And I was talking about the fact that third party or not, the iSight is a webcam with support on the Mac, so those two companies were not the only ones who support their webcams on the Mac. Not that I buy that statement anyway, I'm sure there are more, but can't be bothered to look it up since I don't care about such silly things as webcams.
> the company is aware of the white blemishes on some new 15-in. screens, but hasn't yet "captured" enough of the computers to figure out why the spots are appearing.
Funny choice of words. I can't help but picture a herd of beautiful wild PowerBooks, running free across the plain.
It's not despicable. It's sensible. I'm saving my main point for last, but first off, if you HAVE an iPod AND purposely downloaded iTunes, why would you want to use MusicMatch with your iPod anymore anyway?
Apple probably figured that it wasn't worth the time they'd spend addressing this problem because nobody would want to bother with MusicMatch's iPod connectivity after they HAVE a "native" iPod client (iTunes) installed. Maybe they'd still want to use MMJB to play Mp3s once in a while, but this issue doesn't affect that.
Oh, and the article's subject: "iTunes disables MusicMatch" is blatantly incorrect and inflammatory. "iTunes interferes with iPod/MMJB connectivity" is correct. No one is saying the program was disabled.
And as for MusicMatch's music download service and the claims that Apple is "knocking out an opponent":
HELLO! It's WMA! If you have an iPod, you would be stupid to buy music downloads from MusicMatch because the iPod doesn't PLAY WMA! MusicMatch's service is only a competitor to iTunes for Windows to non-iPod users (i.e. users of other MP3 players or none at all). Those are users for whom iTunes does not affect MusicMatch's behavior one bit!
This is not anticompetitive behavior; this is completely trivial because it's a non-issue. If you want to sync your iPod with two different programs to confuse yourself, big deal, do a 5-minute uninstall/reinstall and you're fine. I'm surprised at how easy the fix is. And besides, MusicMatch is not their competitor anyway. Apple is a hardware company. iTunes Music Store (as well as the program itself) is just a trojan horse for selling iPods. Which are a trojan horse for selling Macs. End of discussion.
> with Apache, it could be running on any one of many OS`s, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HPUX, AIX for instance,
I know you said "for instance," but you forgot Windows. My Windows server is running Apache for HTTP and Mercury for mail. I wouldn't trust IIS for anything.
This is definitely why censorware is bad. But Symantec isn't the bad guy here, the people who got laws passed to require censorware are. The fact is, that if "big brother" or parents don't want their users/children to read about things that go against their fundamentalist beliefs, such as sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and in this case, guns, then that's what the filters will filter. Anti-gun sites do not feature any material worth filtering (unless there were a filter category called "Political Discussion"). As such, they should not be blocked just to "balance out" the political scale. If for every blocked site, an opposing one were blocked "just to be fair," you'd essentially double the number of blocked sites, thereby greatly increasing the already too-severe censorship.
Filters cut across political boundaries, all the time. It's impossible not to. On the other end of the spectrum from the gun debate, they block sites about safe sex and discussion about sex but wouldn't block a site about abstinence from, say, Focus on the Family. (I just confirmed this is the case with N2H2's Bess.) This is because there is not a category for "Christian Conservative Rhetoric." Probably very few parents and other users of this type of software have requested to have their users "protected" from the latter. This behavior favors conservatives, just like the gun behavior favors liberals. Big deal. Filtering software always favors the more puritanical on any issue. Usually that is conservatives in Internet filtering issues, so the NRA racket should shut up.
To conclude, just like this gun story pisses off conservatives (who were the ones to get this bad-idea software installed in the first place), it pisses off liberals that you can't get information about safe sex through these filters, but you can get an admonition from Pat Robertson about how you should wait until marriage. Both of these debates get a one-sided treatment when passed through a filter. This is by design, is a side-effect of overprotecting "our children," and is not cause for singling out Symantec. Do you really think Symantec is some sort of evil liberal-agenda-pushing corporation? Liberal corporation is an oxymoron. Symantec's users, probably the paranoid overprotective parents who love this software so much, probably made a case for why they wanted this site blocked, and Symantec went along with them, in an attempt to keep its customers happy.
Headline: Microsoft Launches Portable Music Player Definition: Launch: To actually start selling something, as in "Apple launched Mac OS 10.3 Panther last Friday."
Article: Microsoft Announces....to be available in the second half of 2004. Definition: Announce: To promise that someday you will develop something.
