Fine. That doesn't make it an original idea though. I didn't mean to imply anything about whether or not taking the idea was done legitimately, only that it was in fact taken. Which you don't seem to dispute:-)
Original ideas are overrated. I'm not impressed by something wildly new, especially in interface design -- just look at the shambling wreck that is Enlightenment to give an idea of how much "originality" can be a bad thing. I'm much more pleased to see competent integration of pre-existing, and possibly obscure ideas, and OSX is chock full of that. BeOS was an even better example: very little was original, but being able to use a system that glued together all these great ideas was wonderful, and the few ideas from BeOS that truly were new -- the clever filesystem for example -- seem to be gradually trickling back to the mainstream operating systems.
So, back to what I was originally thinking, if not saying. Original ideas aren't that big of a deal. If you're going to accuse the open source people of ripping off their best idea, keep in mind that Apple and Microsoft have done plenty of this themselvees -- and that's okay! Better to play into what people have learned over the years than to take off on weird experiments that leave everyone confused (e.g. Microsoft Bob). Whether or not Apple had a license, it wasn't originality, but that doesn't bother me at all, and I can't see why other people make such a big stink over the fact that it happens.
OSX has had a built in firewall since at least Jaguar, and I seem to remember it being there in 10.1 as well. I seem to recall people writing that it's just standard *nix ipfw, but I can't find anything at the moment to verify this. In any case, given the choice between high quality freeware firewall software, and commercial software that might or might not be as good but certainly would require some kind of licensing fees, Apple has seemed more than willing to go with the FOSS stuff when bringing in new OSX components (KHTML, BSD, Apache, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc...).
It's just a subtle UI feedback thing. The "traffic light" icons at the top left of each window are, by default, colorful for the active window but muted for all other windows. However, if you hover your mouse over the traffic light icons of a background window (without actually clicking on that window of course -- then it wouldn't be in the background anymore), then it's icons will light up the same way as the foreground ones do.
So for example if you had several non-overlapping Finder or Terminal windows open, and you stepped away from your computer for a little while, when you got back you should be able to tell at a glance which window is active, just by the fact that the titlebar is opaque and the lights are on (and if any other window's lights are on, you know where your mouse pointer is as well).
The equivalent on Windows is for the background window to be decorated in a slightly different color scheme -- usually a more muted one than that of the foreground. Either way you're getting the same UI feedback effect, the OSX way is just a little bit slicker, and almost as dessert it lets you have a peek at what's going on with a slice of the window behind that translucent titlebar. Stuff like this doesn't make or break the UI, but a collection of subtle cues like this makes the system feel more responsive & self-descriptive, which is almost always a good thing.
True, but this at least gives us something more substantial to work with. Cases like the alleged blocks of code with duplicated comments &c. should now be identifiable, and can be revised accordingly. This wasn't possible until a copy of the SCO source was found.
To avoid "polluting" developers, a tech savvy lawyer can run the diffs, and then let the kernel team know that "lines X-Y of file Z need to be edited" without explaining any further.
Okay, so now someone can run a diff between this & the Linux source, and we can finally identify what the claims are all about without having to let SCO continue to make vague threats about what they allege to be there. We don't have to wait for them anymore!
I think that was kind of the point of the Pearl Jam [1] concert albums: they flooded the market with so many of them at once (25 or something, and more later?) that only a serious nut would want to buy them all. More likely, people would get different ones and share them with their friends, and maybe make mp3s too. But that's okay -- the production costs had to be tiny so it shouldn't have taken huge sales to recoup the cost and give the fans a lot of what they wanted. I thought it was an interesting experiment in how a band could confront cheap internet competition in a non-antagonistic way. It sure beats the hell out of silly DRM schemes...
[1] The band puts an "a" in the word "Pearl". Weirdos:-)
Interestingly, that sort of thing seems to be what Python was invented for: it was the control language for the Amoeba distributed OS, as described by Guido van Rossum himself:
Guido van Rossum: In 1986 I moved to a different project at CWI, the Amoeba project. Amoeba was a distributed operating system. By the late 1980s we found we needed a scripting language. I had a large degree of freedom on that project to start my own mini project within the scope of what we were doing.
I don't know if you knew about this stuff in advance, but working on distributed code was apparently a great way to play into Python's strengths-by-design. Amoeba has long been one of those neat little esoteric systems that I've wanted to play with (also including Plan9/Inferno), but have never had the chance to. I wonder if it ever got any traction outside of research circles...
