I monitored the news coming from different countries before and after the invasion of Iraq and noticed the same thing.
It was different in Britain and Canada then it was in the US. They actually questioned things and discussed both sides. It got me in the habit of reading the British press rather then US.
Most likely to respond? You mean most likely to respond with PR and lawyers. Greenpeace has been issuing these reports for a while. Apple got the bottom by being the only company that responded with pure hot air (making global warming worse, to boot).
I'm glad to hear that Apple might now finally make some changes.
I'm not suggesting that GP is wonderful or that their assessment is the right way to assess environmental impact, but I would rather see companies respond to these things in a positive way anyway, as many other companies in the study did.
MS had already said that they planned to support Apple (and WinCE) for their WPF/E (windows presentations everywhere) technology. They then renamed that to Silverlight, and lo-and-behold, it still supports Apple. Where's the news?
Not to mention that this was predicted all along. MS has been supporting the MacOS for years, and hinting at the cross-platform possibilities of their net platform. MS wants the Mac to replace Linux as the alternative to Windows, so this is a pretty straightforward decision for them. So why are people acting suprised?
It is true that we could end up with a situation where WinCE has 30% of the market, Symbian has 50%, and Apple has only 4%, but Apple makes more money then the others combined. But isn't this what we call success?
If Linux was to become more then a hobby OS it needed to get commercial interests involved. The unpaid OS developers can and have done a lot, but they can't do everything.
Naturally, the marketing departments play fast and loose with the meaning of words - they always have. If you are looking for accuracy in marketing then you'll be looking for a long time.
I personally would not be interested in Linux if it decided to stick its head in the sand and play the corporate game. I want something I can use both at home and at work.
There was some useful info in this article about configuring your network adapter to support wake-on-lan, but what about wireless adapters? In my experience they don't seem to support WOL or any equivalent. The only solution I can think of is to connect an ethernet client device to my computer so that I can use the WOL of the computer's ethernet, but this is not really a good solution.
Is there any sort of WOL capabilities in the new 802.11n?
Getting good quality audio from your PC is more difficult then people realize, and is very important if you use your PC to listen to a lot of music or watch movies (ie. as an HTPC).
Since a lot of PC audio equipment is geared towards gamers and people listening to low quality MP3's, it is easy to get loud, deep, multi-channel audio. The hard part is getting clear crisp sound. The one downfall I have found with HTPC's is that I have a much harder time hearing the dialog clearly for some movies then I would if I were in the theater.
This is particularly true when it comes to movies downloaded from the Internet (or so I'm told - I would never do this myself of course). The movies on the internet tend to use 2 channel MP3 or AC-3 audio, so a fancy 5.1 channel AC-3 decoder and speakers don't help (not to mention that they are expensive and ugly).
So, does anyone have any suggestions for sound cards or speakers that will provide clear, crisp, 2 channel sound at a reasonable price?
As usual, endless details on speed, and next to nothing about noise levels, power usage, and whether they have the ability to spin down when not in use.
This seems to be a common defense of Apple - that they are a business, they own OS-X, so they have a right to do what they want with it.
All of this is perfectly true and valid.
Really the same argument can be used to defend many of the Microsoft and Sony practices that are decried here.
As for their prices. Your experience is totally different then mine. I find that you pay more for everything on Apple, and this makes much more sense then what you say. Apple is positioning itself as a high end, fashion, brand. There margins on much higher then their competitors. They sell into a closed market compared to the PC market. If their prices were competitive they wouldn't have lock users onto their hardware.
> It's riding Jobs' coattails, crying "me too!, me too!", as if MS is some kind of crusader for consumers' rights around music and DRM.
Nor is this Steve Jobs idea. You think Steve Jobs cares about consumer rights? Do they let you run OS-X on commodity hardware? Do they license their DRM? These are the masters of lock-in.
Yahoo has been pushing the labels to sell unlocked content for years (mind you, maybe I'm naive to think that was anything more then PR). iTunes got it first because iTunes has all the power in this market and Yahoo (and even MS) don't matter.
