I understand that the person you are talking about has never heard of email, but did you know that Donald Knuth, computer science god etc etc does not have an email address?
"Is plainly and completely wrong, plz see 'revert to original' menu item in iphoto"
Revert to original doesn't let you step back through your actions. It's one giant leap to your starting point.
I use both Macs and PCs regularly and I agree that Garageband is a great app, along with iMovie and iDVD. However iPhoto doesn't even come close to what Picasa can do. Even though Picasa started out as a iPhoto clone, it is a far superior application today. Let me explain why
1. It lets you specify folders to 'monitor' instead of the 'import' feature that iPhoto limits itself to. For photographers like me who have thousands of photographs in external drives, it makes no sense to import all of those to one central location (the iPhoto library)
The beauty of 'monitoring' is that you can retain your own organization on the disk as well as within the application. If you decide to dump Picasa tomorrow, you can still see your original organization in another viewer. iPhoto on the other hand creates a bunch of folders named 01, 02 03 etc which have no relation to the way you organized your collection.
2. Picasa does not alter the original images when you decide to 'edit' the image. Even if you crop the image, Picasa leaves the original image alone and only displays the photo as cropped or edited when you view it from within Picasa. If you wish to generate a photo that matches the Picasa display you an easily 'export' it. Also you can come back days later and undo any edit you did to a photo. iPhoto on the other hand changes the source image and once you finalize an edit, you cannot come back later to undo them.
3. Picasa is much faster when you want to browse through thousands of pictures, especially since the picture loaded initially is of a much smaller resolution than the one loaded by iPhoto.
--
Having said that, iPhoto is a great application and the picture viewing and editing features are pretty much equivalent in both. One great feature of Picasa that iPhoto lacks is the 'I'm feeling lucky' which does an auto level and color correction a-la Photoshop.
"most of us are arguing that the Chinese side of the analogy is a much graver moral compromise than just turning over untraceable search results."
Whether it is a graver compromise is a matter of opinion. To my mind, being made to lose my privacy is just as terrible since it effectively compromises my free speech - if the government keeps tabs on me, then it's a form of intimidation too. We may be biased towards thinking that the American compromise is smaller compared to the Chinese one because the US is a democracy while China is not, but if you look beyond that, they are both compromises (the US one hasn't happened yet for Google, but it has happened for MSN and others) that limit our free speech. They are both due to mandates of the government, and not due to any company philosophy.
What we should be criticizing is the Chinese law that makes such compromises necessary, not the companies that have to follow the law. Let's not adopt a holy and condescending attitude - companies have to do business according to local laws. It's up to the people (citizens) to change the laws. If companies tried to pressure governments into changing laws, we would be up in arms too crying foul over 'business taking over the government'.
If the US government passes a law that mandates that Google along with other companies must provide detailed search results of any user that they demand, should Google and all these companies stop doing business (effectively close shop), or should they comply with the law of the land?
Yes, you can fight the law in courts, but when the law is finally decided, you have to abide by it if you want to do business in a country. In China, the government is the law, so there is no fight once they decide the law.
Quoting directly from the linked article:
(b) permit customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law;
Nowhere does it mention that the devices should be limited to customary historic use. It states that customary historic use should be permitted provided that it doesn't break nay applicable law. I'm not an *AA defender, but crying wolf over something that's not there does not help the fight against them. In this case, the ArsTechnica article simply states a line out of context (Notice how the same quote in the first paragraph of the story conveniently edits out the word 'permit' to completely change the tone of that line)
"n a digital camera, the image is broken down into pixels, whereas in a film camera, the image goes directly to the chemicals on the film. So really, the only way a digital camera could possibly achive a higher resolution than a film camera is if the pixels were smaller than the molecules of the chemicals on the film."
Each pixel in your digital camera's sensor stores some distinct color information (provided the lens is good enough to sharply focus light on to each pixel). Each molecule on film however, does not store any 'distinct' color information by itself. Information is stored by a collection of molecules that form a 'grain' on the film - finer your grain (and needless to say, sharper your lens) the better the 'resolution' of your film. Therefore, to compare the resolution of digital and film, you need to compare the sizes of the film grains to the pixels on the sensor.
You make a sound point, but your argument tries to compare the United States with countries where there is much less freedom of expression to gain the effect of "Look, we are not as bad as they are.. how dare you criticize us!"
It's not about how good we look compared to others - it's about how good we are in an absolute sense. If we have any loss of freedom of expression, it's a loss to worry and whine about. You don't have to get down to the level of the lowest common denominator before gaining the right to complain about it.
