The problem is those APIs rely on waylaying open standards. If the music store relied on open standards instead of proprietary calls requiring IE, they wouldn't have to worry about third party issues.
The biggest issue here is that MS has been forcing its dominance on what was supposed to be an open environment, the internet. Everytime they create anything internet related that requires one of their products, everytime they fail to support published open standards, everytime they implement some behavor, some scripting environment that excludes non m$ products from using internet services, they undermine the very nature of the internet.
They grab control. No single corporation should have any control of media. Ultimately, controlling M$ is a free speech issue. Allowing their dominance allows them to control the press. If they are allowed to impose their technology upon the internet, they control who can buy the tools needed to speak through the internet.
(my this rant's taken a different turn hasn't it?)
"Embrace and Extend" is their supposed motto that really translates to "Embrace, Influence, Usurp, Replace and Control." Sounds like a certain fascist political party in Europe in the early twentieth century. If you don't let us control everything, your life will suffer.
REDUNDANT. The problem is using a monopoly position to quash competition. If there are two stores on a block one a little mom & pop, the other a massive megastore thats used its influence to build fences, reconfigure parking, and redirect traffic so that no matter the desire of the consumer they must go to the megastore the big store isn't serving the consumer. Imagine the megastore, while bigger has one or two choices for pens, let's say. They just have more of those few choices in stock. They're inferior, but whenever someone tries to go to the little store that actually can better serve the customer's needs, megastore sends an agent out to the customer and drags them to the megastore. The consumer loses. Only the megastore wins.
Monopolies eliminate merit from the market. Monopolies undermine quality choices in favor of forced/percieved convenience. Superior competitors are quashed before their superiority is recognized.
under Mac OS X, you can use any browser to purchase music from any site at any time.
That would be a good point if music sites didn't lock you into using windoze. Not that I'm really interested in pay-in-perpituity for that song sites, but e.g., Rhapsody. iTunes actually gave Mac users a source. Its model has loosened the grip of windoze on the music market. Was there any thing but indies and mp3.com to give that choice before iTunes?
If you make such a superior product that your market must have it, they will choose the platform (if it's usable enough) that you build it for. How many times have you heard/read the comment "I would have switced completely to Mac but I've got this "verticle/niche app" that only runs on windows so I have this crap box over here." The unavailability of the App on platforms other than windoze forces people to keep windoze.
Niche apps are the one that keep many orgs stuck with windoze. The general computing needs of 90%+ users are met by all platforms
Niche apps have niche markets. The only real advantage of building for windoze is that your potential market is more likely to have the platform. The lower quality a product need a larger market to succeed. High quality products earn their market by virtue of better quality. The potential market for Theil speakers is much smaller than Sony. Yet, Theil succeeds because they make a superior product that their smaller potential market wants. Do they have the annual sales of Sony? No. Does every company have to be a massive monster of lowest common denominator products megacorp? No. Adobe became successful on Macs, and could certainly have sustained themselves without adding Windows. They did expand, but it wasn't necessary to their survival, just their ubiquity.
If you've already told your OS which browser you prefer and it launches another, it's restricting choice. MS has been whining so much recently about offering choice (re: iTMS), and yet they do everything to undermine user choice. The internet is supposed to be an open road. I shouldn't have to pull over and switch to a Homer just to drive to a certain store.
practically everthing on a Mac is proprietary Apple software and you don't see the Mac people going ballistic over it
Mac users have options, and unlike IE, Mac browsers actually follow standards.
Your plugins for Excel example is off the point. When it comes to MS forcing its browser on users, the problem is that they are trying to defeat and close open standards. The WWW was never supposed to require any platform. It is supposed to be an Open Standard. Everytime some lazy coder caters to the anti-standard functions of MS tech, the universality of the web shrinks. If MS actually followed web standards, browser detection could be a thing of the past. They continue to require developers to cater to their crap. Through their quirks they've usurped the universal, open nature of the web and mad significant portions of it closed to anyone not choosing their crap platform.