This is great. Microsoft to users: "Don't buy an iPod...we'll have a poor substitute that sucks and has support for crippled DRM WMAs from places like 'Napster' 2.0 and the rest of the lame new download services. And you only have to wait a year!"
Who needs a USB logo? If I were selling USB gear, I sure as hell wouldn't pay $750 a year for the use of some stupid logo (especially considering how obfuscated the USB logo is now with USB 2.0 High-Speed, Full-Speed, Low-Speed, Speed-Speed, Slow-Speed. F*ck that.
My product would have a big red circle, with white letters saying "USB" in the middle. 95% of consumers wouldn't notice the difference.
Dumbass. Are you comparing being too damn lazy/incompetent to draw more than one icon for Mozilla with Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium?
Way to make a flawed analogy, asshole. Icon laziness is not exactly revolutionary. And by "not exactly revolutionary," I mean stupid.
I didn't say it was confusing or affected functionality. I said it was wrong. Approximately every single program except this one has had such thing as a "document icon" ever since icons were invented. And it's not asking too much. It takes 20 minutes to compose a rudimentary icon.
I would think most people would qualify under the minimum balance or direct-deposit category. If one doesn't, though, I can understand how it doesn't look very inviting if you're not already paying a monthly fee for your checking account.
[Use] different icons for Mozilla itself and files associated with Mozilla
This is a serious and obvious problem, and I have no idea why the article didn't mention it. It's one of the main reasons I wouldn't make Netscape6/Mozilla the default browser back when I used Windows. I'd always have bunches of.url files on my desktop and they'd be 50 netscape logos. It was just...wrong.
Nice humorous ambiguity in the article: Oxman's 15-year-old son, Robert, says five out of six e-mails he gets daily are spam...Robert says he simply deletes them and is less bothered by spam than his father.
I got mine for $69, including free shipping, and it will be here tomorrow afternoon. (In other words, I won't have to wait for 8:00.
Ah, the perks of being a student.
It's worth it either way. Sure, financially, it seems like a good thing to be running Windows XP for five years, but that little "Search Dog" is going to seem pretty old by 2006. I'll take my innovation in large, annual chunks, versus the Windows way of annual, bug-fix Service Packs, followed by a big, garish upgrade every 5 years.
Maybe you should consider switching banks. My bank, Citibank, has an awesome online banking system, and one of the features I like most is that even payees it doesn't have in its electronic payment system can be paid through the site, still for free, by check. When you set up the payee, you check and see if there's an electronic way of paying that company, and if not, you just put in the address and payee the bill would normally have, and it will say "Payment will be sent by check." Even cooler, you can even use this method to pay your friends or whatever. You can essentially lose your checkbook after you get started with this.
Fees: I'm a student, so I pay $3/month for the checking account, or free when I'm employed (direct deposit). The bill payment service comes free with it. For non-students, "Free if you meet the combined balance ($1500) or if a Direct Deposit is made (latter applies only to CA & NV). If not, $7.50 in NY, NJ & CT; $9.50 in all other states."
Full Disclosure: I don't work for Citibank, I just find that they are a bank which respects me and appears to value my business (unlike Wells Fargo).
Actually, you need at least one of the following: checking, savings, credit card.
> what checking account nowadays does not offer a free VISA [debit] card?
Checking accounts for those under 18, for one. Some banks (Washington Mutual) will give you a checking account, but will not even give minors ATM cards of any kind, even without the V/MC logo. Others (HELLS^H^H^H^H^H Wells Fargo) will give you a (non-debit) ATM card with savings, but will not even let a minor be on a checking account, even with a parent.
The one reason why I'm glad I'm not under 18 anymore.
You are correct with the debit card that they will not fund a debit card transaction with anything but your existing PayPal balance, meaning you'd have to transfer money in, wait for three business days 'til it shows up, and then use the debit card.
Instead of getting the debit card (which I have and do find useful), for this purpose I would recommend using the PayPal debit bar, which just gives you a virtual MasterCard number you can use online. The requirements to get it are: - Have a Domestic PayPal account - Be Verified (have added and confirmed a bank account) - Have added a credit card where the monthly statement is sent to a physical street address (not a P.O. Box) - Have a positive balance in their PayPal account - Have a PayPal account in good standing (as determined by the Account Review Department)
In other words, (a) you don't have to wait for the card to be delivered, (b) you don't have to have a Premier or Business account, and (c) you don't have to have had the account for 60 days.
