'It is true that the Amalgamated has lost business through my activities, but that is the natural result of my discovery, which has made their policies as obsolete as the bow and arrow. If an injunction is granted on that ground, I shall set up a coal-oil-lamp factory, and then ask for an injunction against the Edison and General Electric companies to forbid them to manufacture incandescent bulbs.'
Very similar indeed. I'm told that the Germans have a saying, 'Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude,' which merely says that Schadenfreude is the purest joy.
(The Germans, being a learned and on the whole sensible people, know that there are indeed other joys. Among these are guzzling beer, listening to really awful music at ear-splitting volume, and annoying the French.)
>The freedom to do what you want with something which you have paid money for is a fundamental right.
All right, then. I paid money for this house; I therefore have the fundamental right to build a blast furnace in the back yard and stable feedlot cattle in the bedrooms.
What's that you say? Zoning laws don't allow industrial use in a residential district? But my fundamental rights, waah, waah, waah!
I also paid money for this semi-automatic rifle; I therefore have the fundamental right to fire off rounds into the air whenever I feel like it, and if someone happens to be in the way when the bullets come down, tough.
What's that you say? Illegal to discharge a firearm inside city limits? But my fundamental rights, waah, waah, waah!
And I paid money for this lovely limited-edition art print hanging on the wall behind me; I therefore have the fundamental right to make unlimited copies of it and sell them on eBay for $20 each, thus driving the original artist out of the business of selling his own prints for $200.
What's that you say? . . . . .
The fact is, when you buy a copy of a musical recording, you are not buying the right to do whatever you want with it. Copyright law, which imposes explicit restrictions on your so-called fundamental rights, is much older than recorded music. And the idea of the law putting restrictions on what you can do with your personal property is as old as law and property themselves.
When I worked as a car salesman, I found myself mostly finding for customers the best Model T with the lowest price possible. The only time the prettiness of a car ever came into the discussion was when I was talking to people who couldn't drive.
And how do I know they couldn't drive? Because they wanted a car that wasn't black! Real drivers don't care about cosmetic crap like that.
I've been using OS X daily for four years, and I have never once ejected a disc by dragging it to the trash. If you don't like that method (as I don't), I know of at least four others. Normally I eject CDs with the Eject key on the keyboard (which you can't do with a pirated copy on a crapware PC because it hasn't got an Eject key). Network volumes and disk images I unmount by clicking the 'eject' symbol next to their icon in the sidebar of any Finder window. I could also use a keyboard shortcut or a pull-down menu, if I wanted.
The thing is, in the developed world nearly everybody who wants a PC for those purposes already has one. And there's no reason to buy the latest greatest hardware to run IE, Outlook, and Wordpad. That's why hardware sales are stagnant in mature markets -- except Apple's, which are rapidly going up. Digital photography, home audio recording, and amateur video are becoming mainstream apps, and Apple has made a science of catering to those markets. Microsoft hasn't, and the PC makers who are shackled to MS can't even try.
By the way, gamers never buy those 300-euro crapware white boxes. Hardcore gamers are quite happy to drop that much money on the video card alone, and even the dabblers know better than to run an FPS on a machine with integrated graphics.
Which is why anybody for whom 64-bitness matters should wait a couple of months for the Core 2 Duo MBP.
I myself was rather peeved that I was going to need a new laptop in August, just before Merom and Conroe reach the market in quantity. Now my deadline has been pushed back to December, and I can comfortably wait for a proper 64-bit Intel Mac.
Running under VPC on my iMac G5, WinXP barely manages to crawl. Either someone is exaggerating when they say Vista 'runs', or this is some new usage of the word 'run' that I wasn't previously familiar with.
With a Lyra, or say a Sony PSP it's just drag and drop the albums/files to the correct folder and you're good to go, no special software needed.
With an iPod, you plug it in and iTunes syncs it, no drag and drop needed. If I wanted to worry about finding the correct folder for everything and doing it file by file, I wouldn't even have a computer; I'd still be happy to keep my data on index cards and my music on shelves.