MS should have to change to adapt to the world, not the world adapt to MS. Picture a four-lane highway. Some Canyonero driver is straddling the line, forcing traffic to stay behind it. The road was built for two lanes of traffic going in each direction. A standard was established, but one driver, just because he can, keeps it from working as designed. Shouldn't the cops get that driver off the road?
I think you are trying to suggest that film has more stop...
Doesn't sound like that to me. Sounds like, BW's saying that if you rely on the added data to tell you the significance of an image (i.e., GPS/EXIF) you're just as likely to lose sight of the signifigance of the image. ('though certainly the inferior resolution of a digital snapshot camera wouldn't resolve the nametag).
It might not be much of a chore, for the hyper-organized, but for the average person it will be one "of those thing I need to do," that gets put off or completely forgotten before the data is gone.
That would work. One might even call it almost feasible, but is really practical, especially if you're talking about a pro's library? Or even the avg. amateur who is going to put the disc away and forget about it until some point long after the data is retrievable. Time progesses and the data degrades, becoming irretrievable in much less than a generation. No need to worry about ever seeing pictures of grampa when he was young!
But that aside...a photographic print is a physical thing. It's a creation, especially BW art prints. Carbon transfer color prints last over a hundred years without dye degredation. It only takes one act, the original printing, to give that image to generations to come. Continually recopying bits is not an answer.
Well then, those Kodachrome slides I have from the 50s are still good, the dyes haven't faded either. FTWIW Nitrate based supports were phased out beginning in the 30s, to be replaced by acetate and polyester (or Estar as Kodak calls it).
Fuji, Agfa and Ilford make better film. To name one company that makes good film: Efke. Kodak doesn't make particularly exceptional film. They do have the widest variety of emulsions for every application from ariel surveying, to general photography, to holography, to motion pictures.
Kodak cameras have always been of below-average quality AFAIK (even dating back to the 1930's
Actually, until the 50's, Kodak made some very credible cameras in addition to the Bantam and Brownie lines you might first think of. The Retina line was very good, almost comparable to German cameras sort of like Petax vs. Nikon today.
video cameras have improved dramatically... film is still the preferred medium because of its look after processing
Improvements in the latitude of vid sensors, and post-processing that better mimics the look of film have allowed video to be used much more widely. In addition to Lucas films, there have been other major releases films using video, not for CG capabilities, but for cost reduction.
However, movie projection is actually a less demanding medium than still images. A 16x20 print from a 6x7cm neg viewed next to the same from digital will be easily discerable as superior.
I can think of one good use: graphic design. Having very small type, e.g., 5pt, and 1/2pt hairline rules displayed accurately makes on-screen proofing much more reliable.
I never saw the TV series but... I've always had in my mind...
It's better not to have seen the TV ver. That second head (not to mention the third hand) is so poorly made it completely fails at "suspension of belief." Rereading the books, I sometimes have flashes of the horrid thing and it ruins things. However, even though Marvin was done no better, he was forgetable. Considering how clunky he sounded on the radio series, one can build a very inelegant looking Marvin and get away with it.
One thing the TV series did add that I like is making Trillian the source of the probability reciting voice on the Heart of Gold...Hmm, the Heart of Gold? A Nike product placement opportunity in the making!
Mod points be damned! I can't let this one get by.
Midland, TX? A city? Barely. It's a hickville. There's plenty of hicks in Midland. Maybe if you live in Mentone or Wink you'd consider Midland a city, but still even lesser than Odessa. Sure, being from Goldsmith or Cohoma assures hick status, but being from the second-largest large town in a 150 mile radius isn't insurance against hickness. After all, there's plenty o' hicks in that larger "city" to the north that smells like the feedlots it hosts (aka, Lubbock).
Yes, I know wherefrom I speak. West Texas is not the place to become wise of the world.
