Lately the filter in Apple's Mail.app (10.3.1 version, not 10.3.2) has gotten close to 100% effectiveness for me. Combined with my "Anything base64-encoded is junk" filter, I'm only getting about one spam a week outside the Junk folder. So far it doesn't seem to be thrown off by the mad-libs stuff.
> We don't consider children capable of consent to things like sexual acts for the same reason.
We do if they're at least the age of consent...16 in most states. I'd say 16-17 year olds make up the majority of the underage, competent-enough-to-make-their-own-decisions-in-an -election population as well.
16 is also the age at which the vast majority of working teenagers start working, and thus earning their own money and being taxed on it.
Maybe this should be the voting age as well. Seems logical and reasonable. Most 16-year-olds are either apathetic (won't vote anyway) or passionate about various causes, so their contributions to the electoral system would be just as valuable, if not more (due to being more informed) than your average "adult's."
That's excellent. Would you mind posting the model number of that player? I would definitely want to give it a try knowing that, and I know one of my friends who would want it for that reason as well.
Has it had any sort of reliability problems, or has it been fine for the two years?
I wouldn't buy a Sony. I used to buy their products until I realized they fell apart/were defective out-of-box at an alarming rate considering their price. I'd go with middle-of-the-road DVD players. My friends and I have Sanyo, Go-Video, Samsung, and recently, Daewoo, DVD players. We've had nothing but good results with them. If I wanted to go top-of-the-line, I'd probably go with Panasonic. IMHO, Sony isn't of a higher quality than the "Bargain" brands this article is about. I wouldn't buy an Apex or similar, especially since they are known to not play VCDs well.
You're exactly right. I keep trying to tell people the same thing, but people are too busy spreading FUD and blindly hating "the evil Apple" to listen to reason.
> Think of the iPod as a tie in to iTunes music store, they certainly want to steer you towards...
Lol. The iTMS doesn't make any money. You've got it backwards. The iTMS is a trojan horse to sell iPods, not the other way around. Supporting OGG or WMA on the iPod wouldn't hurt Apple (except in the pride department with WMA). On the other hand, what Apple won't ever do is offer WMA downloads from the iTMS, because the only reason iTMS exists is to sell iPods. Offering WMA files would allow people to use the iTMS and put it on cheap little iRiver or Creative players, depriving Apple of the only profit to be had in the online music business, the portable player.
But aren't hashes constructed by definition in such a way that the hash of the message "V*i-4.G..R.a." would be as different from "V*i-A.G..R.a" as the hash of "Hello TGK"? The way spammers operate now, cycling random letters, random text, random punctuation, and random grammar would do a pretty good job of evading automated matching of spams with their duplicates.
If that's only a property of some hashes, then I stand corrected.
I didn't say it wasn't against the EULA. I said it wasn't "even unethical." Those aren't always the same thing. For example, it's ethical to sell counterfeit copies of Windows XP (or Mac OS X) if you absolutely must in order to feed your child (say, if you and your child were trapped on a desert island visited only by people intent on buying cheap software). It's not legal though, it's copyright infringement, and it definitely violates the Microsoft and Apple EULAs.
Ethics are personal. In my view, cracking a program just to get rid of the nag screen isn't unethical. Cracking it because you want/need the avanced functionality (say, Winamp 5) probably is.
lol. I hope they fix that iCal problem. I don't know how iCal reminders work, but it would seem like it'd have to have some sort of daemon running all the time. Is there one? Or is the problem that you have to have iCal.app itself running to receive alerts? I'd prefer a tiny little daemon if that's not already how it's done.
I like all your ideas. Your first Mac OS comment made me think of this: About five years ago there was surely a group of people at Apple who said "The sheer thinking of a SYSTEMWIDE change to the entire operating system is actually quite propsterous" at the thought of migrating to a BSD kernel. Those people are now either laughing at that statement in retrospect or working somewhere else.
The same argument probably happened at Microsoft sometime (maybe 1999) when someone suggested dragging everyone's sorry ass over to the NT kernel and knifing the Windows 95 platform for good.
Big changes are the hardest, duh. But they're also the ones that accomplish the most. Copernicus, the American Revolution, etc.
