I was wondering this myself. I bet it's a lot cheaper to get a license for stock photos that requires you to include the credit watermarked in, instead of being able to use the photos on your own without obvious credits.
no, i buy images from getty quite often, the point of the watermark is to specifically show that the image has not been bought. who in the world would want to use a watermarked image? the extra stupid thing about it is, you can get non-watermarked low-rez getty images simply by registering for an account. that way people like me can make comps with their images without that distracting watermark. so the "designer" who did their site is not only unethical, but quite stupid as well. to top it off, they could have hidden their "borrowing" quite easily by just cropping in tighter than the watermark.
if getty images wanted to support this cause, i'm sure the designer or the organization could have negotiated out a pro-bono deal with them easily. getty commonly supplies non-watermarked high-rez images for their regular customers if you ask. i've downloaded high-rez images from them and even stock footage for project presentations. no designer in their right mind would use a watermarked image like that.
MS's $500 million investment probably saved the company from bankruptcy. This was at the low point of Apple's market share, reputation and stock price. MS propped them up because they knew Apple customers were potential MS customers too, even if they didn't use their OS.
it was $100M. apple was far far away from bankruptcy at the time. however, apple did need to sure a version of office of mac for their future viability. ms likely propped them up because they heard the DOJ breathing down their neck.
That deal has expired at this point, but Apple is now a stronger company than they were at that time, and MS is weaker. I'd say Apple actually got the better end of that deal. (So maybe it wasn't "mutually beneficial", but Apple didn't come out on the short end.)
i agree. whether it was foresight or just a company trying to stay relevant, the hat-in-hand maneuver that jobs pulled in order to get bill g on that big (brother) screen behind him ended up being one of the best strategic moves in a while. apple was able to keep office on their computers. but since then, step by step apple has taken little bites out of ms.
make itunes and the ipod. suddenly quicktime is installed on a huge number of windows computers and aac is a heavily-used music codec as opposed to wmv. build os x on a unix core to attract both home/consumer users and hardcore geeks. make ie the default, then build safari. switch to intel chips and offer boot camp to run windows. make a little innocuous works suite with just word processing and presentation software in iwork, then slide out a spreadsheet a couple years later. each quarter apple is breaking their previous unit-shipment record.
the barriers to entry for macs are coming down slowly and methodically. it's almost as if somebody planned it that way. apple has stopped making the huge shifts in strategy that we've grown accustom to since jobs' return, but they seem to still be making progress on their own agenda. the main issue facing apple now is how to manage their growth and figure out how big they can get before they become bad. how much can they grow before they start to become what they hate?
as a long-time mac user, i'm happy to see the market playing out this way. it's the most interesting time to be a mac user since 1984.
I was talking about an event that is going to happen, I didn't put a date on it, my position is that at some point in the future we will run out of oil but this will not happen now, it will happen when our population is at some other crisis point and more resources will have to be put towards research into energy. I am talking about having enough population to work on the oil deficiency problem.
you can't say that with any certainty. just on slashdot in the past couple months we've seen many articles on sustainable practices for creating oil that can be used for plastics and transportation. would we run out of oil at some point in the reasonably near future if our only source was dead dinosaurs? perhaps. perhaps not. we haven't even gotten to the point of taking advantage of the huge oil resources in oil shale and oil sand. if we can come up with a way to create oil from a sustainable practice such as algae or depolymerizing our waste, then we could very likely NEVER run out of oil until we kill ourselves off.
it seems to me that plenty of resources are being put against the oil deficiency problem right now. the best thing for those solutions might be for ground oil prices to spike so high that their solutions become economically competitive. at that point, we can hope that their processes are scalable and can become more efficient and less expensive over time.
And the music gets on to the iPod by, uh, what? Telekinesis? It comes via the computer. Which has to be authorized. What was your so-called point?
unless you just randomly walk around accessing your itunes account from different computers there's no issue at all. if you have itunes on your computer, when it's charging you upload it to your iphone. it's not like you have to enter your password constantly on the same computer nor to put it on any ipod or iphone from that computer. but thanks for your ridiculously stupid response.
well, that's the pickle isn't it? i wouldn't say that "the internet hates being marketed to..." first off, you can't even come close to homogenizing all the users of the internet. at best you could say the people who would participate in something like second life don't like being marketed to badly. there have been many many viral marketing sites that have done very well and become extremely popular. marketing is not a single entity. if it's done right and it uses the advantages of the medium in an interesting way, then people will like it fully knowing that they're being marketed to (i.e. subservient chicken). if it sucks, then people will be more likely to be hateful towards marketing materials than user-created content that sucks equally as much.
