So the gif got named "apple_g5_powerbook," despite the fact that the filename doesn't matter (as already pointed out ad naseum).
The fact that the other product pages use "apple_g5_powermac" and "apple_g5_xserve" don't reinforce the idea these are "real products," they make it more obvious that the powerbook was a typo. And this isn't even Apple's work, but a outside design company.
Even more puzzling is the logical leap The Register takes to suggest that this is some kind of before and after study. WTF? IT'S BEFORE RIGHT NOW! So they are measuring interest in a G5 Powerbook, pre announcement, by placing it invisibly in a page pertaining to currently available non-G5 Powerbooks, and measuring interest? In G4s or G5s? Please enlighten!
Or is it they are simply counting clicks before and after the product is announced, but it is somehow important that the link refer to the processor installed in the next product to non-differentiate the before and after clicks?
I used to like reading theReg a lot, but I've lost a tremendous amount of respect for The Register lately. Between this and the iTunes DRM pipe rattling and the boo-hoo-hooing over some Harvard kid getting sued for soliciting trade secrets to display next to his ads, those brits over there are becoming just another "sensationalist crap with ads" site.
It's always easy to take pot shots as losers after the game is over. But in this case, you are wrong and just demonstrating your ignorance of standards and what open means.
In the 80's when Betamax and VHS were contending for the home VCR market and home Camcorders, neither Sony nor JVC (who licensed VHS) were obvious losers or winners. And nothing about VHS was open; it was just as much of a proprietary and licensed technology as Betamax was.
And in fact, JVC's VHS was only a success in the consumer market, and was inferior in some respects. Betamax formats designed for prosumer and professional markets took over (and still own) the high end. JVC's ridiculous VHS-C format was taken over by Sony's 8mm format, which was a much more appropriate format for camcorders (flying erase heads, smaller transport, etc) until much later when DV came out.
Sony didn't invent LaserDisc, but it was also far ahead of the crappy VHS standard, and the only game in town prior to DVD.
There are not and will very likely never be open manufacturing standards for tape and disk transports. If you are thinking about published and interoperable formats for media, well that is a different discussion.
Sony's huge mistake has been thinking that they matter enough to make all their memory parts proprietary and DRMed to death.
From MagicGate/MemoryStick to ATRAC formatted audio, Sony arrogance has lead them into becoming obsolete. If everything you own is Sony, it isn't as big of a problem, but increasingly people want things from different vendors to work together, and the more you try to use Sony consumer gear with other stuff, the more annoying Sony's lock-in crap becomes, and the less of it you want to deal with.
Yeah Steve tried to limit the Apple II to 3 slots (it had 8 i believe), and he was against expansion ports in the original Mac because it was supposed to be a cuisinart (not anything related to being hacker proof, don't know what ass you pulled that from).
But Steve's NeXT had plenty of NuBus + slots in it, as do the plastic G3/G4s and the G5s, all of which were designed under Steve's watch. So its hard to fathom what your point is about Steve, slots and the mini.
Its an appliance, it has USB and Firewire, and RAM/Wireless slots, why does it need a PCI or PC Card slot? What would you put in it, a card reader?.5% of the market is interested, and they should consider a laptop, iMac or a G5 instead.
- Why doesn't Apple make a better, cheaper computer that is Windows compatible and uses AMD CPUs?
Same reason they don't sell printers and CRT monitors. The market is awash in that product; it is unprofitable; it has nothing to do with Apple's core competency or market niche. Seriously, that was a stupid question, wasn't it?
- Why doesn't Apple make a smaller, cheaper iPod with a voice recorder, FM radio, and longer battery life?
Well they did make a smaller cheaper iPod shuffle. As for why any iPod would need a radio, well... anyone who pays a premium ($300-500) for a personal music player is doing so with the idea of being able to carry around their entire music collection and listen to whatever they want. If they wanted to listen to the radio, why go through the trouble of buying, selecting, organizing and holding their own music? Radio players cost what, $15? If you listen to the radio, you probably don't need an iPod. If you have an iPod, what need do you have of poorer quality, commercial ridden content prone to outages?
Along the same lines, the iPod is a music playback system. While you can brainstorm features you could add, recording audio isn't something most people with a music player need or want to do. CDs were playback only for the first 15 years, and even now that we can record to them, we generally don't have need to do this in a portable. We do it at home, and take the CD-R with us.
If you want to record voice or music, there are a lot of options suited to what you want to do, none of which seem very well paired with the iPod, which is a playback system, not a everything wannabe (which tend to disappoint on all counts).
Some people might find other features desirable in the iPod that aren't going to be standard features because they aren't a good fit (heartbeat/blood sugar monitor? Thermometer? MIDI Input? color printing?).
I think I saw that one, but I remember it a little differently.
Seems like it was five groups of ten people walking around aimlessly within a huge Apple store, arguing amongst themselves of who was leading the group and where the group was going, with various groups occasionally splitting up to head in different directions and sometimes just giving up and just walking out.
The Apple Store seemed to accommodate the various groups without incident, along with all the other individuals walking around the store and lining up to buy things.
There was talk amongst some to craft a sledgehammer to be thrown, but nothing ever materialized, then instead one of the groups came up with some brilliant ideas for improving the screen with the huge Apple logo. Their ideas were implemented and those who had helped seemed pretty happy about their contribution.
The US wasn't exactly "isolationist" toward Iraq during the time Saddam was gaining power and killing off Kurds with chemical weapons. The USA was supporting his governement! Remember that when Reagan was president, the US was allied with Iraq in an effort against the Iranian Ayatollah that had toppled US supported nationalist leadership in 1979.
Since it was in the interest of the USA to support an enemy of Iran, the US didn't say anything about Saddam killing its own people through the last two decades. It was only when Iraq threatened the profits of American oil companies that Bush Sr lead an attack on Iraq. And similarly, GW Bush is in Iraq not because Saddam needed to be stopped, but because Bush, along with Oil and Defense Contractor buddies, decided it would be profitable to destroy Iraq's existing government, install one more to their liking, and use Iraq's own oil reserves to pay for it all.
