I'm totally with you - suing fan sites are wrong. I believe, however, that they've found a nice way to settle the torrent trial while still setting an example for the other people out there, and I hope that they won't go further with the other trials.
There's a thin line between "apple doesn't want their customers to have a choice" and "Apple don't want other companies mooching off of them, seeing as how they'd make nothing out of this deal". You think Apple's going to let go when they finally strike the majority of market share in a market? You don't think Real would have done the same thing if they lead the market and Apple were to pull a similar move?
The people that don't want people to have a choice are the labels - the guys that demand DRM in the first place. Napster and friends are more DRM-friendly than Apple are seeming as how subscription-based services wouldn't really work without DRM. In the DRM-based music store market - there's not good and bad, there's really just slightly evil and more evil.
(By the way, it's a shame blowing people off as fanboys when your arguments don't need help to stand on their own. It just makes you look like you don't have arguments in the first place.)
What's the ratio of Linux/*BSD-praising stories to Mac-praising stories again? Slashdot is a Linux/*BSD advocacy site if anything - if we're solely to count the knee-jerk reactions of story descriptions, that is.
Because way more people use Mac OS X than Openstep, and applications are not write-once-run-on-both-immediately (the nib file format - the one used to build interfaces in Cocoa/AppKit - isn't available for Openstep). What they are left with are basically a BSD distribution with an implementation of a pretty high - but not consistently implemented, and always catching up - subset of AppKit.
Yes, a five minute song does take five minutes to retrieve. I didn't contest this. You won't be able to download a guy's whole library, but it's still 288 songs if every song is five minutes long and we download continiously. Critical mass - big enough for the labels to whine - would be around 10 songs. That'd take 50 minutes. It's certainly concievable that a guy spends an hour or two at a coffee house or library with wifi, and people could snag a CD or two off of him every day. This is what would enrage the labels and thus Apple has to stop it somehow.
I believe they created that restriction to make it less appealing for people to download the shared music by connecting, playing and wiretapping to a file. They realized they couldn't throttle it in the flow, but at the source, so to speak.
a) Yahoo has been around longer. b) Some people just don't know how to spell or pronounce Google. In the past three days I've heard Gobble, Goggles, Groogle, Glogge and Gooleg. Yahoo's not easy to spell for these people either, but it's at least an established word.
Hailing "blogging" is effectively like hailing paper - it's just a way to get your word out. Independent writers and publishers, like John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) and Joel Spolsky (http://joelonsoftware.com/) as well as the personal thoughts from people that are inside different industries - like Om - are what you like, the gems of which you speak.
Sure - "blogging" as a media sure has its upsides, and I'm not sure we would have seen these writers without the rise of it. But hailing "blogging" - as some people here do - is no more correct than saying that all comments on Slashdot ought to be rated 5, Insightful. The opposite - degrading something for being based on the "blogging" format just because kids use it, too - is in essence no different than degrading the New York Times because the New York Times publishes on paper, and kids draw stupid stuff on paper. I hope we'll finally get away from all the hype on the particular media.
The grandparent brought up Microsoft copying something from Apple that Apple *did* invent. But it seems to me that Stacks are rather something like the Smart Folders in Tiger, because Piles would be maintained manually like any old Folder according to the documents I've seen. (Apple certainly didn't *copy* anything from Xerox by the way - the staff that went from Xerox to Apple went on to invent new things on the Mac OS and couldn't implement a lot of the stuff from PARC because the hardware was less powerful. They did implement a GUI, but Xerox was not the first guys to bring out a GUI.)
Makes sense. Now that I think about it, the Windows iPod installer reformats your iPod drive to FAT32 for you, so that might have taken some figuring out, unless you were to get an HP iPod which are FAT32 out of the box.
A personal music player is a very personal thing and not everyone suits an iPod. Bingo. It's so nice hearing this for once and not something insulting involving the words hippies, cult, cool and hip. Everyone's different. It's all good.
You don't have to need to listen to singles all that often to see why it's good to be able to find any given song quickly. It's one of those features that just must be right if you're going to make a music player device - imagine a phone where entering the digit 5 is hard. That wouldn't make a lot of sense.
When I use my iPod on commutes, I occasionally use shuffle (for the insane OMG FANBOY people who need this spelled out: no, not because I'm an Apple fan, but because I've been using shuffle since I first started using Winamp lots of years ago) but mostly I use Smart Playlists that change every time I sync them - songs without rating and so on (I rate them as I listen). Even knowing why the cable is proprietary and why they can't change it (it's a long story; I once wrote a comment on it) it's a valid point.
