I'm sorry I don't have hard independant data to back up my claims... I do have a lot of experience with them and have run my own benchmarks.. (I'm mostly talking about sequential reads here, as seek is not that important on an average user's computer)
I'm just a hardware enthusiast trying to bust out a myth that i have always had a prob with..
Those benchmarks don't make sence.... My origional argument talks about 1) Sequential reads and 2) Seek times...
I never claimed that the 5400RPM drive is faster in ALL respects... But in sequential reading a 5400RPM drive is as fast or faster than the same size desktop 7200RPM drive simply because of raw data density
This tomshardware review doesn't touch on these points..
Yes.. you can take the advice of the parent poster... but let me explain a couple things which dictate that 7200RPM laptop drives are not always better....
1) Drive density: a laptop drive at 80GB is roughly twice as dense (bytes per square inch) than an 80GB desktop hard drive
2) Head travel time: In a 2.5in laptop drive, the hard drive head does not have to traverse more than ~1in (from center to outter track) of the drive to do any given seek. A desktop drive must traverse roughly 50% more distance (and time) on random seeks
3) Heat: 5400RPM drives produce significantly less heat than 7200RPM drives.. on top of this, a 5400RPM drive built with the same quality as a 7200RPM drive has significantly longer average lifetime.
4) Noise: Equivilently built drives one running at 5400RPM and one at 7200RPM. The 7200RPM is significantly louder and produces high pitched noise (nowadays, all laptop drives are hydro bearings so you can't cop out and say that a cheaper 5400RPM drive will use cheaper ball bearings... like you used to be able to say)
5) battery life: less heat == less watts == less power consumption. Remember that the hard drive is the second largest drain on your battery when talking about centrino/turion systems (LCD is the first). In a P4 laptop then the CPU uses more power than the drive. a 5400RPM or 4200RPM drive has faster spin up times. It has lower sustained power consumption, and will generally give you a longer battery life on the order of an half to full hour or so in a midsized notebook using default battery.
6) Data integrity/ruggedness: a slower spinning hard drive will not have as detremental of an affect on your data if the drive is bumped during reads/writes. Think of it as hitting a large speed bump going 54MPH vs going 72MPH.
Now some of this needs explanation: (1) tells about drive density. What this means is that a 7200RPM 3.5in drive is about as fast as a 5400RPM 2.5in drive in sustained reads/writes. (2) tells about seek time (latency). A laptop drive at 5400RPM has a faster seek than a desktop at 5400RPM. I will admit that a 7200RPM desktop drive has faster seeks, but not significantly so. A faster spinning drive can seek faster only when the head is in place and it must wait for the drive to rotate to the corect angle in order to read the requested data. It does NOT make the head travel faster. For this reason high RPM speeds are good and well for seek time... but using smaller platters is also a very good way to reduce seek time. Not to mention that loading programs and loading large video files or photoshop files, etc... are not highly seek dependant. They are sequential read dependant. Database accesses, or accessing a badly fragmented hard drive are cases where faster seek will help you out. But in a laptop system where you are loading programs and files and keep your disk defragmented it will do you very little good.
Now.. I'm not saying that 10K and 15K rpm drives are bad... they are great for seek time and they are great for high transaction/sec databases... What they are overkill for is desktop systems which the user would typically be loading programs or transferring files from one disk to another or loading large files... Because most 10K drives are around 36GB or 74GB... and they are actually marginally _SLOWER_ at sequential read/write than cheaper and larger 7200RPM drives on the desktop....
now.. Apply all of the above to a laptop 5400RPM drive vs the standard desktop drive of 7200RPM.. I hope you are able to see what I'm getting at. a 7200RPM drive in a laptop is significantly faster than an equivilently sized desktop drive at 7200RPMs... Anybody who says they feel a slowdown on 5400RPM laptop drives vs. a 7200RPM desktop drive is either using very low GB laptop drive, or very large GB desktop drive, or is just fooling themselves... In general, a 5400RPM laptop drive performs approximately the same as a 7200RPM desktop drive in most end user desktop applications...
your are correct. There are tons of compiler optimizations that can be done witht he athlon64 that cannot be done with any previous version of the x86 ISA... That being said, compiler technology isn't really taking advantage of this yet...