Unfortunately for all involved, they seriously underestimated the costs of attacking, occupying, rebuilding and policing a third world nation, and the costs of getting oil out of a country in the middle of chaos and civil turmoil. The results: hundreds of dead American soldiers, thousands of innocent Iraqi casualties, staggering billions in debt for the US, being stuck in a war with no easy way out, and increasing worldwide disapproval of American policy.
To suggest that the American attack on Iraq was more than a gamble for oil profits, or somehow related to Saddam killing Kurds in the 80's (when the US supported him), or that going after Saddam was some humanitarian effort to stop Kurds from getting killed, is all pretty transparently silly.
Further, pulling some old figurehead out of office, and rebuilding a new government with his cronies is as bad a plan for Iraq as would be taking down Hitler and putting Goebbels and Goering in charge of a post war Germany. Or taking Bush out of office and replacing him with Cheney and pals.
The world is not safer with a Saddam-less Iraq, because Iraq and Saddam were not part of the terrorism problem. If anything, having Iraq under American occupation is more of a danger to American interests in the Middle East and here, as it serves to inflame radical Islamic populations and offers the possibility of creating a vacuum of power in Iraq that could be filled by someone far worse than a posturing old fop like Saddam.
It also is draining American resources that could be better spent working to target real terrorists, and create opportunities in third world nations so that they join the world economy (like India) instead of wallowing in poverty and plotting ways to retaliate against their oppressors.
Recall that terrorism played a key role in America's breaking free from British domination. Freedom fighters practicing guerrilla warfare and sponsoring destruction of state property built this nation.
There is far more hypocrisy in the US playing the role of an 18th century Imperialist England, and being clueless about why the nations we are stripping of their resources and oppressing in poverty are producing rebel fighters that seek to shoot our world police and blow up production facilities.
--
WW II tried to stop Hitler's Germany from destroying neighboring countries to gain access to resources. The war in Iraq is the opposite: attacking a bad government to *take over their resources* From that perspective, Bush -- not Saddam -- is the modern day Hitler. Understandably, the rest of the world is in shock and expressing their disapproval.
Apple released the Apple IIGS in 1986, using "Quickdraw II" ( a ported and extended version of the Mac Quickdraw toolbox) which did both color and proportional scroll bars.
Apple did not change the Mac scroll bars because their behavior was already considered standard. Apple released changes to the interface in major upgrades, where a series of changes could be introduced together, avoiding constant change in usability.
One of the principles of Apple's UI guidelines is constancy. The guidelines are a good read. Others i recall off the top of my head are Forgiveness (undo/backstep) and Metaphor (mimic the behavior of real world objects).
Apple guidelines, which seem obvious after reading them, were the result of groundbreaking research that all modern software benefits from, in proportion to how well they are implemented.
Menu bars at the top of the screen is a good example. You don't have to think about where things might be or what the current application is. Your menu choices are always in a consistent place, and are easily targeted being at the top. MS put their Start menu at the bottom not as an improvement, but simply to be different.
Pulldown menus are not difficult to abort because you can just leave the menu and let go. There was no epidemic of users picking the wrong thing. That problem comes from complex submenus of options (such as say, navigating Start/Settings/Control Panel/Printers), which Apple discouraged.
In deep hierarchical submenus, users have to follow a narrow target through a series of menus. That is fairly rare in the Mac interface, but elemental to how Windows works: Start/Programs/Office/Word. Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Blah/Blah/Blah/target.
You can argue about interface differences, but what convinces me that Apple made good decisions is that when I'm tired (or say drinking), its far less frustrating to use a Mac than struggle with outthinking the interface in Windows (which Linux distros have largely copied). I find MDI (document windows inside application windows) particularly retarded.
The threat Netscape posed was providing an alternative platform to Windows for development. By eliminating Netscape on the client side, MS could change ("extend") the rules to ensure that, even on the web, development would still require Windows.
It does seem to get forgotten that Netscape was being rather arrogant and dismissed MS as a dinosaur they were going to replace, with the suggestion that Netscape would own the web instead of MS. It turned out that Netscape didn't really bother to keep up, and their development efforts simply stagnated while MS aggressively competed (using their 1000 lb monopoly in desktop OS) in an effort to dismiss the threat.
How many other companies have arrogantly suggested they were going to shut MS down, then simply sat there while MS took a few stabs and ended up making them irrelevant (at least for a time)? Incompetent, lazy competition seems to be the reason MS is in business:
Apple in the 90's "Yawn! Windows 95 is us in 89!" 10 years of stagnant System 7 left 'beleaguered Apple' for dead. Sun's Java "We are the next platform!" Then undercut when they tried to get Microsoft to deliver their product for them on Windows. IBM OS/2 "Better Windows than Windows!" Then installed Windows on their own PCs anyway.
Contrast that with their recent successful efforts at competing with MS:
Apple's clear innovation in OS X, and delivery of functional software that simply replaced WMP in music downloads using fashion, engineering and responsiveness to fair-use rights. Microsoft talks big but has lost the head of the table in desktop OS development and music downloads.
Netscape's Mozilla project stopped talking about how they were replacing MS on the desktop and simply worked on making a better browser. MS' rush to push IE into the OS resulted in sloppy work that opens an ugly can of security and malware exploits. Users find Mozilla a useful alternative while MS stews.
IBM stopped trying to keep up with Windows on the desktop and focused instead on using Linux to build solutions for their clients. IBM shifts revenue from software to services and their their clients benefit while IBM profits.
Lesson to be learned?
Don't talk big, just do the work. Find out what the market wants and supply a need, don't just assume you will be "the next Microsoft" and sit back waiting for the PR you sent out to make it so.
While testing and education and condom availability are all good things, the spread of HIV has far more to do with the reality of human behavioral problems.
