One of us is an ignoramus, but I'm not sure it's me.
If you don't see the problem of an OS setting up only one account with admin privileges, that requires no password to execute those privileges, then I'm afraid I can't help you and you really don't understand computer security. I've already pointed out that the problem is that computers will be running configured as if they have a single user, but in reality will have multiple users. You then put onus of this design flaw back on the consumer. This is the flaw of the design as it comes from MS. Sorry you don't see it.
You show further ignorance in not understanding the difference between those config files that reside in the user's directory and those that reside in the system directory. A program launched by a user could only fowl up the config files owned by the user (i.e. in the user's directory), if the program needs to write to files other than its own in the system directory, then an escalation of privileges needs to be granted (via admin password entry). So, yes, a program could screw with settings from other programs, but only at the user level. It's this granularity that MS continues to fail to understand.
But, then, for the sake of argument, since you think that the Unix/Linux/BSD/Mac way is not superior, let's just compare the number of registry repair utilities on the market to the number of config file repair utilities on the market for the other OSes? Hmmm. Done checking? There are literally dozens of registry repair tools for Windows and none for these other OSes. Why? Because the problems with the global registry are real and anyone who has spent any significant time troubleshooting Windows, if they are being honest, will attest to this. And no, its not because of the market size difference between Windows and those other OSes, it is because the registry is a bad design prone to corruption and rot. This isn't the only problem of a global registry either- another being that you cannot just chuck the registry and reboot and have Windows rebuild a fresh one on the fly. I'm sure MS had reasons for this design, one of which was to prevent piracy by making it harder to copy the software from one machine to another (i.e. you should need the installer CD to put the OS on another machine)- how's that working out for ya?
Now, you didn't even touch on the problem of programs being too intertwined with the OS and able to modify, update, or corrupt files belonging to the OS (without an escalation of privileges). Or, was this a case of me not knowing my limits (whatever the hell that meant)?
You also didn't address the issue of the number of processes that simply run as administrator, thereby having full run of the machine once they are compromised. Most other OSes have something like 40 different system accounts all with their permissions set specifically to keep them within their domains of specialty, and should they be compromised they cannot affect the entire system. Is it my ignorance that keeps you from addressing this point?
And, then there's the silly assertion from your opening, 'belligerent posts from ignoramuses who don't know their own limits'. What was belligerent about my observations of Win 7? What limits don't I know that I should have kept within? It's one thing to make such assertions, it's quite another to back them up. Or, are you ignorant of how to argue your point with evidence?
Many reviewers are probably making the same mistakes and oversights with Windows 7 that they did with Vista.
Any reviewer who is not pointing out how severely flawed UAC is in Win 7 is not thinking clearly and/or not doing their job properly. I've been putting Win 7 through it's paces and I can't help but marvel that Microsoft still thinks that it is okay (during the initial install) to have the user setup a single administrator account. Once logged in on this account, whenever UAC needs privilege elevation, it simply presents a dialog with "Yes" and "No" buttons. No password entry is required. Why is this a problem? Think of the millions of users who will setup their PCs this way and then let friends and family use them? Should the trojan that your 15 year old's best friend just downloaded to the family PC get its privileges elevated? Sure, no problem, because all Billy has to do is click "Yes" when he's using your computer- he doesn't need to talk to you or know your password before proceeding. I searched and can find no option to require password entry for UAC privilege approval/escalation on admin accounts in Win 7. The fix, is to create "Regular User" accounts, log out of the administrator account and then use those. But, seriously, how many people are actually going to do this? And, how hard would it have been for Microsoft to write the OS install wizard to set things up this way? It's almost amazing how poorly designed things can be coming from that company. It's almost like they strive for mediocrity.
Oh, and while I'm thinking about it. Win 7, while better in initial performance than Vista, will eventually suck as bad as any version of Windows. Why? Because the global registry is still there and still subject all of its flaws and rot problems. Programs are still too entwined with the OS and able to update, change, or corrupt it. And, because too many processes run as "Administrator". The viruses, worms, trojans, adware, etc. will not be stopped and your system will still spend a considerable portion of its CPU scanning for that shit in the background. And, there will be millions of users who neglect to have any, or at least any that's up-to-date, anti-malware detection.
Windows 7, slightly better out of the gate, but still arriving at the same destination due to poor design decisions in its underpinnings.
