Retailers like the Limited are fighting back. Sometime in the spring, consumers and Express workers say, the store began replacing the placards denoting its return policy with new signs saying the company uses an "industrywide" system to authorize returns and that "under certain circumstances we reserve the right to deny returns."
The store did not back off of its own stated return policy.
No, AirPort Express only allows you to broadcast on one set of speakers (one AirPort Express station). AirPort Express can broadcast any audio out from iTunes. It works by compressing whatever audio is coming from iTunes using the Apple Lossless Codec and sends it to the station where the "stream" is decompressed, thus no audio degradation is incurred.
Most living rooms have both a cable jack (for cable modem) and a phone jack (for DSL modem), so you should be able to hook up the AirPort Express in the living room to both the stereo and Internet no problem. And you'll just access the Internet through the Express wirelessly. The only problem is if you have a wired network, but this is a wireless network product, so it's really a non-issue.
They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse...
Actually, Eclipse doesn't use the standard Java GUI library (Swing), and uses the IBM developed SWT, so it takes more than just coding the app "correctly".
The standard Java GUI can be written to be fast and responsive without using SWT however. Just check out the IntelliJ IDE.
http://www.intellij.com
I used it exclusively for my Java development, until I switched to Eclipse because of cost. Swing development can be tricky and responsive apps become harder to develop with it. Good thing thread programming is so easy with Java, because with Swing, you'll need to use it plenty.
The HMP-A1 will go on sale in Japan on 26 June for around 63,000 ($563/310).
I would hardly call a 20GB MP3 player that costs $500+ "cheap". Granted, it does a lot and all, but from its description, it's kinda big and heavy. So we'll see. Sony will probably lower the price before it's introduced to the US.
My main complaint with Sony digital audio players is Sony's obsession with their ATRAC3 audio format. I used to have a MiniDisc player and I thought ATRAC3 was quite good, but for digital audio, most of my files are in MP3 formats. Yet you can't play MP3's, the most popular format out there, on their machines unless you convert them to ATRAC3. They instantly lost my interest when that was announced. Hopefully this one will play MP3 natively.
While I agree with you that the IBM comparison isn't valid, since the lawsuit is quite different from the gist of this story, which is the age requirements of hiring in the Indian firm.
However, your comparison of minimum age requirement in US elected representative doesn't really apply in this case. The problem with the hiring in the Indian firm is about maximum age requirement. This is indeed troubling.
I find it strange that people seem to brush off foreign IT hiring practices. Look, outsourcing is an emotional issue for many people, and although I don't particularly like it, it's nevertheless a procedure that is here to stay. However, we have to be somewhat aware of what these outsourcing firms are doing in regards to their hiring. True, we can never hold foreign countries to the same standards that we apply to ourselves in the US, but we get outraged when we hear about GAP and Nike and other apparel company employ child labor or practice any questionable hiring practices, why shouldn't we feel disturbed when foreign IT firms do something similar? Outsourcing proponents often point to the influx of income as good for these foreign workers, but it takes more than just money going towards these companies that makes the workers' life better.
Actually, I'd say Java is far from dead or dying. It's simply proliferating at a market segment that it wasn't originally marketed. Server-side Java development has been growing at a fast pace since the J2EE spec were introduced in the late 90's. If you browse any Java development magazines and articles, you'll see that the focus of Java development has been on server side for a long time. Java, when used in conjunction with plenty of open sourced development tools, makes server-side development easy and fast.
Furthermore, Java is very good as an educational aid for object oriented programming. It's pretty well and cleanly designed and implemented, and the syntax is easily transferrable to any of the C derivatives (except for Objective-C, which is quite a bit different from personal experience). In studying CS, a lot of theories are involved, and it's not necessarily a professional program. So using Java to learn OOP is not a bad thing at all.
Strangely enough, I did not encounter this problem. Software Update seems to have recognized that I have the security update installed, and have not asked me to download it again.
According to your post, shouldn't PlayStation 2 be failing big time in markets outside of Japan? AFAIK, there are no differences between the Japanese PS2 and the American one - other than what is necessary (PAL versus NTSC and the like).
Also, I believe the Xbox is the same in the US and world markets.