No, it gives you all the functions you could dream of. But functionality in my view also means, for example, the ability to rip a CD and automatically add the tracks to your player's library. Or to burn a playlist from within the player, with only one or two clicks. To do that, you actually need an integrated program. Whether that's important to you is, of course, your call.
That said, Nero is an excellent general CD-burning application.
The following Apple products are not perfect: Mac OS X iTunes Safari Mail
There are more, but I suppose you get the idea.
The poster was trying to make the point that with one (admittedly big) free download iTunes seamlessly supports MP3 and AAC encoding and CD burning, while Winamp charges you for this. This is a valid point. He didn't say it was perfect. I mean come on, your counterargument was essentially: No, iTunes having more features than WinAmp is not reason to give it any credit--because one can get other software to implement those missing features! Well duh. The point is that with iTunes, you only need one program for both those tasks instead of needing to install two. And the integration is good: Does EAC add the encoded tracks to your favorite player's library? Does your favorite burning app write a CD from a playlist with two clicks, within the player? I doubt it. Winamp's Pro version probably does these things, but it's, y'know, not free. iTunes is. Free is good.
And if Apple was the one charging for this, you people would be screaming all over the place that Apple is ripping you off, "when program XYZ does this for FREE!" Take for example the way the Anti-Apple-Zealots seethe with hatred every time they see the "Get QuickTime Pro" nag screen. Word to the wise: If you don't like the nag screen, then GET A KEYGEN AND CRACK IT! It's not that hard to find it. It's not even unethical to do that if you don't use the pro features.
I'm going to have to agree that it would get old after a couple of months. What they should do is advertise "Metronomy PRO!" during a few of those ad breaks, PRO! being code for "You pay us xxx and we disable all the ad software on your computer and release you from your contract."
Make that sum of money enough to break even on the computer plus 75 profit. Adjust it to be fair, so it gets lower as the user has had the computer longer and earned Metronomy more revenue.
1. Give away free computers with ads. 2. Users get tired of ads and pay for "PRO!" to get rid of them. 3. 75 profit!
90% of the trailers out there in QuickTime, and I'm pretty sure all the ones on apple's Trailers site are not strictly "streaming." They're just a regular MOV file that you can choose to open in the browser and watch-as-you-download, but you can also just right-click and save it., or pause the trailer and wait for the seek bar to fill up with gray, indicating it's done downloading.
If your connection can't handle the progressive download, then save it and quit whining. No format can compensate 100% for your network problems. Besides, this way you'll have the file to watch later or show to friends.
I remember the Nobel story just as you described it. I do generally agree that Nobel wasn't targeting the program for killing devices, but I'm sure there have been some people who won it for great technological advances developed for the military, since that's where many of the best technological advances come from. Advances like, say, this Internet, to which you and I are currently connected.
You have a point that it's a bit incongruous, though, since most of the Nobel prizes awarded are for non-evil achievements.
I'm sure plenty of Nobel-prize-worthy groundbreaking discoveries in the areas of physics and chemistry are created for the express purpose of killing people.
> everyone of them is made to have the battery easily replaceable, without jamming something sharp into the case to pry it apart.
Looking at my Palm m505, I don't see any sliding battery cover. I see 4 tiny Torx screws which would probably run you at least $5 for a driver. Throw in a battery for $34.99 plus $10 shipping and tax, and it's over $50 to replace the battery. Where are all the Palm users crying fraud? Palm used to use user-replaceable batteries, so you could put in your own rechargeable of choice, but they probably switched to this kind so they could better guarantee it would charge properly in the cradle (more practical than charging your AAAs a la carte) and also to make it less likely that cheap Chinese import batteries (like in the phone market) could be easily swapped in and cause headaches when they exploded, leaked and such. Apple's choice may have been grounded on similar thinking.
You are entitled to your opinion (that everything should have tool-free battery doors), but in my opinion any self-respecting geek doesn't care whether something is designed to be user-serviceable or not. All that matters is whether it is user-serviceable, and the iPod is. And while we're asking one another where we found things, I'd like to see where you buy your laptop batteries.
> And if you buy the kit,...$59...you might as well just ship the stupid thing back to Apple and pay them $99...
