Actually, it was Cmdr Taco who posted the "Personally I just crank the tunes. Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?" part. Usually only the block-quoted chunk is what the submitter entered.
The blame for this lies entirely at the feet of Microsoft.
Who created the Operating System which will execute arbitrary code -- for that matter, arbitrary code which ought to require administrator privileges -- without the say-so of the user? Microsoft did.
Uh, yeah. Apple somehow let their product get shipped out with a virus on it, and it's Microsoft's fault, because their software is the what the virus targets? As much as I dislike Microsoft and Windows, it's not their fault that someone planted a virus on iPods, and it's not their responsibility to make sure the iPods are clean when shipped.
That's like if a food company sold some food with harmful bacteria or viruses in it. Would you blame them for shipping tainted food products, or pass the blame off saying they weren't the ones who designed humans to be susceptible to illness in the first place.
Or if a mechanic didn't do a good job fixing my car and a critical part wasn't fastened good enough, is the mechanic's fault if I drive over a pothole and shake that part loose and my car stops working? Or would you say it's the city's fault for not filling the pothole fast enough? I'd be annoyed at the city for leaving the pothole there, but I would be calling up the mechanic fast, not City Hall.
I wonder who the genius was who decided it was a good idea to have an upper case 'i' look the same as a lower case 'L' in sans-serif fonts? I read the word 'ill' in the title to be the roman numeral 3 at first.
I misread that as "MySpace Organizes Sudden Fundraiser", and was expecting to read that MySpace is in financial troubles and needed to raise some money fast.
Music shuffling is fine. What needs to be fixed is the randomness of the blocks in the iPod version of Tetris. Without fail, it always starts me out with the red "Z" block, yellow square, red "Z" and the brown "L" block for the first game upon starting Tetris (after this the next game starts with different blocks, unless I quit and reload Tetris).
Seems to me like the programmers used a bad choice of a seed value for the random number generator.
There are 12 people on staff where I work. 4 of us have birthdays in a span of 5 days, i.e. there's my birthday, one day off, then three birthdays in a row. I wonder what the odds of this happening are.
The downside of all this is we get gypped out of 3 birthday cakes this way since we only have one for all four of us.:(
The article actually goes into more depth than people seem to be getting from the summary. The author is not complaining about problems with the shuffle. Rather, he starts by making note of his early observations, then describing his research into music shuffling, and how we perceive patterns where there are none.
FTFA:
First of all, note what it doesn't do - it's not like mixing all the songs in the equivalent of a big bucket of lottery balls and picking out the next one. Instead, as the name implies, it shuffles the entire library so as to reorder them, just as a blackjack dealer shuffles a deck of cards. If you listen to the entire library all through, you will hear every song once and once only. What is important, then, is not whether a song is included but how evenly an artist's songs are distributed throughout the list. When I say that Steely Dan is over-represented, it means that the band's songs show up early in the run - it would be like a blackjack dealer whose first hand had aces in it.
Or
We perceive trends when there are none. Poker players invariably believe they can lock into streaks. Backgammon champions swear that dice can go hot or cold. Likewise, people think they can cosmically predict what song will come next on their shuffle. The blogger Kapgar, who claimed this power, remembers vividly the times when he predicted a song and the iPod amazingly delivered it. But there may have been a thousand times when his iPod played songs he didn't guess - non-memorable circumstances that, not surprisingly, didn't make an impression.
I recall The Steve personally addressing this issue in one of his keynotes (although not with iPods, but iTunes). People thought iTunes' shuffle feature wasn't random enough. Steve assured everyone that it indeed was completely random, but then announced that iTunes had a new "Smart Shuffle" option. The description in iTunes is "Smart shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album." There's a slider with "More Likely" on one end, "Less likely" on the other end, and "Random" right in the middle. Although this feature is in iTunes, it has not yet made it onto iPods.
I personally have had it happen where my iPod is in shuffle mode and I've heard not just two songs in a row by the same artist, but a song plays and then the next song from that album follows it. And that's with a library of over 5,000 songs. Naturally it's more likely to happen on a much smaller Shuffle with a fraction of the songs.