The articles your referred to regarding differences in Japanese, European, and American markets talked about the gaming titles themselves (i.e. what genre of games each market like), and didn't really refer to the gaming hardware themselves.
In fact, if Nintendo manufactured different hardware for each of its regional markets, they probably can't take advantage of lowering manufacturing costs in terms of scale, so it would probably lead to a higher retail price and damage its market share.
P.S. the NES and the FamiCom had very little differences outside of appearance. It was purely a marketing decision to make them "different".
I think present generation always takes innovation of the past for granted. This is especially true in the field of media and entertainment.
Take films for example. Early silent films, like "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Birth of a Nation" (factoring out its racist narrative) contributed greatly to the field of filmmaking in regards to storytelling techniques and editing. They were revolutionary. But how many film goers of today would actually enjoy them and/or seek them out?
Actually, Apple has had an API for gaming developers for a long time. It's called Game Sprockets.
http://developer.apple.com/games/sprockets.html
Unfortunately it seems to be only available to OS 9 and below. There doesn't seem to be a version for OS X. AFAIK, Apple now encourages developers to use OpenGL for their games development - OpenGL is very well supported by the platform. However, most developers probably would like to see more resources available.
As I recall, right before Jobs came back to Apple via NeXT, Apple was trying really hard to woo back gaming developers, as at that time, pretty much everyone was jumping ship. That's when sprockets were developed. I remember reading it in a gaming mag circa 1997.
Actually, GCC may have optimization for the G5, but it is far from being optimal:
The compiler that seems to be best/fully optimized for the G5 is the new IBM XL compilers, released at the beginning of the year.
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&thread id =197118
There doesn't seem to be much benchmark done using it yet, but all information points to significant gain in performance when using the IBM compiler versus GCC (not surprising, since IBM built the chip). The only benchmark I can find is from a German site:
I don't believe the G5 is indeed the "fastest" personal computer in the world as claimed by Apple, but it certainly is comparable to the best in the x86 world. Not to mention it is a very new architecture, and there are still plenty of optimization that can be made to make it faster. But to claim that GCC is fully optimized for the G5, and that Apple was using it to justify its claim of being the "fastest" is incorrect. It used a compiler that is arguably good, but certainly not excellent for it.
In regards to comparing Mac OS X to Linux rather than Windows. I think the comparison is valid considering the market Apple has been targeting recently. Apple seems to have backed off from wooing the MS crowd, but instead focusing on firms that use UNIX workstations. Apple wants these companies to switch to the PowerMac rather than to a x86/Linux platform. This is highlighted by their advocacy of using OS X for biotech and film/video effects production. I remember one of their earlier OS X ad even told the reader to send all of their old UNIX boxes to "/dev/null" - or something like that.
I just want to point out to readers who are not familiar with Australian politics, especially Americans, the Liberal party of Australia is actually the more conservative party in politics. You can basically think of them as the Republican party in the US. Its main opposition is the Labor (Labour) party.
I was a bit confused about the whole thing when I stayed in Oz.
Maybe they didn't know they were committing war crimes? The latest news is that one of the MP's stated that she (and probably) other reservists never received training on the Geneva Convention's rules on POW treatments. So they probably didn't know what they were doing constituted as war crimes.
Granted, it should be obvious to the MP's that what they were doing were cruel and wrong, but apparently not.
Personally, I checked the site out and watched 30 second of one video and I've had enough. All the people on it are obvious wanna-be actors... It's like any other reality TV show... I can't stand all the actors already.
Truthfully though, I can see it do well, but only if they put TONS of money in marketing.
Hammacher Schlemmer, the listed reseller of Jens of Sweden's product in the US, has one of the older models - the MP110 - for $249.95 with 256MB of storage.
That statistic was from looking at raw sales dollars $$$$. Since laptops are twice the price as desktops, that stat is n/a; worthless.
Even if all laptops are twice as much as desktops, that would mean in percentage of sales, laptops would account for a high of 33% of all CPU's sold. Sure, that's probably too high, but 25% is rather fair.
25% of any market is hardly worthless, and even 20% is pretty significant.
The first paragraph stated that GIMP is free and open sourced:
...have no idea what a 'Gimp' is but computer users of a UNIX persuasion will recognise that it as the name of an open source (read 'free')...