In answer to whomever said the card was issued by Bank One, you might be thinking of the PayPal credit card, which is actually issued by Providian. It's just your average sponsored credit card, like the Disney Visa or the Amazon.com Visa. Just a standard Bank One credit card with a PayPal logo that PayPal markets for them and PayPal gets a cut of the commission. You don't even need to be a PayPal user to get it. The debit card, by contrast, is actually issued by PayPal themselves.
My college book store had a "Low Price Guarantee." Policy was, you buy the book there, and if you find it somewhere else cheaper (not counting Marketplace/Half.com/etc), you put in a form and they'll reimburse double the difference. I found my $100 math book for $70 after shipping at Pickabook.co.uk. New. I filed for my LPG, and forced them to give me back my $60. So I actually made $5 profit on that book when I sold it back to them for $45.
They were so pissed that now, the LPG only gives back the difference (instead of double), and their policy stipulates "For online comparisons, the book must be offered by a retail establishment located in the United States, not... sites located in the UK."
Having moved from my childhood home of Ukiah, CA (Population: 15,000) to San Francisco (Population: A Bunch) for college, I know what you mean. There are certain advantages to not living in a metropolis. However, there are also disadvantages. I wouldn't mind being back in Ukiah with my friends, lots of parking, and plenty of landfill space, I can't because there are no four-year colleges there. And after I graduate, there won't be any tech-sector jobs there (not that there are any anywhere, but that's India's fault) either. In addition, I now get all my UPS packages about two days faster than I did there.
The suburbs are the best places to live: Close enough to the city to be able to work or educate yourself in the city, and to have good shopping, but far enough away to have less crime and more adequate parking.
Only problem is, to live in that kind of place (Marin County/South Bay) costs a lot more than either the city or a place like Ukiah. I'll never be able to afford it.
I hope you can eat them. Every time I have a misburned or obsolete CD-R lying around, I can just munch on it as I work. Or you could make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on CD-R's. Mmmmmm...
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And I was talking about the fact that third party or not, the iSight is a webcam with support on the Mac, so those two companies were not the only ones who support their webcams on the Mac. Not that I buy that statement anyway, I'm sure there are more, but can't be bothered to look it up since I don't care about such silly things as webcams.
> the company is aware of the white blemishes on some new 15-in. screens, but hasn't yet "captured" enough of the computers to figure out why the spots are appearing.
Funny choice of words. I can't help but picture a herd of beautiful wild PowerBooks, running free across the plain.
(it's a Daria reference.)
It's not despicable. It's sensible. I'm saving my main point for last, but first off, if you HAVE an iPod AND purposely downloaded iTunes, why would you want to use MusicMatch with your iPod anymore anyway?
Apple probably figured that it wasn't worth the time they'd spend addressing this problem because nobody would want to bother with MusicMatch's iPod connectivity after they HAVE a "native" iPod client (iTunes) installed. Maybe they'd still want to use MMJB to play Mp3s once in a while, but this issue doesn't affect that.
Oh, and the article's subject: "iTunes disables MusicMatch" is blatantly incorrect and inflammatory. "iTunes interferes with iPod/MMJB connectivity" is correct. No one is saying the program was disabled.
And as for MusicMatch's music download service and the claims that Apple is "knocking out an opponent":
HELLO! It's WMA! If you have an iPod, you would be stupid to buy music downloads from MusicMatch because the iPod doesn't PLAY WMA! MusicMatch's service is only a competitor to iTunes for Windows to non-iPod users (i.e. users of other MP3 players or none at all). Those are users for whom iTunes does not affect MusicMatch's behavior one bit!
This is not anticompetitive behavior; this is completely trivial because it's a non-issue. If you want to sync your iPod with two different programs to confuse yourself, big deal, do a 5-minute uninstall/reinstall and you're fine. I'm surprised at how easy the fix is. And besides, MusicMatch is not their competitor anyway. Apple is a hardware company. iTunes Music Store (as well as the program itself) is just a trojan horse for selling iPods. Which are a trojan horse for selling Macs. End of discussion.
> Logitech and Orange Micro are the only ones that support theirs on the Mac
Oh, and Apple. Dumbass.
> with Apache, it could be running on any one of many OS`s, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HPUX, AIX for instance,
I know you said "for instance," but you forgot Windows. My Windows server is running Apache for HTTP and Mercury for mail. I wouldn't trust IIS for anything.