I don't follow your logic. First you bitch that $10 is too much to ask for the tools to pop the iPod case, then you shrug and say that it's not worth doing it yourself, even though (a) you save $40, (b) you don't have to give it up for a week, and (c) you don't have to swap your iPod for a different one (mine is engraved). Make up your mind--are you cheap or are you lazy and wasteful?
> You really are an Apple zealot in the worst sense. That's why I have two Windows PCs next to my desk that I use every day, and have used every Windows OS since 3.1. That's why I make money doing Windows support and stuff. Cos I'm an Apple zealot. Yeah, that's it. Christ, why does every article that mentions Apple have to turn into a "you're wrong because you [do/do not] use a Mac" debate? I'm simply stating facts here. It sounds like you're just pissed off because Apple, for a couple of brief years, has a lead in marketshare in this particular field. So what?
> Not everybody can afford to buy a new iPod in 18 months Everyone's seen that silly video where the guy goes around spraypainting that the iPod battery "only lasts 18 months." So one guy used his iPod so much (and probably didn't observe good charging habits) that it dies sooner than expected. Or perhaps it was just defective. Big fucking deal. Every once in a while a battery is either defective, or someone uses a battery a whole lot, and it doesn't last as long as it's supposed to. This is true for any battery-powered device. Don't tell me you really believe no laptop or cellphone battery ever died unexpectedly. And so the iPod battery is no different than any battery. I know tons of people who have had iPods longer than that which are still fine (and in fact none with dead batteries). And sure, it's not "user-replaceable" in the classical sense. But you can replace it yourself, and if you can post on Slashdot, I think you can read the directions and do it.
> And I don't know where the hell you got the $50 battery - This is where the hell I got the $49 battery. If only there were a website where one could type in terms and find web pages relevant to them! Oh, wait, there is. It's called a search engine.
> Apple charges $99 and you have to give up your iPod to get a different one. How nice. See this link.
> The only thing the Zen doesn't do is sync up with iTunes...
That's a deal-breaker for me. I've used lots of jukebox programs on the Windows side, and I hated them all. Library management is their weakness. I was forced to revert to Winamp 2.x (no library management then) because the jukebox programs were useless. And on the Mac side (where I spend 90% of my time, there hasn't really been much effort put into jukebox/MP3 programs since we've had iTunes for so long--which does implement library management properly.
MPEG-4 AAC is not a "propietary Apple format." It's an MPEG standard just like MPEG-1 Layer 3 ("MP3"), and you are dumb.
As far as the protected AAC files from the iTMS, other online music stores could if they wish license the same FairPlay DRM technology Apple uses.
So MPEG-4 AAC is not proprietary, and neither the AAC format nor the DRM technology is specific to Apple.
> and play a propietary Apple format [sic]... which doesn't bother me one bit to be honest
Bothers me, more than a bit. I like the iTunes music store and don't want to have to transcode all the music I've bought there. I also don't much care for the WMA stores and the way their DRM works. It's not as straightforward to me as Apple's "Authorize/Deauthorize Computer" options.
> battery problems
Ooooh, battery problems. Oh, no! By the time the battery dies, I'll be ready for a bigger iPod. I'll probably get one of those $50 replacement batteries anyway, just because $50 is good for a FireWire hard drive, but I wouldn't mind buying a new iPod in three years.
> and a lower cost
This is really all there is. This is what it's all about for all you cheapskates. Go ahead and buy the cheap player if that's all that matters to you. To me, these plastic POS's are just as crappy as my friend's Compaq laptop--flimsy, plastic, and feels like it was assembled by 8-year-olds in a Mexican sweatshop. I'll take my metal iPod and aluminum laptop and you can play with a player that looks like a toy to match your flimsy plastic computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Lately the filter in Apple's Mail.app (10.3.1 version, not 10.3.2) has gotten close to 100% effectiveness for me. Combined with my "Anything base64-encoded is junk" filter, I'm only getting about one spam a week outside the Junk folder. So far it doesn't seem to be thrown off by the mad-libs stuff.
> We don't consider children capable of consent to things like sexual acts for the same reason.
n -election population as well.