" That's a lot of money. For my money, I would rather accept that.."
Well, it isn't as easy as that. What you don't realize is that GPS has applications far beyond simple travel routing for the average person. There are applications that you never see, but are critically dependant on GPS. For example, a GPS system is at heart, a very accurate time-telling mechanism. It is used in any application that needs precise time, for example network routers, or even your mobile communication system. Then there are aircraft that depend on GPS for their navigation, and surveyors and a host of other industries that need a reliable GPS system. An investment of $3-4 billion is very tiny when you look at the number of industries that are dependant on this system.
You always have the option to choose graphical ads or text ads in your adsense account. Graphical ads have always been part of adsense - most folks just choose not to use them.
Since very few folks will RTFA, here's the text in its entirety
The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We'd like to clear some of those up.
- Biased results? No way. Providing great search is the core of what we do. Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results. If a partner's page ranks high, it's because they have a good answer to your search, not because of their business relationship with us.
- Indexing more of AOL's content. Our goal is to organize all of the world's information. When we say "all the world's information," this includes AOL's. We're going to work with the webmasters at AOL -- just as we work with webmasters all over the world -- to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don't inadvertently overlook their content.
- AOL will receive a credit towards advertising purchased through Google's ad program. You might wonder if this will affect the ad auction. It won't. We don't offer preferential treatment on advertising (in either the auction or the display) to any of our partners.
- We have a service called "onebox" for which we provide some additional links separate from ads (sponsored links) and search results. (Try searching on [new york transit strike] and look for the news section.) AOL and its products have always been a part of onebox, along with many other providers, and will continue to be.
- There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.
Our service and our business works because of you - our users. You're important to us and something that we think about all the time -- as we build new products, negotiate deals, and think about what our future holds.
We're looking forward to what AOL can help us do for you, and believe that our new agreement with them will only create a better experience for you in 2006 and beyond -- one where you can continue to trust that we're giving you a result because it's the best one we can possibly provide.
ITONE is an ayurvedic preparation that is quite popular in India. It's made by a Calcutta company called Deys Medicals and it's a very safe herbal preparation that many people use daily just to keep their eyes cool and refreshed. It also works great when your eyes are irritated or if you have conjunctivitis.
It's one of the common ayurvedic medicines that almost every I knew in India used.
How does it compare? Well, it actually works, for a start.
Interesting. You haven't used CoPilot, but you claim that it Actually Works (TM). You had trouble using Remote Assistance once and you claim that it's crappy even though you have no idea how to use it. (Refer to the reply to your post that explains that you can use Windows Messenger to do it - yes, I've done it for friends and I've never had an issue - firewall, or no firewall)
You figured that since Remote Assistance is a MS feature, it must be crappy by default. Sorry, no luck there.
If I may suggest.. since you are checking for false positives, you can do a 'select all' for each page that you inspect and then do a 'delete forever'. If there was a way to select the messages on all the pages in the spam folder, then you wouldn't really be inspecting them for false positives, would you?:-)
Why do you care? The spam 'folder' does not add to your alloted storage space. The messages do not appear in your inbox or your regular searches (unless you specifically search using in:spam), so why do you care whether there are 0 messages or a gazillion messages in the spam folder?
One of the greatest features of VLC is that it will let you save any media that it can read. So whether it is a movie file or a streaming movie, it will let you save it to a file (or broadcast it). That is pretty much how *most* applications in other areas work - if you can read a file, you can save it too, but no other mainstream media player will let you do this for media files.
Mashooka and Yeh Dil are movies that no one in India has heard of. Saathiya was a great movie in its original Tamil version made by one of India's greatest directors Mani Rathnam, but I'm not sure how good the remake was. I suggest that you get your Indian movies from Netflix where you can see the user ratings - In a country that produces a gazillion movies, the average movie is sure to suck. You need to get movie recommendations from Indians rather than watching movies like 'Yeh Dil'
It's affiliated with the American MTV, but the shows are produced in Mumbai(Bombay). They show plenty of english music videos, but the majority of videos shown are Indian pop music videos or songs from Indian (not just Bollywood) movies.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that the person you are talking about has never heard of email, but did you know that Donald Knuth, computer science god etc etc does not have an email address?
"Is plainly and completely wrong, plz see 'revert to original' menu item in iphoto"
Revert to original doesn't let you step back through your actions. It's one giant leap to your starting point.