I'm a big Apple/Mac fanboy and I think that this was a schleppy move on Apple's part. It'd be worse if they had it set itself as the default browser, and conversely, it'd be less egregious if there was some new functionality in either iTunes or QuickTime that now required Safari. However, no matter how much they may want to promote their browser, they shouldn't be pushing it on people. It'd be one thing if there was a yes/no question in the installer/upgrade wizard, but to just slip it in is entirely wrong.
That being said, and this doesn't excuse their behavior, but Apple isn't the only company to do something like this. Adobe delivers Opera with some of their products. I'm not sure exactly which, but I think it happened to me once when I installed either Photoshop Elements or Dreamweaver. Of course, there is an some obvious relevance with Dreamweaver, and it certainly didn't make Opera the default browser. But, it did cause some head aches later when I upgraded to a newer version of Opera and Photoshop Elements began crashing while attempting to launch. It took several hours of troubleshooting (that included creating a brand new user account and logging into it) to finally determine that the updated prefs files from the newer Opera where causing Photoshop Elements to crash. I couldn't believe that Adobe had coded their program so poorly as to choke and die upon reading the modified prefs of another app from a different vendor. I was forced to choose between Photoshop Elements and the latest Opera.
In one sense, you're right that OS X is more closed because you need Apple HW to run it. In another, though, it is more open because it is based on FreeBSD and it so it has a familiar CLI under the hood and it supports X11 with the simple addition of one small software package.
Of course, Apple chose not to use X11 as the default windowing environment, which if they had would make it much easier to release the same apps on both OS and other *nixes. However, there is a FOSS counterpart to Apple's Aqua/Cocoa environment- GNUStep. It'd be interesting to see some more effort from the community on bringing GNUStep up to point where OS X apps could run unmodified on a *nix desktop. I think this would make desktop Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris etc. much more interesting than the efforts that are being done on things like WINE.
Don't know about the current iMacs, but my 11 month old MacBook does not have this artificial limitation. When connected to an external display, it is easy to switch it between spanning and mirrored. Also, applying the firmware hack on my previous iBook was no big deal and then I had the same options.
It would be kind of like I started a philosophy called "Chocolatism" that said "If you eat nothing but chocolate, you will live forever"... Then, when people ate nothing but chocolate and inevitably died, I said "That isn't real Chocolatism... In real Chocolatism people live forever". Ah, but you said that the people actually ate nothing but chocolate. So, you're analogy isn't apt. You'd have to change it to, 'Then people ate nothing but carob (or something else besides chocolate) and inevitably died'
Saying the people ate nothing but cholocate is like saying that Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam actually practiced true communism and the point of the poster that you're replying to is that these places have never done that.
It's too bad these apps aren't truly portable. They're only portable from one Win32 box to another. Imagine if all of these apps were coded in Java and would run on any machine with a suitable JVM implementation, then they would truly be portable.
I went to the city of Boston's website and used the submission form to send this to Thomas M. Menino:
Hi. I'd like to first state that even though I can't quit laughing about the news of what happened in your city on Wednesday, I also feel sympathy for you in the decisions that you now face. It is never easy to step back and admit that a person or a group, especially those that you may know and be involved with either professionally or personally, has over reacted and caused a problem where no problem actually existed. However, I firmly believe that your law enforcement completely over reacted to Wednesday's "situation" regarding the guerrilla marketing props placed in your city to promote the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. I'm writing to you because I think that you should consider that a lot of us in other parts of the country are laughing at just how incompetent this makes the involved agencies and officials in Boston look. Especially when you consider that these same types of advertising props were placed in several other major cities without any sort of similar incident. Is there no one on your bomb squad who is young enough and hip enough to at least have known that these were ATHF characters? Obviously, I'm not a citizen of Boston and therefore you don't need to worry about whether or not I would ever vote for you, however, I think that you should consider how your constituents who might hold views similar to mine will view your actions following this fiasco. I think you should take appropriate action to start placing blame and responsibility squarely where it belongs- with those who over reacted and failed to see these things for what they were. If the "experts" within your police force or swat team or whomever it was that was evaluating these advertising gimmicks couldn't determine that they were in fact harmless and contained no explosive or incendiary components of any kind then their competency to fulfill their roles should be what is being questioned at this point. The makers and placers of these devices are probably only guilty of a minor offense in that they placed unauthorized advertising on public property. The biggest fault here lies with those who made the biggest mistake and that is not the placers of the ads, it is those who chose to bring the city to its knees because they failed to properly assess what they were looking at. I think the citizens of Boston are due an apology and I think that it needs to come from those who perpetrated the biggest offense. Anyway, that's just my 'two cents'. I only took the time to write because I thought it might help you to know some of us from the outside are currently viewing your predicament.