The real advantage to having an athlon64 in a laptop is power savings and raw memory bandwidth and ultra low latency...
For the first time ever (aside from crusoe but their mem bandwidth is not that much) we are seeing ultra low powered CPU's put into 12in sub-notebooks with on die memory controllers.. This is the single most advantageous feature of the athlon64. This is also packed into the Turion. This integrated memory controller means there is no exchange with an off die chip soldered onto the mobo (which adds several fold latency to every memory request and write). Instead, the CPU talks directly to main memory. This reduces memory latency to a fraction of intel's and older athlonXP laptops. and since latency is reduced significantly (im talking several times lower than the fastest centrino's memory controller) and memory efficiency is increased, you get much more memory bandwidth on top of all the above advantages.
It has already been shown in every reviewer's benchmarks that memory intensive applications run significantly faster on athlon64's than any other platform (including Intel P4 EE) This is due to raw bandwidth and raw quickness (latency)
Now, we can all sit here and say that the chip is capable of calculating 64 bit numbers without having to break it down, and that it is capable of running more than 4GB ram, and that it has more general purpose registers (which aren't taken advantage of when running winXP 32 btw) and that it has shed a lot of legacy logic which is implemented in microcode instead (like older stuff DOS uses)
But in the end it is the memory controller which is the real improvement with athlon64. The 64bit-ness of the chip, and all those other features will have their time to shine.. Just not in the near future (the lifetime of a new laptop you might buy this year)
why do you nitpick cynical and sarcastic statements? You act as if I actually believe George Bush INVENTED that phrase... You also act as if I have never heard of Budism.
I hate to break it to you buddy, only a right wing christian fundamentalist (aka hypocrite) would use the words I used and be obvilious of what you are saying. There are a lot of them out there, but I am not one of them (I thought that was obvious in my post).
BTW: How do i "clearly" not understand IP rights? These people are going to court over it. Apple is clearly on the defensive of an IP lawsuit. How does saying "blatant abuse of their IP rights" have ANYTHING to do with me not understanding IP? This court case is OBVIOUSLY out of your league of understanding if you can say I don't understand IP.
Now, does this have anything to do with how YOU understand IP laws? Or how you agree or disagree with them? Because MY statement was clear and accurate and Apple IS blatantly abusing other people's IP rights. Whether or not you personally agree with them having those rights is another story altogether.
buy.com has been storing your information on their servers for years before. All you had to do was login with a username and password. your CC and address and perferred shipping method and everything already stored...
there are several other companies which have done the same thing in the past... it really isn't something new or innovating.
Amen. Apple has been asking for this one for YEARS. Now the big one finally came back to bite them. Apple is the king of BS IP Lawsuits. Now it is time to watch them crash and burn... At 12% of their iTMS revenue stream, and the RIAA upping the wholesale price of their songs, looks like 1.99 or maybe even 2.99 per song within the next year or so... Heh. Its not a good time to be an iPod owner..
Glad I saved my money for a flash based player which has no DRM restrictions attached to its loading program(which is a USB mass storage device) and for half the price and twice the features, better quality sound, and immeasureably more rugged.
That Apple already caved in when they licensed 1-Click shopping.
That was only the begining. They caved in once, now they are a target. It is their own fault...look at them going crazy sueing journalists because they are (LEGALLY I might add) protecting their sources. There is no end to apple's foolishness. Maybe this will be the nail in their coffin. (I wish)
Its about time Apple has a taste of their own medacine... Maybe one of these days they will realize that harm done against legitimate rights will bring ten fold the harm into their own house.
I would like to take this moment to say a big Thank You to the companies who are standing up against Apple's blatant abuse of their IP rights. I guess we should have seen this coming. It was only a matter of time before the Karma came back to bite them in the ass. Not to steal a quote from George Bush but I can't resist: Bring it on!
The fact remains that NO sync software should be required... like _EVERY_ _OTHER_ _PLAYER_ out there which comes up as a mass storage device and you can load mp3's directly... But no, apple had to come up with some PROPRIETARY way to load mp3's onto the player, only supported by iTunes(and musicma[bi]tch + 3rd party hax), in order to get them to play. This is the problem. You are acting like it is NORMAL for an mp3 player to _REQUIRE_ proprietary loaders in order to use them. It is NOT normal. _NOBODY_ else does this.