Ahh yeah, I've got a recording of "Salt Peanuts" on an old Charlie Parker album, I think "The Yardbird Suites". Very catchy song. I'd like to hear this cover of it...
My problem with jam bands -- and yes, the scent you're about to pick up just might be the smell of me talking out of my ass -- is that it's mostly monotonous riffing over the same scales & chord structures. It's fairly easy to go noodling on for 45 minutes as long as you're basically sticking to a 12-bar blues (or whatever -- my music theory is flaky at best). All of those jam bands, from the Dead to Phish, Blues Traveller, and Dave Matthews band, just annoy the living crap out of me.
Honestly, for interesting jam music outside of the jazz genre, my two favorites are nominally punk bands: Sonic Youth & Fugazi. They can make fascinating instrumental music that, crucially, does not put me to sleep:)
On a similar tack, every one of Radiohead's albums has been more interesting than the one that preceded it, and as far as I can tell a lot of that has to do with the influence of electronic dance bands like Autechre, Massive Attack, and Portishead. All of which are, again, fascinating and progressive and jazzy and rocky and in no way sleep inducing.
To the guy who suggested that Kenny G is the future of jazz, no way. He may be the commercial future of jazz, but so what -- boy bands are the commercial future of rock but that doesn't keep creative people like Radiohead from putting out enormously successful albums at the same time. And yes, I'll concede that the hippie jam bands do draw from classic jazz as much as Sonic Youth or Portishead do, and they all do a decent job of reintrepreting the old ideas once again. But the jam bands have not in my opinion assumed the role of sole defenders of the genre today, and thank god as far as I'm concerned:-)
It sounds like you're off to an excellent start -- you're about where I am in learning about great old jazz. If you want to go beyond this, I highly recommend raiding the CD section of your local library. I've gotten to sample box sets from Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, a great Ella Fitzgerald & Duke Ellington set, etc from there, not to mention lots of individual albums.
To go beyond that, read & listen. When Christopher Lydon used to do the public radio show The Connection from WBUR in Boston, he used to do lots of great jazz shows. The ones on Kind of Blue & A Love Supreme greatly deepend my appreciation of what was already two of my favorite albums, and Lydon's enthusiasm for the music also got me interested in hearing more from people like Count Basie and others. Thanks to the magic of RealAudio and the generosity of Boston University, you can still listen to these great radio shows today. On a similar note, NPR's Curious Listeners Guide to Jazz looks like a pretty good overview of the genre but deeper conniseurs than me might disagree about that one.
Really though, the library is the best thing. Check out everything you can, make a note of what you like & what doesn't do anything for you, and focus on the artists & time periods that you like the best. For me, the stuff from the late 40s (Davis' "Rebirth of the Cool", 1948 [?]) through the late 50s (1959 gave us Davis' "Kind of Blue", Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um" & "Blues & Roots", and Coltrane's "Giant Steps" -- four of my favorites) and into the early 60s (Contrane's "Blue Train", 1961) seems to have been the golden age of jazz. Before that was a lot of big band & swing (fun, but not as personally satisfying to me) and after that came a lot of avant garde & psychedelic stuff that I only care for in small doses.
As for whether you'll like modern stuff, I dunno. The 60s & 70s seemed to bring a lot of psychedelic free jazz & funk, but personally I haven't yet found anything from that era or since that has won me over. The closest thing I can find to modern jazz that I like is Martin Medesky & Wood, who in some ways do an interesting blend of that older cool jazz mixed well with modern hip hop -- making me wonder just what John Coltrane would have done if anyone thought to have a DJ in a band back in the 60s. My problem with MMW though is the whole hippie jam band thing, which I find great for naptime. Oh well. The other modern jazz person I've found to be consistently interesting is John Zorn; if you've ever heard Mr Bungle's albums and tried to puzzle out how they got to be so different from what Faith No More did, blame/thank John Zorn. To the extent that the first Bungle album didn't sound like "The Real Thing", to my ear it's almost all Zorn's influence (he produced the album). This stuff is fascinating to listen to, but it can barely be described as music in any conventional sense: his Cobra album seems to go out of its way to discard rhythm, melody, harmony & tempo -- it's just vaguely organized bursts of sound on disc. Very very weird.
Bonus points: compare & contrast the album cover for "Blue Train" with that of one of the Cowboy Bebop DVDs -- the cover art & logo are similar, and the back cover tiny font text are like mirrors of each other. First time I ever got a chance to see Cowboy Bebop (again, at the library -- I don't have cable tv:), I could tell just from the cover that the people that did this had excellent taste:):):)
So looking at Hyper Transport, at this stage, I'm a tad leery of it because it didn't come from Apple. I'm worried that it might have some kind of negative impact on the technology.