Thanks! That's not quite Quicksilver, but it's the closest I've seen yet for Windows. I was even able to configure it to use Control + Space as its hot key. My days at work just got a little less sucky.
I have the exact opposite opinion of eMusic. I think their music catalog is great. I do agree that the subscription model is a bit tiresome, but I find it worth putting up with as they have a lot of content that I want. I currently have 75 albums in my "Saved for Later" playlist on eMusic and I enjoy downloading 1 or 2 albums per weekend in high quality variable bit rate, non DRM'ed MP3 format. eMusic is what is keeping me out of the used CD bins that I used to so frequently visit (sorry local CD shops). I only spend $14 a month on music now, instead of the $60 - $100 per month I used to do.
Nope. Burning the tracks to a regular audio CD and then re-ripping them is no illegal. In doing this, you haven't "circumvented" or "modified any security technology" to do so. You've only done what Apple has allowed you to do with iTunes. If they didn't want you to be able to do this, then they wouldn't have designed the software to allow it. Also, this method of 'circumventing' the DRM has been widely published since the the iTunes Music Store was announced and Apple have done nothing to prevent people from distributing this information.
I'm not pointing out that the scheme is useless. The scheme has a use. It pacifies the recording industry into a false sense of security and it got the whole legal downloading of music kick started.
It's kind of like getting your uptight, virginal boyfriend/girlfriend to finally take a few sips of wine. Yeah, you could argue that he/she should have just given himself/herself to you in the first place, but unfortunately, sometimes in life we have to build up a certain level of trust and tear down a certain level of reserve or nothing exciting will ever happen.
Let's just be glad the way around Apple's DRM is easy and hope that at some point the recording industry realizes that it is unnecessary. But, the answer isn't to require Apple to let others use their DRM- that would be a step backward. The answer is to show people that owning an iPod isn't tied to using the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), and that, conversely, buying tracks on iTMS isn't tied to using those tracks only on an iPod. Educating the public about how easy it is to use iTMS tracks with the device of their choosing is a far better solution than opening up Apple's DRM for more use elsewhere.
And, to those of you who say that taking your 5,000 tracks you bought from iTMS and burning them to CD and then re-ripping them would be too much work, here's a hint- don't do it all at once. One or two CDs a day and you'd have this library free of DRM restrictions in no time.
I know this is somewhat off topic, but I see that there are ad-sense type ads on this discussion for software that allows you to get songs off of an iPod. Now, I know that slashdot wouldn't exist without advertising, however, in this case, the ads do clueless readers a disservice.
No one should have to pay to get their music off of their iPod. Hell, even Apple now has a page that explains how to do this without any additional software other than iTunes:
This is why I don't leave the few things I've purchased from iTMS on my system as "protected". I burn it to an audio CD and then re-import it. (If I think the quality has suffered noticeably, I up the bit rate to 192 to compensate.) I don't want any of the music I've purchased to ever not work because of the stupid DRM. Apple has left you an easy way around their DRM, use it.
Same here. I just bought the bundle. I can honestly say that I would probably never have purchased any of these apps at their individual prices, but couldn't resist the thought of getting all of them for $49. So far I've only tried Disco. The smoke rising off of the window as it burns CDs is a total gimmick, but really darn cool nonetheless.
I'm so sick of hearing about the need for a two button mouse or trackpad. Control + click is NOT hard. It's easy. It accomplishes the same damn thing that having a right mouse button does. And, it does it without confusing users who will never understand what the right mouse button on a PC does. Oh, and on newer iBooks, PowerBooks, MacBooks, & MacBook Pros that support gestures, you can configure the trackpad to interpret two fingers on the pad + a click as a right click. And, for the 1000th time, if you simply plug in a mouse with multiple buttons, OS X will instantly recognize them and they will work as expected. Get over it.
I like the having a single mouse button on my Macs. I spend 8 hours a day in front of a Windows PC with a two button scroll mouse and then I go home to a MacBook Pro in the evenings with it's single button trackpad. When I'm at work, I right click and use the scroll wheel. When I'm at home, I control+click and use PageUp/PageDown (or these days use the two finger trackpad gesture). I go back and forth between these two configurations and I don't even think about it. It's not that hard- really.
