No, I think hysterical and 'fighting tooth and nail' will just make things worse. But have fun with your placards if you find that a good way to spend your college years. Especially good if you can figure out how to extend out your college years indefinitely by, say, going for a Masters, Ph.D., and then tenure in, say, climatology or even the social sciences.
Are you proposing a big increase in enforcement powers of government, to mandate some sort of 'solution' planned in a top-down fashion by bureaucrats and their minions?
There isn't a 'big International plan' for industrialisation, nor even a 'big National plan' in many countries.
Really, that's what this is about, for many of the people arguing for it: A proposal to implement a planned economy directed by government.
There still isn't a portable music player that could store all of my recordings of music.
All of my 'music' is an even more distant goal, as that's a lot of sheet music.
But I can carry with me as much of my recordings of music, in portable format, as I want to listen to on any day, on a CDR or two with my Genica Tavaria player.
Once that sort of 'quality control' initiatve has been implmented, it's a 'failure' by engineering if the product lasts longer than warranty. I witnessed the period when that sort of MBA-type management slipped into many companies in the late 80's.
I remember when I worked at a medical device company where I sat across the room from the lone repair tech. The company made a product that came with a 'lifetime warranty' and they hadn't excluded the battery (rechargable 9v Ni-Cd) from the warranty. He fixed about anything, even if it meant replacing the circuit board and the case it came in.
I agree. And I was running a commercial binary-only Motif WM on Linux four years ago. Part of the niceness of FVWM is there's just one file to understand and maintain (~/.fvwm2rc ) not hidden futzes or config 'utilities' to add layers of croft. A FVWM desktop runs well enough that I've used it on 486 laptops.
That said, OpenMotif is now available, too, and it's pretty nice. Not as light/powerful as FVWM, though.
A competitor will name itself sometime in the next year. It might be iRiver, it might be somebody else. Hell, it might be Sony. They have the manufacturing capacity to eat Apple's lunch if they want to. And in spite of all the hype and hoo-ah, there isn't that much to the 'design' or 'interface' that a cloner can't pump out pretty fast. There are definitely multiple teams working on it.
'this market segment' itself might wither and die. It certainly will if they expect Joe Sixpack to pay $200-400 for a basic playback device. Right now the early-adopter elite are 'the market' and that can't last.
My point is that historically a portable music player has an established price-point of about $30. People have to be insane to pay as much as a 'medium-end' stereo component.
Apple traditionally has hated screws. On products that they forbid customers to open, like the original Macintoshes (up to the SE/30) and these playback devices, they make it as difficult as possible for regular folks to open it.
Are people crazy? I paid $500 for my Yamaha Integrated Amp, with 100 watts of pure clean sound per channel, and it's going to be a beautiful, well-engineered piece of music playback technology for the next several decades. People pay $500 for a little pack-of-cigarettes portable player that they're guaranteed to be spending $100 every few years just to keep it operating??
open source community's fascination with creating "open source replacements" for applications and file formats strikes me as little less than plagarism
Malda: pandering to these Mac people is dangerous. If you want us nerds to stick around you'd better do something about it.
Well, obviously there was a bit of 'greasing each other's palms', at least in the sense that they shifted a whole TON of G5 boxes off to this project, leaving a lot of pre-order customers high-and-dry and pissed off. Surely some of us still remember that controversey from awhile ago here.
For VA Tech this may be an intellectual pursuit. For Apple it's obviously a marketing stunt.
Well, I've got whole boxes of old cards that need to be identified. Maybe we should set up a photo gallery to identify all of them. But I didn't post pictures of any of mine here, so oh well. I guess.
The way I usually figure out what cards are and/or what settings they have is to boot a Slackware boot/root diskette set on the machine and read the kernel messages from the bootup. That's how I figured out the IRQ/IO addressing on the NE2000 card in the machine I run Minix on. Can't do that on a Mac, but you CAN boot up NetBSD, which is just as good.
You can use Mozilla for almost anything on the WWW. Treat IE as a specialized 'Windows Update Utility' and use it for nothing else. It works. Just do things that way and you'll be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I think hysterical and 'fighting tooth and nail' will just make things worse. But have fun with your placards if you find that a good way to spend your college years. Especially good if you can figure out how to extend out your college years indefinitely by, say, going for a Masters, Ph.D., and then tenure in, say, climatology or even the social sciences.
Why not deal with it now?
Who? Who is it you propose should 'deal with it'?
Are you proposing a big increase in enforcement powers of government, to mandate some sort of 'solution' planned in a top-down fashion by bureaucrats and their minions?
There isn't a 'big International plan' for industrialisation, nor even a 'big National plan' in many countries.
Really, that's what this is about, for many of the people arguing for it: A proposal to implement a planned economy directed by government.
That's been tried before. No thanks.
Most of my music is on vinyl.
There still isn't a portable music player that could store all of my recordings of music.
All of my 'music' is an even more distant goal, as that's a lot of sheet music.