Hyper Transport seems to have been collaboratively developed by Apple and others, just as happened five years or so ago with Open Firmware. Just as Apple, AMD, and Transmeta all seem to be going in on Hyper Transport as an interconnect between hardware compoinents, Apple, Sun, and possibly others have been using OF as the "non-proprietary boot firmware that is usable on different processors and buses" for their computers for years now. There will be no negative impact, or at least not at all for the reasons that you seem to be concerned about.
The necessary question is; is this going to be the next evolutionary step for Apple, or is it just an added hardware feature that is relatively minor?
From everything I've read about the "speed issue" on Apple hardware over the past few years, the biggest thing holding current generation Macs back isn't the PowerPC chips, but the frozen in evolutionary time speeds of the boards those CPUs plug into. Apparently you can only expect a 20-30% speed bump by adding a second G4 processor to one of these systems, but it's not because the chips are slow -- they're really not all that bad -- but because they're bandwidth starved.
Hyper Transport is specifically aimed to address this bottleneck. No, it cannot be a "relatively minor" thing, because if it lives up to its promise and relieves the biggest bottleneck in the current generation machines, a good chunk of the gap between PPC and x86 machines will be closed. That's a big deal.
Of course I remember the Wizard -- that show ruled when I was a kid. Watching ol' Don Herbert showing those kids science experiments was way more fun than any dumb old video game console -- and still would be now...:-)
Oh like an Eagles DVD wouldn't be just as much torture as the Metallica disc.
As far as I'm concerned, the silver lining here is that I saved $17.98 and my sanity, and the bastards are cutting me a thirteen dollar check to top it all off. I couldn't be happier:-)
They may develop on Macs, but they test on Win/IE. Web developers aren't stupid (well, not all of them:) -- if 97% of the market is using a platform, you must make sure that what you're working on will behave on that platform.
A lot of people seem to be developing more on Windows for this very reason: the Mac may be more pleasant to use, but test cycles are shorter if you suck it up and work on the same platform as your audience.
Case in point: I've uncovered bugs in how Safari renders certain pages but, since they looked fine on IE and they didn't look that bad in NS7, the concensus from the very sympathetic web developers I talked to was "to hell with Safari". Making this particular glitch go away would have been far too much work for far too little return.
Man's best friend? Author, dog owner and trainer Jon Katz says that the relationship between dogs and their owners has gone way beyond master and pet; that increasingly we're treating them as family members and human surrogates.
Katz says that in America today we give our dogs human names, they sleep on our beds, we spoil them with gifts, and turn to them more and more for emotional support, helping us through loneliness, isolation, divorce and aging.
In his latest book, "The New Work of Dogs," Katz looks at the relationships between 12 dogs and their owners in his hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, a town that he has dubbed "Dogsville, USA" to show just how much we're asking of our dogs today for attachment and emotional support.
Guests Jon Katz, author of "A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me" and "The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love and Family"
Yes, I too would like to know if it's the same guy. I didn't hear the whole show, and don't know if that ever came up.
Actually that's not quite right -- the options are always (in some random order, and using ampersand to denote the shortcut key):
&Quit
&Ordering Information
either I &Agree or I Agr&ee
This is true of my currently installed version (8.1 -- copyright 2001) and it was true of every version I used up until then. If they've changed this since then, I'm not aware of it. Every version of WinZip I've seen, the keystrokes to quit & order are stable, and there's only two variants of the "I Agree" button.
The nice thing about this is that it means that you don't have to waste valuable brain cycles hunting for the right button to push -- just be ready to hit ALT + A, ALT + E and you're in in two keychords -- no matter how the buttons are arranged.
But really, with Cygwin available, I just use it's Zip these days:-)
From everything I've read, it seems like the canonical best way to transfer a collection of mail folders from one application to another application is almost to try using IMAP for the translation: have your source application (Outlook in this case) export all it's messages to the IMAP server, then use your new mail application (Mail.app here) to import messages back from the server. Ideally, you could even leave the messages on the server, so switching from one mail client to another becomes as trivial as switching web browsers for accessing the same sites.