I'm pretty much a total mac fanboy, but I have to concede this point. I never tried multiple monitors on a Mac until a few years ago when I got my first iBook and discovered that a simple firmware adjustment was all that was needed in order to allow spanning instead of mirroring when hooking up an external monitor. I was really excited at first, but soon learned how annoying it is to have the menu bar only available on one of the screens- especially when you want to have one app running on one screen and another on the other.
For single monitors, I still believe that the stationary menu bar at the top of the screen is a superior UI. If you don't believe this, you need to spend some time observing how many users of Windows/Linux keep every window maximized- they are in effect simulating the stationary menu bar effect. However, for multiple monitors, the menu bar in the window paradigm of Windows/X11 is currently better. I think that Apple could easily fix this by having the Mac's menu bar move from screen to screen with the mouse. They could even make it's appearance 'ghosted' on the screens where the mouse currently is not. Placing a menu bar on each screen would then allow different apps to be in the foreground on different monitors. I've made suggestions along these lines on the OS X feedback page, but, sadly they have yet to realize the brilliance of what I'm telling them.;-]
I have a feeling that they've concluded that there is not enough multiple monitor use to warrant spending time coming up with a more elegant solution.
If you have 1GB of RAM and you're constantly getting the spinning rainbow of death (I'm guessing that's what you meant by "pinwheels"), then you need to do 1 of 2 things:
- get more RAM (a faster hard drive wouldn't hurt either)
- close some apps
Ever notice how some of the icons in the dock have little black triangles under them and some don't? The ones with little black triangles under them are still active in memory and depending on how well/poorly they are coded, can sometimes be eating up significant amounts of RAM & CPU cycles- even if you've shut all of their associated windows.
My wife was always complaining about how slow her iBook G4 800Mhz w/ 640MB of RAM was running. And, every time she complained about it, I always noticed how she had like 12 - 15 programs running. Once she started shutting down some of the apps, the performance of her iBook went way up.
You've got to work within the limits of the machine/OS. It doesn't matter if it is OS X or any other OS. I've got an Ubuntu box that only has 256MB of RAM. It runs great for things like Firefox, the terminal, and OpenOffice, but if I launch VMWare Player and then fire up a Windows 2000 virtual machine that is allocated 128MB of RAM, the whole damn thing slows to a crawl. Guess what? I know it's not Ubuntu's fault, but mine for not having enough RAM in that box for what I'm asking it to do at the time. I'm typing this from a Windows XP machine that has 512MB of RAM. I can get this thing crawling after a few hours just by opening Firefox (with a bunch of tabs), Adobe Reader (with several big PDFs), & several documents in OpenOffice.
One last thing, learn to use the "Activity Monitor". It's in [Name of your hard drive]/Applications/Utilities on your mini. It will start to help you get some sense of what's going on behind the scenes with OS X and will also give you some clues as to why your machine gives you the spinning pinwheel of death so frequently.
Oh, I lied, this is really the last thing. If you use Firefox on the Mac, quit it once in awhile and relaunch it. It's gotten better in v2.0, but it still seems to be a total resource pig in OS X and it seems to progressively leak memory the longer it is open. Safari is the best day to day browser on OS X and Firefox is a nice backup for sites that aren't 100% compatible with Safari yet.
I agree with the idea that the Zodiac's size kept it from being a portable PDA. The size is the number one thing that kept me from getting one of these. I have carried a Palm OS device with me nearly everywhere I go since 1999. I spent some time playing with the Zodiac at a local CompUSA and was experiencing some serious technolust. However, the Zodiac, was just too big to be carried daily in my cargo pants/shorts like other Palm OS devices. BTW- I'm having some of the same feelings about the new PSP.
Well, if it's the case that the compiler just didn't optimize for competitors' processors, then I'd agree with you. However, in the event that Intel took the time to code their compiler to intentionally degrade performance on competitors' processors, then I'd have to strongly disagree with your point.
Slashdot Mirror
One of us is an ignoramus, but I'm not sure it's me.
If you don't see the problem of an OS setting up only one account with admin privileges, that requires no password to execute those privileges, then I'm afraid I can't help you and you really don't understand computer security. I've already pointed out that the problem is that computers will be running configured as if they have a single user, but in reality will have multiple users. You then put onus of this design flaw back on the consumer. This is the flaw of the design as it comes from MS. Sorry you don't see it.