When corporations invade a community's environment for the purpose of marketing, of course they aren't going to elicit a positive reaction. How could any reasonable person expect that?
"invade" is a bit of a strong word and likely not even accurate. it's not as if second life was happy just humming along losing money providing this virtual world at their own cost and for no benefit. second life is a contrived "game" basically created to sell ad space to its captive users. it's no different really than facebook or myspace or any other number of social networking sites. they're all created for someone's financial gain. otherwise why deal with the bandwidth expenses?
your comment to more accurately read "how could any reasonable person expect that a corporation would run a community environment at their own great expense without the expectation of some marketing dollars being made somewhere down the line?" i seriously doubt lindencorp just decided to blow wads of cash so people can fly around as gigantic penises.
Re:Why some of us are excited about iPhone
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the 650s i've seen were better than my 700. but i wouldn't call any of them reliable. in fact, my brother just woke up late yesterday. i was pissed because we had errands to do all day. turns out his 650 had crashed overnight and since he uses it as his alarm clock, he overslept. also, he couldn't hear me calling. of course, he got an iphone today. haha.
i might have just gotten the dog of the models, but the fact that palm would release a device like the 700p with known defects is enough for me to write them off forever.
Re:Why some of us are excited about iPhone
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In the case of this guy and his Treo 700p, if you read the post that he made he clearly states that he so wanted it to work, etc. It just amazes me that he didn't ask for his unit to be replaced if it was clearly faulty when he bought it.
because there was always a firmware update "just around the corner". so rather than return something which i had already bought a lot of peripherals and software for, i figured palm would make it right. after all, it was a brand new device. logic would dictate that any company that is still in business after all those years would have the ability to fix the devices they make with a firmware update. however, the issue turned out to be, from the rumors, that palm had just decided to use very slow and cheap ram in the 700p so there was really nothing they could do to fix it. i've compared the 700p to two 650ps. one of my brother's and one from my friend and the 650 was drastically faster in nearly all functions. the 700p could take up to 4 seconds just to switch applications, eg from the web browser to the phone. i came to know the treo as the "white screen of wait".
so yes, it didn't work right out of the box, but i had already invested money in it and i thought it could be fixed. palm barely even acknowledged the problem then i believe they said they were "working on a fix" that never materialized.
Re:Why some of us are excited about iPhone
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I don't understand the iphone hype, other than the pretty screen and possibly sexy interface.
I have had my treo 650P for a while, and it does what I need. Phone, PDA, MP3, Internet, Word, Excel, PDF, Camera. And I just found a program that allows for stereo bluetooth. The rocker works for navigation and I can thumb type pretty darn well.
and you get the added benefit of being able to take off the battery cover and stick the stylus in the reset slot in the dark by memory because you've become so familiar with it. my treo 700p had to be reset at least 4 times a day. if i did a hard reset to put it back to factory form and lose all my data, it would only crash once a day instead.
You are excited that phones can sync music? Dump MP3s on a SD card and you are ready to go on a Treo. No DRMd itunes requred, and you can pack a few different SD cards.
my 700p would stutter and skip on mp3's after about five seconds. it did this right out of the box so it basically never functioned properly. you can put a 4Gb sd card in it but it still won't have as much space as a 8Gb iphone. the iphone can also play non-drmed music just like every other ipod in existence.
Want video? You can rip a DVD and play it too. Crappy resolution, but not much worse than the iphone.
but it is worse. if the treo had a larger screen than an iphone, i'm sure you'd call the iphone lame for having a smaller screen.
They are touting a real browser on the iphone. Do you really want to surf on a 480x320 screen? I don't really like using a 1024x768 screen.
well, if you want to browse the web on your phone you have limited choices. obviously you just don't like using the web on any phone, but if you do, then having a larger screen makes more sense up to a point. i can't see how this is a negative. why get a smartphone if you just want it to play music and make calls?