HIV is not an easy disease to contract, compared with many other STDs. Most people with HIV get it by getting infected blood injected into their veins or through rough anal sex (the inside of the ass has thin walls and is easy to injure; it's far easier to transmit HIV anally than vaginally).
The reason HIV didn't flood through into heterosexual populations as was predicted is because HIV largely flows from the penetrator to the penetrated. The infection risk is far lower for the man in vaginal sex and the top in anal sex.
Many gay men were infected quickly because gay men frequently trade positions, making them not only engaging in riskier anal sex, but also alternating between insertive and receptive roles, giving them more equal chances to get infected and also be in a position to infect others.
Straight men and women act as a firebreak; in the US, there aren't large populations of men who have sex with both sexes and trade positions in sex. Infected women are far less likely to infect other men, so infection can't spread as quickly.
The epidemic in Africa is largely a problem with extreme poverty and women lacking the empowerment to chose who they have sex with. Differences in society mean African men are more likely to have sex with whoever is available (not limited to heterosexual partners) and that women are often not given a choice in partners AND in the use of protection. The result is that while every populated continent on earth has around a million or less infected with HIV, Africa has around 38 million infected.
The HIV epidemic is rooted deeply in entrenched behavior patterns that aren't changing with a bit of PSAs and some more research, or even the discovery of some wonderdrug.
We are struggling to keep up with antibiotics for common bacterial infections. HIV is mutating as well.
Additionally, the epidemic is migrating from the rich and famous to the poor and forgotten, and known treatments are very expensive, leaving the African poor without treatments available in the US. That means the even if the US were to find an HIV-cure, the epidemic in Africa would likely birth cure-resistant strains exported back to the west. We already have strains here that don't respond to the existing treatments we have for managing the disease.
So Jerkcity, its a bit early to wave your condom in triumph and laugh at your imaginary god. We are still in lots of hurt.
I for one welcome the immanent arrival of our Linux-virus writing overlords.
Their big challenge: how to port Internet Explorer, Outlook and Visual Basic to Linux and integrate them in such a way that Linux users can't remove the offending code, so there are huge holes to exploit, and built in distribution systems to make exploits into worldwide virus catastrophes.
When i was a courier for the courts in Oregon, there were court papers that had to be delivered on time or the criminal charges against the defendant were dropped.
I would think if the state could not present their case as scheduled, they may lose the case.
Of course, the Colorado DMV court may be shut down itself; in my case, the court was operating and the state prosecutors failed to make their case, so the situation might be different.
And what's a HYPERDRIVE? Macs had what Apple called a "SuperDrive," but that was a high density 3.5" floppy. Recently the same name got applied to a DVD-R drive.
I charge plenty of PC owners $100/hr to fix their Windows crap.
I have to wonder about clients who think they are saving $300 on a cheaper no name PC from Costco, only to spend a couple years on a crappy machine that runs poorly, has flakey software bundled with it, and requires expensive repair time when users plug it into their DSL, fire up IE and saturate their machine with viruses and malware.
If they bought a Mac, they could pay me to teach them useful things like learning Photoshop or AppleScripting their workflow instead of bailing out their Windows problems.
My dad ran a business cleaning up after floods, fire damage and crime scenes (mostly suicides). Some things smell bad. Some require vomiting (like rotten meat). Some are just unpleasant but linger (like the acrid smoke smell from a fire).
Things you can't clean by washing can be put in a tent with an ozone (O3) generator. Ozone is what you smell after a lightning storm: the clean rain smell. Concentrated, it smells sort of like bleach, but sharper.
It's both toxic and cleaning because (as I recall) Ozone happily oxidizes anything it contacts, preferring to be regular O2 + a free radical oxygen atom. The free Oxygen can bond with a molecule of stank and modify it to something less stanky, or it can, say, attach to a molecule in a cell wall and kill the cell.
It's like an efficiently burning fire in slow motion. I think oxidation is part of what makes your skin age; as you age, the damage created by environmental oxidation is repaired less and less by your body, until you just wither away. That's the idea behind taking certain vitamins that are supposed to block the damaging effects of free radicals in your body.
Of course, when you have something that stinks, you'd prefer it be destroyed by oxidation.
Unfortunately, plastics are among the hardest things to clean because they can absorb odors and its very hard to suck the stink back out. Stink isn't just something on the surface you can wipe off in most cases.
Spraying perfume just adds a new smell on top, which might not outlast the stink itself. I think Fabreze is a corn based chemical that works along the same principle as ozone. However, it leaves a residue on hard surfaces; it's designed for fabrics.
Sometimes when you have, say, a guy who dies alone in a house and his body fluids drain through the floor, or, in a moment of anguish, someone decides to end it all using a shotgun, you have a situation where you just need to throw things away.
Wow, in that case, I wonder how much money Slashdot is making in their "collaboration" between editors and readers.
1) Editor posts grammatically inane blurb about old news stories laced with inflammatory errors and misleading conjecture. 2) Readers post blind opinions on their take of the story as-blurbed, without consulting the actual source, but spend hours researching involved answers to errors in grammar and off topic rants. 3) ??? 4) Profit!
Since time is being wasted, and time is money, only an idiot can fail to see that the Corporation behind this nonsense is fleecing the public to perhaps trillions of dollars!
Oh by the way, what did you have in mind when you wrote: "When callers don't immediately get an answerer, that's revenue not spent on the call center."
Are you mistaking "revenue" for expense? Opportunity cost? Hmm. I can assure you there is no revenue involved with providing free phone support.
If we were all worth $x/hour, and every waking moment was "labor time," I'd have to send you a bill for the 15 minutes I wasted reading your nonsense, and writing this comment explaining why.:P
Yeah the problem wasn't that Macs couldn't use networks, but that the OS had limitations that prevented rich networking features.