You show further ignorance in not understanding the difference between those config files that reside in the user's directory and those that reside in the system directory. A program launched by a user could only fowl up the config files owned by the user (i.e. in the user's directory), if the program needs to write to files other than its own in the system directory, then an escalation of privileges needs to be granted (via admin password entry). So, yes, a program could screw with settings from other programs, but only at the user level. It's this granularity that MS continues to fail to understand.
But, then, for the sake of argument, since you think that the Unix/Linux/BSD/Mac way is not superior, let's just compare the number of registry repair utilities on the market to the number of config file repair utilities on the market for the other OSes? Hmmm. Done checking? There are literally dozens of registry repair tools for Windows and none for these other OSes. Why? Because the problems with the global registry are real and anyone who has spent any significant time troubleshooting Windows, if they are being honest, will attest to this. And no, its not because of the market size difference between Windows and those other OSes, it is because the registry is a bad design prone to corruption and rot. This isn't the only problem of a global registry either- another being that you cannot just chuck the registry and reboot and have Windows rebuild a fresh one on the fly. I'm sure MS had reasons for this design, one of which was to prevent piracy by making it harder to copy the software from one machine to another (i.e. you should need the installer CD to put the OS on another machine)- how's that working out for ya?
Now, you didn't even touch on the problem of programs being too intertwined with the OS and able to modify, update, or corrupt files belonging to the OS (without an escalation of privileges). Or, was this a case of me not knowing my limits (whatever the hell that meant)?
You also didn't address the issue of the number of processes that simply run as administrator, thereby having full run of the machine once they are compromised. Most other OSes have something like 40 different system accounts all with their permissions set specifically to keep them within their domains of specialty, and should they be compromised they cannot affect the entire system. Is it my ignorance that keeps you from addressing this point?
And, then there's the silly assertion from your opening, 'belligerent posts from ignoramuses who don't know their own limits'. What was belligerent about my observations of Win 7? What limits don't I know that I should have kept within? It's one thing to make such assertions, it's quite another to back them up. Or, are you ignorant of how to argue your point with evidence?
Many reviewers are probably making the same mistakes and oversights with Windows 7 that they did with Vista.
Any reviewer who is not pointing out how severely flawed UAC is in Win 7 is not thinking clearly and/or not doing their job properly. I've been putting Win 7 through it's paces and I can't help but marvel that Microsoft still thinks that it is okay (during the initial install) to have the user setup a single administrator account. Once logged in on this account, whenever UAC needs privilege elevation, it simply presents a dialog with "Yes" and "No" buttons. No password entry is required. Why is this a problem? Think of the millions of users who will setup their PCs this way and then let friends and family use them? Should the trojan that your 15 year old's best friend just downloaded to the family PC get its privileges elevated? Sure, no problem, because all Billy has to do is click "Yes" when he's using your computer- he doesn't need to talk to you or know your password before proceeding. I searched and can find no option to require password entry for UAC privilege approval/escalation on admin accounts in Win 7. The fix, is to create "Regular User" accounts, log out of the administrator account and then use those. But, seriously, how many people are actually going to do this? And, how hard would it have been for Microsoft to write the OS install wizard to set things up this way? It's almost amazing how poorly designed things can be coming from that company. It's almost like they strive for mediocrity.
Oh, and while I'm thinking about it. Win 7, while better in initial performance than Vista, will eventually suck as bad as any version of Windows. Why? Because the global registry is still there and still subject all of its flaws and rot problems. Programs are still too entwined with the OS and able to update, change, or corrupt it. And, because too many processes run as "Administrator". The viruses, worms, trojans, adware, etc. will not be stopped and your system will still spend a considerable portion of its CPU scanning for that shit in the background. And, there will be millions of users who neglect to have any, or at least any that's up-to-date, anti-malware detection.
Windows 7, slightly better out of the gate, but still arriving at the same destination due to poor design decisions in its underpinnings.
I'm a big Apple/Mac fanboy and I think that this was a schleppy move on Apple's part. It'd be worse if they had it set itself as the default browser, and conversely, it'd be less egregious if there was some new functionality in either iTunes or QuickTime that now required Safari. However, no matter how much they may want to promote their browser, they shouldn't be pushing it on people. It'd be one thing if there was a yes/no question in the installer/upgrade wizard, but to just slip it in is entirely wrong.