And my new 755p on Verizon is coming out next week. Better camera and mini SD card, no antenna.
and the same kludgy, poorly multitasking, ugly operating system as palms have had for how many years now?
i tried to like my treo 700p. i spent a lot of money on it and software for it. it was simply the worse piece of technology i have ever owned. if palm went out of business tomorrow it wouldn't phaze me one bit. they released a product that was defective and basically never admitted it nor fixed it. mine was stolen under stressful circumstances. but even after it was stolen at gunpoint, i was pretty relieved to be rid of the damned thing.
Let's not forget that it also has Apple's brand name on it.. and Mac users are in love with Apple so they will go back to using Safari even if they find something better.
actually, as big of an apple fan as i am, i gave firefox a chance for a month. the text rendering on firefox somehow hurts my eyes a lot more than it does in safari or camino. when i need to do some web work i'll use firefox tools but otherwise, 99% of the time i'm just reading stuff on the web and safari works much better for that for me.
well, i'll take your word for it as my use of vista has been limited to playing with it for ten minutes in costco. however, most of the complaints i've heard center around the fact that vista doesn't display all of its features on machines with lower specs. if the os turns off transparencies and effects on a computer with less ram, then to me the os is not running fully on the lower ram settings. to say the os is running fine but turning off many of the features is a specious way to say that the os doesn't require more ram. if the os is designed in a certain way and is advertised with certain features, then that's what the os is. to tell people their machine is vista capable yet require them to run it with less features is lying. again, i'm just going by what i've heard. perhaps the issues have been overblown.
my personal experience with os x bears out that it runs with nearly all of its features and eye candy on very old machines. i have 10.4 running on a 400Mhz pismo powerbook with 512 Mb of ram. it displays the eye candy and animation, albeit a bit slowly. but this is the most recent version of the mac os running on a machine that shipped seven years ago with last generation's operating system.
Ok, not to start a flame or anything, but weren't people on SlashDot bitching just a couple of months ago how horrible the hardware requirements of Vista were that it required 512mb of RAM, and 1GB was the high end sweet spot?
from my perspective people were bitching about vista needing more ram because the system itself required that ram to run aero glass properly. the macbook pro coming with more ram is a benefit because the types of apps people use on macbook pros run much better with more ram. the ram requirements of the os are the same as before obviously since we're still on the same operating system. having to add ram just to make your computer run is something to bitch about. having to add ram to prevent photoshop from paging out is not something to bitch about.
personally i ordered a macbook pro with the standard amount of ram and bought 2 2Gb modules at the same time from a 3rd party vendor for $400.
yes... if it's anything like my treo 700p was, i'm wondering how hard it is to take the battery cover off and hit the reset button. that action was about as common as using the send button to actually complete a call.
The 700p (which I have) has a LOT of issues that have really pissed off treo owners. It has a serious lag, turns non-responsive, has the Worst bluetooth implementation *ever* (flaky to the point of almost being unusable), and a slew of other performance / stability problems.
i had a treo 700p as well. it was easily the worst piece of technology i have ever owned. it was stolen and honestly, other than the trauma of the robbery, i was relieved. i had invested enough money in software for it that i would have felt guilty for just leaving it in a drawer. but my god that phone is awful. up until the day it was stolen i never got it to play more than 5 seconds of a song without skipping horribly. i will never buy another palm device again unless something extremely drastic changes. more likely that i'll just move on through the next generation/s of the iphone. palm can go fuck themselves for foisting that piece of shit on my life for 8 months.
Thats all assuming the reviews are positive, but this is such a great and good looking idea its a guaranteed sell. Gamers would love it, Photoshop users would love it, hell i would love it.
being a photoshop user (retoucher) i woudn't use this keyboard for that kind of work. there's no point and it's needlessly expensive. i can remember the keys that i need. also, many of the tools in photoshop require multiple presses of the same key to invoke. for instance, you can toggle between the many types of lasso tool (freeform, rubber band, magnetic) by pressing the "L" key.
this keyboard wouldn't really offer any benefit to a user since, at best, it can either display the current tool, or the next tool in the heirarchy of that button. in either case, i already know how to toggle to that next tool and i don't need the keyboard to tell me what the next tool is.
for $250 i might buy it. but for $1500, i'd recommend any photoshop user buy more ram, a bigger monitor (or a secondary or tertiary monitor) and a wacom tablet and still have some money left over.