Precisely. I recall when a friend of mine tried to configure an old OS X box as an Apache server for the first time. Now, of course Apache is installed with OS X by default, but not enabled out of the box. This guy, familiar with Apache and Linux and all such Good Stuff, futzed around with the Terminal and Startup Items and man pages and other things that would be relevant on a straight *ix system for about 45 minutes, while I kept saying over and over, 'Try the online help.' Finally I shoved him out of his chair, looked at Apple Help, went into System Prefs, and checked a checkbox. One checkbox, and Apache was running smoothly (and has been for four years since). Time elapsed: under 2 minutes.
If you're used to jumping through the hoops set up by people who have no clue how to design a usable UI, then obviously you'll have some re-learning to do when someone gives you a UI designed by someone who actually knows how. Apple is not the only company to commit the horrible, horrible crime of doing things right after geeks have trained themselves to put up with doing them wrong.
16 year olds know how to rip CDs to MP3 players, and it doesn't bother them doing it. They don't mind grabbing a couple of MP3s from online, or a friend... its easy for them, they think of it as normal, so the iBusiness_model will soon also be outdated.
This 39-year-old has been doing all that since 1998. I bought an iPod because it's the most convenient portable player for all the music I've ripped. It's easy, I think of it as normal, and it perfectly vindicates the 'iBusiness_model' that you despise so much.
'Sheeple,' quotha? Ah, isn't the Internet wonderful! It gives misanthropic misfits like you the ability to personally insult thousands of people without ever getting close enough to risk having your lights punched out, a thing that would probably have happened to you regularly in the bad old days of F2F interaction.
I'm confused as to why XP on a Mac is suddenly so popular among the stereotypical Mac fanboy crowd.
I'm confused as to why you think anyone who uses a Mac is thereby part of 'the stereotypical Mac fanboy crowd'. Are you a stereotypical Windows fanboy, or (just possibly) a human being?
Chaffing aside--
I'm heading back to school in September for a mid-life career change. The program I'm taking requires me to have a laptop that will boot into Windows. On the other hand, you can take away my Mac when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Dual-booting XP on a MB[P] is exactly what I need. Sometimes it's about one or two specific apps that only run in Windows; sometimes it's just plain bureaucracy.
(Then, of course, there are the idiots. This would be the people who want to dual-boot XP just so they can play games on a tiny screen with a trackpad, er, I mean, complain to everyone in earshot about how integrated graphics are teh suX0rz.)
As many people have pointed out, to right-click, you tap the trackpad with two fingers (in tap mode) or touch the trackpad with two fingers while clicking the button (in click mode). The only drawback is that this will not work in Windows on a dual-boot setup.
Re:The WMDs of the tech world have been found
on
Apple Sues Creative
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
'Of course I've got lawyers. They are like nuclear weapons: I've got em 'cause everyone else has. But as soon as you use them they **** everything up.'
What do you mean? That he doesn't have the right to disclose what he found? Does his constitutional rights make you sick?
HAVING the right is not the same thing as BEING right. Just because you have the constitutional right to make a public nuisance of yourself while helping crackers and malware perps do their malicious business, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
So what do YOU mean? That people don't have the right to complain if he discloses what he found? Do THEIR constitutional rights make YOU sick? Sauce for the goose, Deorus.
Remember how copyright works. It doesn't work like patents, if you do not enfore your copyright you lose it. Apple must send something awful a C&D notice, regardless of how their copyright is being infringed and whether the effects are positive or negative.
Trademark works like that. Copyright doesn't. Neither under the Berne Convention nor the DMCA is there any requirement to sue infringers in order to maintain copyright. Once a copyright is in force, there is very little that anyone can do to remove it, short of explicitly putting the work in the public domain.
And nowhere near even the ground floor of the ridiculous things done in the name of atheism. Read The Black Book of Communism lately?
Proven historical fact: People will kill each other for any damn fool excuse, or for none at all. Although a pissing contest over one's favoured OS has yet to yield any reported homicides, probably because few/.ers are capable of the level of face-to-face human interaction required to commit murder. HHOS.
Yeah, everybody knew about Apple Corps. Accountants in particular. 'Apple Corps? Oh, yeah, those crazy Beatles. The only four guys in the world who could go broke running a tax dodge.' (howl with laughter, clutch sides, wipe eyes with handkerchief)
Seriously, I very much doubt if the Apple trademark ever sold a Beatle record. (It may have done something for Mary Hopkins and Badfinger. Jackie Lomax, on the other hand, probably wants those years of his life back.) There is only one trademark with any real value in selling the Beatles' music, and that is THE BEATLES (R). Apple-labelled records without that name on the cover had a proven history of being flopperoos.