This is a review by someone who uses image editing program professionally, so to her, time is money. She may save herself quite a bit of money, but she would have to spend a large amount of time to learn the program before she can utilize it for work. All that time is lost revenue for her. In addition to the steep learning curve, she is complaining about the quality of the resulting images from GIMP - this would be a big no no for someone who does graphics editing professionally. If she can't produce top quality work, how is she suppose to satisfy her clients? In another words, more lost revenue. Pretty soon the lost revenue should equal to or surpass the money she saves from not buying PhotoShop.
I think most people are okay with plant cross/inter-breeding, after all pretty much everyone learned about it in basic biology courses (with regards to genetics, etc.). However, the new methods of bioengineering of food should be scrutinized. The infamous Monsanto "New Leaf Superior" potatoes, for example, secretes pesticide. I think that's pretty different from results from cross/inter-breeding of plants of old.
http://www.garynull.com/Documents/erf/seeds_of_d es truction.htm
Furthermore, these new bioengineered food also have other socioeconomic consequences. Namely that farmers are not allowed to save portions of their harvest for future planting, instead, they are forced to go to Monsanto every year to get "eyes" for their planting. Monsanto is even planning to make the potato seeds sterile through bioengineering.
The health and socioeconomic effects of these newly bioengineered food should be further studied. I don't necessarily buy into the idea that people would be adversely harmed from eating them, but we don't have enough data to prove it either way as of yet. It is unfortunate that the government and FDA has been dragging their feet in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
The engine is quite good at rendering large outdoor scenarios. Take a look at Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
http://pc.ign.com/objects/748/748377.html
-B
It does not appear that just because you are captured on camera it is an automatic conviction. Look at the statistics for cities listed here.
For example, look at San Francisco's 2004 statistics and you'll see that out of 29,335 "raw" violations, only 7,943 citations were issued.
-B
FoxTrot comic about elves being outsourced:
http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2004/12/24/
-B
The store did not back off of its own stated return policy.
Better solution, take your business elsewhere.
-B
No, AirPort Express only allows you to broadcast on one set of speakers (one AirPort Express station). AirPort Express can broadcast any audio out from iTunes. It works by compressing whatever audio is coming from iTunes using the Apple Lossless Codec and sends it to the station where the "stream" is decompressed, thus no audio degradation is incurred.
6 60 861/E1786577583/
Here are some explanation:
http://homepage.mac.com/craigamiller/iblog/C672
-B
Most living rooms have both a cable jack (for cable modem) and a phone jack (for DSL modem), so you should be able to hook up the AirPort Express in the living room to both the stereo and Internet no problem. And you'll just access the Internet through the Express wirelessly. The only problem is if you have a wired network, but this is a wireless network product, so it's really a non-issue.
-B
They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse...
Actually, Eclipse doesn't use the standard Java GUI library (Swing), and uses the IBM developed SWT, so it takes more than just coding the app "correctly".
The standard Java GUI can be written to be fast and responsive without using SWT however. Just check out the IntelliJ IDE.
http://www.intellij.com
I used it exclusively for my Java development, until I switched to Eclipse because of cost. Swing development can be tricky and responsive apps become harder to develop with it. Good thing thread programming is so easy with Java, because with Swing, you'll need to use it plenty.
-B
Sorry to reply to my own post, but my bad... I just saw that it does support MP3 natively. Should've read more closely.
-B
From the article:
The HMP-A1 will go on sale in Japan on 26 June for around 63,000 ($563/310).
I would hardly call a 20GB MP3 player that costs $500+ "cheap". Granted, it does a lot and all, but from its description, it's kinda big and heavy. So we'll see. Sony will probably lower the price before it's introduced to the US.
My main complaint with Sony digital audio players is Sony's obsession with their ATRAC3 audio format. I used to have a MiniDisc player and I thought ATRAC3 was quite good, but for digital audio, most of my files are in MP3 formats. Yet you can't play MP3's, the most popular format out there, on their machines unless you convert them to ATRAC3. They instantly lost my interest when that was announced. Hopefully this one will play MP3 natively.
