Yours is one of the better defenses of the anti-DRM position against the club-handed assertion that people should just shut up and enjoy iTMS. Well done.
Apple is doing a great thing, but people will always find something to complain about.
Oh, iTMS is attractive, convenient and easy to use, I'll grant you that.
But Apple is serving as a front end for a music industry that is quite broadly condemned for its unfair practices to artists. It's also peddling low-to-moderate quality recordings no audiophile can take seriously.
Those are two reasons that rather debunk the "great thing" claim. Try to be a bit more realistic.
Downhillbattle.org makes the case quite well: iTunes is a GUI for the music industry, which didn't become any less corrupt simply because Apple digitally harnessed it.
Now, we all love our iPods, etc. etc. But keep this in mind:
Apple says iTunes is "better than free" because it's "fair to the artists and record labels." That's simply not true. First of all, Apple gets 3 times as much money as musicians from each sale. Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do. Record labels receive the other 65% of each sale. Of this, major label artists will end up with only 8 to 14 cents per song, depending on their contract. Many of them will never even see this paltry share because they have to pay for producers and recording costs, both of which can be enormous. Until the musician "recoups" these costs, when you buy an iTunes song, the label gives them nothing.
The artists are still being screwed, even if it's behind a lickable interface.
Mary Jo Foley, editor of Microsoft Watch, said she had no knowledge of the iPod's popularity on Microsoft's campus, but has noticed a lot of iPod chatter among Microsoft's legions of bloggers.
"I have seen lots of Softies blog about it," she wrote in an e-mail.
I don't envy Ms. Foly reading "lots" of Microsoft bloggarrhea. The poor woman!
Still, at least the Softies have hard ons for something good.;-)
Er, you know what? This doesn't help. The idea is getting people to switch, my friend, not taking a switch to people's asses.
Characterizing different opinions as "bitching" and "whining," or denigrating people as "fry boy" because you think they can't afford what you can, just make you sound mean and petty.
Don't fool yourself: you're giving Apple products a bad name. Nobody there wants the product line to be associated with invidious comparisons. In fact, that's why Apple lowered the price. To attract "fry boys."
One thing that did surprise me about the Mac mini was the noise level, both good and bad. Most of the time the machine is very quiet, basically silent; I expected more regular fan noise given the cramped quarters inside the box. On the other hand, under the heaviest extended loads--ripping a number of CDs in a row while performing other processor-intenstive tasks, for example--the fan ramps up to a surprising volume. Nothing compared to the wind tunnel levels of a crashed Power Mac G5, to be sure, but louder than I expected. Similarly, the Mac mini's optical drive is about as loud as its PowerBook cousin--it can get noisy when ripping songs in iTunes. (Thankfully, it's nearly silent when watching DVDs.)
Well, that's hardly encouraging. That it's even being mentioned by MacWorld, whose job is generally to cheer for Apple products, is significant.
Small form factor PC's have struggled mightily to reduce noise, with minimal but increasing success. Apple might have learned from the PC sector's improvements and produced a design with better heat exchange. One obvious direction is being pursued by Hush.
And posts photos of the PC competitors, too.
What is of note here is that these small form factor PCs have been on the market for some time. Indeed, some small boxes preceded the Mac mini by months.
Based on living in a Mac-PC household, my take is that the mini will be suitable for a good many of those in the market for a SFF box. It's no gaming machine, obviously, and that matters to those gamers driving the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. But SFF gaming PCs, it should be noted, can be very loud. In the PC world, much message board agonizing and indeed even entire web sites are devoted to quieting the damn things (and their large boxen brethern) down. My SFF PC sits in a closet to dampen its roar.
But if your gaming needs are nil or satisfied elsewhere (or by old-school games) then the mini ought to do very nicely. Without having to go in the closet.;-)
Precisely right; your elegant quip really took the wind out of the previous remark.
The fact is that differentiation is measurable by much more than the criteria of design, packaging and marketing; there are objective and subjective issues.