It is possible, I suppose, that Apple Computer will one day bring a lawsuit as frivolous as those repeatedly brought against them by Apple Corps. For instance, they could sue somebody for stealing the Newton trademark. Until then, I can state with confidence that of the two, the Beatles' Apple holds the most worms.
OK, I can see the use of all the other buttons, up to including 'Boobs +'. But would a man actually use a button labelled 'Boobs -'?
Quibbles aside, it's about time we got a remote like that on the market. After all, women have been pushing men's buttons for thousands of years. Strike a blow for gender equality!
uhh, try again. The iPod may have the marketing appeal, but what feeds it? iTunes. Not iTMS, but the actual iTunes software -- which is a fine example of those 'other enlightened Apple solutions' you don't appear to believe in. And while iTunes exists for Windows, it is not seamlessly integrated with other Windows apps, as it is with iLife (and Mac OS X generally). That integration would be the first casualty if Apple spun off the iPod, and a serious casualty it would be.
There are four necessary components to a successful music player: the physical machine itself, the music store that feeds it, the software that syncs it with your computer, and the behind-the-scenes integration of the other three components. Get any one of the four wrong, and you have a recipe for dismal failure (hello, Sony). Most manufacturers concentrate on one piece of the widget and are at someone else's mercy for the quality of the other pieces. Few companies have seriously attempted to provide all four, and only Apple has done it successfully.
Result: we have a winner -- but not if Apple breaks up the winning combination. Fortunately, Steve Jobs isn't stupid enough to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
'It is true that the Amalgamated has lost business through my activities, but that is the natural result of my discovery, which has made their policies as obsolete as the bow and arrow. If an injunction is granted on that ground, I shall set up a coal-oil-lamp factory, and then ask for an injunction against the Edison and General Electric companies to forbid them to manufacture incandescent bulbs.'
-- Robert A. Heinlein, 'Life-Line' (1939)
The MBP does, in fact, have a right mouse button.
Tap the trackpad with two fingers = right-click.
Drag two fingers across the trackpad = scroll.
I've seen this particular myth circulated before, but you'd think someone who actually owns an MBP would know better.
Very similar indeed. I'm told that the Germans have a saying, 'Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude,' which merely says that Schadenfreude is the purest joy.
(The Germans, being a learned and on the whole sensible people, know that there are indeed other joys. Among these are guzzling beer, listening to really awful music at ear-splitting volume, and annoying the French.)
>The freedom to do what you want with something which you have paid money for is a fundamental right.
All right, then. I paid money for this house; I therefore have the fundamental right to build a blast furnace in the back yard and stable feedlot cattle in the bedrooms.
What's that you say? Zoning laws don't allow industrial use in a residential district? But my fundamental rights, waah, waah, waah!
I also paid money for this semi-automatic rifle; I therefore have the fundamental right to fire off rounds into the air whenever I feel like it, and if someone happens to be in the way when the bullets come down, tough.
What's that you say? Illegal to discharge a firearm inside city limits? But my fundamental rights, waah, waah, waah!
And I paid money for this lovely limited-edition art print hanging on the wall behind me; I therefore have the fundamental right to make unlimited copies of it and sell them on eBay for $20 each, thus driving the original artist out of the business of selling his own prints for $200.
What's that you say? . . . . .
The fact is, when you buy a copy of a musical recording, you are not buying the right to do whatever you want with it. Copyright law, which imposes explicit restrictions on your so-called fundamental rights, is much older than recorded music. And the idea of the law putting restrictions on what you can do with your personal property is as old as law and property themselves.
When I worked as a car salesman, I found myself mostly finding for customers the best Model T with the lowest price possible. The only time the prettiness of a car ever came into the discussion was when I was talking to people who couldn't drive.
And how do I know they couldn't drive? Because they wanted a car that wasn't black! Real drivers don't care about cosmetic crap like that.