If your ISP or job *ahem* doesn't provide you with access to an IMAP server, then you can use Fink to install a copy of UW-IMAPD, and just run that on localhost or somewhere on your home network -- sudo fink -y install uw-imapd
If you had other questions, I'm sure some sysadmin at work *ahem* would be willing to answer any questions...:-)
Could be worse -- they could all be using Lotus Notes. I know people that work in all Notes shops that would give a spare testacle or ovary for a chance to switch to something as user-friendly as Outlook.
"But Outlook is a security nightmare!", we Linux & Mac nerds whine. Maybe so. But for all Outlooks many, many flaws, it definitely serves it's PIM role well for the people that spend all day in it. (And as an aside, the Exchange trick that allows remote users to get their Outlook desktops in an SSL protected web browser is also surprisingly good, especially for web mail.) None of this would get them to pry my copy of Pine away from me, but I'm a damn dirty GNU hippie, so I would think things like that. If held at gunpoint and forced to choose between Outlook & Notes, I'd take Outlook in a heartbeat, and I might actually be able to be happy with the decision. Maybe.
For the other 95% of the world that doesn't want to use a deliberately out of step mail client like I do, Outlook really does meet their needs very well in a way that something as minimalist as Pine or Mutt never could, and in a way that pure mail clients like Eudora or The Bat! only partly address, and in a way that a program like Notes gets oh so horribly wrong.
It's just good enough, in other words, to be a serious problem considering how deep it's flaws run -- especially since some of those usability & convenience strengths are too often also security & spam weaknesses. The more people adapt to the good UI aspects of Outlook, the more by that movement do they move away from good security.
Damn if I know what to do about it, but I can't blame the Outlook users. They're just embracing a flawed tool. Blame the toolmaker (MS), not the tool user...
I've just grepped my spamtrap directory for 'with DAV', as the linked article suggests should be seen in messages delivered using this exploit. For background, here's a little ascii chart of my month over month spam trends (line length is divided by 25):
0165 Jun xxxxxx
1602 May xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0734 Apr xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0439 Mar xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0289 Feb xxxxxxxxxxx
0236 Jan xxxxxxxxx
0283 Dec xxxxxxxxxxx
0189 Nov xxxxxxx
0417 Oct xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0349 Sep xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Clearly, I for one have been getting a surge in spam lately, which might possibly be sloping back down after last month's spike, but it's too early to tell yet.
In spite of that, of the nearly 3000 spams I have received since march, only seven match the pattern with DAV in the message headers. That bears repeating: I have received only seven instances of this exploit, vs. 2940 overall spams since March. Further, I only see 72 messages that have a hotmail.com server on their received headers at all -- most of the time I get "from Hotmail users" it's almost always forged.
Anyway, the first message to mention "with DAV" was sent March 25th, which fits the timeline this guy describes. On the other hand, the rest of my data massively disagrees with the 2200% spike that is suggested in the linked blog -- it seems to me that 0.238% of the spam I'm getting is due to this mis-feature, not 2200%.
Now granted, the two of us are the only two data points that I know of so far, but the results that we're seeing are so wildly out of step that I wouldn't think people should draw conclusions from this. Two completely conflicting measurements can't show us any kind of pattern.
The spam sky may be falling, but this isn't one of the falling pieces you need to keep an eye out for as near as I can tell.
On a cheaper note, a roommate in college taught me a simpler trick for reviving scratched CDs: wipe 'em with clear deodorant. The laser will burn it off after a while, so you have to reapply it periodically, but it works surprisingly well.
The idea is that any transparent, gel-like substance you happen to have laying around the house ought to be workable, as long as it can fill in the gaps in the plastic while not screwing up how the laserbeam hits the aluminum. Deodorant is probably just one of many examples that would do the job, but seeing as it's something that most people have available it's the first one to try.
If that doesn't work, then shell out a few bucks for this Novus stuff, but you may well find that such products are unneeded.
The point is that you haven't eliminated enough of the cost to bring down the price by the ridiculous factors you want.
I don't disagree. My point, which maybe I didn't make so well, is that if you're only getting a 25% or so discount, then I for one would be happy to pay the premium and just get the actual disc -- if only because that completely cuts out all the DRM issues. The digital version has too many drawbacks to make it appealing to me at that price -- just as the cassette format, although cheaper, also has drawbacks for most people.
I used to work in a CD plant, and I know full well that a large order could be pressed for something like a penny per disc even five years ago -- and maybe even less now. Still, a lot of middlemen get to step in and ask for a slice of the pie, so the cost of the media doesn't account for everything.