OK, based on your last post, I've reconsidered your product. And, frankly, now I think it has merit.
Mind, it's not nearly as novel as you'd like to think. In fact, many of us are already very familiar with what you describe: getting recommendations from people whose opinion we respect. It's always been the basis of criticism, and many of us also do it on a small scale with family, friends, and colleagues, not to mention "querying the whole world" through IMDb, Netflix, and message boards the world over. (Notably, what we're getting from those sources isn't merely numerical matches to our taste; we're getting human speech, human thought, human responses, as well as interaction.)
But is helping to digitize the process of taste match-making the same thing as "bring(ing) our fragmented society closer together"? Would we casually make such exagerrated claims about selecting media? About taste?
You would. Not I. Society is fragmented not by our taste in what we choose to read, watch, or hear but instead by real issues, real problems. Fragmentation of taste, in fact, is pretty damn normal and desirable. It's what pluralism's all about. There's no good reason to want everyone to like the same thing; there are plenty of nasty ones, though.
Call me cynical if you like; fair enough. For my part, you strike me as a tad starry-eyed, as in:
How incredible, I thought, to have the ability to KNOW, before I ever buy a book, before I even go to the store, that I'm going to like it!
You do realize that 99.9% of all Mac users don't even know what a "mailing list" or a "message board" is, right? I'm just sayin', that's hardly a good way to make a judgment.
Heh. If you persist in these fantasies, glance at Macfixit's or even Apple's support boards some time; they veritably groan under the weight of your, er,.1% of Macdom.
But to the point. My post addressed whether Safari is inferior to Firefox. On the merits, Firefox is the better browser: faster, ad-free, more stable, more extensible. Rather than huffing and puffing, Leo, you'd be better off trying the new Firefox than criticizing an old beta. (If it makes you feel better, you can even dress it in a neat little Safari-style theme; we won't tell anyone.)
In what? Building "dictionary look-up" and "translation" into the Web browser? Silly man. You must not be aware of Dashboard. Rather than building completely unrelated features into the Web browser, Apple took core browser technologies like the XHTML renderer and the JavaScript runtime and made them available through a desk-accessory-type paradigm. So you don't have to take things that are built on Web technologies but that clearly don't belong in the Web browser and build standalone widgets out of them instead.
It's 2005, my purist friend. Browser development has left your narrow fundamentalist views far behind. No extension I've described is "built into the browser" any more than Dashboard's widgets are "built into" Tiger. Extensions serve the user who chooses to install them--a truly elegant case of individualizing technology.
In any case your comparison isn't very impressive. No, indeed, the promising Dashboard isn't available, while Firefox has been for months. Yet even if it had shipped, so what? What can be accomplished with one click in Firefox is a far more efficient interaction than calling up Dashboard, mousing to a given widget, and typing in your request for a dictionary entry or translation. You're welcome to the extra effort; the rest of us have work to do.
You've hit on why I haven't bought the software. For me it offers nothing that I cannot do simply by regarding my collection where it sits upon the shelves.
Now, usefulness is relative; some will swear they are getting every last penny's worth of deliciousness from their media now that it is arranged on virtual shelves, too. More power to them.
But I think the appeal of the software is more totemistic--fetishistic, even. Just as iTunes cannot fail to remind you that you've got a shitload of mp3s, Delicious Library also strokes your ego: see all my things, my pretty things, all in a row? The difference, though, is that you need iTunes; otherwise you're quite lost trying to find your songs. To "manage" your books or CDs or DVDs, you need only walk up to the shelf, take one down, and use it. Delicious Library may have its uses, but it's appealing to something a lot more primitive than keeping lists.
We're going to use the data to create new virtual communities of people with common interests, and bring our fragmented society closer together.
Or not.