Apple reinvented Mac networking a couple of times, with Classic Networking, then OpenTransport. The problem wasn't Apple's ability to engineer grand solutions, but that the underlying OS had limitations that prevented the Mac from reaching the level of other operating systems. Shared memory, non-reentrant code and no preemptive multitasking were all difficult problems to try to get around.
Apple spent 10 years working on System 7 (eventually renamed Mac OS 7, 8 and 9) and Copland, but despite lots of nice UI and multimedia features, they were increasingly falling behind in core OS technology, which prevented further progress.
NeXT's underpinnings allowed for an entirely new direction for the company; instead of bolting new things on a tired core OS, now they could adapt existing software from the Unix world to extend a clean, modern OS and keep up much easier with the state of the art, using their core strengths (such as UI and multimedia) to add value to Unix rather than try to reinvent an entirely new OS.
Now Microsoft's Windows is the only general desktop OS that is not Unix based, and therefore must struggle with redeveloping every new wheel as it comes along; debugging their own new code rather than using code with known stability.
Windows has limitations of its own that prevent progress, and Longhorn is increasingly becoming a marketing stab at xp+ rather than anything really new, just as Copland's great plans for being a feature rich System 8 melted in the face of unworkability and poor management into being some features added to System 7 instead.
\Du"ress\, n. [OF. duresse, du?, hardship, severity, L.
duritia, durities, fr. durus hard. See {Dure}.]
1. Hardship; constraint; pressure; imprisonment; restraint of
liberty.
2. (Law) The state of compulsion or necessity in which a
person is influenced, whether by the unlawful restrain of
his liberty or by actual or threatened physical violence,
to incur a civil liability or to commit an offense.
Signing a contract and then saying, "hey, I'll be inconvenienced if I have to hold up my end of the agreement!" is not the same as being forced under duress. Otherwise, we could all go and lease cars and then flip off the dealership! "I had no intention of paying tens of thousands of dollars to drive your car! I'll just motor around for free!" Rent apartments and squat! "Pay to live in your place? Your rent is so high it's unconscionable!"
Your benefit from agreeing to iTMS' terms of service is... drumroll please... the service of listening to music. If you want to hear the music performed by a star and distributed by a label, well you need to pay those involved in bringing it to you. Otherwise you are a thief.
All of this pseudo-Libertarian bullshit does a poor job of hiding the simple fact that you want things without paying for them. There is no unalienable right to use or take another's stuff simply because you want it.
After the Dvorak Apocalypse, where Apple suddenly vanishes from 'insufficient market share,' those who bought songs from iTMS can export their library onto CDs or DVDs as mp3 or AIFF files.
Ideally, we can also simply decode the AACs with the key we own in iTunes. But I doubt that will need to happen anytime soon.
When Real vanishes, so will support for the 500 songs they sold.
When PC buyers get an iPod, the few WMP DRM rentals they got from Napster will get trashed as the useless dreck they are, if the subscription hadn't already worn out. Sony ATRAC-3's as well.
Why send money to Russian software pirates for music you could steal for free on your own?
Don't say you think they are legally copying music with a valid license, and that the music you download is an honest transaction.
It's no different than buying a HDTV out of the back of a van for $100 and suggesting that it might not be stolen goods since you paid something for it.
You are simply a thief + a hypocrite. Better to just be a thief.
Yes the iTMS is selling slightly less than CD quality tracks. Most of the buyers are using those tracks on iPods. There is not a large percentage of buyers who want or need music files (of Brittany? 50 Cent?) in a higher quality than iTMS' AAC or CD provide. If there were, the market would adjust.
You can already buy CDs of whatever music you like instead, if you think you are missing out when you hear the word lossy.
Buyers of iTMS AACs will have no problem using them after some speculated upon apocalypse scenario where Apple and iPods no longer exist. iTunes happily poops out your library in mp3 or AIFF files for burning to CDs or DVDs.
Customers aren't stupid. The majority of people are satisfied with good sounding music at an easy to navigate store. Those that aren't can buy CDs.
It's hardly 'crap' just because you can perceive a difference on your $5000 speakers.
Please do give up, your prattle is tiresome. Last week you people were bawling that CDs were so inferior to LPs. The market largely disagreed.
Would it be possible to boot from a flash disk for speed, then remap the operating system's root volume to a hard drive for regular operations? Maybe this would have negligible benefit, but it seems like one of the slowest operations for a modern PC is rebooting.
Is there a technical reason why an OS couldn't mount a disk, sync any differences between the flash boot volume and the disk, and then use the new disk as its boot volume?
Seems like the ability to do this on a low OS level would also enable hot swap support for failing root volumes, or failover.
For small backup operations, everything from 4mm to DLT is losing the capacity advantage over disk. Since hard drives get a huge jump bigger every year for the same dollar, maintaining archives of DAT or Travan or DLT carts simply becomes more hassle for less point, particularly since tapes aren't that robust and are very slow.
Back in the days of the Commodore Vic-20 we stored data on audio cassette. But when floppy disks were larger, faster and cheaper, tapes was gone.
Tape inherently sucks: its not random access, its prone to both warping, stretching out and breaking (thin plastic media) and accidental erasure (the magnetic oxide).
Disks will always be faster access, media can range from floppy plastic to hard plastic to metal platters, and disks offer both magnetic and optical options. Can't erase a DVD with a magnet (unless you use it to scratch the aluminum off of course).
So with things equal, Tape vs Disk is always a losing proposition. Flash Disk vs Magnetic Disk is a very different comparison. Even if flash were the same price, you couldn't use flash in many hard disk applications, since it wears out so quickly.
So I'd say flash vs magnetic hard drives are more complementary than competitive.
Slashdot Mirror
So the gif got named "apple_g5_powerbook," despite the fact that the filename doesn't matter (as already pointed out ad naseum).
The fact that the other product pages use "apple_g5_powermac" and "apple_g5_xserve" don't reinforce the idea these are "real products," they make it more obvious that the powerbook was a typo. And this isn't even Apple's work, but a outside design company.