Cassettes cost a nickel or so a pop to make, yet the sale price for tapes was always lower than it was for CDs -- obviously something else is coming into play there. The same consumer mentality applies here as well: if a digital version could be offered for 1/10 the cost of the physical one, then it would be worthwhile -- and, I'd argue, increased sales volume at the lower price might make up for the lower margin on an individual digital copy. Until we can reach something closer to that sweet spot though, digital copies, just like cassettes, aren't worth it to me.
Quite by coincidence, I stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn in Richmond VA last weekend, while spending the weekend there for a wedding. Random observations:
The place was nice. Nothing fancy, but comfortable -- which is probably better than stuffy fanciness anyway.
There was not, as far as I could tell, any 'net access in the room. Bummer, I'd planned on getting some work done over the weekend, but it's probably just as well.
As nice as the amenities in the room itself were -- again, nothing fancy, just nice -- a bigger matter was that of the walls: they were too thin. I really didn't need to know what the couple in the next room were up to thankyouverymuch.
That last one is the kicker -- if rich-folks rooms start getting made with hifi stereos and Bose speaker arrays, I do *not* want to hear it in the next room -- especially if they're watching one of the "adult" channels and I'd rather not know about it. If all the money that went into these hi-tech toys went instead into better sound-proofing, that would be just fine with me...
People want to be able to get the one track for a small price over the internet - not a whole CD with 12 filler tracks and one good track.
Not to be a naysayer or anything, but where did this meme come from? It's certainly not how I see things. Maybe it's just the genres of music I like (indie rock, old jazz, etc), but for most of the albums I like (which would include hundreds of albums in this context), I don't see them as "one good song and 12 filler songs".
Maybe it's different if you're into crap like Britney Spears & Christina Aguilera, but I couldn't even guess what the "one" good song on most of the CDs I like would be. Of the albums I like that have managed to get any airplay, it's only a coincidence if the songs I like best happen to be the ones that happened to make it on the radio. With the rise of Clear Channel & Infinity, the most radio friendly tracks are usually just the middle of the road boring ones, not the gems.
But that "one good track" mindset just seems silly to me, it doesn't really bother me -- if people see things that way it's not my problem. The bigger issue to me is the pricing. While I agree that a "small price over the internet" is a good idea, I don't think that $1/song or $10/album is that price. At that rate, it's close enough to the price of the physical disc that I'd rather just get that from my local Newbury Comics & not deal with the DRM baggage. If the price of the digital, non physical edition were to come in at 1/4 or 1/10 of the CD then I'd start paying attention, but at the current 1/2 to 1/1 the price I'm just not convinced it's such a good deal.
As usual, the solution here -- which Apple seems to have approached more closely than anyone else, but still not quite attained -- is a viable micropayments model. I don't count $1 as "micro" in the usual sense of the term "micropayments" and I'm having a hard time understanding why many people seem to be treating the iTMS as such a revolution in that area: it's a step closer, but we're not there yet by a long shot.
Slashdot Mirror
Original ideas are overrated. I'm not impressed by something wildly new, especially in interface design -- just look at the shambling wreck that is Enlightenment to give an idea of how much "originality" can be a bad thing. I'm much more pleased to see competent integration of pre-existing, and possibly obscure ideas, and OSX is chock full of that. BeOS was an even better example: very little was original, but being able to use a system that glued together all these great ideas was wonderful, and the few ideas from BeOS that truly were new -- the clever filesystem for example -- seem to be gradually trickling back to the mainstream operating systems.
So, back to what I was originally thinking, if not saying. Original ideas aren't that big of a deal. If you're going to accuse the open source people of ripping off their best idea, keep in mind that Apple and Microsoft have done plenty of this themselvees -- and that's okay! Better to play into what people have learned over the years than to take off on weird experiments that leave everyone confused (e.g. Microsoft Bob). Whether or not Apple had a license, it wasn't originality, but that doesn't bother me at all, and I can't see why other people make such a big stink over the fact that it happens.
If you're trying to stick up for Apple, don't let anyone from Xerox PARC hear you saying that... :-)
OSX has had a built in firewall since at least Jaguar, and I seem to remember it being there in 10.1 as well. I seem to recall people writing that it's just standard *nix ipfw, but I can't find anything at the moment to verify this. In any case, given the choice between high quality freeware firewall software, and commercial software that might or might not be as good but certainly would require some kind of licensing fees, Apple has seemed more than willing to go with the FOSS stuff when bringing in new OSX components (KHTML, BSD, Apache, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc...).