-B
While I agree with you that the IBM comparison isn't valid, since the lawsuit is quite different from the gist of this story, which is the age requirements of hiring in the Indian firm.
However, your comparison of minimum age requirement in US elected representative doesn't really apply in this case. The problem with the hiring in the Indian firm is about maximum age requirement. This is indeed troubling.
I find it strange that people seem to brush off foreign IT hiring practices. Look, outsourcing is an emotional issue for many people, and although I don't particularly like it, it's nevertheless a procedure that is here to stay. However, we have to be somewhat aware of what these outsourcing firms are doing in regards to their hiring. True, we can never hold foreign countries to the same standards that we apply to ourselves in the US, but we get outraged when we hear about GAP and Nike and other apparel company employ child labor or practice any questionable hiring practices, why shouldn't we feel disturbed when foreign IT firms do something similar? Outsourcing proponents often point to the influx of income as good for these foreign workers, but it takes more than just money going towards these companies that makes the workers' life better.
-B
Actually, I'd say Java is far from dead or dying. It's simply proliferating at a market segment that it wasn't originally marketed. Server-side Java development has been growing at a fast pace since the J2EE spec were introduced in the late 90's. If you browse any Java development magazines and articles, you'll see that the focus of Java development has been on server side for a long time. Java, when used in conjunction with plenty of open sourced development tools, makes server-side development easy and fast.
Furthermore, Java is very good as an educational aid for object oriented programming. It's pretty well and cleanly designed and implemented, and the syntax is easily transferrable to any of the C derivatives (except for Objective-C, which is quite a bit different from personal experience). In studying CS, a lot of theories are involved, and it's not necessarily a professional program. So using Java to learn OOP is not a bad thing at all.
-B
Strangely enough, I did not encounter this problem. Software Update seems to have recognized that I have the security update installed, and have not asked me to download it again.
-B
I'll probably upgrade, mainly for two reasons:
1) Unicode support
2) Long filename support
-B
According to your post, shouldn't PlayStation 2 be failing big time in markets outside of Japan? AFAIK, there are no differences between the Japanese PS2 and the American one - other than what is necessary (PAL versus NTSC and the like).
Also, I believe the Xbox is the same in the US and world markets.
The articles your referred to regarding differences in Japanese, European, and American markets talked about the gaming titles themselves (i.e. what genre of games each market like), and didn't really refer to the gaming hardware themselves.
In fact, if Nintendo manufactured different hardware for each of its regional markets, they probably can't take advantage of lowering manufacturing costs in terms of scale, so it would probably lead to a higher retail price and damage its market share.
P.S. the NES and the FamiCom had very little differences outside of appearance. It was purely a marketing decision to make them "different".
-B
I think present generation always takes innovation of the past for granted. This is especially true in the field of media and entertainment.
Take films for example. Early silent films, like "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Birth of a Nation" (factoring out its racist narrative) contributed greatly to the field of filmmaking in regards to storytelling techniques and editing. They were revolutionary. But how many film goers of today would actually enjoy them and/or seek them out?
-B
Actually, Apple has had an API for gaming developers for a long time. It's called Game Sprockets.
http://developer.apple.com/games/sprockets.html
Unfortunately it seems to be only available to OS 9 and below. There doesn't seem to be a version for OS X. AFAIK, Apple now encourages developers to use OpenGL for their games development - OpenGL is very well supported by the platform. However, most developers probably would like to see more resources available.
As I recall, right before Jobs came back to Apple via NeXT, Apple was trying really hard to woo back gaming developers, as at that time, pretty much everyone was jumping ship. That's when sprockets were developed. I remember reading it in a gaming mag circa 1997.
-B
According to the website provided by Slashdot:
They are coming from a company in Florida calling themselves Flamingo Travel... they sell time shares.
-B
Actually, GCC may have optimization for the G5, but it is far from being optimal:
d id =197118
2 30 /
The compiler that seems to be best/fully optimized for the G5 is the new IBM XL compilers, released at the beginning of the year.