By letting people see that they all own the same crappy Hollywood movies, you won't necessarily be "bring(ing) our fragmented society closer together." At best, you'll be helping people form narrow communities based on sameness of taste. That's further fragmentation, in fact. At worst, you'll just be fostering consumerism and the replacement of identity by brand. Not such a sin, really, in a society where identity is purchased; but maybe you should hold off on ordering the halo just yet, eh?
I tried AbiWord for OS X the other day. The latest port is impressive. Still some quirks, and not quite as smooth as the PC version, but the new dev is doing a very good job. Generally speaking the UI is clean and minimalist, the app launches very fast, and its Word-centric style pasting function is a plus if you're used to the MS way (as I am through long habit, *sigh*).
This is a direction with a lot of potential--AI-facilitated design for amateurs. And why not? The desire to create is far more common than the innate or learned ability to do so...
Now, to be sure, the templates in Pages do represent more cookie-cutter design. But as demonstrated by Jobs, it's simple to move page elements around and insert new ones in real time, with the app reflowing text for the user. With minor effort, in other words, the templates can be significantly altered.
That isn't the AI you envision; but it does appear to take a small step toward allowing "someone not creatively inclined to make something unique that looks good."
Mozilla (Camaro, Firebird, whatever the hell they're calling themselves this week) just sucks compared to Safari.
Your otherwise good post really stumbled on this one.
Judging from mailing lists and message boards, many of us are leaving Safari for Firefox because the latter is faster, more stable, and far more customizable. Its best feature is its range of extensions (I'm running several that Safari couldn't dream of replicating). These are essentials, really: ad-blocking, dictionary lookup, translation--to name a few. There was a point in time months ago when Safari ran better than the pre-release Firefox; that time is long since past. Apple must now play catch-up.
Another Ballmer-inspired change: Fostering a kinder, gentler image and greater trust among both customers and partners. Ballmer issues annual missives to his troops calling on them to build products that are more useful for customers and to be more responsive to customer needs.
*sob*...oh, the humanity! Well, if James Gandolfini won't come back for another season, now they know who to cast.
And as for the razor-sharp journalists at ZDNet...just as gardeners itch to plant seeds, the pandering press likes to court the tender buds of the new year's ad revenue as early as it can.
The listed uses ( http://www.stuffit.com/imagecompression/ ) seem trivial at best.
You're right. I read the list, reproduced below. Who'd want to:
* Send more photos via email
* Fit more on CDs, DVDs, and other backup media
* Save time when sending pictures over the internet or across the network
* Reduce bandwidth costs
After all, electronic storage media is infinite, and bandwidth is free!
Hell hath no fury like a whiney blogger scorned.;-)
Just a couple days ago, Palmer wrote:
Alright, I've said all I'm going to say about the headless iMac nonsense (at least until after it doesn't get announced at the Keynote on Tuesday), as I think I've made my position abundantly clear, and I've grown a bit tired of making my point again and again.
Naturally, being so colossally wrong is tough on the average egomaniac. So today, his headline is,
Apple can take its idiot box and stick it where the sun don't shine
followed by something like 2,000 words of RSI-inducing keyboard mashing. I'd never heard of the guy before; heh, now I know why.
And so it begins: the Toppling of the Snobs as Apple tells its limousine class they now have to share company with average Joes. Oh, boo hoo.;-)
I took your advice, but was instantly assailed with:
Alright, I've said all I'm going to say about the headless iMac nonsense (at least until after it doesn't get announced at the Keynote on Tuesday), as I think I've made my position abundantly clear, and I've grown a bit tired of making my point again and again. And at this point I'd have to imagine that many of you are as sick of hearing about it as I am.
Whew! Now we know what's rarer than a sub-$500 headless iMac. The first recorded case of male PMS.
This is the type of snit fit that prima donnas--from the Jobses to the Marthas to the Trumps--engage in frequently as a matter of privilege.
Do it as an ordinary Joe, and you will soon be arrested, fired, sued, beat up, divorced, etc.
Do it if you are rich, and gossipy news media will hail your "uncompromising standards," men will shiver at your approach, and women of loose morals will queue to induct your seed.