That would have easily passed any decent spell checker. What you're probably thinking of is a grammar chacker, none of which are or have ever been very good.
which is why i said "beyond the obligatory spell checker" implying that simply running a spellchecker is not the same thing as proofing an article.
I don't suppose the opinions stated in this blog post deserve much attention if the author can't be bothered to write the name of the company correctly.
nor proof it beyond running the obligatory spell-check. "quite about the future". the worst thing about blogging is that poorly written crap like this looks "official enough" to the general public.
i agree with your assessment. i'm engaged to a turk and was in turkey last summer. while i don't follow politics as closely as i should, it's pretty clear that the turks were trying pretty hard to get into the eu and the eu is basically turning away from them. as a result, turks feel like they are being rejected outright and they're not too happy about it. i think these recent stories are an indication that they're reacting to being shunned. they're about to elect their very religious PM into presidency.
i believe we do have a replacement for the floppy in email. for files that small it's really the best solution. if that doesn't work, then a usb stick or an ipod works well. i don't think we'll see a true replacement for the floppy because we just don't need it. floppies are not really a great medium anyway, just the best at the time and world without ubiquitous internet access.
And any of Iomega's proprietary formats: Zip, Jaz, Clik! (aka PocketZip), REV, etc.
i'm not sure zip or jaz belong in the "flop" category. the zip disk was amazing when it came out as far as $/Mb ratio. in my industry we all used syquests and the most common form of them was the 44Mb version. those disk ran about $75 per at the time. when the zip disk came into being with 100Mb disks for $20, everyone in my industry abandoned syquest and let them drown in their own hubris. they had a strangehold on the "affordable" high-capacity portable storage market at the time and were gladly fleecing their users.
i think the zip disk was more a victim of a very short lifespan because it was eventually destroyed by cd-r's. zip disks were a very successful and useful product for a rather short amount of time. better technology just happened to obsolete it faster than most other success stories.
I don't know, I spent the last twenty minutes trying to find one of these new, drm-free tracks on the iTunes store with no luck. Looked up artists that belong to EMI, but none of them seem to have any $1.30 songs for sale (as far as I can tell, the only way to determine what format it will be). I even tried searching by that price, but apparently searching for $1.30 breaks the music store. Oops, maybe Apple's interface does suck. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way to search for these tracks... and I haven't even found any by looking at artists I know are on EMI. Can anyone point to an artist/album on itms that offers these new tracks for us iTMS-impaired people?
did you miss the part of the article summary that said "Starting next month,"? last i checked, it's not next month yet.
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if getty images wanted to support this cause, i'm sure the designer or the organization could have negotiated out a pro-bono deal with them easily. getty commonly supplies non-watermarked high-rez images for their regular customers if you ask. i've downloaded high-rez images from them and even stock footage for project presentations. no designer in their right mind would use a watermarked image like that.
they're an hour apart. that's a lot of people fighting over the remote.
make itunes and the ipod. suddenly quicktime is installed on a huge number of windows computers and aac is a heavily-used music codec as opposed to wmv.
build os x on a unix core to attract both home/consumer users and hardcore geeks.
make ie the default, then build safari.
switch to intel chips and offer boot camp to run windows.
make a little innocuous works suite with just word processing and presentation software in iwork, then slide out a spreadsheet a couple years later.
each quarter apple is breaking their previous unit-shipment record.
the barriers to entry for macs are coming down slowly and methodically. it's almost as if somebody planned it that way. apple has stopped making the huge shifts in strategy that we've grown accustom to since jobs' return, but they seem to still be making progress on their own agenda. the main issue facing apple now is how to manage their growth and figure out how big they can get before they become bad. how much can they grow before they start to become what they hate?
as a long-time mac user, i'm happy to see the market playing out this way. it's the most interesting time to be a mac user since 1984.
it seems to me that plenty of resources are being put against the oil deficiency problem right now. the best thing for those solutions might be for ground oil prices to spike so high that their solutions become economically competitive. at that point, we can hope that their processes are scalable and can become more efficient and less expensive over time.