This is definitely why censorware is bad. But Symantec isn't the bad guy here, the people who got laws passed to require censorware are. The fact is, that if "big brother" or parents don't want their users/children to read about things that go against their fundamentalist beliefs, such as sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and in this case, guns, then that's what the filters will filter. Anti-gun sites do not feature any material worth filtering (unless there were a filter category called "Political Discussion"). As such, they should not be blocked just to "balance out" the political scale. If for every blocked site, an opposing one were blocked "just to be fair," you'd essentially double the number of blocked sites, thereby greatly increasing the already too-severe censorship.
Filters cut across political boundaries, all the time. It's impossible not to. On the other end of the spectrum from the gun debate, they block sites about safe sex and discussion about sex but wouldn't block a site about abstinence from, say, Focus on the Family. (I just confirmed this is the case with N2H2's Bess.) This is because there is not a category for "Christian Conservative Rhetoric." Probably very few parents and other users of this type of software have requested to have their users "protected" from the latter. This behavior favors conservatives, just like the gun behavior favors liberals. Big deal. Filtering software always favors the more puritanical on any issue. Usually that is conservatives in Internet filtering issues, so the NRA racket should shut up.
To conclude, just like this gun story pisses off conservatives (who were the ones to get this bad-idea software installed in the first place), it pisses off liberals that you can't get information about safe sex through these filters, but you can get an admonition from Pat Robertson about how you should wait until marriage. Both of these debates get a one-sided treatment when passed through a filter. This is by design, is a side-effect of overprotecting "our children," and is not cause for singling out Symantec. Do you really think Symantec is some sort of evil liberal-agenda-pushing corporation? Liberal corporation is an oxymoron. Symantec's users, probably the paranoid overprotective parents who love this software so much, probably made a case for why they wanted this site blocked, and Symantec went along with them, in an attempt to keep its customers happy.
Um, this.
Headline: Microsoft Launches Portable Music Player
Definition: Launch: To actually start selling something, as in "Apple launched Mac OS 10.3 Panther last Friday."
Article: Microsoft Announces....to be available in the second half of 2004.
Definition: Announce: To promise that someday you will develop something.
This is great. Microsoft to users: "Don't buy an iPod...we'll have a poor substitute that sucks and has support for crippled DRM WMAs from places like 'Napster' 2.0 and the rest of the lame new download services. And you only have to wait a year!"
Seriously. I haven't used that piece of **** in so long.
Who needs a USB logo? If I were selling USB gear, I sure as hell wouldn't pay $750 a year for the use of some stupid logo (especially considering how obfuscated the USB logo is now with USB 2.0 High-Speed, Full-Speed, Low-Speed, Speed-Speed, Slow-Speed. F*ck that.
My product would have a big red circle, with white letters saying "USB" in the middle. 95% of consumers wouldn't notice the difference.
Dumbass. Are you comparing being too damn lazy/incompetent to draw more than one icon for Mozilla with Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium?
Way to make a flawed analogy, asshole. Icon laziness is not exactly revolutionary. And by "not exactly revolutionary," I mean stupid.
I didn't say it was confusing or affected functionality. I said it was wrong. Approximately every single program except this one has had such thing as a "document icon" ever since icons were invented. And it's not asking too much. It takes 20 minutes to compose a rudimentary icon.
I would think most people would qualify under the minimum balance or direct-deposit category. If one doesn't, though, I can understand how it doesn't look very inviting if you're not already paying a monthly fee for your checking account.
Dreamcast?
[Use] different icons for Mozilla itself and files associated with Mozilla
.url files on my desktop and they'd be 50 netscape logos. It was just...wrong.
This is a serious and obvious problem, and I have no idea why the article didn't mention it. It's one of the main reasons I wouldn't make Netscape6/Mozilla the default browser back when I used Windows. I'd always have bunches of
Nice humorous ambiguity in the article:
Oxman's 15-year-old son, Robert, says five out of six e-mails he gets daily are spam...Robert says he simply deletes them and is less bothered by spam than his father.
Robert's top annoyances:
1. His father
2. Spam
Responded to Spam? I think they misspelled "end lusers."
Of course, responding to spam makes you a lot worse than a luser.
How bout "Someone I wish would die in hell along with the spammers."
I got mine for $69, including free shipping, and it will be here tomorrow afternoon. (In other words, I won't have to wait for 8:00.
Ah, the perks of being a student.
It's worth it either way. Sure, financially, it seems like a good thing to be running Windows XP for five years, but that little "Search Dog" is going to seem pretty old by 2006. I'll take my innovation in large, annual chunks, versus the Windows way of annual, bug-fix Service Packs, followed by a big, garish upgrade every 5 years.