I've been using OS X daily for four years, and I have never once ejected a disc by dragging it to the trash. If you don't like that method (as I don't), I know of at least four others. Normally I eject CDs with the Eject key on the keyboard (which you can't do with a pirated copy on a crapware PC because it hasn't got an Eject key). Network volumes and disk images I unmount by clicking the 'eject' symbol next to their icon in the sidebar of any Finder window. I could also use a keyboard shortcut or a pull-down menu, if I wanted.
The thing is, in the developed world nearly everybody who wants a PC for those purposes already has one. And there's no reason to buy the latest greatest hardware to run IE, Outlook, and Wordpad. That's why hardware sales are stagnant in mature markets -- except Apple's, which are rapidly going up. Digital photography, home audio recording, and amateur video are becoming mainstream apps, and Apple has made a science of catering to those markets. Microsoft hasn't, and the PC makers who are shackled to MS can't even try.
By the way, gamers never buy those 300-euro crapware white boxes. Hardcore gamers are quite happy to drop that much money on the video card alone, and even the dabblers know better than to run an FPS on a machine with integrated graphics.
In other words, you're a PC fanboy who's in love with the idea of spending hours on end dicking around inside his computer. Most of us aren't.
I bet you just love the smell of solder in the morning.
Which is why anybody for whom 64-bitness matters should wait a couple of months for the Core 2 Duo MBP.
I myself was rather peeved that I was going to need a new laptop in August, just before Merom and Conroe reach the market in quantity. Now my deadline has been pushed back to December, and I can comfortably wait for a proper 64-bit Intel Mac.
More to the point . . . how can they tell?!
Running under VPC on my iMac G5, WinXP barely manages to crawl. Either someone is exaggerating when they say Vista 'runs', or this is some new usage of the word 'run' that I wasn't previously familiar with.
With a Lyra, or say a Sony PSP it's just drag and drop the albums/files to the correct folder and you're good to go, no special software needed.
With an iPod, you plug it in and iTunes syncs it, no drag and drop needed. If I wanted to worry about finding the correct folder for everything and doing it file by file, I wouldn't even have a computer; I'd still be happy to keep my data on index cards and my music on shelves.
Precisely. I recall when a friend of mine tried to configure an old OS X box as an Apache server for the first time. Now, of course Apache is installed with OS X by default, but not enabled out of the box. This guy, familiar with Apache and Linux and all such Good Stuff, futzed around with the Terminal and Startup Items and man pages and other things that would be relevant on a straight *ix system for about 45 minutes, while I kept saying over and over, 'Try the online help.' Finally I shoved him out of his chair, looked at Apple Help, went into System Prefs, and checked a checkbox. One checkbox, and Apache was running smoothly (and has been for four years since). Time elapsed: under 2 minutes.
If you're used to jumping through the hoops set up by people who have no clue how to design a usable UI, then obviously you'll have some re-learning to do when someone gives you a UI designed by someone who actually knows how. Apple is not the only company to commit the horrible, horrible crime of doing things right after geeks have trained themselves to put up with doing them wrong.
16 year olds know how to rip CDs to MP3 players, and it doesn't bother them doing it. They don't mind grabbing a couple of MP3s from online, or a friend... its easy for them, they think of it as normal, so the iBusiness_model will soon also be outdated. This 39-year-old has been doing all that since 1998. I bought an iPod because it's the most convenient portable player for all the music I've ripped. It's easy, I think of it as normal, and it perfectly vindicates the 'iBusiness_model' that you despise so much. 'Sheeple,' quotha? Ah, isn't the Internet wonderful! It gives misanthropic misfits like you the ability to personally insult thousands of people without ever getting close enough to risk having your lights punched out, a thing that would probably have happened to you regularly in the bad old days of F2F interaction.
I'm confused as to why XP on a Mac is suddenly so popular among the stereotypical Mac fanboy crowd.
I'm confused as to why you think anyone who uses a Mac is thereby part of 'the stereotypical Mac fanboy crowd'. Are you a stereotypical Windows fanboy, or (just possibly) a human being?
Chaffing aside--
I'm heading back to school in September for a mid-life career change. The program I'm taking requires me to have a laptop that will boot into Windows. On the other hand, you can take away my Mac when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Dual-booting XP on a MB[P] is exactly what I need. Sometimes it's about one or two specific apps that only run in Windows; sometimes it's just plain bureaucracy.