Even more puzzling is the logical leap The Register takes to suggest that this is some kind of before and after study. WTF? IT'S BEFORE RIGHT NOW! So they are measuring interest in a G5 Powerbook, pre announcement, by placing it invisibly in a page pertaining to currently available non-G5 Powerbooks, and measuring interest? In G4s or G5s? Please enlighten!
Or is it they are simply counting clicks before and after the product is announced, but it is somehow important that the link refer to the processor installed in the next product to non-differentiate the before and after clicks?
I used to like reading theReg a lot, but I've lost a tremendous amount of respect for The Register lately. Between this and the iTunes DRM pipe rattling and the boo-hoo-hooing over some Harvard kid getting sued for soliciting trade secrets to display next to his ads, those brits over there are becoming just another "sensationalist crap with ads" site.
It's always easy to take pot shots as losers after the game is over. But in this case, you are wrong and just demonstrating your ignorance of standards and what open means.
In the 80's when Betamax and VHS were contending for the home VCR market and home Camcorders, neither Sony nor JVC (who licensed VHS) were obvious losers or winners. And nothing about VHS was open; it was just as much of a proprietary and licensed technology as Betamax was.
And in fact, JVC's VHS was only a success in the consumer market, and was inferior in some respects. Betamax formats designed for prosumer and professional markets took over (and still own) the high end. JVC's ridiculous VHS-C format was taken over by Sony's 8mm format, which was a much more appropriate format for camcorders (flying erase heads, smaller transport, etc) until much later when DV came out.
Sony didn't invent LaserDisc, but it was also far ahead of the crappy VHS standard, and the only game in town prior to DVD.
There are not and will very likely never be open manufacturing standards for tape and disk transports. If you are thinking about published and interoperable formats for media, well that is a different discussion.
Sony's huge mistake has been thinking that they matter enough to make all their memory parts proprietary and DRMed to death.
From MagicGate/MemoryStick to ATRAC formatted audio, Sony arrogance has lead them into becoming obsolete. If everything you own is Sony, it isn't as big of a problem, but increasingly people want things from different vendors to work together, and the more you try to use Sony consumer gear with other stuff, the more annoying Sony's lock-in crap becomes, and the less of it you want to deal with.
But that iPod wouldn't play your collection of Ogg Vobis recordings, nor would it sync with your PC running linux.
I'm sure the 500 people in line waiting for an iPod will be pleased you are getting out of the way.
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Yeah Steve tried to limit the Apple II to 3 slots (it had 8 i believe), and he was against expansion ports in the original Mac because it was supposed to be a cuisinart (not anything related to being hacker proof, don't know what ass you pulled that from).
.5% of the market is interested, and they should consider a laptop, iMac or a G5 instead.
But Steve's NeXT had plenty of NuBus + slots in it, as do the plastic G3/G4s and the G5s, all of which were designed under Steve's watch. So its hard to fathom what your point is about Steve, slots and the mini.
Its an appliance, it has USB and Firewire, and RAM/Wireless slots, why does it need a PCI or PC Card slot? What would you put in it, a card reader?
Wow those are easy enough for me to answer:
- Why doesn't Apple make a better, cheaper computer that is Windows compatible and uses AMD CPUs?
Same reason they don't sell printers and CRT monitors. The market is awash in that product; it is unprofitable; it has nothing to do with Apple's core competency or market niche. Seriously, that was a stupid question, wasn't it?
- Why doesn't Apple make a smaller, cheaper iPod with a voice recorder, FM radio, and longer battery life?
Well they did make a smaller cheaper iPod shuffle. As for why any iPod would need a radio, well... anyone who pays a premium ($300-500) for a personal music player is doing so with the idea of being able to carry around their entire music collection and listen to whatever they want. If they wanted to listen to the radio, why go through the trouble of buying, selecting, organizing and holding their own music? Radio players cost what, $15? If you listen to the radio, you probably don't need an iPod. If you have an iPod, what need do you have of poorer quality, commercial ridden content prone to outages?
Along the same lines, the iPod is a music playback system. While you can brainstorm features you could add, recording audio isn't something most people with a music player need or want to do. CDs were playback only for the first 15 years, and even now that we can record to them, we generally don't have need to do this in a portable. We do it at home, and take the CD-R with us.
If you want to record voice or music, there are a lot of options suited to what you want to do, none of which seem very well paired with the iPod, which is a playback system, not a everything wannabe (which tend to disappoint on all counts).
Some people might find other features desirable in the iPod that aren't going to be standard features because they aren't a good fit (heartbeat/blood sugar monitor? Thermometer? MIDI Input? color printing?).
I think I saw that one, but I remember it a little differently.
Seems like it was five groups of ten people walking around aimlessly within a huge Apple store, arguing amongst themselves of who was leading the group and where the group was going, with various groups occasionally splitting up to head in different directions and sometimes just giving up and just walking out.
The Apple Store seemed to accommodate the various groups without incident, along with all the other individuals walking around the store and lining up to buy things.
There was talk amongst some to craft a sledgehammer to be thrown, but nothing ever materialized, then instead one of the groups came up with some brilliant ideas for improving the screen with the huge Apple logo. Their ideas were implemented and those who had helped seemed pretty happy about their contribution.
Watching it made me want to buy an iPod.
The US wasn't exactly "isolationist" toward Iraq during the time Saddam was gaining power and killing off Kurds with chemical weapons. The USA was supporting his governement! Remember that when Reagan was president, the US was allied with Iraq in an effort against the Iranian Ayatollah that had toppled US supported nationalist leadership in 1979.
Since it was in the interest of the USA to support an enemy of Iran, the US didn't say anything about Saddam killing its own people through the last two decades. It was only when Iraq threatened the profits of American oil companies that Bush Sr lead an attack on Iraq. And similarly, GW Bush is in Iraq not because Saddam needed to be stopped, but because Bush, along with Oil and Defense Contractor buddies, decided it would be profitable to destroy Iraq's existing government, install one more to their liking, and use Iraq's own oil reserves to pay for it all.