And screw musicmatch.. that program is trash and everyone knows it. You bring it up like it is the "great alternative" when it is NOTHING of the sort. It makes me roll on the floor and laff when I hear someone make such a silly claim.
"Actually, it's just that Apple has posted so many changes that it's taking a while for the developers to port them to Konquerer"
Actually, its not. The KHTML developers have already given up on importing the apple changes. they are too mangled and they have already contacted apple and they refuse to cooperate in sending patches that are useful. It was a lot of promise for a while, until they made this announcement... just months later the KDE core developers decided to slowly move Gecko into KDE as the primary html renderer. It is likely that KHTML will die a slow death over the next few years.
Grandparent was talking about iTunes. that is what this thread is about...
besides, itunes music service also requires itunes. They are one in the same. iTMS is just the music store part of iTunes. You can't say they are different products.
The fact remains that iPods require iTunes to install music into the iPod (barring hacked unapproved 3rd party apps, which this thread is not about)
You forgot to mention that with fairplay + iTunes, if you burn a CD, and then rip it to mp3, you lose a significant amount of quality. Encoding to one codec, then re-encoding to another codec has serious detremintal effects on the quality of music. It is just as bad or worse than making a clone of a clone back when you were trading tapes.
"Have you not seen how many small, portable, hard drive based mp3 players exist? I would argue there that by making the market profitable, Apple has encouraged competition."
I'm sorry, but hard drive players existed almost a full YEAR before apple came out witht he iPod. They were profitable, and they were popular. Apple fed on their popularity by making the iPod and then putting it on TV. This is not innovation. They copied innovation.
"Have you not seen how many music stores now exist? I would also argue that by making the market viable, Apple has encouraged competition."
Before iTMS, there were already several music stores in the works. Also, it was only a natural progression of the music industry that EVERYONE had already called for. iTMS clearly benefited from the iPod tv commercials, considering that ipods ONLY work with iTunes. To this date, iPods only work with iTunes... You can't really come close to being accurate by saying it was an innovation. It was a copy of what was already out there, only done "the apple way". You would be surprised at how unpopular iTunes really is when it comes to non iTunes users. Your argument can be used just as easilly for walmart music and buymusic.com and real and musicmatch.
"Have you not seen Apple's adoption of Open Source software? I would argue that by making Open Source profitable, that Apple has injected new life into the open source movement;"
You can't really say apple has injected new life into the open source movement. For one, apple didn't make "open source" profitable. They used opensource software, forked it, change it to be useless to the origional projects, and then sold it. the forked code is no longer useful to anyone but apple. This has nothing to do with opensource other than the fact that that is the base they started with. They have not contributed any manpower to any of the projects. they have not cooperated with any of the maintainers of any of the projects. and they have not submitted any significant working patches back to any of the projects.
SCO has done more to boost the open source movement than apple. At least they give it more publicity.
GCC, KHTML (Konqueror web browser), et al are NOT benefiting from apple fixes.
As countless previous posters have already proven and posted and as countless project maintainers to the above projects have already said, apple changes are useless and cannot be put back into the main project. They mangle the code.
Also, the first part of your post is just silly. iPod doesn't play MP3's without first going through iTunes. So telling me that iTunes and iPod aren't closely tied is just plain RIDICULOUS. you simply cannnot install mp3's into your iPod without iTunes the program (unless you use a hacked program to load them in)
Talk about telling it how it is... Just look at Safari web browser. They forked Konqueror and now they have mangeled the code so bad that the konq maintainers can't even get the fixes back into their main trunk.
Sure, apple posts their changes on their developer site... it is GPL afterall, but now unless the Konq authors decided to base their distribution off the safari browser, it would be impossible for the developers to bring in the improvements apple has made...
And since apple refuses to work with the Konq developers as a team, and instead does their own work in solitary, there is no chance for any of apple's code to come into other projects (at least not in the near future)
Until you can sync a wireless PDA using Palm or pocketPC to a calendaring service using a wifi PDA and not going through your desktop system then this whole "calendaring" services crap is just a buncha hype.