That being said, and this doesn't excuse their behavior, but Apple isn't the only company to do something like this. Adobe delivers Opera with some of their products. I'm not sure exactly which, but I think it happened to me once when I installed either Photoshop Elements or Dreamweaver. Of course, there is an some obvious relevance with Dreamweaver, and it certainly didn't make Opera the default browser. But, it did cause some head aches later when I upgraded to a newer version of Opera and Photoshop Elements began crashing while attempting to launch. It took several hours of troubleshooting (that included creating a brand new user account and logging into it) to finally determine that the updated prefs files from the newer Opera where causing Photoshop Elements to crash. I couldn't believe that Adobe had coded their program so poorly as to choke and die upon reading the modified prefs of another app from a different vendor. I was forced to choose between Photoshop Elements and the latest Opera.
In one sense, you're right that OS X is more closed because you need Apple HW to run it. In another, though, it is more open because it is based on FreeBSD and it so it has a familiar CLI under the hood and it supports X11 with the simple addition of one small software package.
Of course, Apple chose not to use X11 as the default windowing environment, which if they had would make it much easier to release the same apps on both OS and other *nixes. However, there is a FOSS counterpart to Apple's Aqua/Cocoa environment- GNUStep. It'd be interesting to see some more effort from the community on bringing GNUStep up to point where OS X apps could run unmodified on a *nix desktop. I think this would make desktop Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris etc. much more interesting than the efforts that are being done on things like WINE.
Don't know about the current iMacs, but my 11 month old MacBook does not have this artificial limitation. When connected to an external display, it is easy to switch it between spanning and mirrored. Also, applying the firmware hack on my previous iBook was no big deal and then I had the same options.
Saying the people ate nothing but cholocate is like saying that Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam actually practiced true communism and the point of the poster that you're replying to is that these places have never done that.
It's too bad these apps aren't truly portable. They're only portable from one Win32 box to another. Imagine if all of these apps were coded in Java and would run on any machine with a suitable JVM implementation, then they would truly be portable.
I dont' know if it was Jim Allchin but, I think it's obvious that someone at Microsoft bought a mac:
David Pogue's Tongue In Cheek Comparison of OS X & Vista
"The Real Windows Vistas"
I went to the city of Boston's website and used the submission form to send this to Thomas M. Menino:
Hi. I'd like to first state that even though I can't quit laughing about the news of what happened in your city on Wednesday, I also feel sympathy for you in the decisions that you now face. It is never easy to step back and admit that a person or a group, especially those that you may know and be involved with either professionally or personally, has over reacted and caused a problem where no problem actually existed. However, I firmly believe that your law enforcement completely over reacted to Wednesday's "situation" regarding the guerrilla marketing props placed in your city to promote the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. I'm writing to you because I think that you should consider that a lot of us in other parts of the country are laughing at just how incompetent this makes the involved agencies and officials in Boston look. Especially when you consider that these same types of advertising props were placed in several other major cities without any sort of similar incident. Is there no one on your bomb squad who is young enough and hip enough to at least have known that these were ATHF characters? Obviously, I'm not a citizen of Boston and therefore you don't need to worry about whether or not I would ever vote for you, however, I think that you should consider how your constituents who might hold views similar to mine will view your actions following this fiasco. I think you should take appropriate action to start placing blame and responsibility squarely where it belongs- with those who over reacted and failed to see these things for what they were. If the "experts" within your police force or swat team or whomever it was that was evaluating these advertising gimmicks couldn't determine that they were in fact harmless and contained no explosive or incendiary components of any kind then their competency to fulfill their roles should be what is being questioned at this point. The makers and placers of these devices are probably only guilty of a minor offense in that they placed unauthorized advertising on public property. The biggest fault here lies with those who made the biggest mistake and that is not the placers of the ads, it is those who chose to bring the city to its knees because they failed to properly assess what they were looking at. I think the citizens of Boston are due an apology and I think that it needs to come from those who perpetrated the biggest offense. Anyway, that's just my 'two cents'. I only took the time to write because I thought it might help you to know some of us from the outside are currently viewing your predicament.
Nice serious reply to a post which was obviously a joke. Can you say 'satire'?
Thanks! That's not quite Quicksilver, but it's the closest I've seen yet for Windows. I was even able to configure it to use Control + Space as its hot key. My days at work just got a little less sucky.