Sometimes you want to play just that exact song, sometimes you want to listen through some new albums, sometimes you just want to listen to *anything*. The iPod works for me because it does all of those things and it does them well. I also find that iTunes helps with this because of stuff like Smart Playlists - you just can't do that kind of stuff in the file system without massive lag as it creates the internal database within the device, on battery time instead of as you go on your PC.
The other day I tried looking for a specific song on a friend's Zen, and it took freaking forever to scroll through everything. I'm sure it does the other scenarios, but without being good at all three, it's just painful. A music player device whose major point is a large capacity should never suck at navigating. I've had a flash player, a CD player and a mini disc, and I never used those, because they couldn't cope with navigating.
Extra features are hard to decide on. You don't really *know* if you'll make use of FM radio, voice recording, calendars, to-do's, notes or the bundled partridges in pear trees. I have all five Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books in my iPod's notes section and I enjoy playing the breakout clone, but that wasn't even a primary factor when I chose my device, it's just something I decided to like afterwards after having tried it out.
By using certain P2P services I can download the mentioned file off of several sources simultaneously. This means a faster download and more time left for me to focus on actually using the material in question.
I'm more opposed to APB now than I was to Apple when that trial was in a similar stage. APB has collected evidence in a way that may not be legal to begin with. Apple didn't break one law as far as I could see (and yes, more specific laws trump the amendments in some cases - Patriot Act anyone?). They both are suing smaller guys, and the smaller guys have both deserved it, but I didn't like any one of the cases on the basis that they are beating up a small guy. I understand they want to set precedents and that they have legal basis, but that doesn't mean it seems right.
If this ends with APB having a relatively clear case - which I don't think, since, again, it's debatable if the way they collected evidence was legal to begin with - and having the *chance* to destroy the guy's life and opting to settle instead, I'll congratulate them on being as smart as Apple were a few days ago. I'm not a hypocrite, but that doesn't mean I can't detect some differences and change my opinion based on those.
I meant smart folders as in Tiger - basically search criteria. The *screenshot* in the article shows some kind of criteria for those stacks which implies that Explorer can stack up files *for* you. Piles have always been manual from what I've heard.
Slashdot Mirror
I do believe it's spelled frist psot. Please. :)
That said, *awesome* post.
I'm totally with you - suing fan sites are wrong. I believe, however, that they've found a nice way to settle the torrent trial while still setting an example for the other people out there, and I hope that they won't go further with the other trials.
There's a thin line between "apple doesn't want their customers to have a choice" and "Apple don't want other companies mooching off of them, seeing as how they'd make nothing out of this deal". You think Apple's going to let go when they finally strike the majority of market share in a market? You don't think Real would have done the same thing if they lead the market and Apple were to pull a similar move?
The people that don't want people to have a choice are the labels - the guys that demand DRM in the first place. Napster and friends are more DRM-friendly than Apple are seeming as how subscription-based services wouldn't really work without DRM. In the DRM-based music store market - there's not good and bad, there's really just slightly evil and more evil.
(By the way, it's a shame blowing people off as fanboys when your arguments don't need help to stand on their own. It just makes you look like you don't have arguments in the first place.)
That's one fucked up definition of 'hacker'.
Using that logic, are all "Linux found better at task x" stories redundant?
What's the ratio of Linux/*BSD-praising stories to Mac-praising stories again? Slashdot is a Linux/*BSD advocacy site if anything - if we're solely to count the knee-jerk reactions of story descriptions, that is.
Because way more people use Mac OS X than Openstep, and applications are not write-once-run-on-both-immediately (the nib file format - the one used to build interfaces in Cocoa/AppKit - isn't available for Openstep). What they are left with are basically a BSD distribution with an implementation of a pretty high - but not consistently implemented, and always catching up - subset of AppKit.
Yes, a five minute song does take five minutes to retrieve. I didn't contest this. You won't be able to download a guy's whole library, but it's still 288 songs if every song is five minutes long and we download continiously. Critical mass - big enough for the labels to whine - would be around 10 songs. That'd take 50 minutes. It's certainly concievable that a guy spends an hour or two at a coffee house or library with wifi, and people could snag a CD or two off of him every day. This is what would enrage the labels and thus Apple has to stop it somehow.
I believe they created that restriction to make it less appealing for people to download the shared music by connecting, playing and wiretapping to a file. They realized they couldn't throttle it in the flow, but at the source, so to speak.
a) Yahoo has been around longer.
b) Some people just don't know how to spell or pronounce Google. In the past three days I've heard Gobble, Goggles, Groogle, Glogge and Gooleg. Yahoo's not easy to spell for these people either, but it's at least an established word.