So for example if you had several non-overlapping Finder or Terminal windows open, and you stepped away from your computer for a little while, when you got back you should be able to tell at a glance which window is active, just by the fact that the titlebar is opaque and the lights are on (and if any other window's lights are on, you know where your mouse pointer is as well).
The equivalent on Windows is for the background window to be decorated in a slightly different color scheme -- usually a more muted one than that of the foreground. Either way you're getting the same UI feedback effect, the OSX way is just a little bit slicker, and almost as dessert it lets you have a peek at what's going on with a slice of the window behind that translucent titlebar. Stuff like this doesn't make or break the UI, but a collection of subtle cues like this makes the system feel more responsive & self-descriptive, which is almost always a good thing.
To avoid "polluting" developers, a tech savvy lawyer can run the diffs, and then let the kernel team know that "lines X-Y of file Z need to be edited" without explaining any further.
Okay, so now someone can run a diff between this & the Linux source, and we can finally identify what the claims are all about without having to let SCO continue to make vague threats about what they allege to be there. We don't have to wait for them anymore!
[1] The band puts an "a" in the word "Pearl". Weirdos :-)
Ahh yeah, I've got a recording of "Salt Peanuts" on an old Charlie Parker album, I think "The Yardbird Suites". Very catchy song. I'd like to hear this cover of it...
Honestly, for interesting jam music outside of the jazz genre, my two favorites are nominally punk bands: Sonic Youth & Fugazi. They can make fascinating instrumental music that, crucially, does not put me to sleep :)
On a similar tack, every one of Radiohead's albums has been more interesting than the one that preceded it, and as far as I can tell a lot of that has to do with the influence of electronic dance bands like Autechre, Massive Attack, and Portishead. All of which are, again, fascinating and progressive and jazzy and rocky and in no way sleep inducing.
To the guy who suggested that Kenny G is the future of jazz, no way. He may be the commercial future of jazz, but so what -- boy bands are the commercial future of rock but that doesn't keep creative people like Radiohead from putting out enormously successful albums at the same time. And yes, I'll concede that the hippie jam bands do draw from classic jazz as much as Sonic Youth or Portishead do, and they all do a decent job of reintrepreting the old ideas once again. But the jam bands have not in my opinion assumed the role of sole defenders of the genre today, and thank god as far as I'm concerned :-)
To go beyond that, read & listen. When Christopher Lydon used to do the public radio show The Connection from WBUR in Boston, he used to do lots of great jazz shows. The ones on Kind of Blue & A Love Supreme greatly deepend my appreciation of what was already two of my favorite albums, and Lydon's enthusiasm for the music also got me interested in hearing more from people like Count Basie and others. Thanks to the magic of RealAudio and the generosity of Boston University, you can still listen to these great radio shows today. On a similar note, NPR's Curious Listeners Guide to Jazz looks like a pretty good overview of the genre but deeper conniseurs than me might disagree about that one.
Really though, the library is the best thing. Check out everything you can, make a note of what you like & what doesn't do anything for you, and focus on the artists & time periods that you like the best. For me, the stuff from the late 40s (Davis' "Rebirth of the Cool", 1948 [?]) through the late 50s (1959 gave us Davis' "Kind of Blue", Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um" & "Blues & Roots", and Coltrane's "Giant Steps" -- four of my favorites) and into the early 60s (Contrane's "Blue Train", 1961) seems to have been the golden age of jazz. Before that was a lot of big band & swing (fun, but not as personally satisfying to me) and after that came a lot of avant garde & psychedelic stuff that I only care for in small doses.
As for whether you'll like modern stuff, I dunno. The 60s & 70s seemed to bring a lot of psychedelic free jazz & funk, but personally I haven't yet found anything from that era or since that has won me over. The closest thing I can find to modern jazz that I like is Martin Medesky & Wood, who in some ways do an interesting blend of that older cool jazz mixed well with modern hip hop -- making me wonder just what John Coltrane would have done if anyone thought to have a DJ in a band back in the 60s. My problem with MMW though is the whole hippie jam band thing, which I find great for naptime. Oh well. The other modern jazz person I've found to be consistently interesting is John Zorn; if you've ever heard Mr Bungle's albums and tried to puzzle out how they got to be so different from what Faith No More did, blame/thank John Zorn. To the extent that the first Bungle album didn't sound like "The Real Thing", to my ear it's almost all Zorn's influence (he produced the album). This stuff is fascinating to listen to, but it can barely be described as music in any conventional sense: his Cobra album seems to go out of its way to discard rhythm, melody, harmony & tempo -- it's just vaguely organized bursts of sound on disc. Very very weird.