They'd simply argue that the probe's launch was actually just another routine launch, and with the state of today's CG capabilities, it would be a piece of cake to fake footage.
The only way to prove it to those people would be to actually send them there in person.
Many of the comments in the linked article are people all excited about getting achievement points from these games. I've never used an xbox, so can someone explain why getting these achievement points is such a big deal? My Google search just brought up tons of web sites telling how to get points from various games, and I found a page on the xbox web site that only seemed to indicate to me that it's just bragging rights. Like "w00t! I have 50,000 points! I am so 1337!"
Is that truly all there is to it, or is there more, like unlocking extra minigames on Xbox Live once you reach x points for example? I can't believe that people would be getting so excited about playing the Burger King games so they can get more achievement points if these points aren't actually worth anything.
Be patient, and it will show up. I assume Apple rolls out their updates to various locations slowly over a couple days or so, to keep their servers from being overloaded. I, for one, had iTunes 7.0.1 waiting for me in Software Update when I checked earlier this evening. And I've also seen other updates that aren't available to me for a day or so after I read about it.
Okay, so we currently have the ability to have the front page not show articles posted by specific Slashdot editors. How about expanding that, so we can specify specific submitters, such as Roland Piquepaille for example, who's articles don't show up?
They make it extremely difficult for the average user to export an mp3 from iTunes. In fact they do not allow you to export protected mp3's period. If you are paying to download the songs you sure as hell should be able to use them any way you want to.
To be fair, I'm sure Apple would love to make it easy, but they wouldn't be allowed to as part of their contracts. If they were to announce that all tracks will be unprotected, they'd have the RIAA and the major record labels beating down their door within minutes.
From Apple's perspective, they likely consider it to be a value-added service available to their customers. If you don't set up, or already have, an account, you're not an iTunes customer.
If you have authorized five computers, you can also sign into your account and deauthorize all of them at once. Sign in as you normally would, and click Deauthorize All in the Account Information window. You can only deauthorize all your computers this way once per year.
you can authorise 5 computers simultaneously. you want to add a 6th then you need to deauthorise one of them online (I don't think it has to be done from the computer itself but it's easier that way).
Yeah, that's the part I was wondering about. Let's say I go into iTunes and tell it to deauthorize all computers. There has to be some sort of communication between iTunes on the other computers and the iTMS for it to be told that it's been deauthorized. Otherwise, someone could theoretically authorize five of his friends' computers and copy all his music to them, then deauthorize them in iTunes at one shot, then authorize another five and so on.
This article got me thinking - how does iTunes work with regards to authorizing a computer to play purchased music?
Let's say I hook a computer up to my network, copy some music to it, authorize it, and then remove it from the network so it no longer has access to the Internet. I assume at some point iTunes will want to phone home to double-check that the computer in question is still authorized to play those tracks, or that you haven't reached any burning limits?
My sister had her iMac about a month earlier than her Internet connection, and she didn't have any problems with iTunes during that time with any purchased music that was copied over (she had previously purchased music from iTMS on my Mac, using her own account).
Slashdot Mirror
This would be the final release version of FF 2.0. Not everyone wants to use prerelease software.
Actually, it was Cmdr Taco who posted the "Personally I just crank the tunes. Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?" part. Usually only the block-quoted chunk is what the submitter entered.
Just a guess, but maybe it uses Windows' autorun "feature" to launch as soon as the iPod is plugged in to a PC.
That's like if a food company sold some food with harmful bacteria or viruses in it. Would you blame them for shipping tainted food products, or pass the blame off saying they weren't the ones who designed humans to be susceptible to illness in the first place.
Or if a mechanic didn't do a good job fixing my car and a critical part wasn't fastened good enough, is the mechanic's fault if I drive over a pothole and shake that part loose and my car stops working? Or would you say it's the city's fault for not filling the pothole fast enough? I'd be annoyed at the city for leaving the pothole there, but I would be calling up the mechanic fast, not City Hall.
How did the virus get on there? Did you guys discuss it with whoever made the CDs for you? Do you still do business with that company?