However difficult it is doesn't change the fact that even TextEdit (the Notepad of OS X) supports Hebrew. The tools for implementing Hebrew support are built into OS X. All MS has to do is use them.
we make the only supercomputing platform that you can check email on
This misses the point, too. The implication of Dr. V's email comment is to reinforce the idea that the VT Supercomputer is still at its core the same machine sold to consumers. Nit-picking about the interconnects and certain code optimization may be valid points, but the idea being conveyed is that VT built a supercomputer by using the same machine and OS that Apple sells to everyone else. It's special, but not exotic esoterica.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest issue here is that MS has been forcing its dominance on what was supposed to be an open environment, the internet. Everytime they create anything internet related that requires one of their products, everytime they fail to support published open standards, everytime they implement some behavor, some scripting environment that excludes non m$ products from using internet services, they undermine the very nature of the internet.
They grab control. No single corporation should have any control of media. Ultimately, controlling M$ is a free speech issue. Allowing their dominance allows them to control the press. If they are allowed to impose their technology upon the internet, they control who can buy the tools needed to speak through the internet.
(my this rant's taken a different turn hasn't it?)
"Embrace and Extend" is their supposed motto that really translates to "Embrace, Influence, Usurp, Replace and Control." Sounds like a certain fascist political party in Europe in the early twentieth century. If you don't let us control everything, your life will suffer.
Monopolies eliminate merit from the market. Monopolies undermine quality choices in favor of forced/percieved convenience. Superior competitors are quashed before their superiority is recognized.
That would be a good point if music sites didn't lock you into using windoze. Not that I'm really interested in pay-in-perpituity for that song sites, but e.g., Rhapsody. iTunes actually gave Mac users a source. Its model has loosened the grip of windoze on the music market. Was there any thing but indies and mp3.com to give that choice before iTunes?
Your guess is correct. FWIW, its a standalone app (Sytem Updater) that can be launched independently or from a System Preferences pane.
Niche apps are the one that keep many orgs stuck with windoze. The general computing needs of 90%+ users are met by all platforms
Niche apps have niche markets. The only real advantage of building for windoze is that your potential market is more likely to have the platform. The lower quality a product need a larger market to succeed. High quality products earn their market by virtue of better quality. The potential market for Theil speakers is much smaller than Sony. Yet, Theil succeeds because they make a superior product that their smaller potential market wants. Do they have the annual sales of Sony? No. Does every company have to be a massive monster of lowest common denominator products megacorp? No. Adobe became successful on Macs, and could certainly have sustained themselves without adding Windows. They did expand, but it wasn't necessary to their survival, just their ubiquity.
If you've already told your OS which browser you prefer and it launches another, it's restricting choice. MS has been whining so much recently about offering choice (re: iTMS), and yet they do everything to undermine user choice. The internet is supposed to be an open road. I shouldn't have to pull over and switch to a Homer just to drive to a certain store.
Mac users have options, and unlike IE, Mac browsers actually follow standards.
Your plugins for Excel example is off the point. When it comes to MS forcing its browser on users, the problem is that they are trying to defeat and close open standards. The WWW was never supposed to require any platform. It is supposed to be an Open Standard. Everytime some lazy coder caters to the anti-standard functions of MS tech, the universality of the web shrinks. If MS actually followed web standards, browser detection could be a thing of the past. They continue to require developers to cater to their crap. Through their quirks they've usurped the universal, open nature of the web and mad significant portions of it closed to anyone not choosing their crap platform.
MS should have to change to adapt to the world, not the world adapt to MS. Picture a four-lane highway. Some Canyonero driver is straddling the line, forcing traffic to stay behind it. The road was built for two lanes of traffic going in each direction. A standard was established, but one driver, just because he can, keeps it from working as designed. Shouldn't the cops get that driver off the road?
Okay, they really were German quality then.
Doesn't sound like that to me. Sounds like, BW's saying that if you rely on the added data to tell you the significance of an image (i.e., GPS/EXIF) you're just as likely to lose sight of the signifigance of the image. ('though certainly the inferior resolution of a digital snapshot camera wouldn't resolve the nametag).