But I can carry with me as much of my recordings of music, in portable format, as I want to listen to on any day, on a CDR or two with my Genica Tavaria player.
Apple doesn't have anything even close to the distribution channels that a company like Sony has.
Or even Samsung.
Once that sort of 'quality control' initiatve has been implmented, it's a 'failure' by engineering if the product lasts longer than warranty. I witnessed the period when that sort of MBA-type management slipped into many companies in the late 80's.
I remember when I worked at a medical device company where I sat across the room from the lone repair tech. The company made a product that came with a 'lifetime warranty' and they hadn't excluded the battery (rechargable 9v Ni-Cd) from the warranty. He fixed about anything, even if it meant replacing the circuit board and the case it came in.
I guess I don't feel quite as anal as usual about making sure anything important has the copy-protect tab set to prevent writes.
I agree. And I was running a commercial binary-only Motif WM on Linux four years ago. Part of the niceness of FVWM is there's just one file to understand and maintain (~/.fvwm2rc ) not hidden futzes or config 'utilities' to add layers of croft. A FVWM desktop runs well enough that I've used it on 486 laptops.
That said, OpenMotif is now available, too, and it's pretty nice. Not as light/powerful as FVWM, though.
Actually, if Slashdot starts deleting posts, they cease to have 'common carrier' status and become responsible for the content.
The day that happens, attorneys will show up and shut it down.
(posted without Karma Bonus as this is offtopic)
I don't feel that I have to name a competitor.
A competitor will name itself sometime in the next year. It might be iRiver, it might be somebody else. Hell, it might be Sony. They have the manufacturing capacity to eat Apple's lunch if they want to. And in spite of all the hype and hoo-ah, there isn't that much to the 'design' or 'interface' that a cloner can't pump out pretty fast. There are definitely multiple teams working on it.
'this market segment' itself might wither and die. It certainly will if they expect Joe Sixpack to pay $200-400 for a basic playback device. Right now the early-adopter elite are 'the market' and that can't last.
My point is that historically a portable music player has an established price-point of about $30. People have to be insane to pay as much as a 'medium-end' stereo component.
This is becoming Rolex snobbery.
You also give your user one more potentially confusing option.
So it's another instance of 'one button mouse' stubbornness, and they'll throw out the same lame excuse?
This site is getting severely PACKED with Apple astroturfers these days.
Apple traditionally has hated screws. On products that they forbid customers to open, like the original Macintoshes (up to the SE/30) and these playback devices, they make it as difficult as possible for regular folks to open it.
Are people crazy? I paid $500 for my Yamaha Integrated Amp, with 100 watts of pure clean sound per channel, and it's going to be a beautiful, well-engineered piece of music playback technology for the next several decades. People pay $500 for a little pack-of-cigarettes portable player that they're guaranteed to be spending $100 every few years just to keep it operating??
open source community's fascination with creating "open source replacements" for applications and file formats strikes me as little less than plagarism
Malda: pandering to these Mac people is dangerous. If you want us nerds to stick around you'd better do something about it.
Marketing.
You must not have heard Dolly Parton's cover of the song yet.
I'm ready to show up to the Mac OS Refund Rally.
I even volunteer to be the tool wearing the Darth Vader mask.
Well, obviously there was a bit of 'greasing each other's palms', at least in the sense that they shifted a whole TON of G5 boxes off to this project, leaving a lot of pre-order customers high-and-dry and pissed off. Surely some of us still remember that controversey from awhile ago here.
For VA Tech this may be an intellectual pursuit. For Apple it's obviously a marketing stunt.
What the heck is 'industrial design' anyway?
I haven't seen that one on an Apple Buzzword bulleted list in awhile, thought maybe it had gone away.
What does it actually mean??
Nope. OS X is not 'built on a BSD kernel.'
It's built on a NextStep base, which if I'm not mistaken is Mach derived. Somebody else can fill in the details, but it's NOT based on 'a BSD kernel.'
They did bring in a core userland based on BSD source.
Apple has NOT grasped Open Source.
They are cognizant of it, and more O.S. friendly than some, but they sell a very closed-source OS on a very closed architecture.
Is it still set up that way? That was a convenience from the Clinton era, but is obsolete now.
Well, I've got whole boxes of old cards that need to be identified. Maybe we should set up a photo gallery to identify all of them. But I didn't post pictures of any of mine here, so oh well. I guess.
The way I usually figure out what cards are and/or what settings they have is to boot a Slackware boot/root diskette set on the machine and read the kernel messages from the bootup. That's how I figured out the IRQ/IO addressing on the NE2000 card in the machine I run Minix on. Can't do that on a Mac, but you CAN boot up NetBSD, which is just as good.
I run some 'minority' hardware platforms, too.
That wasn't what this thread was about, though.
You can use Mozilla for almost anything on the WWW. Treat IE as a specialized 'Windows Update Utility' and use it for nothing else. It works. Just do things that way and you'll be fine.