Much less all those useless calendars in the newer phones which are supposedly compatible with iCal..
too bad there isn't a single calendaring server available for businesses or organizations to use which could meet this demand.
It all depends. I can't stand it when people think you don't need to be technically inclined to run the show. It minimises the need artificially. I have said it once and I'll say it again. If the manager isn't technically inclined, he ought to be willing to become. Likewise, if the technically inclined isnt' a good manager (and is being pushed into it) he ought to be willing to try to become. This applies to all jobs. If you manage an IT team, project, or organization, and you aren't willing to learn your project, architecture, approach, and essential technical details of your products or projects, then you have absolutely NO business managing said organization, team, or project.
That said, I personally think it is a waste of time to hire someone with no technical background to manage an IT team or organization.. no matter what his busines sence entails. Maybe hire him on as a consultant with power, but giving some big wig with management/personelle/vision skills into an organization with no ability/desire to learn the project is a recipe for a huge letdown. In _ALL_ circumstances.
I have no problem with hiring upper management without the technical experience. I do however have a problem with them becoming a technical liability at the cost of the entire workforce due to them making the wrong and incompetant decisions. How this applies to CEO's is IMO just the same. A CEO of a company which is doing technical work cannot progress their company if he does not see the marketplace as competitors' leaders do. And no non-experienced CEO has this ability without the required experience. Period.
I realize there is female stigma in every job, But I was only trying to say that (from my experience in several places) there is no IT stigma for females.. Everything you mentioned can be applied to every other job out there except serving food or other female dominated jobs. No offence, but there will always be a female stigma for a job which has a female minority. That is just how the current social practices in the US work. But I don't buy it is an IT stigma. You take an office of IT workers and put 51% female and you won't get those issues.
Personally I blame it on fundamentalist "christians" that seem to be dominating certain social circles. The males grow up to believe males are dominate over females in all walks of life. The females are raised to know nothing of the sort because it is hidden from them. They always seem to be the ones ignoring women (except when they want something from them) and generally talking down to them. Believe it or not they are a very large portion of the US workforce.
I currently work in a fast paced IT job where none of the people are christian and females make up slightly less than half. None of this stigma happens and the females don't get their job done by lifing the skirt or smiling pretty or smelling good. And when a male comes into our office and needs help, they have no problem going to whoever stands up and helps them first. Nobody treats them differently through email or IM or over the phone (except the obvious male client female employee interactions which still yet will always exist when you have that type of male client in any job, IT or not)
I have worked in several other IT jobs where the female stigma is sevear, such as a grocery store. Try working there to see the female stigma. It is blatant and ridiculous.
Then again I live in middle US so my viewpoint could be skewed. And this coming from a male, I'm sorry if you think I'm minimizing the issue but honestly I don't see how females can say there is a stigma specific to IT when it isn't related to IT at all IMO... I'm not trying to bad talk you or your viewpoint so please don't take it that way...
If that is the case then apple had better watch out! Because the PC game sales is only beat out in sales of office programs and operating systems.
How can you say that their target audience is ZERO gamers? It is the single largest market underneath word processing in the entire PC software industry. If they don't target gamers you could have fooled me when steve jobbs is ALWAYS demoing futuristic 3d games on the powermac G5.
It isn't really a stigma once you get into it. Usually they are popular girls. I have to say I have known fewer "geeky" girls in IT than the popular type... It really all depends on the person.
If there is one thing I can say for certain, it is that the female IT stigma is definately non-existant. I'm sure the fear of it exists, but in practice it doesn't. I believe most of the fear of the stigma comes from females that don't know what they are doing and make their way up for other reasons. I know this happens in IT more than other places. And it usually isn't because of a lack of qualified girls, but a lack of hiring experienced girls.
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I'm sorry I don't have hard independant data to back up my claims... I do have a lot of experience with them and have run my own benchmarks.. (I'm mostly talking about sequential reads here, as seek is not that important on an average user's computer)
I'm just a hardware enthusiast trying to bust out a myth that i have always had a prob with..
Those benchmarks don't make sence.... My origional argument talks about 1) Sequential reads and 2) Seek times...