Unfortunately for all involved, they seriously underestimated the costs of attacking, occupying, rebuilding and policing a third world nation, and the costs of getting oil out of a country in the middle of chaos and civil turmoil. The results: hundreds of dead American soldiers, thousands of innocent Iraqi casualties, staggering billions in debt for the US, being stuck in a war with no easy way out, and increasing worldwide disapproval of American policy.
To suggest that the American attack on Iraq was more than a gamble for oil profits, or somehow related to Saddam killing Kurds in the 80's (when the US supported him), or that going after Saddam was some humanitarian effort to stop Kurds from getting killed, is all pretty transparently silly.
Further, pulling some old figurehead out of office, and rebuilding a new government with his cronies is as bad a plan for Iraq as would be taking down Hitler and putting Goebbels and Goering in charge of a post war Germany. Or taking Bush out of office and replacing him with Cheney and pals.
The world is not safer with a Saddam-less Iraq, because Iraq and Saddam were not part of the terrorism problem. If anything, having Iraq under American occupation is more of a danger to American interests in the Middle East and here, as it serves to inflame radical Islamic populations and offers the possibility of creating a vacuum of power in Iraq that could be filled by someone far worse than a posturing old fop like Saddam.
It also is draining American resources that could be better spent working to target real terrorists, and create opportunities in third world nations so that they join the world economy (like India) instead of wallowing in poverty and plotting ways to retaliate against their oppressors.
Recall that terrorism played a key role in America's breaking free from British domination. Freedom fighters practicing guerrilla warfare and sponsoring destruction of state property built this nation.
There is far more hypocrisy in the US playing the role of an 18th century Imperialist England, and being clueless about why the nations we are stripping of their resources and oppressing in poverty are producing rebel fighters that seek to shoot our world police and blow up production facilities.
--
WW II tried to stop Hitler's Germany from destroying neighboring countries to gain access to resources. The war in Iraq is the opposite: attacking a bad government to *take over their resources* From that perspective, Bush -- not Saddam -- is the modern day Hitler. Understandably, the rest of the world is in shock and expressing their disapproval.
Apple released the Apple IIGS in 1986, using "Quickdraw II" ( a ported and extended version of the Mac Quickdraw toolbox) which did both color and proportional scroll bars.
Apple did not change the Mac scroll bars because their behavior was already considered standard. Apple released changes to the interface in major upgrades, where a series of changes could be introduced together, avoiding constant change in usability.
One of the principles of Apple's UI guidelines is constancy. The guidelines are a good read. Others i recall off the top of my head are Forgiveness (undo/backstep) and Metaphor (mimic the behavior of real world objects).
Apple guidelines, which seem obvious after reading them, were the result of groundbreaking research that all modern software benefits from, in proportion to how well they are implemented.
Menu bars at the top of the screen is a good example. You don't have to think about where things might be or what the current application is. Your menu choices are always in a consistent place, and are easily targeted being at the top. MS put their Start menu at the bottom not as an improvement, but simply to be different.
Pulldown menus are not difficult to abort because you can just leave the menu and let go. There was no epidemic of users picking the wrong thing. That problem comes from complex submenus of options (such as say, navigating Start/Settings/Control Panel/Printers), which Apple discouraged.
In deep hierarchical submenus, users have to follow a narrow target through a series of menus. That is fairly rare in the Mac interface, but elemental to how Windows works: Start/Programs/Office/Word. Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Blah/Blah/Blah/target.
You can argue about interface differences, but what convinces me that Apple made good decisions is that when I'm tired (or say drinking), its far less frustrating to use a Mac than struggle with outthinking the interface in Windows (which Linux distros have largely copied). I find MDI (document windows inside application windows) particularly retarded.
The threat Netscape posed was providing an alternative platform to Windows for development. By eliminating Netscape on the client side, MS could change ("extend") the rules to ensure that, even on the web, development would still require Windows.
It does seem to get forgotten that Netscape was being rather arrogant and dismissed MS as a dinosaur they were going to replace, with the suggestion that Netscape would own the web instead of MS. It turned out that Netscape didn't really bother to keep up, and their development efforts simply stagnated while MS aggressively competed (using their 1000 lb monopoly in desktop OS) in an effort to dismiss the threat.
How many other companies have arrogantly suggested they were going to shut MS down, then simply sat there while MS took a few stabs and ended up making them irrelevant (at least for a time)? Incompetent, lazy competition seems to be the reason MS is in business:
Apple in the 90's "Yawn! Windows 95 is us in 89!" 10 years of stagnant System 7 left 'beleaguered Apple' for dead.
Sun's Java "We are the next platform!" Then undercut when they tried to get Microsoft to deliver their product for them on Windows.
IBM OS/2 "Better Windows than Windows!" Then installed Windows on their own PCs anyway.
Contrast that with their recent successful efforts at competing with MS:
Apple's clear innovation in OS X, and delivery of functional software that simply replaced WMP in music downloads using fashion, engineering and responsiveness to fair-use rights. Microsoft talks big but has lost the head of the table in desktop OS development and music downloads.
Netscape's Mozilla project stopped talking about how they were replacing MS on the desktop and simply worked on making a better browser. MS' rush to push IE into the OS resulted in sloppy work that opens an ugly can of security and malware exploits. Users find Mozilla a useful alternative while MS stews.
IBM stopped trying to keep up with Windows on the desktop and focused instead on using Linux to build solutions for their clients. IBM shifts revenue from software to services and their their clients benefit while IBM profits.
Lesson to be learned?
Don't talk big, just do the work. Find out what the market wants and supply a need, don't just assume you will be "the next Microsoft" and sit back waiting for the PR you sent out to make it so.
While testing and education and condom availability are all good things, the spread of HIV has far more to do with the reality of human behavioral problems.