Moral: Assholes, rejoice! If you make enough money, you'll never have to change!
Slashdot Mirror
Yours is one of the better defenses of the anti-DRM position against the club-handed assertion that people should just shut up and enjoy iTMS. Well done.
Oh, iTMS is attractive, convenient and easy to use, I'll grant you that.
But Apple is serving as a front end for a music industry that is quite broadly condemned for its unfair practices to artists. It's also peddling low-to-moderate quality recordings no audiophile can take seriously.
Those are two reasons that rather debunk the "great thing" claim. Try to be a bit more realistic.
Now, we all love our iPods, etc. etc. But keep this in mind:
The artists are still being screwed, even if it's behind a lickable interface.
Still, at least the Softies have hard ons for something good. ;-)
Characterizing different opinions as "bitching" and "whining," or denigrating people as "fry boy" because you think they can't afford what you can, just make you sound mean and petty.
Don't fool yourself: you're giving Apple products a bad name. Nobody there wants the product line to be associated with invidious comparisons. In fact, that's why Apple lowered the price. To attract "fry boys."
Well, that's hardly encouraging. That it's even being mentioned by MacWorld, whose job is generally to cheer for Apple products, is significant.
Small form factor PC's have struggled mightily to reduce noise, with minimal but increasing success. Apple might have learned from the PC sector's improvements and produced a design with better heat exchange. One obvious direction is being pursued by Hush.
Afraid not, sorry. Probably something along the lines of "small form factor."
Google, and interesting. :-)
Based on living in a Mac-PC household, my take is that the mini will be suitable for a good many of those in the market for a SFF box. It's no gaming machine, obviously, and that matters to those gamers driving the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. But SFF gaming PCs, it should be noted, can be very loud. In the PC world, much message board agonizing and indeed even entire web sites are devoted to quieting the damn things (and their large boxen brethern) down. My SFF PC sits in a closet to dampen its roar.
But if your gaming needs are nil or satisfied elsewhere (or by old-school games) then the mini ought to do very nicely. Without having to go in the closet. ;-)
The fact is that differentiation is measurable by much more than the criteria of design, packaging and marketing; there are objective and subjective issues.
Mind, it's not nearly as novel as you'd like to think. In fact, many of us are already very familiar with what you describe: getting recommendations from people whose opinion we respect. It's always been the basis of criticism, and many of us also do it on a small scale with family, friends, and colleagues, not to mention "querying the whole world" through IMDb, Netflix, and message boards the world over. (Notably, what we're getting from those sources isn't merely numerical matches to our taste; we're getting human speech, human thought, human responses, as well as interaction.)
But is helping to digitize the process of taste match-making the same thing as "bring(ing) our fragmented society closer together"? Would we casually make such exagerrated claims about selecting media? About taste?
You would. Not I. Society is fragmented not by our taste in what we choose to read, watch, or hear but instead by real issues, real problems. Fragmentation of taste, in fact, is pretty damn normal and desirable. It's what pluralism's all about. There's no good reason to want everyone to like the same thing; there are plenty of nasty ones, though.
Call me cynical if you like; fair enough. For my part, you strike me as a tad starry-eyed, as in:
My dear Recommender, allow me to recommend a film to you.
Heh. If you persist in these fantasies, glance at Macfixit's or even Apple's support boards some time; they veritably groan under the weight of your, er, .1% of Macdom.
But to the point. My post addressed whether Safari is inferior to Firefox. On the merits, Firefox is the better browser: faster, ad-free, more stable, more extensible. Rather than huffing and puffing, Leo, you'd be better off trying the new Firefox than criticizing an old beta. (If it makes you feel better, you can even dress it in a neat little Safari-style theme; we won't tell anyone.)
It's 2005, my purist friend. Browser development has left your narrow fundamentalist views far behind. No extension I've described is "built into the browser" any more than Dashboard's widgets are "built into" Tiger. Extensions serve the user who chooses to install them--a truly elegant case of individualizing technology.
