ok :)
Ditto!
Another source of UFOs for people to complain about. I mean, how do we know they aren't coming up with this whole plan to just cover up the hovering ships of our new alien overlords? I mean really! We should all start constructing heavy duty tin foil hats, with additional plating up top to protect from this high-altitude threat!!!
Well, redudancies are always good in a critical system... especially ones that have been manufactured to be the same, but at different facilities... but yeah. Mostly I just wanted to point out that the Russians have had a /lot/ to do with the success (?) of the ISS.
I think you have failed to remember their considerable role in creating, staffing, and maintaining the ISS..
While it will be nice to sit around wanking ourselves and dreaming that this will cause the major cell phone companies to lash out at the patent office, I think the more likely outcome will be this:
"Due to increased cost of doing business, your minutes now cost 2.5 cents more per minute. Making a phone call or otherwise using our wireless services implies your agreement to this amendment of your usage agreement."