I never claimed that the 5400RPM drive is faster in ALL respects... But in sequential reading a 5400RPM drive is as fast or faster than the same size desktop 7200RPM drive simply because of raw data density
This tomshardware review doesn't touch on these points..
Yes.. you can take the advice of the parent poster... but let me explain a couple things which dictate that 7200RPM laptop drives are not always better....
1) Drive density: a laptop drive at 80GB is roughly twice as dense (bytes per square inch) than an 80GB desktop hard drive
2) Head travel time: In a 2.5in laptop drive, the hard drive head does not have to traverse more than ~1in (from center to outter track) of the drive to do any given seek. A desktop drive must traverse roughly 50% more distance (and time) on random seeks
3) Heat: 5400RPM drives produce significantly less heat than 7200RPM drives.. on top of this, a 5400RPM drive built with the same quality as a 7200RPM drive has significantly longer average lifetime.
4) Noise: Equivilently built drives one running at 5400RPM and one at 7200RPM. The 7200RPM is significantly louder and produces high pitched noise (nowadays, all laptop drives are hydro bearings so you can't cop out and say that a cheaper 5400RPM drive will use cheaper ball bearings... like you used to be able to say)
5) battery life: less heat == less watts == less power consumption. Remember that the hard drive is the second largest drain on your battery when talking about centrino/turion systems (LCD is the first). In a P4 laptop then the CPU uses more power than the drive. a 5400RPM or 4200RPM drive has faster spin up times. It has lower sustained power consumption, and will generally give you a longer battery life on the order of an half to full hour or so in a midsized notebook using default battery.
6) Data integrity/ruggedness: a slower spinning hard drive will not have as detremental of an affect on your data if the drive is bumped during reads/writes. Think of it as hitting a large speed bump going 54MPH vs going 72MPH.
Now some of this needs explanation: (1) tells about drive density. What this means is that a 7200RPM 3.5in drive is about as fast as a 5400RPM 2.5in drive in sustained reads/writes. (2) tells about seek time (latency). A laptop drive at 5400RPM has a faster seek than a desktop at 5400RPM. I will admit that a 7200RPM desktop drive has faster seeks, but not significantly so. A faster spinning drive can seek faster only when the head is in place and it must wait for the drive to rotate to the corect angle in order to read the requested data. It does NOT make the head travel faster. For this reason high RPM speeds are good and well for seek time... but using smaller platters is also a very good way to reduce seek time. Not to mention that loading programs and loading large video files or photoshop files, etc... are not highly seek dependant. They are sequential read dependant. Database accesses, or accessing a badly fragmented hard drive are cases where faster seek will help you out. But in a laptop system where you are loading programs and files and keep your disk defragmented it will do you very little good.
Now.. I'm not saying that 10K and 15K rpm drives are bad... they are great for seek time and they are great for high transaction/sec databases... What they are overkill for is desktop systems which the user would typically be loading programs or transferring files from one disk to another or loading large files... Because most 10K drives are around 36GB or 74GB... and they are actually marginally _SLOWER_ at sequential read/write than cheaper and larger 7200RPM drives on the desktop....
now.. Apply all of the above to a laptop 5400RPM drive vs the standard desktop drive of 7200RPM.. I hope you are able to see what I'm getting at. a 7200RPM drive in a laptop is significantly faster than an equivilently sized desktop drive at 7200RPMs... Anybody who says they feel a slowdown on 5400RPM laptop drives vs. a 7200RPM desktop drive is either using very low GB laptop drive, or very large GB desktop drive, or is just fooling themselves... In general, a 5400RPM laptop drive performs approximately the same as a 7200RPM desktop drive in most end user desktop applications...
your are correct. There are tons of compiler optimizations that can be done witht he athlon64 that cannot be done with any previous version of the x86 ISA... That being said, compiler technology isn't really taking advantage of this yet...
The real advantage to having an athlon64 in a laptop is power savings and raw memory bandwidth and ultra low latency...
For the first time ever (aside from crusoe but their mem bandwidth is not that much) we are seeing ultra low powered CPU's put into 12in sub-notebooks with on die memory controllers.. This is the single most advantageous feature of the athlon64. This is also packed into the Turion. This integrated memory controller means there is no exchange with an off die chip soldered onto the mobo (which adds several fold latency to every memory request and write). Instead, the CPU talks directly to main memory. This reduces memory latency to a fraction of intel's and older athlonXP laptops. and since latency is reduced significantly (im talking several times lower than the fastest centrino's memory controller) and memory efficiency is increased, you get much more memory bandwidth on top of all the above advantages.