So please, don't tell me that this is anyone's innovation.
Agreed. Measuring eco-friendliness is difficult and fuzzy.
On the other hand, companies only make changes to their environmental practises if they are afraid of (A) a financial penalty (ie. getting caught breaking the law), or (B) bad publicity.
And that's why we need studies like this. But whenever these studies appear, the company and its supporters look for ways to undermine the study and its source. This is a constant. If consumers buy into this, then the company escapes from having to make any changes. Consumers must accept that, as imperfect as the study and its source are, it is an opportunity to put pressure on the company to improve.
What? No this is terrible PR for Greenpeace. All over the world Apple owners are grabbing at any anti-Greenpeace thought or news they can get to rationalize their love for Apple. I mean, Apple is cool (isn't that what the ads tell us?) so if Greenpeace disses Apple, Greenpeace must be making it up for propaganda reasons.
Apple came last in this ranking because, when they've done poorly in this ranking in the past, they sent out the PR attack dogs to undermine GP and the study, rather then making any changes to the practices in question.
Of course, many companies behave this way. When MS discovered during the anti-trust trials that the public's perception of them was a problem, they too responded with PR rather then changing their behavior.
Yes, Yes, I know that both GP and this study are far from perfect, but they are a more objective judge of this matter then Apple itself (or the Apple fanboys who are modding me down as we speak).
I've heard a number of Canadian artists say that the CRTC, the gov, and particularly the cancon rules, have saved Canadian culture and the Canadian artists. So, if what they are asking for could be done then that would be great.
No, the other services use WMA. In third party testing WMA is rated as equivelent to AAC for sound quality vs. bit rate. For non-DRM stuff I'd rather use AAC then WMA since it is more standardized, but for DRM'ed stuff they are both proprietary.
No, I rip to FLAC and then convert to MP3 VBR. In the future hopefully I will re-convert the FLAC's to AAC if it becomes as widespread as MP3.
Yes, I do understand why my opinion is in the minority. For all that I might react to Apple's high prices versus their competitiors, Apple is being extremely successful. Price is no longer king. Cool is king and Apple is cool.
The nerve of Steve Jobs is incredible. He is asking people to pay again for songs that they already bought!
Other services have been selling songs at a more reasonable bit-rate all along (eg. Yahoo was selling songs for a while at 79 cents for 192Kbps), only Apple was selling at 128Kbps. Even the NYT writer (who loves Apple) wrote that 128 is insufficient and that people were making a mistake to spend money on stuff at this quality. The loyal defenders insisted that when and if a higher quality became necessary and available it would be free for everyone who had already bought it.
Now you have to pay again just to get decent sound quality!
I think I'll stick to ripping from CD's.
Re:How do other heavy Java apps perform?
on
OpenOffice 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> OpenOffice isn't what you'd call a pleasant experience to hack on > (some might blame the closed source roots where it would mostly be > the same group of developers for a long period of time that are paid > to work on it).
I would blame the fact that it is a very diverse and unique code base. It is mostly C++ but it is not based on any common libraries. Even for their GUI they decided to completely go it alone, which means that they make no contributions back to any libraries, and learning to hack it is very hard. At one point they considered switching to standard libraries but then didn't get around to following through. And then they started adding Java everywhere they could.
MS spent years keeping Apple alive both to minimize the appearance of monopoly in the US, and because they recognized that Apple was much preferable to Linux. As long as the Mac doesn't take off too much, they are still happy with this (nothing like a competitor that drives prices up!).
On the other hand, the iPod (and related products) is a totally different issue. They never meant for that to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I monitored the news coming from different countries before and after the invasion of Iraq and noticed the same thing.
It was different in Britain and Canada then it was in the US. They actually questioned things and discussed both sides. It got me in the habit of reading the British press rather then US.