(Then, of course, there are the idiots. This would be the people who want to dual-boot XP just so they can play games on a tiny screen with a trackpad, er, I mean, complain to everyone in earshot about how integrated graphics are teh suX0rz.)
As many people have pointed out, to right-click, you tap the trackpad with two fingers (in tap mode) or touch the trackpad with two fingers while clicking the button (in click mode). The only drawback is that this will not work in Windows on a dual-boot setup.
'Of course I've got lawyers. They are like nuclear weapons: I've got em 'cause everyone else has. But as soon as you use them they **** everything up.'
-- Danny DeVito in Other People's Money
Um. If the inventor isn't going to make any money from the deal, what's in it for him?
What do you mean? That he doesn't have the right to disclose what he found? Does his constitutional rights make you sick?
HAVING the right is not the same thing as BEING right. Just because you have the constitutional right to make a public nuisance of yourself while helping crackers and malware perps do their malicious business, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
So what do YOU mean? That people don't have the right to complain if he discloses what he found? Do THEIR constitutional rights make YOU sick? Sauce for the goose, Deorus.
Remember how copyright works. It doesn't work like patents, if you do not enfore your copyright you lose it. Apple must send something awful a C&D notice, regardless of how their copyright is being infringed and whether the effects are positive or negative.
Trademark works like that. Copyright doesn't. Neither under the Berne Convention nor the DMCA is there any requirement to sue infringers in order to maintain copyright. Once a copyright is in force, there is very little that anyone can do to remove it, short of explicitly putting the work in the public domain.
And nowhere near even the ground floor of the ridiculous things done in the name of atheism. Read The Black Book of Communism lately?
/.ers are capable of the level of face-to-face human interaction required to commit murder. HHOS.
Proven historical fact: People will kill each other for any damn fool excuse, or for none at all. Although a pissing contest over one's favoured OS has yet to yield any reported homicides, probably because few
The salaries of the support staff you can lay off will make up the difference in a single year.
Since it's the IT department (i.e. the support staff) that you're calling upon to recommend this purchase, that's not a feature, it's a bug.
Yeah, everybody knew about Apple Corps. Accountants in particular. 'Apple Corps? Oh, yeah, those crazy Beatles. The only four guys in the world who could go broke running a tax dodge.' (howl with laughter, clutch sides, wipe eyes with handkerchief)
Seriously, I very much doubt if the Apple trademark ever sold a Beatle record. (It may have done something for Mary Hopkins and Badfinger. Jackie Lomax, on the other hand, probably wants those years of his life back.) There is only one trademark with any real value in selling the Beatles' music, and that is THE BEATLES (R). Apple-labelled records without that name on the cover had a proven history of being flopperoos.
It is possible, I suppose, that Apple Computer will one day bring a lawsuit as frivolous as those repeatedly brought against them by Apple Corps. For instance, they could sue somebody for stealing the Newton trademark. Until then, I can state with confidence that of the two, the Beatles' Apple holds the most worms.
OK, I can see the use of all the other buttons, up to including 'Boobs +'. But would a man actually use a button labelled 'Boobs -'?
Quibbles aside, it's about time we got a remote like that on the market. After all, women have been pushing men's buttons for thousands of years. Strike a blow for gender equality!
uhh, try again. The iPod may have the marketing appeal, but what feeds it? iTunes. Not iTMS, but the actual iTunes software -- which is a fine example of those 'other enlightened Apple solutions' you don't appear to believe in. And while iTunes exists for Windows, it is not seamlessly integrated with other Windows apps, as it is with iLife (and Mac OS X generally). That integration would be the first casualty if Apple spun off the iPod, and a serious casualty it would be.
There are four necessary components to a successful music player: the physical machine itself, the music store that feeds it, the software that syncs it with your computer, and the behind-the-scenes integration of the other three components. Get any one of the four wrong, and you have a recipe for dismal failure (hello, Sony). Most manufacturers concentrate on one piece of the widget and are at someone else's mercy for the quality of the other pieces. Few companies have seriously attempted to provide all four, and only Apple has done it successfully.
Result: we have a winner -- but not if Apple breaks up the winning combination. Fortunately, Steve Jobs isn't stupid enough to do that.
How could you tell?