It has already been shown in every reviewer's benchmarks that memory intensive applications run significantly faster on athlon64's than any other platform (including Intel P4 EE) This is due to raw bandwidth and raw quickness (latency)
Now, we can all sit here and say that the chip is capable of calculating 64 bit numbers without having to break it down, and that it is capable of running more than 4GB ram, and that it has more general purpose registers (which aren't taken advantage of when running winXP 32 btw) and that it has shed a lot of legacy logic which is implemented in microcode instead (like older stuff DOS uses)
But in the end it is the memory controller which is the real improvement with athlon64. The 64bit-ness of the chip, and all those other features will have their time to shine.. Just not in the near future (the lifetime of a new laptop you might buy this year)
You aren't LINUX TORVALDS!!!!! So it doesn't matter :)
why do you nitpick cynical and sarcastic statements? You act as if I actually believe George Bush INVENTED that phrase... You also act as if I have never heard of Budism.
I hate to break it to you buddy, only a right wing christian fundamentalist (aka hypocrite) would use the words I used and be obvilious of what you are saying. There are a lot of them out there, but I am not one of them (I thought that was obvious in my post).
BTW: How do i "clearly" not understand IP rights? These people are going to court over it. Apple is clearly on the defensive of an IP lawsuit. How does saying "blatant abuse of their IP rights" have ANYTHING to do with me not understanding IP? This court case is OBVIOUSLY out of your league of understanding if you can say I don't understand IP.
Now, does this have anything to do with how YOU understand IP laws? Or how you agree or disagree with them? Because MY statement was clear and accurate and Apple IS blatantly abusing other people's IP rights. Whether or not you personally agree with them having those rights is another story altogether.
Well:
Shuffle has no screen so you can't view which song your on and skip to your favorite songs.
Shuffle doesn't have as high a quality Codec
Shuffle doesn't have digital output for use in stero systems
Shuffle doesn't support OGG playback
Shuffle doesn't have expandable memory slot via SD memory
Shuffle doesn't have an FM Radio
SHuffle doesn't have an FM Transmitter
Shuffle doesn't have a voice recorder (works well I might add)
Shuffle doesn't have line in recording
(All the same can be said about the iPod Mini as well except the screen issue)
So it doesn't have just twice the features.. it has (as far as I have countes so far) over NINE times the features... (the ipod ONLY does playback)
buy.com has been storing your information on their servers for years before. All you had to do was login with a username and password. your CC and address and perferred shipping method and everything already stored...
there are several other companies which have done the same thing in the past... it really isn't something new or innovating.
Amen. Apple has been asking for this one for YEARS. Now the big one finally came back to bite them. Apple is the king of BS IP Lawsuits. Now it is time to watch them crash and burn... At 12% of their iTMS revenue stream, and the RIAA upping the wholesale price of their songs, looks like 1.99 or maybe even 2.99 per song within the next year or so... Heh. Its not a good time to be an iPod owner..
Glad I saved my money for a flash based player which has no DRM restrictions attached to its loading program(which is a USB mass storage device) and for half the price and twice the features, better quality sound, and immeasureably more rugged.
That Apple already caved in when they licensed 1-Click shopping.
That was only the begining. They caved in once, now they are a target. It is their own fault...look at them going crazy sueing journalists because they are (LEGALLY I might add) protecting their sources. There is no end to apple's foolishness. Maybe this will be the nail in their coffin. (I wish)
Its about time Apple has a taste of their own medacine... Maybe one of these days they will realize that harm done against legitimate rights will bring ten fold the harm into their own house.
I would like to take this moment to say a big Thank You to the companies who are standing up against Apple's blatant abuse of their IP rights. I guess we should have seen this coming. It was only a matter of time before the Karma came back to bite them in the ass. Not to steal a quote from George Bush but I can't resist: Bring it on!
Not too ironic...
The MBA is still going to McDonalds... He must not be rich.