Most likely to respond? You mean most likely to respond with PR and lawyers. Greenpeace has been issuing these reports for a while. Apple got the bottom by being the only company that responded with pure hot air (making global warming worse, to boot).
I'm glad to hear that Apple might now finally make some changes.
I'm not suggesting that GP is wonderful or that their assessment is the right way to assess environmental impact, but I would rather see companies respond to these things in a positive way anyway, as many other companies in the study did.
MS had already said that they planned to support Apple (and WinCE) for their WPF/E (windows presentations everywhere) technology. They then renamed that to Silverlight, and lo-and-behold, it still supports Apple. Where's the news?
Not to mention that this was predicted all along. MS has been supporting the MacOS for years, and hinting at the cross-platform possibilities of their net platform. MS wants the Mac to replace Linux as the alternative to Windows, so this is a pretty straightforward decision for them. So why are people acting suprised?
It is true that we could end up with a situation where WinCE has 30% of the market, Symbian has 50%, and Apple has only 4%, but Apple makes more money then the others combined. But isn't this what we call success?
If Linux was to become more then a hobby OS it needed to get commercial interests involved. The unpaid OS developers can and have done a lot, but they can't do everything.
Naturally, the marketing departments play fast and loose with the meaning of words - they always have. If you are looking for accuracy in marketing then you'll be looking for a long time.
I personally would not be interested in Linux if it decided to stick its head in the sand and play the corporate game. I want something I can use both at home and at work.
There was some useful info in this article about configuring your network adapter to support wake-on-lan, but what about wireless adapters? In my experience they don't seem to support WOL or any equivalent. The only solution I can think of is to connect an ethernet client device to my computer so that I can use the WOL of the computer's ethernet, but this is not really a good solution.
Is there any sort of WOL capabilities in the new 802.11n?
The pain it caused me in the 90's.
Getting good quality audio from your PC is more difficult then people realize, and is very important if you use your PC to listen to a lot of music or watch movies (ie. as an HTPC).
Since a lot of PC audio equipment is geared towards gamers and people listening to low quality MP3's, it is easy to get loud, deep, multi-channel audio. The hard part is getting clear crisp sound. The one downfall I have found with HTPC's is that I have a much harder time hearing the dialog clearly for some movies then I would if I were in the theater.
This is particularly true when it comes to movies downloaded from the Internet (or so I'm told - I would never do this myself of course). The movies on the internet tend to use 2 channel MP3 or AC-3 audio, so a fancy 5.1 channel AC-3 decoder and speakers don't help (not to mention that they are expensive and ugly).
So, does anyone have any suggestions for sound cards or speakers that will provide clear, crisp, 2 channel sound at a reasonable price?
As usual, endless details on speed, and next to nothing about noise levels, power usage, and whether they have the ability to spin down when not in use.
This seems to be a common defense of Apple - that they are a business, they own OS-X, so they have a right to do what they want with it.
All of this is perfectly true and valid.
Really the same argument can be used to defend many of the Microsoft and Sony practices that are decried here.
As for their prices. Your experience is totally different then mine. I find that you pay more for everything on Apple, and this makes much more sense then what you say. Apple is positioning itself as a high end, fashion, brand. There margins on much higher then their competitors. They sell into a closed market compared to the PC market. If their prices were competitive they wouldn't have lock users onto their hardware.
> It's riding Jobs' coattails, crying "me too!, me too!", as if MS is some kind of crusader for consumers' rights around music and DRM.
Nor is this Steve Jobs idea. You think Steve Jobs cares about consumer rights? Do they let you run OS-X on commodity hardware? Do they license their DRM? These are the masters of lock-in.
Yahoo has been pushing the labels to sell unlocked content for years (mind you, maybe I'm naive to think that was anything more then PR). iTunes got it first because iTunes has all the power in this market and Yahoo (and even MS) don't matter.
So please, don't tell me that this is anyone's innovation.
Are you sure about that?
It is an MPEG standard, which is a good thing, but MPEG standards are not usually royalty free.