I use both Macs and PCs regularly and I agree that Garageband is a great app, along with iMovie and iDVD. However iPhoto doesn't even come close to what Picasa can do. Even though Picasa started out as a iPhoto clone, it is a far superior application today. Let me explain why
1. It lets you specify folders to 'monitor' instead of the 'import' feature that iPhoto limits itself to. For photographers like me who have thousands of photographs in external drives, it makes no sense to import all of those to one central location (the iPhoto library)
The beauty of 'monitoring' is that you can retain your own organization on the disk as well as within the application. If you decide to dump Picasa tomorrow, you can still see your original organization in another viewer. iPhoto on the other hand creates a bunch of folders named 01, 02 03 etc which have no relation to the way you organized your collection.
2. Picasa does not alter the original images when you decide to 'edit' the image. Even if you crop the image, Picasa leaves the original image alone and only displays the photo as cropped or edited when you view it from within Picasa. If you wish to generate a photo that matches the Picasa display you an easily 'export' it. Also you can come back days later and undo any edit you did to a photo. iPhoto on the other hand changes the source image and once you finalize an edit, you cannot come back later to undo them.
3. Picasa is much faster when you want to browse through thousands of pictures, especially since the picture loaded initially is of a much smaller resolution than the one loaded by iPhoto.
--
Having said that, iPhoto is a great application and the picture viewing and editing features are pretty much equivalent in both. One great feature of Picasa that iPhoto lacks is the 'I'm feeling lucky' which does an auto level and color correction a-la Photoshop.
"most of us are arguing that the Chinese side of the analogy is a much graver moral compromise than just turning over untraceable search results."
Whether it is a graver compromise is a matter of opinion. To my mind, being made to lose my privacy is just as terrible since it effectively compromises my free speech - if the government keeps tabs on me, then it's a form of intimidation too. We may be biased towards thinking that the American compromise is smaller compared to the Chinese one because the US is a democracy while China is not, but if you look beyond that, they are both compromises (the US one hasn't happened yet for Google, but it has happened for MSN and others) that limit our free speech. They are both due to mandates of the government, and not due to any company philosophy.
What we should be criticizing is the Chinese law that makes such compromises necessary, not the companies that have to follow the law. Let's not adopt a holy and condescending attitude - companies have to do business according to local laws. It's up to the people (citizens) to change the laws. If companies tried to pressure governments into changing laws, we would be up in arms too crying foul over 'business taking over the government'.
If the US government passes a law that mandates that Google along with other companies must provide detailed search results of any user that they demand, should Google and all these companies stop doing business (effectively close shop), or should they comply with the law of the land?
Yes, you can fight the law in courts, but when the law is finally decided, you have to abide by it if you want to do business in a country. In China, the government is the law, so there is no fight once they decide the law.
Quoting directly from the linked article:
(b) permit customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law;
Nowhere does it mention that the devices should be limited to customary historic use. It states that customary historic use should be permitted provided that it doesn't break nay applicable law. I'm not an *AA defender, but crying wolf over something that's not there does not help the fight against them. In this case, the ArsTechnica article simply states a line out of context (Notice how the same quote in the first paragraph of the story conveniently edits out the word 'permit' to completely change the tone of that line)
"n a digital camera, the image is broken down into pixels, whereas in a film camera, the image goes directly to the chemicals on the film. So really, the only way a digital camera could possibly achive a higher resolution than a film camera is if the pixels were smaller than the molecules of the chemicals on the film."
Each pixel in your digital camera's sensor stores some distinct color information (provided the lens is good enough to sharply focus light on to each pixel). Each molecule on film however, does not store any 'distinct' color information by itself. Information is stored by a collection of molecules that form a 'grain' on the film - finer your grain (and needless to say, sharper your lens) the better the 'resolution' of your film. Therefore, to compare the resolution of digital and film, you need to compare the sizes of the film grains to the pixels on the sensor.
You make a sound point, but your argument tries to compare the United States with countries where there is much less freedom of expression to gain the effect of "Look, we are not as bad as they are.. how dare you criticize us!"
It's not about how good we look compared to others - it's about how good we are in an absolute sense. If we have any loss of freedom of expression, it's a loss to worry and whine about. You don't have to get down to the level of the lowest common denominator before gaining the right to complain about it.
" That's a lot of money. For my money, I would rather accept that.."
Well, it isn't as easy as that. What you don't realize is that GPS has applications far beyond simple travel routing for the average person. There are applications that you never see, but are critically dependant on GPS. For example, a GPS system is at heart, a very accurate time-telling mechanism. It is used in any application that needs precise time, for example network routers, or even your mobile communication system. Then there are aircraft that depend on GPS for their navigation, and surveyors and a host of other industries that need a reliable GPS system. An investment of $3-4 billion is very tiny when you look at the number of industries that are dependant on this system.