HIV is not an easy disease to contract, compared with many other STDs. Most people with HIV get it by getting infected blood injected into their veins or through rough anal sex (the inside of the ass has thin walls and is easy to injure; it's far easier to transmit HIV anally than vaginally).
The reason HIV didn't flood through into heterosexual populations as was predicted is because HIV largely flows from the penetrator to the penetrated. The infection risk is far lower for the man in vaginal sex and the top in anal sex.
Many gay men were infected quickly because gay men frequently trade positions, making them not only engaging in riskier anal sex, but also alternating between insertive and receptive roles, giving them more equal chances to get infected and also be in a position to infect others.
Straight men and women act as a firebreak; in the US, there aren't large populations of men who have sex with both sexes and trade positions in sex. Infected women are far less likely to infect other men, so infection can't spread as quickly.
The epidemic in Africa is largely a problem with extreme poverty and women lacking the empowerment to chose who they have sex with. Differences in society mean African men are more likely to have sex with whoever is available (not limited to heterosexual partners) and that women are often not given a choice in partners AND in the use of protection. The result is that while every populated continent on earth has around a million or less infected with HIV, Africa has around 38 million infected.
The HIV epidemic is rooted deeply in entrenched behavior patterns that aren't changing with a bit of PSAs and some more research, or even the discovery of some wonderdrug.
We are struggling to keep up with antibiotics for common bacterial infections. HIV is mutating as well.
Additionally, the epidemic is migrating from the rich and famous to the poor and forgotten, and known treatments are very expensive, leaving the African poor without treatments available in the US. That means the even if the US were to find an HIV-cure, the epidemic in Africa would likely birth cure-resistant strains exported back to the west. We already have strains here that don't respond to the existing treatments we have for managing the disease.
So Jerkcity, its a bit early to wave your condom in triumph and laugh at your imaginary god. We are still in lots of hurt.
I for one welcome the immanent arrival of our Linux-virus writing overlords.
Their big challenge: how to port Internet Explorer, Outlook and Visual Basic to Linux and integrate them in such a way that Linux users can't remove the offending code, so there are huge holes to exploit, and built in distribution systems to make exploits into worldwide virus catastrophes.
Step 3: Profit!!
When i was a courier for the courts in Oregon, there were court papers that had to be delivered on time or the criminal charges against the defendant were dropped.
I would think if the state could not present their case as scheduled, they may lose the case.
Of course, the Colorado DMV court may be shut down itself; in my case, the court was operating and the state prosecutors failed to make their case, so the situation might be different.
*Boggle*
What's a MAC 2E?
An Apple IIe? Mac SE/30? Mac IIcx? Mac LC III?
And what's a HYPERDRIVE? Macs had what Apple called a "SuperDrive," but that was a high density 3.5" floppy. Recently the same name got applied to a DVD-R drive.
I charge plenty of PC owners $100/hr to fix their Windows crap.
I have to wonder about clients who think they are saving $300 on a cheaper no name PC from Costco, only to spend a couple years on a crappy machine that runs poorly, has flakey software bundled with it, and requires expensive repair time when users plug it into their DSL, fire up IE and saturate their machine with viruses and malware.
If they bought a Mac, they could pay me to teach them useful things like learning Photoshop or AppleScripting their workflow instead of bailing out their Windows problems.
My dad ran a business cleaning up after floods, fire damage and crime scenes (mostly suicides). Some things smell bad. Some require vomiting (like rotten meat). Some are just unpleasant but linger (like the acrid smoke smell from a fire).
Things you can't clean by washing can be put in a tent with an ozone (O3) generator. Ozone is what you smell after a lightning storm: the clean rain smell. Concentrated, it smells sort of like bleach, but sharper.
It's both toxic and cleaning because (as I recall) Ozone happily oxidizes anything it contacts, preferring to be regular O2 + a free radical oxygen atom. The free Oxygen can bond with a molecule of stank and modify it to something less stanky, or it can, say, attach to a molecule in a cell wall and kill the cell.
It's like an efficiently burning fire in slow motion. I think oxidation is part of what makes your skin age; as you age, the damage created by environmental oxidation is repaired less and less by your body, until you just wither away. That's the idea behind taking certain vitamins that are supposed to block the damaging effects of free radicals in your body.
Of course, when you have something that stinks, you'd prefer it be destroyed by oxidation.
Unfortunately, plastics are among the hardest things to clean because they can absorb odors and its very hard to suck the stink back out. Stink isn't just something on the surface you can wipe off in most cases.
Spraying perfume just adds a new smell on top, which might not outlast the stink itself. I think Fabreze is a corn based chemical that works along the same principle as ozone. However, it leaves a residue on hard surfaces; it's designed for fabrics.
Sometimes when you have, say, a guy who dies alone in a house and his body fluids drain through the floor, or, in a moment of anguish, someone decides to end it all using a shotgun, you have a situation where you just need to throw things away.
Gnarly.
Anyone who considers "AI" to be worth watching is a fool, and should be ignored with extreme prejudice.
Wow, in that case, I wonder how much money Slashdot is making in their "collaboration" between editors and readers.
:P
1) Editor posts grammatically inane blurb about old news stories laced with inflammatory errors and misleading conjecture.
2) Readers post blind opinions on their take of the story as-blurbed, without consulting the actual source, but spend hours researching involved answers to errors in grammar and off topic rants.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Since time is being wasted, and time is money, only an idiot can fail to see that the Corporation behind this nonsense is fleecing the public to perhaps trillions of dollars!
Oh by the way, what did you have in mind when you wrote: "When callers don't immediately get an answerer, that's revenue not spent on the call center."
Are you mistaking "revenue" for expense? Opportunity cost? Hmm. I can assure you there is no revenue involved with providing free phone support.
If we were all worth $x/hour, and every waking moment was "labor time," I'd have to send you a bill for the 15 minutes I wasted reading your nonsense, and writing this comment explaining why.
Yeah the problem wasn't that Macs couldn't use networks, but that the OS had limitations that prevented rich networking features.