I don't suppose this 'Anonymous Reader' who submitted this is an employee of the ChatterBlocker company looking or free ad space on Slashdot...?
I wonder who the genius was who decided it was a good idea to have an upper case 'i' look the same as a lower case 'L' in sans-serif fonts? I read the word 'ill' in the title to be the roman numeral 3 at first.
Ah, web traffic. At first I pictured zombies wandering the streets of NYC and nobody noticing...
I misread that as "MySpace Organizes Sudden Fundraiser", and was expecting to read that MySpace is in financial troubles and needed to raise some money fast.
Music shuffling is fine. What needs to be fixed is the randomness of the blocks in the iPod version of Tetris. Without fail, it always starts me out with the red "Z" block, yellow square, red "Z" and the brown "L" block for the first game upon starting Tetris (after this the next game starts with different blocks, unless I quit and reload Tetris).
Seems to me like the programmers used a bad choice of a seed value for the random number generator.
There are 12 people on staff where I work. 4 of us have birthdays in a span of 5 days, i.e. there's my birthday, one day off, then three birthdays in a row. I wonder what the odds of this happening are.
:(
The downside of all this is we get gypped out of 3 birthday cakes this way since we only have one for all four of us.
FTFA:Or
I recall The Steve personally addressing this issue in one of his keynotes (although not with iPods, but iTunes). People thought iTunes' shuffle feature wasn't random enough. Steve assured everyone that it indeed was completely random, but then announced that iTunes had a new "Smart Shuffle" option. The description in iTunes is "Smart shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album." There's a slider with "More Likely" on one end, "Less likely" on the other end, and "Random" right in the middle. Although this feature is in iTunes, it has not yet made it onto iPods.
I personally have had it happen where my iPod is in shuffle mode and I've heard not just two songs in a row by the same artist, but a song plays and then the next song from that album follows it. And that's with a library of over 5,000 songs. Naturally it's more likely to happen on a much smaller Shuffle with a fraction of the songs.
I don't think even that would convince everyone.
They'd simply argue that the probe's launch was actually just another routine launch, and with the state of today's CG capabilities, it would be a piece of cake to fake footage.
The only way to prove it to those people would be to actually send them there in person.
Many of the comments in the linked article are people all excited about getting achievement points from these games. I've never used an xbox, so can someone explain why getting these achievement points is such a big deal? My Google search just brought up tons of web sites telling how to get points from various games, and I found a page on the xbox web site that only seemed to indicate to me that it's just bragging rights. Like "w00t! I have 50,000 points! I am so 1337!"
Is that truly all there is to it, or is there more, like unlocking extra minigames on Xbox Live once you reach x points for example? I can't believe that people would be getting so excited about playing the Burger King games so they can get more achievement points if these points aren't actually worth anything.
So, nobody would know about breast cancer, except for the fact that web sites change to a pink color scheme for a month? Uh, yeah, sure.
My first thought on reading the title was that there was some sort of marketing campaign starting for The Pink Panther series of movies.
Be patient, and it will show up. I assume Apple rolls out their updates to various locations slowly over a couple days or so, to keep their servers from being overloaded. I, for one, had iTunes 7.0.1 waiting for me in Software Update when I checked earlier this evening. And I've also seen other updates that aren't available to me for a day or so after I read about it.
Okay, so we currently have the ability to have the front page not show articles posted by specific Slashdot editors. How about expanding that, so we can specify specific submitters, such as Roland Piquepaille for example, who's articles don't show up?
From Apple's perspective, they likely consider it to be a value-added service available to their customers. If you don't set up, or already have, an account, you're not an iTunes customer.
This article got me thinking - how does iTunes work with regards to authorizing a computer to play purchased music?
Let's say I hook a computer up to my network, copy some music to it, authorize it, and then remove it from the network so it no longer has access to the Internet. I assume at some point iTunes will want to phone home to double-check that the computer in question is still authorized to play those tracks, or that you haven't reached any burning limits?
My sister had her iMac about a month earlier than her Internet connection, and she didn't have any problems with iTunes during that time with any purchased music that was copied over (she had previously purchased music from iTMS on my Mac, using her own account).