The fact remains that NO sync software should be required... like _EVERY_ _OTHER_ _PLAYER_ out there which comes up as a mass storage device and you can load mp3's directly... But no, apple had to come up with some PROPRIETARY way to load mp3's onto the player, only supported by iTunes(and musicma[bi]tch + 3rd party hax), in order to get them to play. This is the problem. You are acting like it is NORMAL for an mp3 player to _REQUIRE_ proprietary loaders in order to use them. It is NOT normal. _NOBODY_ else does this.
And screw musicmatch.. that program is trash and everyone knows it. You bring it up like it is the "great alternative" when it is NOTHING of the sort. It makes me roll on the floor and laff when I hear someone make such a silly claim.
"Actually, it's just that Apple has posted so many changes that it's taking a while for the developers to port them to Konquerer"
Actually, its not. The KHTML developers have already given up on importing the apple changes. they are too mangled and they have already contacted apple and they refuse to cooperate in sending patches that are useful. It was a lot of promise for a while, until they made this announcement... just months later the KDE core developers decided to slowly move Gecko into KDE as the primary html renderer. It is likely that KHTML will die a slow death over the next few years.
Grandparent was talking about iTunes. that is what this thread is about...
besides, itunes music service also requires itunes. They are one in the same. iTMS is just the music store part of iTunes. You can't say they are different products.
The fact remains that iPods require iTunes to install music into the iPod (barring hacked unapproved 3rd party apps, which this thread is not about)
You forgot to mention that with fairplay + iTunes, if you burn a CD, and then rip it to mp3, you lose a significant amount of quality. Encoding to one codec, then re-encoding to another codec has serious detremintal effects on the quality of music. It is just as bad or worse than making a clone of a clone back when you were trading tapes.
"Have you not seen how many small, portable, hard drive based mp3 players exist? I would argue there that by making the market profitable, Apple has encouraged competition."
I'm sorry, but hard drive players existed almost a full YEAR before apple came out witht he iPod. They were profitable, and they were popular. Apple fed on their popularity by making the iPod and then putting it on TV. This is not innovation. They copied innovation.
"Have you not seen how many music stores now exist? I would also argue that by making the market viable, Apple has encouraged competition."
Before iTMS, there were already several music stores in the works. Also, it was only a natural progression of the music industry that EVERYONE had already called for. iTMS clearly benefited from the iPod tv commercials, considering that ipods ONLY work with iTunes. To this date, iPods only work with iTunes... You can't really come close to being accurate by saying it was an innovation. It was a copy of what was already out there, only done "the apple way". You would be surprised at how unpopular iTunes really is when it comes to non iTunes users. Your argument can be used just as easilly for walmart music and buymusic.com and real and musicmatch.
"Have you not seen Apple's adoption of Open Source software? I would argue that by making Open Source profitable, that Apple has injected new life into the open source movement;"
You can't really say apple has injected new life into the open source movement. For one, apple didn't make "open source" profitable. They used opensource software, forked it, change it to be useless to the origional projects, and then sold it. the forked code is no longer useful to anyone but apple. This has nothing to do with opensource other than the fact that that is the base they started with. They have not contributed any manpower to any of the projects. they have not cooperated with any of the maintainers of any of the projects. and they have not submitted any significant working patches back to any of the projects.
SCO has done more to boost the open source movement than apple. At least they give it more publicity.
GCC, KHTML (Konqueror web browser), et al are NOT benefiting from apple fixes.
As countless previous posters have already proven and posted and as countless project maintainers to the above projects have already said, apple changes are useless and cannot be put back into the main project. They mangle the code.
Also, the first part of your post is just silly. iPod doesn't play MP3's without first going through iTunes. So telling me that iTunes and iPod aren't closely tied is just plain RIDICULOUS. you simply cannnot install mp3's into your iPod without iTunes the program (unless you use a hacked program to load them in)
Talk about telling it how it is... Just look at Safari web browser. They forked Konqueror and now they have mangeled the code so bad that the konq maintainers can't even get the fixes back into their main trunk.
Sure, apple posts their changes on their developer site... it is GPL afterall, but now unless the Konq authors decided to base their distribution off the safari browser, it would be impossible for the developers to bring in the improvements apple has made...
