What do yo mean "Leopard insists"? Genuine question, because I wasn't aware the OS had any mention of DPI (Adobe CS products have their "100%" zoom based on a stupid outdated number, but that's another matter).
I'm pretty sure Apple has noticed a problem that many other people have. If you have several devices (iPhone, iPad, iMac, lets say), and a large collection of data (documents, music, videos, etc.) keeping all this stuff in sync is a royal pain in the arse. It's also damn annoying having to choose what to put on you portable devices. As a hardware manufacturer that want to sell you a stack of devices, Apple has a huge interest in make the management of your data between these devices seamless. Apple's efforts in this direction have been a bit fumbling so far. Manual syncing's not great (Steve Jobs actually mentioned this when he was launching the new Apple TV), and MobileMe is clearly inadequate.
I suspect Apple's heading to a stream anything you have to any iDevice you have any time you have a network connection. They need to to keep their multi-device hardware business competitive. To do this, they need massive data storage and streaming capabilities.
Yes, I do realize that and, eight years ago, when I first tried iTunes, I did just that. My media collection was still borked and I had to clean i up manually. Then I tried getting iTunes to play anything other than it's own proprietary format and, back then, it wouldn't.
See, dude, this is just a lie, which makes me think the rest of your post might be as well. iTunes has always played plain old MP3s, AIFFs, and WAVs, since it was introduced, and with plugins it will play OGG formats since at least 2003 (I have iTunes OGGs imported from then). There is NO SUCH THING as an iTunes proprietary format, certainly not in 2002. To top it off, there wasn't even a Windows version of iTunes until 2004, and it had WMA to AAC conversion. So I'm sorry, but I call bullshit on your story.
I thought that would be an issue before I got my iPod Touch, but it just isn't; the screen is bright enough to make the smudges nearly invisible, especially when you're looking at it straight-on (i.e. nearly all of the time).
Ubuntu 10.10 has great copy on its website extolling the benefits and showing that you can do pretty much anything on Ubuntu that you can on a Mac or Windows based PC.
Pretty much anything... so, why do I want an OS that doesn't do as much as it's competition? This is a big problem, Linux evangelists don't play to it's strengths, they're too defensive. Advertise your killer features, first among them being: built-in fucking app store. Shoulda been playing that up a few years ago, because I suspect Mac OS is about to get just that.
I don't think this is the case. I think a lot of people do understand that the internet can be a danger to their privacy. It's not that they don't care about it, it's that they are taking a (reasonable) calculated risk. For the vast, vast majority of people the value of hassle-free surfing far outweigh the dangers. The lack of privacy on the internet has never seriously damaged them, and realistically never will (regardless of what a bunch of tinfoil hat-wearing libertarian nerds might say).
I bet a TFHWLN are gearing up right now to beat me down with OH BUT IMAGING WHAT GETTING YOUR IDENTITY THEVEREED WOULD DO!!!, but just as I don't spend money on a bullet-proof vest to protect me from accidental shootings, I suspect most people are making an okay call betting that their internet privacy just isn't that big a deal.
Also, there are hundreds of indie games which generally come in under £10, and can be excellent.
Looking through the new releases on Steam for Mac (where older an indie games make up a bigger slice of the pie I will admit), the prices are as follows £5.09, £2.99, £7.19, £6.99, £5.99, £15.99, £12.99, £8.99, £12.99, and £3.99. This doesn't seem expensive!
First off, mp3 is simply not good enough for Classical. If you must buy digital, go for 320 kbps or lame alt-preset-extreme equivalent. As a giant Classical snob (I listen to Classical exclusively), the only way I buy music is physical CDs, and then rip to FLAC once it arrives.
Oh please, for nearly everyone's listening environment, you're not going to be able to tell a decent MP3 from an uncompressed file.
I find this whole audiophile thing pretty interesting, especially now something very similar starting to spill over into mainstream photography. JPEGS are out!, we need 16 bit RAW files for out holiday snaps! As a digital artist, I find it disturbing that people are going to let a JPEG artefact (real or imaginary) spoil their enjoyment of a picture: you're looking at it wrong!
I mean, it's fine if you enjoy your FLACs and presumably horrendously expensive audio equipment, but telling other people that anything less is 'simply not good enough' is ridiculous. I also think it encourages people to miss the point of the music in the first place.
Yes, how dare people presume other people care about them? The presumptuousness is preposterous!
You know, you're perfectly welcome not to use any social media sites. Lots of people like sharing trivialities with their friends, clearly. I'd go so far as to say that's mostly what having friends is about, as opposed to colleagues.
I disagree that they didn't have time. The Lusitania got a similar number off in 18 minutes(!), which suggests that there wasn't enough of a sense of urgency in unloading the Titanic. Perhaps because it seemed pointless in any case.