Maybe you should consider switching banks. My bank, Citibank, has an awesome online banking system, and one of the features I like most is that even payees it doesn't have in its electronic payment system can be paid through the site, still for free, by check. When you set up the payee, you check and see if there's an electronic way of paying that company, and if not, you just put in the address and payee the bill would normally have, and it will say "Payment will be sent by check." Even cooler, you can even use this method to pay your friends or whatever. You can essentially lose your checkbook after you get started with this.
Fees: I'm a student, so I pay $3/month for the checking account, or free when I'm employed (direct deposit). The bill payment service comes free with it. For non-students, "Free if you meet the combined balance ($1500) or if a Direct Deposit is made (latter applies only to CA & NV). If not, $7.50 in NY, NJ & CT; $9.50 in all other states."
Full Disclosure: I don't work for Citibank, I just find that they are a bank which respects me and appears to value my business (unlike Wells Fargo).
> But you need a checking account
Actually, you need at least one of the following: checking, savings, credit card.
> what checking account nowadays does not offer a free VISA [debit] card?
Checking accounts for those under 18, for one. Some banks (Washington Mutual) will give you a checking account, but will not even give minors ATM cards of any kind, even without the V/MC logo. Others (HELLS^H^H^H^H^H Wells Fargo) will give you a (non-debit) ATM card with savings, but will not even let a minor be on a checking account, even with a parent.
The one reason why I'm glad I'm not under 18 anymore.
You are correct with the debit card that they will not fund a debit card transaction with anything but your existing PayPal balance, meaning you'd have to transfer money in, wait for three business days 'til it shows up, and then use the debit card.
Instead of getting the debit card (which I have and do find useful), for this purpose I would recommend using the PayPal debit bar, which just gives you a virtual MasterCard number you can use online. The requirements to get it are:
- Have a Domestic PayPal account
- Be Verified (have added and confirmed a bank account)
- Have added a credit card where the monthly statement is sent to a physical street address (not a P.O. Box)
- Have a positive balance in their PayPal account
- Have a PayPal account in good standing (as determined by the Account Review Department)
In other words, (a) you don't have to wait for the card to be delivered, (b) you don't have to have a Premier or Business account, and (c) you don't have to have had the account for 60 days.
In answer to whomever said the card was issued by Bank One, you might be thinking of the PayPal credit card, which is actually issued by Providian. It's just your average sponsored credit card, like the Disney Visa or the Amazon.com Visa. Just a standard Bank One credit card with a PayPal logo that PayPal markets for them and PayPal gets a cut of the commission. You don't even need to be a PayPal user to get it. The debit card, by contrast, is actually issued by PayPal themselves.
My college book store had a "Low Price Guarantee." Policy was, you buy the book there, and if you find it somewhere else cheaper (not counting Marketplace/Half.com/etc), you put in a form and they'll reimburse double the difference. I found my $100 math book for $70 after shipping at Pickabook.co.uk. New. I filed for my LPG, and forced them to give me back my $60. So I actually made $5 profit on that book when I sold it back to them for $45.
They were so pissed that now, the LPG only gives back the difference (instead of double), and their policy stipulates "For online comparisons, the book must be offered by a retail establishment located in the United States, not... sites located in the UK."
Having moved from my childhood home of Ukiah, CA (Population: 15,000) to San Francisco (Population: A Bunch) for college, I know what you mean. There are certain advantages to not living in a metropolis. However, there are also disadvantages. I wouldn't mind being back in Ukiah with my friends, lots of parking, and plenty of landfill space, I can't because there are no four-year colleges there. And after I graduate, there won't be any tech-sector jobs there (not that there are any anywhere, but that's India's fault) either. In addition, I now get all my UPS packages about two days faster than I did there.
The suburbs are the best places to live: Close enough to the city to be able to work or educate yourself in the city, and to have good shopping, but far enough away to have less crime and more adequate parking.
Only problem is, to live in that kind of place (Marin County/South Bay) costs a lot more than either the city or a place like Ukiah. I'll never be able to afford it.
> 43% of Americans believe they've been abducted by a UFO.
Nearly 33% of Americans believe the moon landings were faked.
I've seen real stats on those two things and therefore I know the claims above are not true.
But your point is still salient.
I hope you can eat them. Every time I have a misburned or obsolete CD-R lying around, I can just munch on it as I work. Or you could make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on CD-R's. Mmmmmm...