And since apple refuses to work with the Konq developers as a team, and instead does their own work in solitary, there is no chance for any of apple's code to come into other projects (at least not in the near future)
Until you can sync a wireless PDA using Palm or pocketPC to a calendaring service using a wifi PDA and not going through your desktop system then this whole "calendaring" services crap is just a buncha hype.
Much less all those useless calendars in the newer phones which are supposedly compatible with iCal..
too bad there isn't a single calendaring server available for businesses or organizations to use which could meet this demand.
It all depends. I can't stand it when people think you don't need to be technically inclined to run the show. It minimises the need artificially. I have said it once and I'll say it again. If the manager isn't technically inclined, he ought to be willing to become. Likewise, if the technically inclined isnt' a good manager (and is being pushed into it) he ought to be willing to try to become. This applies to all jobs. If you manage an IT team, project, or organization, and you aren't willing to learn your project, architecture, approach, and essential technical details of your products or projects, then you have absolutely NO business managing said organization, team, or project.
That said, I personally think it is a waste of time to hire someone with no technical background to manage an IT team or organization.. no matter what his busines sence entails. Maybe hire him on as a consultant with power, but giving some big wig with management/personelle/vision skills into an organization with no ability/desire to learn the project is a recipe for a huge letdown. In _ALL_ circumstances.
I have no problem with hiring upper management without the technical experience. I do however have a problem with them becoming a technical liability at the cost of the entire workforce due to them making the wrong and incompetant decisions. How this applies to CEO's is IMO just the same. A CEO of a company which is doing technical work cannot progress their company if he does not see the marketplace as competitors' leaders do. And no non-experienced CEO has this ability without the required experience. Period.
Actually, 2700 only has 2 significant digits..
If you said 2701 then you would be correct.
I realize there is female stigma in every job, But I was only trying to say that (from my experience in several places) there is no IT stigma for females.. Everything you mentioned can be applied to every other job out there except serving food or other female dominated jobs. No offence, but there will always be a female stigma for a job which has a female minority. That is just how the current social practices in the US work. But I don't buy it is an IT stigma. You take an office of IT workers and put 51% female and you won't get those issues.
Personally I blame it on fundamentalist "christians" that seem to be dominating certain social circles. The males grow up to believe males are dominate over females in all walks of life. The females are raised to know nothing of the sort because it is hidden from them. They always seem to be the ones ignoring women (except when they want something from them) and generally talking down to them. Believe it or not they are a very large portion of the US workforce.
I currently work in a fast paced IT job where none of the people are christian and females make up slightly less than half. None of this stigma happens and the females don't get their job done by lifing the skirt or smiling pretty or smelling good. And when a male comes into our office and needs help, they have no problem going to whoever stands up and helps them first. Nobody treats them differently through email or IM or over the phone (except the obvious male client female employee interactions which still yet will always exist when you have that type of male client in any job, IT or not)
I have worked in several other IT jobs where the female stigma is sevear, such as a grocery store. Try working there to see the female stigma. It is blatant and ridiculous.
Then again I live in middle US so my viewpoint could be skewed. And this coming from a male, I'm sorry if you think I'm minimizing the issue but honestly I don't see how females can say there is a stigma specific to IT when it isn't related to IT at all IMO... I'm not trying to bad talk you or your viewpoint so please don't take it that way...
If that is the case then apple had better watch out! Because the PC game sales is only beat out in sales of office programs and operating systems.
How can you say that their target audience is ZERO gamers? It is the single largest market underneath word processing in the entire PC software industry. If they don't target gamers you could have fooled me when steve jobbs is ALWAYS demoing futuristic 3d games on the powermac G5.
I know several women in IT...
It isn't really a stigma once you get into it. Usually they are popular girls. I have to say I have known fewer "geeky" girls in IT than the popular type... It really all depends on the person.
If there is one thing I can say for certain, it is that the female IT stigma is definately non-existant. I'm sure the fear of it exists, but in practice it doesn't. I believe most of the fear of the stigma comes from females that don't know what they are doing and make their way up for other reasons. I know this happens in IT more than other places. And it usually isn't because of a lack of qualified girls, but a lack of hiring experienced girls.