Very interesting. This is the best response I've seen to the Greenpeace study.
No, I'd put some faith in an EPA study. Please post the link.
Agreed. Measuring eco-friendliness is difficult and fuzzy.
On the other hand, companies only make changes to their environmental practises if they are afraid of (A) a financial penalty (ie. getting caught breaking the law), or (B) bad publicity.
And that's why we need studies like this. But whenever these studies appear, the company and its supporters look for ways to undermine the study and its source. This is a constant. If consumers buy into this, then the company escapes from having to make any changes. Consumers must accept that, as imperfect as the study and its source are, it is an opportunity to put pressure on the company to improve.
What? No this is terrible PR for Greenpeace. All over the world Apple owners are grabbing at any anti-Greenpeace thought or news they can get to rationalize their love for Apple. I mean, Apple is cool (isn't that what the ads tell us?) so if Greenpeace disses Apple, Greenpeace must be making it up for propaganda reasons.
Apple came last in this ranking because, when they've done poorly in this ranking in the past, they sent out the PR attack dogs to undermine GP and the study, rather then making any changes to the practices in question.
Of course, many companies behave this way. When MS discovered during the anti-trust trials that the public's perception of them was a problem, they too responded with PR rather then changing their behavior.
Yes, Yes, I know that both GP and this study are far from perfect, but they are a more objective judge of this matter then Apple itself (or the Apple fanboys who are modding me down as we speak).
Hum... the BBC gets five times as much per capita as the CBC. I wouldn't call that no subsidies.
I've heard a number of Canadian artists say that the CRTC, the gov, and particularly the cancon rules, have saved Canadian culture and the Canadian artists. So, if what they are asking for could be done then that would be great.
But it can't.
No, the other services use WMA. In third party testing WMA is rated as equivelent to AAC for sound quality vs. bit rate. For non-DRM stuff I'd rather use AAC then WMA since it is more standardized, but for DRM'ed stuff they are both proprietary.
No, I rip to FLAC and then convert to MP3 VBR. In the future hopefully I will re-convert the FLAC's to AAC if it becomes as widespread as MP3.
Yes, I do understand why my opinion is in the minority. For all that I might react to Apple's high prices versus their competitiors, Apple is being extremely successful. Price is no longer king. Cool is king and Apple is cool.
Or people who want to play their music on a good quality stereo system.
The nerve of Steve Jobs is incredible. He is asking people to pay again for songs that they already bought!
Other services have been selling songs at a more reasonable bit-rate all along (eg. Yahoo was selling songs for a while at 79 cents for 192Kbps), only Apple was selling at 128Kbps. Even the NYT writer (who loves Apple) wrote that 128 is insufficient and that people were making a mistake to spend money on stuff at this quality. The loyal defenders insisted that when and if a higher quality became necessary and available it would be free for everyone who had already bought it.
Now you have to pay again just to get decent sound quality!
I think I'll stick to ripping from CD's.
> OpenOffice isn't what you'd call a pleasant experience to hack on
> (some might blame the closed source roots where it would mostly be
> the same group of developers for a long period of time that are paid
> to work on it).
I would blame the fact that it is a very diverse and unique code base. It is mostly C++ but it is not based on any common libraries. Even for their GUI they decided to completely go it alone, which means that they make no contributions back to any libraries, and learning to hack it is very hard. At one point they considered switching to standard libraries but then didn't get around to following through. And then they started adding Java everywhere they could.
But they worry about the iPod, not about the Mac.
MS spent years keeping Apple alive both to minimize the appearance of monopoly in the US, and because they recognized that Apple was much preferable to Linux. As long as the Mac doesn't take off too much, they are still happy with this (nothing like a competitor that drives prices up!).
On the other hand, the iPod (and related products) is a totally different issue. They never meant for that to happen.
I'm sorry that I tried to shatter your illusions of Apple. But I think your defenses are strong enough that no damage was done.