I like the looks of the new interface, but am rather concerned it might put people off by being too different from Windows.
The market for Linux is not mostly made up of newbs who want Windows that isn't Windows, but of power users and people who care about free software. These people are already trying to move AWAY from Windows. Making Linux more Windows-like is no good for usability or differentiating Linux. Gnome should move in it's own direction.
I don't think this is a fair characterisation of what was going on in the passenger ship business at the time. These ships were profitable, and a large part of the money came from 2nd and 3rd class accommodation (which was, incidentally, better on the Titanic than most other ships of the day). It was also a relatively safe ship, the hole that sank the Titanic would sink just about any ship.
These ships weren't 'ridiculous show[s] of hubris' any more than a fleet of 747s are. They were profitable and efficient ways of moving a lot of people around. Several companies were building ships the same size or bigger when the Titanic set off on it's maiden voyage, because it was seen as the most efficient way to run a passenger service.
The problem was that it wasn't carrying enough life boats. This was a regulatory problem (although you could argue that this shouldn't need regulation, it was just common sense!).
I don't think there are a lot of things to be learned from the Titanic: it was one fluke event. To learn the right lessons we need a bigger sample, more data. If we base our decisions on impressive single events, we're going to be make some silly decisions.
[...] multiple cores prevents everything from slowing basically everything down
Well, until something decides it needs to read or write to the disk (which everything seems to want to do all the time) in which case you'll get a lockup no matter how many cores you have.
Hardware manufacturers: fix the disk access, for god sake!
The thing is, general computing seems to be seek-heavy. My HD is by far the worst performing component of my system, always laggy and grinding, unresponsive when busy. The memory sits their with huge chunks unused and processor idle. Storage needs to improve speed drastically, and SSDs give us that now, and seem to have more headroom in the future.
If I write a book and do not require your editing, marketing or printing services why exactly do you expect to keep 75% of the sale price?
Ah, but you're probably still going to require editing of some sort, even just to catch typos! And really, I expect having a considered and professional opinion on your writing structure and clarity probably does result in higher quality work. So I suspect a lot of writers are still going to want editors. Marketing, in a world where every man and his dog can publish their books to the same platform, is going to be absolutely crucial.
You save printing costs, but depending on the sort of book, you may want to get professional designers on the job.
Give it time and most large authors will just sell their ebooks directly via their own websites.
This is exactly what the Internet is supposed to be about. Giving the little guy the chance to eliminate the need for the big guy.
I very much doubt that. If that was going to happen on any sort of scale we'd be seeing it already. No, they are going to have to go through some sort of distributor, like iBooks or Amazon or similar, which have a ranking/rating system of some sort and a standardised interface.
I suspect the bright new world of eBooks for everyone from everyone will actually look disappointingly similar to the one we have today.
I liked that! SC2000 just stopped feeling like a challenge. If I can walk away from a game for an hour and it be fine when I get back, what would have been the point of me sitting in front of it?
SC2000 was a great game, probably the best (that or Civ2) , but of course it can be improved!
- Not being able to build on hills always seemed silly, and ruined the looks of many cities.
- Commercial buildings were too short, you never got the feeling of skyscrapers popping up, that was a shame.
- The rail network would have been more fun if you could put different sized stations in, and trains couldn't turn at right angles
- The maps were too small, limiting gameplay (one you go good, you'd generally cover the map pretty quickly)
- The game got easier as you went along, rather than throwing up new challenges (SC4 improved this somewhat as transportation became a real challenge)
I'd like to see a game like Sim City get regular releases, refining it's gameplay. It doesn't need fancy 3D graphics, in fact that make it hard to play, attractive 2D is fine. But give us real depth and flexibility, and a challenge even once the city is making money.
What didn't you like about SC4? The transportation systems, and that you could click on a building and see all the commuter routes, were awesome. It seemed like a worthy successor to SC2000 to me.
This seems like the plan, but I don't see how it could possibly work. As more papers go behind paywalls, the remaining free ones will see climbing readership, and due to the economies of scale with online publishing, will start to make real money. Why go behind a paywall then? This is exactly what is happening in the online Times vs. Guardian battle right now. With 30% of the online news market, you might break even, with close to 100%, you'll make a killing.
There will always be free online news, because there is money to be made there, especially if the paywall space is crowded.
Slashdot Mirror
What do yo mean "Leopard insists"? Genuine question, because I wasn't aware the OS had any mention of DPI (Adobe CS products have their "100%" zoom based on a stupid outdated number, but that's another matter).
I'm not sure how this works exactly, but there might be some benefit to the sharpness of these displays, even if your eyesight isn't great.