Bonus points: compare & contrast the album cover for "Blue Train" with that of one of the Cowboy Bebop DVDs -- the cover art & logo are similar, and the back cover tiny font text are like mirrors of each other. First time I ever got a chance to see Cowboy Bebop (again, at the library -- I don't have cable tv :), I could tell just from the cover that the people that did this had excellent taste :) :) :)
Anyway, this is al
From everything I've read about the "speed issue" on Apple hardware over the past few years, the biggest thing holding current generation Macs back isn't the PowerPC chips, but the frozen in evolutionary time speeds of the boards those CPUs plug into. Apparently you can only expect a 20-30% speed bump by adding a second G4 processor to one of these systems, but it's not because the chips are slow -- they're really not all that bad -- but because they're bandwidth starved.
Hyper Transport is specifically aimed to address this bottleneck. No, it cannot be a "relatively minor" thing, because if it lives up to its promise and relieves the biggest bottleneck in the current generation machines, a good chunk of the gap between PPC and x86 machines will be closed. That's a big deal.
Of course I remember the Wizard -- that show ruled when I was a kid. Watching ol' Don Herbert showing those kids science experiments was way more fun than any dumb old video game console -- and still would be now... :-)
As far as I'm concerned, the silver lining here is that I saved $17.98 and my sanity, and the bastards are cutting me a thirteen dollar check to top it all off. I couldn't be happier :-)
A lot of people seem to be developing more on Windows for this very reason: the Mac may be more pleasant to use, but test cycles are shorter if you suck it up and work on the same platform as your audience.
Case in point: I've uncovered bugs in how Safari renders certain pages but, since they looked fine on IE and they didn't look that bad in NS7, the concensus from the very sympathetic web developers I talked to was "to hell with Safari". Making this particular glitch go away would have been far too much work for far too little return.
I don't think this is atypical.
Yes, I too would like to know if it's the same guy. I didn't hear the whole show, and don't know if that ever came up.
Clearly, putting the word "express" in the name of the product reveals a sense of humor previously unsuspected at Quark... :-)
This is true of my currently installed version (8.1 -- copyright 2001) and it was true of every version I used up until then. If they've changed this since then, I'm not aware of it. Every version of WinZip I've seen, the keystrokes to quit & order are stable, and there's only two variants of the "I Agree" button.
The nice thing about this is that it means that you don't have to waste valuable brain cycles hunting for the right button to push -- just be ready to hit ALT + A, ALT + E and you're in in two keychords -- no matter how the buttons are arranged.
But really, with Cygwin available, I just use it's Zip these days :-)
If your ISP or job *ahem* doesn't provide you with access to an IMAP server, then you can use Fink to install a copy of UW-IMAPD, and just run that on localhost or somewhere on your home network -- sudo fink -y install uw-imapd
If you had other questions, I'm sure some sysadmin at work *ahem* would be willing to answer any questions... :-)
"But Outlook is a security nightmare!", we Linux & Mac nerds whine. Maybe so. But for all Outlooks many, many flaws, it definitely serves it's PIM role well for the people that spend all day in it. (And as an aside, the Exchange trick that allows remote users to get their Outlook desktops in an SSL protected web browser is also surprisingly good, especially for web mail.) None of this would get them to pry my copy of Pine away from me, but I'm a damn dirty GNU hippie, so I would think things like that. If held at gunpoint and forced to choose between Outlook & Notes, I'd take Outlook in a heartbeat, and I might actually be able to be happy with the decision. Maybe.
For the other 95% of the world that doesn't want to use a deliberately out of step mail client like I do, Outlook really does meet their needs very well in a way that something as minimalist as Pine or Mutt never could, and in a way that pure mail clients like Eudora or The Bat! only partly address, and in a way that a program like Notes gets oh so horribly wrong.
It's just good enough, in other words, to be a serious problem considering how deep it's flaws run -- especially since some of those usability & convenience strengths are too often also security & spam weaknesses. The more people adapt to the good UI aspects of Outlook, the more by that movement do they move away from good security.
Damn if I know what to do about it, but I can't blame the Outlook users. They're just embracing a flawed tool. Blame the toolmaker (MS), not the tool user...