We do if they're at least the age of consent...16 in most states. I'd say 16-17 year olds make up the majority of the underage, competent-enough-to-make-their-own-decisions-in-a
16 is also the age at which the vast majority of working teenagers start working, and thus earning their own money and being taxed on it.
Maybe this should be the voting age as well. Seems logical and reasonable. Most 16-year-olds are either apathetic (won't vote anyway) or passionate about various causes, so their contributions to the electoral system would be just as valuable, if not more (due to being more informed) than your average "adult's."
That's excellent. Would you mind posting the model number of that player? I would definitely want to give it a try knowing that, and I know one of my friends who would want it for that reason as well.
Has it had any sort of reliability problems, or has it been fine for the two years?
I wouldn't buy a Sony. I used to buy their products until I realized they fell apart/were defective out-of-box at an alarming rate considering their price. I'd go with middle-of-the-road DVD players. My friends and I have Sanyo, Go-Video, Samsung, and recently, Daewoo, DVD players. We've had nothing but good results with them. If I wanted to go top-of-the-line, I'd probably go with Panasonic. IMHO, Sony isn't of a higher quality than the "Bargain" brands this article is about.
I wouldn't buy an Apex or similar, especially since they are known to not play VCDs well.
You're exactly right. I keep trying to tell people the same thing, but people are too busy spreading FUD and blindly hating "the evil Apple" to listen to reason.
> Think of the iPod as a tie in to iTunes music store, they certainly want to steer you towards...
Lol. The iTMS doesn't make any money. You've got it backwards. The iTMS is a trojan horse to sell iPods, not the other way around. Supporting OGG or WMA on the iPod wouldn't hurt Apple (except in the pride department with WMA). On the other hand, what Apple won't ever do is offer WMA downloads from the iTMS, because the only reason iTMS exists is to sell iPods. Offering WMA files would allow people to use the iTMS and put it on cheap little iRiver or Creative players, depriving Apple of the only profit to be had in the online music business, the portable player.
Get it now?
But aren't hashes constructed by definition in such a way that the hash of the message "V*i-4.G..R.a." would be as different from "V*i-A.G..R.a" as the hash of "Hello TGK"? The way spammers operate now, cycling random letters, random text, random punctuation, and random grammar would do a pretty good job of evading automated matching of spams with their duplicates.
If that's only a property of some hashes, then I stand corrected.
Very true. Of course, any $30 cd-burner these days comes with Nero for free.
I am so glad Ahead, rather than Roxio, made friends with all those cheap white-box CD-RW distributers. That Roxio program is the crap.
I didn't say it wasn't against the EULA. I said it wasn't "even unethical." Those aren't always the same thing. For example, it's ethical to sell counterfeit copies of Windows XP (or Mac OS X) if you absolutely must in order to feed your child (say, if you and your child were trapped on a desert island visited only by people intent on buying cheap software). It's not legal though, it's copyright infringement, and it definitely violates the Microsoft and Apple EULAs.
Ethics are personal. In my view, cracking a program just to get rid of the nag screen isn't unethical. Cracking it because you want/need the avanced functionality (say, Winamp 5) probably is.
I didn't know crackheads looked good! Cool!
lol. I hope they fix that iCal problem. I don't know how iCal reminders work, but it would seem like it'd have to have some sort of daemon running all the time. Is there one? Or is the problem that you have to have iCal.app itself running to receive alerts? I'd prefer a tiny little daemon if that's not already how it's done.
I like all your ideas. Your first Mac OS comment made me think of this:
About five years ago there was surely a group of people at Apple who said "The sheer thinking of a SYSTEMWIDE change to the entire operating system is actually quite propsterous" at the thought of migrating to a BSD kernel. Those people are now either laughing at that statement in retrospect or working somewhere else.
The same argument probably happened at Microsoft sometime (maybe 1999) when someone suggested dragging everyone's sorry ass over to the NT kernel and knifing the Windows 95 platform for good.
Big changes are the hardest, duh. But they're also the ones that accomplish the most. Copernicus, the American Revolution, etc.
> Gives me all the functionality there is.
No, it gives you all the functions you could dream of. But functionality in my view also means, for example, the ability to rip a CD and automatically add the tracks to your player's library. Or to burn a playlist from within the player, with only one or two clicks. To do that, you actually need an integrated program. Whether that's important to you is, of course, your call.