I have the exact opposite opinion of eMusic. I think their music catalog is great. I do agree that the subscription model is a bit tiresome, but I find it worth putting up with as they have a lot of content that I want. I currently have 75 albums in my "Saved for Later" playlist on eMusic and I enjoy downloading 1 or 2 albums per weekend in high quality variable bit rate, non DRM'ed MP3 format. eMusic is what is keeping me out of the used CD bins that I used to so frequently visit (sorry local CD shops). I only spend $14 a month on music now, instead of the $60 - $100 per month I used to do.
Nope. Burning the tracks to a regular audio CD and then re-ripping them is no illegal. In doing this, you haven't "circumvented" or "modified any security technology" to do so. You've only done what Apple has allowed you to do with iTunes. If they didn't want you to be able to do this, then they wouldn't have designed the software to allow it. Also, this method of 'circumventing' the DRM has been widely published since the the iTunes Music Store was announced and Apple have done nothing to prevent people from distributing this information.
I'm not pointing out that the scheme is useless. The scheme has a use. It pacifies the recording industry into a false sense of security and it got the whole legal downloading of music kick started.
It's kind of like getting your uptight, virginal boyfriend/girlfriend to finally take a few sips of wine. Yeah, you could argue that he/she should have just given himself/herself to you in the first place, but unfortunately, sometimes in life we have to build up a certain level of trust and tear down a certain level of reserve or nothing exciting will ever happen.
Let's just be glad the way around Apple's DRM is easy and hope that at some point the recording industry realizes that it is unnecessary. But, the answer isn't to require Apple to let others use their DRM- that would be a step backward. The answer is to show people that owning an iPod isn't tied to using the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), and that, conversely, buying tracks on iTMS isn't tied to using those tracks only on an iPod. Educating the public about how easy it is to use iTMS tracks with the device of their choosing is a far better solution than opening up Apple's DRM for more use elsewhere.
And, to those of you who say that taking your 5,000 tracks you bought from iTMS and burning them to CD and then re-ripping them would be too much work, here's a hint- don't do it all at once. One or two CDs a day and you'd have this library free of DRM restrictions in no time.
Sorry, but you're wrong about needing to re-tag the music. If you burn an audio CD in iTunes and then re-rip it, the tags are intact.
I know this is somewhat off topic, but I see that there are ad-sense type ads on this discussion for software that allows you to get songs off of an iPod. Now, I know that slashdot wouldn't exist without advertising, however, in this case, the ads do clueless readers a disservice.
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P rograms&Page=SharePod
No one should have to pay to get their music off of their iPod. Hell, even Apple now has a page that explains how to do this without any additional software other than iTunes:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
Also, there are plenty of free programs out there that do what the advertised programs do:
Windows:
http://www.ephpod.com/
http://www.sturm.net.nz/website.php?Section=iPod+
Mac:
http://www.ilinkpod.com/
http://fadingred.org/senuti/
I'm sure there are some for Linux as well, but I've yet to connect my iPod to Linux so I haven't ever looked for any.
1) Burn tracks to an audio CD
2) Re-rip tracks from audio CD in the format of your choice
3) Use newly ripped, un-DRMed tracks on the non-iPod device of your choosing
Or, is it that this process is:
a) too complicated
b) too much work
c) too time consuming
for most Europeans to figure it out?
I'll have 2 of whatever he/she had.
This is why I don't leave the few things I've purchased from iTMS on my system as "protected". I burn it to an audio CD and then re-import it. (If I think the quality has suffered noticeably, I up the bit rate to 192 to compensate.) I don't want any of the music I've purchased to ever not work because of the stupid DRM. Apple has left you an easy way around their DRM, use it.
Same here. I just bought the bundle. I can honestly say that I would probably never have purchased any of these apps at their individual prices, but couldn't resist the thought of getting all of them for $49. So far I've only tried Disco. The smoke rising off of the window as it burns CDs is a total gimmick, but really darn cool nonetheless.
I'm so sick of hearing about the need for a two button mouse or trackpad. Control + click is NOT hard. It's easy. It accomplishes the same damn thing that having a right mouse button does. And, it does it without confusing users who will never understand what the right mouse button on a PC does. Oh, and on newer iBooks, PowerBooks, MacBooks, & MacBook Pros that support gestures, you can configure the trackpad to interpret two fingers on the pad + a click as a right click. And, for the 1000th time, if you simply plug in a mouse with multiple buttons, OS X will instantly recognize them and they will work as expected. Get over it.