I'm pretty sure Apple has noticed a problem that many other people have. If you have several devices (iPhone, iPad, iMac, lets say), and a large collection of data (documents, music, videos, etc.) keeping all this stuff in sync is a royal pain in the arse. It's also damn annoying having to choose what to put on you portable devices. As a hardware manufacturer that want to sell you a stack of devices, Apple has a huge interest in make the management of your data between these devices seamless. Apple's efforts in this direction have been a bit fumbling so far. Manual syncing's not great (Steve Jobs actually mentioned this when he was launching the new Apple TV), and MobileMe is clearly inadequate.
I suspect Apple's heading to a stream anything you have to any iDevice you have any time you have a network connection. They need to to keep their multi-device hardware business competitive. To do this, they need massive data storage and streaming capabilities.
All seems pretty obvious to me.
Yes, I do realize that and, eight years ago, when I first tried iTunes, I did just that. My media collection was still borked and I had to clean i up manually. Then I tried getting iTunes to play anything other than it's own proprietary format and, back then, it wouldn't.
See, dude, this is just a lie, which makes me think the rest of your post might be as well. iTunes has always played plain old MP3s, AIFFs, and WAVs, since it was introduced, and with plugins it will play OGG formats since at least 2003 (I have iTunes OGGs imported from then). There is NO SUCH THING as an iTunes proprietary format, certainly not in 2002. To top it off, there wasn't even a Windows version of iTunes until 2004, and it had WMA to AAC conversion. So I'm sorry, but I call bullshit on your story.
I thought that would be an issue before I got my iPod Touch, but it just isn't; the screen is bright enough to make the smudges nearly invisible, especially when you're looking at it straight-on (i.e. nearly all of the time).
Ubuntu 10.10 has great copy on its website extolling the benefits and showing that you can do pretty much anything on Ubuntu that you can on a Mac or Windows based PC.
Pretty much anything... so, why do I want an OS that doesn't do as much as it's competition? This is a big problem, Linux evangelists don't play to it's strengths, they're too defensive. Advertise your killer features, first among them being: built-in fucking app store. Shoulda been playing that up a few years ago, because I suspect Mac OS is about to get just that.
I don't think this is the case. I think a lot of people do understand that the internet can be a danger to their privacy. It's not that they don't care about it, it's that they are taking a (reasonable) calculated risk. For the vast, vast majority of people the value of hassle-free surfing far outweigh the dangers. The lack of privacy on the internet has never seriously damaged them, and realistically never will (regardless of what a bunch of tinfoil hat-wearing libertarian nerds might say).
I bet a TFHWLN are gearing up right now to beat me down with OH BUT IMAGING WHAT GETTING YOUR IDENTITY THEVEREED WOULD DO!!!, but just as I don't spend money on a bullet-proof vest to protect me from accidental shootings, I suspect most people are making an okay call betting that their internet privacy just isn't that big a deal.
Also, there are hundreds of indie games which generally come in under £10, and can be excellent.
Looking through the new releases on Steam for Mac (where older an indie games make up a bigger slice of the pie I will admit), the prices are as follows £5.09, £2.99, £7.19, £6.99, £5.99, £15.99, £12.99, £8.99, £12.99, and £3.99. This doesn't seem expensive!
I've got one:
"OpenOffice.org/index.html"
Catchy!
First off, mp3 is simply not good enough for Classical. If you must buy digital, go for 320 kbps or lame alt-preset-extreme equivalent. As a giant Classical snob (I listen to Classical exclusively), the only way I buy music is physical CDs, and then rip to FLAC once it arrives.
Oh please, for nearly everyone's listening environment, you're not going to be able to tell a decent MP3 from an uncompressed file.
I find this whole audiophile thing pretty interesting, especially now something very similar starting to spill over into mainstream photography. JPEGS are out!, we need 16 bit RAW files for out holiday snaps! As a digital artist, I find it disturbing that people are going to let a JPEG artefact (real or imaginary) spoil their enjoyment of a picture: you're looking at it wrong!
I mean, it's fine if you enjoy your FLACs and presumably horrendously expensive audio equipment, but telling other people that anything less is 'simply not good enough' is ridiculous. I also think it encourages people to miss the point of the music in the first place.
Yes, how dare people presume other people care about them? The presumptuousness is preposterous!
You know, you're perfectly welcome not to use any social media sites. Lots of people like sharing trivialities with their friends, clearly. I'd go so far as to say that's mostly what having friends is about, as opposed to colleagues.
Who are 'regular' people? Because it really depends...
I disagree that they didn't have time. The Lusitania got a similar number off in 18 minutes(!), which suggests that there wasn't enough of a sense of urgency in unloading the Titanic. Perhaps because it seemed pointless in any case.