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&threa
There doesn't seem to be much benchmark done using it yet, but all information points to significant gain in performance when using the IBM compiler versus GCC (not surprising, since IBM built the chip). The only benchmark I can find is from a German site:
http://www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/as/spec/ct0408
I don't believe the G5 is indeed the "fastest" personal computer in the world as claimed by Apple, but it certainly is comparable to the best in the x86 world. Not to mention it is a very new architecture, and there are still plenty of optimization that can be made to make it faster. But to claim that GCC is fully optimized for the G5, and that Apple was using it to justify its claim of being the "fastest" is incorrect. It used a compiler that is arguably good, but certainly not excellent for it.
In regards to comparing Mac OS X to Linux rather than Windows. I think the comparison is valid considering the market Apple has been targeting recently. Apple seems to have backed off from wooing the MS crowd, but instead focusing on firms that use UNIX workstations. Apple wants these companies to switch to the PowerMac rather than to a x86/Linux platform. This is highlighted by their advocacy of using OS X for biotech and film/video effects production. I remember one of their earlier OS X ad even told the reader to send all of their old UNIX boxes to "/dev/null" - or something like that.
-B
I just want to point out to readers who are not familiar with Australian politics, especially Americans, the Liberal party of Australia is actually the more conservative party in politics. You can basically think of them as the Republican party in the US. Its main opposition is the Labor (Labour) party.
I was a bit confused about the whole thing when I stayed in Oz.
-B
Maybe they didn't know they were committing war crimes? The latest news is that one of the MP's stated that she (and probably) other reservists never received training on the Geneva Convention's rules on POW treatments. So they probably didn't know what they were doing constituted as war crimes.
Granted, it should be obvious to the MP's that what they were doing were cruel and wrong, but apparently not.
-B
Well, from the web page's source... Quicktime (*.mov).
<EMBED SRC="reed050304x.mov" WIDTH="231" HEIGHT="162" ALIGN="BOTTOM" autostart="false" kioskmode="true">
Personally, I checked the site out and watched 30 second of one video and I've had enough. All the people on it are obvious wanna-be actors... It's like any other reality TV show... I can't stand all the actors already.
Truthfully though, I can see it do well, but only if they put TONS of money in marketing.
-B
Hammacher Schlemmer, the listed reseller of Jens of Sweden's product in the US, has one of the older models - the MP110 - for $249.95 with 256MB of storage.
o =e l_audio
http://www.hammacher.com/publish/70549.asp?prom
I would think this model, the MP130, would be at least as expensive, but likely more.
-B
That statistic was from looking at raw sales dollars $$$$. Since laptops are twice the price as desktops, that stat is n/a; worthless.
Even if all laptops are twice as much as desktops, that would mean in percentage of sales, laptops would account for a high of 33% of all CPU's sold. Sure, that's probably too high, but 25% is rather fair.
25% of any market is hardly worthless, and even 20% is pretty significant.
-B
This is a review by someone who uses image editing program professionally, so to her, time is money. She may save herself quite a bit of money, but she would have to spend a large amount of time to learn the program before she can utilize it for work. All that time is lost revenue for her. In addition to the steep learning curve, she is complaining about the quality of the resulting images from GIMP - this would be a big no no for someone who does graphics editing professionally. If she can't produce top quality work, how is she suppose to satisfy her clients? In another words, more lost revenue. Pretty soon the lost revenue should equal to or surpass the money she saves from not buying PhotoShop.
-B
I think most people are okay with plant cross/inter-breeding, after all pretty much everyone learned about it in basic biology courses (with regards to genetics, etc.). However, the new methods of bioengineering of food should be scrutinized. The infamous Monsanto "New Leaf Superior" potatoes, for example, secretes pesticide. I think that's pretty different from results from cross/inter-breeding of plants of old.
d es truction.htm
http://www.garynull.com/Documents/erf/seeds_of_
Furthermore, these new bioengineered food also have other socioeconomic consequences. Namely that farmers are not allowed to save portions of their harvest for future planting, instead, they are forced to go to Monsanto every year to get "eyes" for their planting. Monsanto is even planning to make the potato seeds sterile through bioengineering.
The health and socioeconomic effects of these newly bioengineered food should be further studied. I don't necessarily buy into the idea that people would be adversely harmed from eating them, but we don't have enough data to prove it either way as of yet. It is unfortunate that the government and FDA has been dragging their feet in this regard.
-B