0165 Jun xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
1602 May xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0734 Apr xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0439 Mar xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0289 Feb xxxxxxxxxxx
0236 Jan xxxxxxxxx
0283 Dec xxxxxxxxxxx
0189 Nov xxxxxxx
0417 Oct xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
0349 Sep xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Clearly, I for one have been getting a surge in spam lately, which might possibly be sloping back down after last month's spike, but it's too early to tell yet.
In spite of that, of the nearly 3000 spams I have received since march, only seven match the pattern with DAV in the message headers. That bears repeating: I have received only seven instances of this exploit, vs. 2940 overall spams since March. Further, I only see 72 messages that have a hotmail.com server on their received headers at all -- most of the time I get "from Hotmail users" it's almost always forged.
Anyway, the first message to mention "with DAV" was sent March 25th, which fits the timeline this guy describes. On the other hand, the rest of my data massively disagrees with the 2200% spike that is suggested in the linked blog -- it seems to me that 0.238% of the spam I'm getting is due to this mis-feature, not 2200%.
Now granted, the two of us are the only two data points that I know of so far, but the results that we're seeing are so wildly out of step that I wouldn't think people should draw conclusions from this. Two completely conflicting measurements can't show us any kind of pattern.
The spam sky may be falling, but this isn't one of the falling pieces you need to keep an eye out for as near as I can tell.
The idea is that any transparent, gel-like substance you happen to have laying around the house ought to be workable, as long as it can fill in the gaps in the plastic while not screwing up how the laserbeam hits the aluminum. Deodorant is probably just one of many examples that would do the job, but seeing as it's something that most people have available it's the first one to try.
If that doesn't work, then shell out a few bucks for this Novus stuff, but you may well find that such products are unneeded.
I don't disagree. My point, which maybe I didn't make so well, is that if you're only getting a 25% or so discount, then I for one would be happy to pay the premium and just get the actual disc -- if only because that completely cuts out all the DRM issues. The digital version has too many drawbacks to make it appealing to me at that price -- just as the cassette format, although cheaper, also has drawbacks for most people.
I used to work in a CD plant, and I know full well that a large order could be pressed for something like a penny per disc even five years ago -- and maybe even less now. Still, a lot of middlemen get to step in and ask for a slice of the pie, so the cost of the media doesn't account for everything.
Cassettes cost a nickel or so a pop to make, yet the sale price for tapes was always lower than it was for CDs -- obviously something else is coming into play there. The same consumer mentality applies here as well: if a digital version could be offered for 1/10 the cost of the physical one, then it would be worthwhile -- and, I'd argue, increased sales volume at the lower price might make up for the lower margin on an individual digital copy. Until we can reach something closer to that sweet spot though, digital copies, just like cassettes, aren't worth it to me.
YM[usic]MV :-)
That last one is the kicker -- if rich-folks rooms start getting made with hifi stereos and Bose speaker arrays, I do *not* want to hear it in the next room -- especially if they're watching one of the "adult" channels and I'd rather not know about it. If all the money that went into these hi-tech toys went instead into better sound-proofing, that would be just fine with me...
Not to be a naysayer or anything, but where did this meme come from? It's certainly not how I see things. Maybe it's just the genres of music I like (indie rock, old jazz, etc), but for most of the albums I like (which would include hundreds of albums in this context), I don't see them as "one good song and 12 filler songs".
Maybe it's different if you're into crap like Britney Spears & Christina Aguilera, but I couldn't even guess what the "one" good song on most of the CDs I like would be. Of the albums I like that have managed to get any airplay, it's only a coincidence if the songs I like best happen to be the ones that happened to make it on the radio. With the rise of Clear Channel & Infinity, the most radio friendly tracks are usually just the middle of the road boring ones, not the gems.
But that "one good track" mindset just seems silly to me, it doesn't really bother me -- if people see things that way it's not my problem. The bigger issue to me is the pricing. While I agree that a "small price over the internet" is a good idea, I don't think that $1/song or $10/album is that price. At that rate, it's close enough to the price of the physical disc that I'd rather just get that from my local Newbury Comics & not deal with the DRM baggage. If the price of the digital, non physical edition were to come in at 1/4 or 1/10 of the CD then I'd start paying attention, but at the current 1/2 to 1/1 the price I'm just not convinced it's such a good deal.
As usual, the solution here -- which Apple seems to have approached more closely than anyone else, but still not quite attained -- is a viable micropayments model. I don't count $1 as "micro" in the usual sense of the term "micropayments" and I'm having a hard time understanding why many people seem to be treating the iTMS as such a revolution in that area: it's a step closer, but we're not there yet by a long shot.