In any case your comparison isn't very impressive. No, indeed, the promising Dashboard isn't available, while Firefox has been for months. Yet even if it had shipped, so what? What can be accomplished with one click in Firefox is a far more efficient interaction than calling up Dashboard, mousing to a given widget, and typing in your request for a dictionary entry or translation. You're welcome to the extra effort; the rest of us have work to do.
Now, usefulness is relative; some will swear they are getting every last penny's worth of deliciousness from their media now that it is arranged on virtual shelves, too. More power to them.
But I think the appeal of the software is more totemistic--fetishistic, even. Just as iTunes cannot fail to remind you that you've got a shitload of mp3s, Delicious Library also strokes your ego: see all my things, my pretty things, all in a row? The difference, though, is that you need iTunes; otherwise you're quite lost trying to find your songs. To "manage" your books or CDs or DVDs, you need only walk up to the shelf, take one down, and use it. Delicious Library may have its uses, but it's appealing to something a lot more primitive than keeping lists.
Or not.
By letting people see that they all own the same crappy Hollywood movies, you won't necessarily be "bring(ing) our fragmented society closer together." At best, you'll be helping people form narrow communities based on sameness of taste. That's further fragmentation, in fact. At worst, you'll just be fostering consumerism and the replacement of identity by brand. Not such a sin, really, in a society where identity is purchased; but maybe you should hold off on ordering the halo just yet, eh?
Definitely worth a look.
This is a direction with a lot of potential--AI-facilitated design for amateurs. And why not? The desire to create is far more common than the innate or learned ability to do so...
Now, to be sure, the templates in Pages do represent more cookie-cutter design. But as demonstrated by Jobs, it's simple to move page elements around and insert new ones in real time, with the app reflowing text for the user. With minor effort, in other words, the templates can be significantly altered.
That isn't the AI you envision; but it does appear to take a small step toward allowing "someone not creatively inclined to make something unique that looks good."
Your otherwise good post really stumbled on this one.
Judging from mailing lists and message boards, many of us are leaving Safari for Firefox because the latter is faster, more stable, and far more customizable. Its best feature is its range of extensions (I'm running several that Safari couldn't dream of replicating). These are essentials, really: ad-blocking, dictionary lookup, translation--to name a few. There was a point in time months ago when Safari ran better than the pre-release Firefox; that time is long since past. Apple must now play catch-up.
Brilliant Beige
Tin Treat
Aluminum-num-num!
Pretty Good PVC
"Root" Beer
*sob* ...oh, the humanity! Well, if James Gandolfini won't come back for another season, now they know who to cast.
And as for the razor-sharp journalists at ZDNet...just as gardeners itch to plant seeds, the pandering press likes to court the tender buds of the new year's ad revenue as early as it can.
You're right. I read the list, reproduced below. Who'd want to:
After all, electronic storage media is infinite, and bandwidth is free!...the tamPod? ;-)
Just a couple days ago, Palmer wrote:
Naturally, being so colossally wrong is tough on the average egomaniac. So today, his headline is,
followed by something like 2,000 words of RSI-inducing keyboard mashing. I'd never heard of the guy before; heh, now I know why.
And so it begins: the Toppling of the Snobs as Apple tells its limousine class they now have to share company with average Joes. Oh, boo hoo. ;-)
I took your advice, but was instantly assailed with:
Whew! Now we know what's rarer than a sub-$500 headless iMac. The first recorded case of male PMS.
Do it as an ordinary Joe, and you will soon be arrested, fired, sued, beat up, divorced, etc.
Do it if you are rich, and gossipy news media will hail your "uncompromising standards," men will shiver at your approach, and women of loose morals will queue to induct your seed.
Moral: Assholes, rejoice! If you make enough money, you'll never have to change!
Bravo! One of those posts that light up the Slashdot sky.