I have been using the OSX beta for the past half an hour and the Santa tracker works great. The beta is available on many sites if you google for it.
For the record, Santa Claus is currently delivering gifts in India (as of 2:40 AM IST)
You always have the option to choose graphical ads or text ads in your adsense account. Graphical ads have always been part of adsense - most folks just choose not to use them.
Since very few folks will RTFA, here's the text in its entirety
The recent announcement of the AOL partnership has been the source of a lot of rumors and misconceptions. We'd like to clear some of those up.
- Biased results? No way. Providing great search is the core of what we do. Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results. If a partner's page ranks high, it's because they have a good answer to your search, not because of their business relationship with us.
- Indexing more of AOL's content. Our goal is to organize all of the world's information. When we say "all the world's information," this includes AOL's. We're going to work with the webmasters at AOL -- just as we work with webmasters all over the world -- to help them understand how the Google crawler works (with regard to robots.txt, how to use redirects, non-html content, etc.) so we don't inadvertently overlook their content.
- AOL will receive a credit towards advertising purchased through Google's ad program. You might wonder if this will affect the ad auction. It won't. We don't offer preferential treatment on advertising (in either the auction or the display) to any of our partners.
- We have a service called "onebox" for which we provide some additional links separate from ads (sponsored links) and search results. (Try searching on [new york transit strike] and look for the news section.) AOL and its products have always been a part of onebox, along with many other providers, and will continue to be.
- There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.
Our service and our business works because of you - our users. You're important to us and something that we think about all the time -- as we build new products, negotiate deals, and think about what our future holds.
We're looking forward to what AOL can help us do for you, and believe that our new agreement with them will only create a better experience for you in 2006 and beyond -- one where you can continue to trust that we're giving you a result because it's the best one we can possibly provide.
ITONE is an ayurvedic preparation that is quite popular in India. It's made by a Calcutta company called Deys Medicals and it's a very safe herbal preparation that many people use daily just to keep their eyes cool and refreshed. It also works great when your eyes are irritated or if you have conjunctivitis.
It's one of the common ayurvedic medicines that almost every I knew in India used.
Slashdot to adopt all previous stories.
On Monday Intel announced that it was investing $1bn in India.
How does it compare? Well, it actually works, for a start.
Interesting. You haven't used CoPilot, but you claim that it Actually Works (TM). You had trouble using Remote Assistance once and you claim that it's crappy even though you have no idea how to use it. (Refer to the reply to your post that explains that you can use Windows Messenger to do it - yes, I've done it for friends and I've never had an issue - firewall, or no firewall)
You figured that since Remote Assistance is a MS feature, it must be crappy by default. Sorry, no luck there.
If I may suggest.. since you are checking for false positives, you can do a 'select all' for each page that you inspect and then do a 'delete forever'. If there was a way to select the messages on all the pages in the spam folder, then you wouldn't really be inspecting them for false positives, would you? :-)
They are not dropping zip files, only zip files that contain executables. You can still send your zipped up data.
Why do you care? The spam 'folder' does not add to your alloted storage space. The messages do not appear in your inbox or your regular searches (unless you specifically search using in:spam), so why do you care whether there are 0 messages or a gazillion messages in the spam folder?
One of the greatest features of VLC is that it will let you save any media that it can read. So whether it is a movie file or a streaming movie, it will let you save it to a file (or broadcast it). That is pretty much how *most* applications in other areas work - if you can read a file, you can save it too, but no other mainstream media player will let you do this for media files.
You can use ffmpegx on the Mac to convert your Tivo togo files to iPod ready MPEG-4. It's free (as in beer) and is a great GUI for the ffmpeg app.
Here's a tutorial on using ffmpegx to create iPod ready videos (Link is not worksafe!)
Since not all the settings in the converter will give you iPod ready videos, I have typed out a quick tutorial.
Mashooka and Yeh Dil are movies that no one in India has heard of. Saathiya was a great movie in its original Tamil version made by one of India's greatest directors Mani Rathnam, but I'm not sure how good the remake was. I suggest that you get your Indian movies from Netflix where you can see the user ratings - In a country that produces a gazillion movies, the average movie is sure to suck. You need to get movie recommendations from Indians rather than watching movies like 'Yeh Dil'
For starters, use this.
It's affiliated with the American MTV, but the shows are produced in Mumbai(Bombay). They show plenty of english music videos, but the majority of videos shown are Indian pop music videos or songs from Indian (not just Bollywood) movies.
MTV India website