I like the having a single mouse button on my Macs. I spend 8 hours a day in front of a Windows PC with a two button scroll mouse and then I go home to a MacBook Pro in the evenings with it's single button trackpad. When I'm at work, I right click and use the scroll wheel. When I'm at home, I control+click and use PageUp/PageDown (or these days use the two finger trackpad gesture). I go back and forth between these two configurations and I don't even think about it. It's not that hard- really.
I'm pretty much a total mac fanboy, but I have to concede this point. I never tried multiple monitors on a Mac until a few years ago when I got my first iBook and discovered that a simple firmware adjustment was all that was needed in order to allow spanning instead of mirroring when hooking up an external monitor. I was really excited at first, but soon learned how annoying it is to have the menu bar only available on one of the screens- especially when you want to have one app running on one screen and another on the other.
For single monitors, I still believe that the stationary menu bar at the top of the screen is a superior UI. If you don't believe this, you need to spend some time observing how many users of Windows/Linux keep every window maximized- they are in effect simulating the stationary menu bar effect. However, for multiple monitors, the menu bar in the window paradigm of Windows/X11 is currently better. I think that Apple could easily fix this by having the Mac's menu bar move from screen to screen with the mouse. They could even make it's appearance 'ghosted' on the screens where the mouse currently is not. Placing a menu bar on each screen would then allow different apps to be in the foreground on different monitors. I've made suggestions along these lines on the OS X feedback page, but, sadly they have yet to realize the brilliance of what I'm telling them. ;-]
I have a feeling that they've concluded that there is not enough multiple monitor use to warrant spending time coming up with a more elegant solution.
If you have 1GB of RAM and you're constantly getting the spinning rainbow of death (I'm guessing that's what you meant by "pinwheels"), then you need to do 1 of 2 things:
- get more RAM (a faster hard drive wouldn't hurt either)
- close some apps
Ever notice how some of the icons in the dock have little black triangles under them and some don't? The ones with little black triangles under them are still active in memory and depending on how well/poorly they are coded, can sometimes be eating up significant amounts of RAM & CPU cycles- even if you've shut all of their associated windows.
My wife was always complaining about how slow her iBook G4 800Mhz w/ 640MB of RAM was running. And, every time she complained about it, I always noticed how she had like 12 - 15 programs running. Once she started shutting down some of the apps, the performance of her iBook went way up.
You've got to work within the limits of the machine/OS. It doesn't matter if it is OS X or any other OS. I've got an Ubuntu box that only has 256MB of RAM. It runs great for things like Firefox, the terminal, and OpenOffice, but if I launch VMWare Player and then fire up a Windows 2000 virtual machine that is allocated 128MB of RAM, the whole damn thing slows to a crawl. Guess what? I know it's not Ubuntu's fault, but mine for not having enough RAM in that box for what I'm asking it to do at the time. I'm typing this from a Windows XP machine that has 512MB of RAM. I can get this thing crawling after a few hours just by opening Firefox (with a bunch of tabs), Adobe Reader (with several big PDFs), & several documents in OpenOffice.
One last thing, learn to use the "Activity Monitor". It's in [Name of your hard drive]/Applications/Utilities on your mini. It will start to help you get some sense of what's going on behind the scenes with OS X and will also give you some clues as to why your machine gives you the spinning pinwheel of death so frequently.
Oh, I lied, this is really the last thing. If you use Firefox on the Mac, quit it once in awhile and relaunch it. It's gotten better in v2.0, but it still seems to be a total resource pig in OS X and it seems to progressively leak memory the longer it is open. Safari is the best day to day browser on OS X and Firefox is a nice backup for sites that aren't 100% compatible with Safari yet.
I agree with the idea that the Zodiac's size kept it from being a portable PDA. The size is the number one thing that kept me from getting one of these. I have carried a Palm OS device with me nearly everywhere I go since 1999. I spent some time playing with the Zodiac at a local CompUSA and was experiencing some serious technolust. However, the Zodiac, was just too big to be carried daily in my cargo pants/shorts like other Palm OS devices. BTW- I'm having some of the same feelings about the new PSP.
Well, if it's the case that the compiler just didn't optimize for competitors' processors, then I'd agree with you. However, in the event that Intel took the time to code their compiler to intentionally degrade performance on competitors' processors, then I'd have to strongly disagree with your point.