Apple reinvented Mac networking a couple of times, with Classic Networking, then OpenTransport. The problem wasn't Apple's ability to engineer grand solutions, but that the underlying OS had limitations that prevented the Mac from reaching the level of other operating systems. Shared memory, non-reentrant code and no preemptive multitasking were all difficult problems to try to get around.
Apple spent 10 years working on System 7 (eventually renamed Mac OS 7, 8 and 9) and Copland, but despite lots of nice UI and multimedia features, they were increasingly falling behind in core OS technology, which prevented further progress.
NeXT's underpinnings allowed for an entirely new direction for the company; instead of bolting new things on a tired core OS, now they could adapt existing software from the Unix world to extend a clean, modern OS and keep up much easier with the state of the art, using their core strengths (such as UI and multimedia) to add value to Unix rather than try to reinvent an entirely new OS.
Now Microsoft's Windows is the only general desktop OS that is not Unix based, and therefore must struggle with redeveloping every new wheel as it comes along; debugging their own new code rather than using code with known stability.
Windows has limitations of its own that prevent progress, and Longhorn is increasingly becoming a marketing stab at xp+ rather than anything really new, just as Copland's great plans for being a feature rich System 8 melted in the face of unworkability and poor management into being some features added to System 7 instead.
And then I'd laugh because I said come.
\Du"ress\, n. [OF. duresse, du?, hardship, severity, L. duritia, durities, fr. durus hard. See {Dure}.]
1. Hardship; constraint; pressure; imprisonment; restraint of liberty.
2. (Law) The state of compulsion or necessity in which a person is influenced, whether by the unlawful restrain of his liberty or by actual or threatened physical violence, to incur a civil liability or to commit an offense.
Signing a contract and then saying, "hey, I'll be inconvenienced if I have to hold up my end of the agreement!" is not the same as being forced under duress. Otherwise, we could all go and lease cars and then flip off the dealership! "I had no intention of paying tens of thousands of dollars to drive your car! I'll just motor around for free!" Rent apartments and squat! "Pay to live in your place? Your rent is so high it's unconscionable!"
Your benefit from agreeing to iTMS' terms of service is... drumroll please... the service of listening to music. If you want to hear the music performed by a star and distributed by a label, well you need to pay those involved in bringing it to you. Otherwise you are a thief.
All of this pseudo-Libertarian bullshit does a poor job of hiding the simple fact that you want things without paying for them. There is no unalienable right to use or take another's stuff simply because you want it.
Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"
*pokes self*
Doctor: "Don't do that!" *cymbal hit*
*patient thinks*
*patient thinks*
Patient: "um... Doctor, it hurts when I do ANYTHING!"
After the Dvorak Apocalypse, where Apple suddenly vanishes from 'insufficient market share,' those who bought songs from iTMS can export their library onto CDs or DVDs as mp3 or AIFF files.
Ideally, we can also simply decode the AACs with the key we own in iTunes. But I doubt that will need to happen anytime soon.
When Real vanishes, so will support for the 500 songs they sold.
When PC buyers get an iPod, the few WMP DRM rentals they got from Napster will get trashed as the useless dreck they are, if the subscription hadn't already worn out. Sony ATRAC-3's as well.
Why send money to Russian software pirates for music you could steal for free on your own?
Don't say you think they are legally copying music with a valid license, and that the music you download is an honest transaction.
It's no different than buying a HDTV out of the back of a van for $100 and suggesting that it might not be stolen goods since you paid something for it.
You are simply a thief + a hypocrite. Better to just be a thief.
Yes the iTMS is selling slightly less than CD quality tracks. Most of the buyers are using those tracks on iPods. There is not a large percentage of buyers who want or need music files (of Brittany? 50 Cent?) in a higher quality than iTMS' AAC or CD provide. If there were, the market would adjust.
You can already buy CDs of whatever music you like instead, if you think you are missing out when you hear the word lossy.
Buyers of iTMS AACs will have no problem using them after some speculated upon apocalypse scenario where Apple and iPods no longer exist. iTunes happily poops out your library in mp3 or AIFF files for burning to CDs or DVDs.
Customers aren't stupid. The majority of people are satisfied with good sounding music at an easy to navigate store. Those that aren't can buy CDs.
It's hardly 'crap' just because you can perceive a difference on your $5000 speakers.
Please do give up, your prattle is tiresome. Last week you people were bawling that CDs were so inferior to LPs. The market largely disagreed.
Would it be possible to boot from a flash disk for speed, then remap the operating system's root volume to a hard drive for regular operations? Maybe this would have negligible benefit, but it seems like one of the slowest operations for a modern PC is rebooting.
Is there a technical reason why an OS couldn't mount a disk, sync any differences between the flash boot volume and the disk, and then use the new disk as its boot volume?
Seems like the ability to do this on a low OS level would also enable hot swap support for failing root volumes, or failover.
Am I overlooking something huge?
For small backup operations, everything from 4mm to DLT is losing the capacity advantage over disk. Since hard drives get a huge jump bigger every year for the same dollar, maintaining archives of DAT or Travan or DLT carts simply becomes more hassle for less point, particularly since tapes aren't that robust and are very slow.
Back in the days of the Commodore Vic-20 we stored data on audio cassette. But when floppy disks were larger, faster and cheaper, tapes was gone.
Tape inherently sucks: its not random access, its prone to both warping, stretching out and breaking (thin plastic media) and accidental erasure (the magnetic oxide).
Disks will always be faster access, media can range from floppy plastic to hard plastic to metal platters, and disks offer both magnetic and optical options. Can't erase a DVD with a magnet (unless you use it to scratch the aluminum off of course).
So with things equal, Tape vs Disk is always a losing proposition.
Flash Disk vs Magnetic Disk is a very different comparison. Even if flash were the same price, you couldn't use flash in many hard disk applications, since it wears out so quickly.
So I'd say flash vs magnetic hard drives are more complementary than competitive.