well, that's the pickle isn't it? i wouldn't say that "the internet hates being marketed to..." first off, you can't even come close to homogenizing all the users of the internet. at best you could say the people who would participate in something like second life don't like being marketed to badly. there have been many many viral marketing sites that have done very well and become extremely popular. marketing is not a single entity. if it's done right and it uses the advantages of the medium in an interesting way, then people will like it fully knowing that they're being marketed to (i.e. subservient chicken). if it sucks, then people will be more likely to be hateful towards marketing materials than user-created content that sucks equally as much.
your comment to more accurately read "how could any reasonable person expect that a corporation would run a community environment at their own great expense without the expectation of some marketing dollars being made somewhere down the line?" i seriously doubt lindencorp just decided to blow wads of cash so people can fly around as gigantic penises.
the 650s i've seen were better than my 700. but i wouldn't call any of them reliable. in fact, my brother just woke up late yesterday. i was pissed because we had errands to do all day. turns out his 650 had crashed overnight and since he uses it as his alarm clock, he overslept. also, he couldn't hear me calling. of course, he got an iphone today. haha.
i might have just gotten the dog of the models, but the fact that palm would release a device like the 700p with known defects is enough for me to write them off forever.
so yes, it didn't work right out of the box, but i had already invested money in it and i thought it could be fixed. palm barely even acknowledged the problem then i believe they said they were "working on a fix" that never materialized.
i tried to like my treo 700p. i spent a lot of money on it and software for it. it was simply the worse piece of technology i have ever owned. if palm went out of business tomorrow it wouldn't phaze me one bit. they released a product that was defective and basically never admitted it nor fixed it. mine was stolen under stressful circumstances. but even after it was stolen at gunpoint, i was pretty relieved to be rid of the damned thing.
well, i'll take your word for it as my use of vista has been limited to playing with it for ten minutes in costco. however, most of the complaints i've heard center around the fact that vista doesn't display all of its features on machines with lower specs. if the os turns off transparencies and effects on a computer with less ram, then to me the os is not running fully on the lower ram settings. to say the os is running fine but turning off many of the features is a specious way to say that the os doesn't require more ram. if the os is designed in a certain way and is advertised with certain features, then that's what the os is. to tell people their machine is vista capable yet require them to run it with less features is lying. again, i'm just going by what i've heard. perhaps the issues have been overblown.
my personal experience with os x bears out that it runs with nearly all of its features and eye candy on very old machines. i have 10.4 running on a 400Mhz pismo powerbook with 512 Mb of ram. it displays the eye candy and animation, albeit a bit slowly. but this is the most recent version of the mac os running on a machine that shipped seven years ago with last generation's operating system.
personally i ordered a macbook pro with the standard amount of ram and bought 2 2Gb modules at the same time from a 3rd party vendor for $400.
yes... if it's anything like my treo 700p was, i'm wondering how hard it is to take the battery cover off and hit the reset button. that action was about as common as using the send button to actually complete a call.
Two lines and a triangle got a bit tipsy at the company holiday party. The rest, as they say, is history.
this keyboard wouldn't really offer any benefit to a user since, at best, it can either display the current tool, or the next tool in the heirarchy of that button. in either case, i already know how to toggle to that next tool and i don't need the keyboard to tell me what the next tool is.
for $250 i might buy it. but for $1500, i'd recommend any photoshop user buy more ram, a bigger monitor (or a secondary or tertiary monitor) and a wacom tablet and still have some money left over.
i agree with your assessment. i'm engaged to a turk and was in turkey last summer. while i don't follow politics as closely as i should, it's pretty clear that the turks were trying pretty hard to get into the eu and the eu is basically turning away from them. as a result, turks feel like they are being rejected outright and they're not too happy about it. i think these recent stories are an indication that they're reacting to being shunned. they're about to elect their very religious PM into presidency.
i believe we do have a replacement for the floppy in email. for files that small it's really the best solution. if that doesn't work, then a usb stick or an ipod works well. i don't think we'll see a true replacement for the floppy because we just don't need it. floppies are not really a great medium anyway, just the best at the time and world without ubiquitous internet access.
i think the zip disk was more a victim of a very short lifespan because it was eventually destroyed by cd-r's. zip disks were a very successful and useful product for a rather short amount of time. better technology just happened to obsolete it faster than most other success stories.