I like the looks of the new interface, but am rather concerned it might put people off by being too different from Windows.
The market for Linux is not mostly made up of newbs who want Windows that isn't Windows, but of power users and people who care about free software. These people are already trying to move AWAY from Windows. Making Linux more Windows-like is no good for usability or differentiating Linux. Gnome should move in it's own direction.
I don't think this is a fair characterisation of what was going on in the passenger ship business at the time. These ships were profitable, and a large part of the money came from 2nd and 3rd class accommodation (which was, incidentally, better on the Titanic than most other ships of the day). It was also a relatively safe ship, the hole that sank the Titanic would sink just about any ship.
These ships weren't 'ridiculous show[s] of hubris' any more than a fleet of 747s are. They were profitable and efficient ways of moving a lot of people around. Several companies were building ships the same size or bigger when the Titanic set off on it's maiden voyage, because it was seen as the most efficient way to run a passenger service.
The problem was that it wasn't carrying enough life boats. This was a regulatory problem (although you could argue that this shouldn't need regulation, it was just common sense!).
I don't think there are a lot of things to be learned from the Titanic: it was one fluke event. To learn the right lessons we need a bigger sample, more data. If we base our decisions on impressive single events, we're going to be make some silly decisions.
[...] multiple cores prevents everything from slowing basically everything down
Well, until something decides it needs to read or write to the disk (which everything seems to want to do all the time) in which case you'll get a lockup no matter how many cores you have.
Hardware manufacturers: fix the disk access, for god sake!
The thing is, general computing seems to be seek-heavy. My HD is by far the worst performing component of my system, always laggy and grinding, unresponsive when busy. The memory sits their with huge chunks unused and processor idle. Storage needs to improve speed drastically, and SSDs give us that now, and seem to have more headroom in the future.
If I write a book and do not require your editing, marketing or printing services why exactly do you expect to keep 75% of the sale price?
Ah, but you're probably still going to require editing of some sort, even just to catch typos! And really, I expect having a considered and professional opinion on your writing structure and clarity probably does result in higher quality work. So I suspect a lot of writers are still going to want editors. Marketing, in a world where every man and his dog can publish their books to the same platform, is going to be absolutely crucial.
You save printing costs, but depending on the sort of book, you may want to get professional designers on the job.
Give it time and most large authors will just sell their ebooks directly via their own websites.
This is exactly what the Internet is supposed to be about. Giving the little guy the chance to eliminate the need for the big guy.
I very much doubt that. If that was going to happen on any sort of scale we'd be seeing it already. No, they are going to have to go through some sort of distributor, like iBooks or Amazon or similar, which have a ranking/rating system of some sort and a standardised interface.
I suspect the bright new world of eBooks for everyone from everyone will actually look disappointingly similar to the one we have today.
Oi, why did I have to check that out? I'm all dizzy and nauseous, and frustrated at my low score!
If clippy suggested it, it might be more like:
"If deity stop clippy pops up once more the computer is going out the engaging in vigorous sexual intercourse window"
I liked that! SC2000 just stopped feeling like a challenge. If I can walk away from a game for an hour and it be fine when I get back, what would have been the point of me sitting in front of it?
SC2000 was a great game, probably the best (that or Civ2) , but of course it can be improved!
- Not being able to build on hills always seemed silly, and ruined the looks of many cities.
- Commercial buildings were too short, you never got the feeling of skyscrapers popping up, that was a shame.
- The rail network would have been more fun if you could put different sized stations in, and trains couldn't turn at right angles
- The maps were too small, limiting gameplay (one you go good, you'd generally cover the map pretty quickly)
- The game got easier as you went along, rather than throwing up new challenges (SC4 improved this somewhat as transportation became a real challenge)
I'd like to see a game like Sim City get regular releases, refining it's gameplay. It doesn't need fancy 3D graphics, in fact that make it hard to play, attractive 2D is fine. But give us real depth and flexibility, and a challenge even once the city is making money.
What didn't you like about SC4? The transportation systems, and that you could click on a building and see all the commuter routes, were awesome. It seemed like a worthy successor to SC2000 to me.
This seems like the plan, but I don't see how it could possibly work. As more papers go behind paywalls, the remaining free ones will see climbing readership, and due to the economies of scale with online publishing, will start to make real money. Why go behind a paywall then? This is exactly what is happening in the online Times vs. Guardian battle right now. With 30% of the online news market, you might break even, with close to 100%, you'll make a killing.
There will always be free online news, because there is money to be made there, especially if the paywall space is crowded.
Hey, they run Flash games you insensitive clod! That is not a trivial processing task!