It might not be much of a chore, for the hyper-organized, but for the average person it will be one "of those thing I need to do," that gets put off or completely forgotten before the data is gone.
That would work. One might even call it almost feasible, but is really practical, especially if you're talking about a pro's library? Or even the avg. amateur who is going to put the disc away and forget about it until some point long after the data is retrievable. Time progesses and the data degrades, becoming irretrievable in much less than a generation. No need to worry about ever seeing pictures of grampa when he was young!
But that aside...a photographic print is a physical thing. It's a creation, especially BW art prints. Carbon transfer color prints last over a hundred years without dye degredation. It only takes one act, the original printing, to give that image to generations to come. Continually recopying bits is not an answer.
Well then, those Kodachrome slides I have from the 50s are still good, the dyes haven't faded either. FTWIW Nitrate based supports were phased out beginning in the 30s, to be replaced by acetate and polyester (or Estar as Kodak calls it).
Fuji, Agfa and Ilford make better film. To name one company that makes good film: Efke. Kodak doesn't make particularly exceptional film. They do have the widest variety of emulsions for every application from ariel surveying, to general photography, to holography, to motion pictures.
Actually, until the 50's, Kodak made some very credible cameras in addition to the Bantam and Brownie lines you might first think of. The Retina line was very good, almost comparable to German cameras sort of like Petax vs. Nikon today.
Maybe if you could just figure out the contradictory sentence was the quote being refuted, you'd have a better chance at getting it.
Is this where I insert you're new here aren't you?
Improvements in the latitude of vid sensors, and post-processing that better mimics the look of film have allowed video to be used much more widely. In addition to Lucas films, there have been other major releases films using video, not for CG capabilities, but for cost reduction.
However, movie projection is actually a less demanding medium than still images. A 16x20 print from a 6x7cm neg viewed next to the same from digital will be easily discerable as superior.
Perhaps you should follow film technology a little more closely before making such uninformed statements.
I can think of one good use: graphic design. Having very small type, e.g., 5pt, and 1/2pt hairline rules displayed accurately makes on-screen proofing much more reliable.
It's probably best thought of as a board room presentation screen.
Heart of Gold Nikes, Galumbits Corsets, Snornquelous Beta Matresses, Sirius Cybernetics Tea, ...will your next car come in Disaster Area Black?
Zaphod had the third arm added, just for Trillian, after the party.
It's better not to have seen the TV ver. That second head (not to mention the third hand) is so poorly made it completely fails at "suspension of belief." Rereading the books, I sometimes have flashes of the horrid thing and it ruins things. However, even though Marvin was done no better, he was forgetable. Considering how clunky he sounded on the radio series, one can build a very inelegant looking Marvin and get away with it.
One thing the TV series did add that I like is making Trillian the source of the probability reciting voice on the Heart of Gold...Hmm, the Heart of Gold? A Nike product placement opportunity in the making!
Mod points be damned! I can't let this one get by.
Midland, TX? A city? Barely. It's a hickville. There's plenty of hicks in Midland. Maybe if you live in Mentone or Wink you'd consider Midland a city, but still even lesser than Odessa. Sure, being from Goldsmith or Cohoma assures hick status, but being from the second-largest large town in a 150 mile radius isn't insurance against hickness. After all, there's plenty o' hicks in that larger "city" to the north that smells like the feedlots it hosts (aka, Lubbock).
Yes, I know wherefrom I speak. West Texas is not the place to become wise of the world.
However difficult it is doesn't change the fact that even TextEdit (the Notepad of OS X) supports Hebrew. The tools for implementing Hebrew support are built into OS X. All MS has to do is use them.
This misses the point, too. The implication of Dr. V's email comment is to reinforce the idea that the VT Supercomputer is still at its core the same machine sold to consumers. Nit-picking about the interconnects and certain code optimization may be valid points, but the idea being conveyed is that VT built a supercomputer by using the same machine and OS that Apple sells to everyone else. It's special, but not exotic esoterica.