That said, Nero is an excellent general CD-burning application.
Hey Man-Who-Loves-Stereotypes-Dude:
I'm an "Apple defender." And look:
The following Apple products are not perfect:
Mac OS X
iTunes
Safari
Mail
There are more, but I suppose you get the idea.
The poster was trying to make the point that with one (admittedly big) free download iTunes seamlessly supports MP3 and AAC encoding and CD burning, while Winamp charges you for this. This is a valid point. He didn't say it was perfect. I mean come on, your counterargument was essentially: No, iTunes having more features than WinAmp is not reason to give it any credit--because one can get other software to implement those missing features! Well duh. The point is that with iTunes, you only need one program for both those tasks instead of needing to install two. And the integration is good: Does EAC add the encoded tracks to your favorite player's library? Does your favorite burning app write a CD from a playlist with two clicks, within the player? I doubt it. Winamp's Pro version probably does these things, but it's, y'know, not free. iTunes is. Free is good.
And if Apple was the one charging for this, you people would be screaming all over the place that Apple is ripping you off, "when program XYZ does this for FREE!" Take for example the way the Anti-Apple-Zealots seethe with hatred every time they see the "Get QuickTime Pro" nag screen. Word to the wise: If you don't like the nag screen, then GET A KEYGEN AND CRACK IT! It's not that hard to find it. It's not even unethical to do that if you don't use the pro features.
I'm going to have to agree that it would get old after a couple of months. What they should do is advertise "Metronomy PRO!" during a few of those ad breaks, PRO! being code for "You pay us xxx and we disable all the ad software on your computer and release you from your contract."
Make that sum of money enough to break even on the computer plus 75 profit. Adjust it to be fair, so it gets lower as the user has had the computer longer and earned Metronomy more revenue.
1. Give away free computers with ads.
2. Users get tired of ads and pay for "PRO!" to get rid of them.
3. 75 profit!
I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as good beer.
Wait, what did Miramax do? I must have taken a day off and now I'm all behind on who we hate.
No need to post a diatribe, though. A link would be fine.
90% of the trailers out there in QuickTime, and I'm pretty sure all the ones on apple's Trailers site are not strictly "streaming." They're just a regular MOV file that you can choose to open in the browser and watch-as-you-download, but you can also just right-click and save it., or pause the trailer and wait for the seek bar to fill up with gray, indicating it's done downloading.
If your connection can't handle the progressive download, then save it and quit whining. No format can compensate 100% for your network problems. Besides, this way you'll have the file to watch later or show to friends.
-dan
> I can build a new machine damn for around that cost,
I wonder why you inserted the word damn randomly in that sentence. It's almost as if it was a Freudian damn slip or something.
I remember the Nobel story just as you described it. I do generally agree that Nobel wasn't targeting the program for killing devices, but I'm sure there have been some people who won it for great technological advances developed for the military, since that's where many of the best technological advances come from. Advances like, say, this Internet, to which you and I are currently connected.
You have a point that it's a bit incongruous, though, since most of the Nobel prizes awarded are for non-evil achievements.
> They don't give out Nobel prizes for "Most Novel New Method to Kill People".
Um, he didn't say "Nobel Peace Prize." He said Nobel Prize. They do give out Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, economics, medicine/physiology, and literature as well as for peace.
I'm sure plenty of Nobel-prize-worthy groundbreaking discoveries in the areas of physics and chemistry are created for the express purpose of killing people.
> everyone of them is made to have the battery easily replaceable, without jamming something sharp into the case to pry it apart.
...$59...you might as well just ship the stupid thing back to Apple and pay them $99...
Looking at my Palm m505, I don't see any sliding battery cover. I see 4 tiny Torx screws which would probably run you at least $5 for a driver. Throw in a battery for $34.99 plus $10 shipping and tax, and it's over $50 to replace the battery. Where are all the Palm users crying fraud? Palm used to use user-replaceable batteries, so you could put in your own rechargeable of choice, but they probably switched to this kind so they could better guarantee it would charge properly in the cradle (more practical than charging your AAAs a la carte) and also to make it less likely that cheap Chinese import batteries (like in the phone market) could be easily swapped in and cause headaches when they exploded, leaked and such. Apple's choice may have been grounded on similar thinking.