Hailing "blogging" is effectively like hailing paper - it's just a way to get your word out. Independent writers and publishers, like John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) and Joel Spolsky (http://joelonsoftware.com/) as well as the personal thoughts from people that are inside different industries - like Om - are what you like, the gems of which you speak. Sure - "blogging" as a media sure has its upsides, and I'm not sure we would have seen these writers without the rise of it. But hailing "blogging" - as some people here do - is no more correct than saying that all comments on Slashdot ought to be rated 5, Insightful. The opposite - degrading something for being based on the "blogging" format just because kids use it, too - is in essence no different than degrading the New York Times because the New York Times publishes on paper, and kids draw stupid stuff on paper. I hope we'll finally get away from all the hype on the particular media.
"Easter Egg".
Not to mention it being *easter* now.
91MB. I wonder if the team had permission to get it in there or if it "mysteriously appeared" all of a sudden. ;)
The grandparent brought up Microsoft copying something from Apple that Apple *did* invent. But it seems to me that Stacks are rather something like the Smart Folders in Tiger, because Piles would be maintained manually like any old Folder according to the documents I've seen. (Apple certainly didn't *copy* anything from Xerox by the way - the staff that went from Xerox to Apple went on to invent new things on the Mac OS and couldn't implement a lot of the stuff from PARC because the hardware was less powerful. They did implement a GUI, but Xerox was not the first guys to bring out a GUI.)
Oh - that makes sense.
Isn't Apache more secure than IIS out of the box though?
Makes sense. Now that I think about it, the Windows iPod installer reformats your iPod drive to FAT32 for you, so that might have taken some figuring out, unless you were to get an HP iPod which are FAT32 out of the box.
A personal music player is a very personal thing and not everyone suits an iPod. Bingo. It's so nice hearing this for once and not something insulting involving the words hippies, cult, cool and hip. Everyone's different. It's all good.
You don't have to need to listen to singles all that often to see why it's good to be able to find any given song quickly. It's one of those features that just must be right if you're going to make a music player device - imagine a phone where entering the digit 5 is hard. That wouldn't make a lot of sense.
When I use my iPod on commutes, I occasionally use shuffle (for the insane OMG FANBOY people who need this spelled out: no, not because I'm an Apple fan, but because I've been using shuffle since I first started using Winamp lots of years ago) but mostly I use Smart Playlists that change every time I sync them - songs without rating and so on (I rate them as I listen). Even knowing why the cable is proprietary and why they can't change it (it's a long story; I once wrote a comment on it) it's a valid point.
Also mounts as a hard drive under Linux, no fuss. Doesn't the iPod support the standard USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces, respectively?
Sometimes you want to play just that exact song, sometimes you want to listen through some new albums, sometimes you just want to listen to *anything*. The iPod works for me because it does all of those things and it does them well. I also find that iTunes helps with this because of stuff like Smart Playlists - you just can't do that kind of stuff in the file system without massive lag as it creates the internal database within the device, on battery time instead of as you go on your PC.
The other day I tried looking for a specific song on a friend's Zen, and it took freaking forever to scroll through everything. I'm sure it does the other scenarios, but without being good at all three, it's just painful. A music player device whose major point is a large capacity should never suck at navigating. I've had a flash player, a CD player and a mini disc, and I never used those, because they couldn't cope with navigating.
Extra features are hard to decide on. You don't really *know* if you'll make use of FM radio, voice recording, calendars, to-do's, notes or the bundled partridges in pear trees. I have all five Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books in my iPod's notes section and I enjoy playing the breakout clone, but that wasn't even a primary factor when I chose my device, it's just something I decided to like afterwards after having tried it out.
Yeah, like the square one!
Dear IT Department,
By using certain P2P services I can download the mentioned file off of several sources simultaneously. This means a faster download and more time left for me to focus on actually using the material in question.
Sincerely,
Student
Mix that with an intranet sporting a database which encourages reuse and you've got yourself a winner.
I'm more opposed to APB now than I was to Apple when that trial was in a similar stage. APB has collected evidence in a way that may not be legal to begin with. Apple didn't break one law as far as I could see (and yes, more specific laws trump the amendments in some cases - Patriot Act anyone?). They both are suing smaller guys, and the smaller guys have both deserved it, but I didn't like any one of the cases on the basis that they are beating up a small guy. I understand they want to set precedents and that they have legal basis, but that doesn't mean it seems right.
If this ends with APB having a relatively clear case - which I don't think, since, again, it's debatable if the way they collected evidence was legal to begin with - and having the *chance* to destroy the guy's life and opting to settle instead, I'll congratulate them on being as smart as Apple were a few days ago. I'm not a hypocrite, but that doesn't mean I can't detect some differences and change my opinion based on those.
(I'm Swedish, for those who are keeping track.)
I meant smart folders as in Tiger - basically search criteria. The *screenshot* in the article shows some kind of criteria for those stacks which implies that Explorer can stack up files *for* you. Piles have always been manual from what I've heard.