You are entitled to your opinion (that everything should have tool-free battery doors), but in my opinion any self-respecting geek doesn't care whether something is designed to be user-serviceable or not. All that matters is whether it is user-serviceable, and the iPod is. And while we're asking one another where we found things, I'd like to see where you buy your laptop batteries.
> And if you buy the kit,
I don't follow your logic. First you bitch that $10 is too much to ask for the tools to pop the iPod case, then you shrug and say that it's not worth doing it yourself, even though (a) you save $40, (b) you don't have to give it up for a week, and (c) you don't have to swap your iPod for a different one (mine is engraved). Make up your mind--are you cheap or are you lazy and wasteful?
> You really are an Apple zealot in the worst sense.
.
That's why I have two Windows PCs next to my desk that I use every day, and have used every Windows OS since 3.1. That's why I make money doing Windows support and stuff. Cos I'm an Apple zealot. Yeah, that's it. Christ, why does every article that mentions Apple have to turn into a "you're wrong because you [do/do not] use a Mac" debate? I'm simply stating facts here. It sounds like you're just pissed off because Apple, for a couple of brief years, has a lead in marketshare in this particular field. So what?
> Not everybody can afford to buy a new iPod in 18 months
Everyone's seen that silly video where the guy goes around spraypainting that the iPod battery "only lasts 18 months." So one guy used his iPod so much (and probably didn't observe good charging habits) that it dies sooner than expected. Or perhaps it was just defective. Big fucking deal. Every once in a while a battery is either defective, or someone uses a battery a whole lot, and it doesn't last as long as it's supposed to. This is true for any battery-powered device. Don't tell me you really believe no laptop or cellphone battery ever died unexpectedly. And so the iPod battery is no different than any battery. I know tons of people who have had iPods longer than that which are still fine (and in fact none with dead batteries). And sure, it's not "user-replaceable" in the classical sense. But you can replace it yourself , and if you can post on Slashdot, I think you can read the directions and do it.
> And I don't know where the hell you got the $50 battery -
This is where the hell I got the $49 battery. If only there were a website where one could type in terms and find web pages relevant to them! Oh, wait, there is. It's called a search engine
> Apple charges $99 and you have to give up your iPod to get a different one. How nice.
See this link.
> The only thing the Zen doesn't do is sync up with iTunes...
That's a deal-breaker for me. I've used lots of jukebox programs on the Windows side, and I hated them all. Library management is their weakness. I was forced to revert to Winamp 2.x (no library management then) because the jukebox programs were useless. And on the Mac side (where I spend 90% of my time, there hasn't really been much effort put into jukebox/MP3 programs since we've had iTunes for so long--which does implement library management properly.
MPEG-4 AAC is not a "propietary Apple format." It's an MPEG standard just like MPEG-1 Layer 3 ("MP3"), and you are dumb.
As far as the protected AAC files from the iTMS, other online music stores could if they wish license the same FairPlay DRM technology Apple uses.
So MPEG-4 AAC is not proprietary, and neither the AAC format nor the DRM technology is specific to Apple.
> and play a propietary Apple format [sic]... which doesn't bother me one bit to be honest
Bothers me, more than a bit. I like the iTunes music store and don't want to have to transcode all the music I've bought there. I also don't much care for the WMA stores and the way their DRM works. It's not as straightforward to me as Apple's "Authorize/Deauthorize Computer" options.
> battery problems
Ooooh, battery problems. Oh, no! By the time the battery dies, I'll be ready for a bigger iPod. I'll probably get one of those $50 replacement batteries anyway, just because $50 is good for a FireWire hard drive, but I wouldn't mind buying a new iPod in three years.
> and a lower cost
This is really all there is. This is what it's all about for all you cheapskates. Go ahead and buy the cheap player if that's all that matters to you. To me, these plastic POS's are just as crappy as my friend's Compaq laptop--flimsy, plastic, and feels like it was assembled by 8-year-olds in a Mexican sweatshop. I'll take my metal iPod and aluminum laptop and you can play with a player that looks like a toy to match your flimsy plastic computer.