As far as I can tell, all iTunes did was have better advertising than any other tool. Anytime anyone says X brought something to the masses, it just meant they hit the masses over the head with it more than anyone else.
Anybody who wanted to rip CDs befoer iTunes on windows just needed to type RIP CDs into GOOGLE, and likely would have found CDex for instance, and many commercial tools as well. I find it sad how most of the world seems incapable of finding something without 50 loops of a TV commercial or the equivelent. Now, that the iPod was what brought MP3 players into the mainstream and gave someone the impetus to rip CDs then is no real testament to iTunes - it's the same as claiming Windows brought computing to the masses . . no, it's what came with the hardware.
I could go on as to why I find iTunes supposed usibility (on the PC anyway) to be a lot of hot air, but whatever. Of course, it may just be that I don't quite get the "Apple" way, and so many of the UI conventions require explaining for me.
And the big problem is something that MS probably ought have come up with 10 years ago, like a search box for stuff in your start menu, turns out to not be quite what I expected, and I already have a program to do that in XP.
The eye candy is nice, but mostly a waste of resources - plus the major difference is retraining time spent finding things which seem to have been moved for no good reason.
You know what I really liked about Vista so far? The Mahjong game... But not worth all the differences.
At least with XP they got something right - the ability to get the classic interface back. And that is possible with Vista too - to a point, I didn't see a classic version of the control panel, for instince - but I may have missed it.
Wouldn't someone figure out how this works and write a proxomitron filter, userJS and or Greasemonky script to kill it, forget about those who care and run with JS off and turn it on in site specific prefs, use NoScript or something similar in proxomitron?
I disagree. Everything I've ever learned states you should reference as close to primary sources as is practical. So there would be no reason to reference something else you wrote, you'd reference whatever is applicable from the references of the other paper on this one - otherwise you're just making people run around more for no good reason. Of course, if you want to say "for further reading on related topics" etc, that's fine, but not required.
Specifically, if I wrote a paper last year on topic A referencing study B, and this year I'm writing another paper that has a mention of Topic A again, I would expect to reference study B in this paper as well.
Even if you're copying your text for part of this paper from your older paper - it shouldn't need a reference. You can't plagerize yourself, just like you can't violate your own copyright.
Well, I would think that wireless that has decent antennas which consumer grade products get ~ 50% signal at 600 feet unobstructed, and usually 100 feet with walls and such with supported ad hoc and autoconnect to unencrypted access points + auto connect with predetermined keys for the emergency connections might do well.
Don't use the wireless infrastructure for security, layer a VPN over it so you can also jump on other non secured access points and such, and still hit the server securily. Something like Hamachi embedded that will tunnel/relay out through basically any internet connection.
This would likely be pretty fault tolerant - one access point goes - no biggie, hit the next nearest. No infrastructure points within ~ 600 feet? Ad hoc across a water brigade like chain of your comrades radio's till someone is near an infrastructure point.
No infrastructure points withing range of that? Well, adhoc across the entire mesh to everyone near enough to everyone else - on something like 9/11 that's still going to cover a pretty large area.
Want to make it even better? Have infrastructure points on every patrol car with a 3G uplink connection, or better, a satallite uplink. With buffering, it might not be instant, but it'd get through better than there being nothing there.
Again, at the armageddon level disaster, you might not get an instant turn around, it might even be 10-20 minutes round trip through slow links and such, but even that has got to be better than no chance of getting a message through at all. And most of the time, there would be enough infrastructure and mesh to have the backbone of this be at at least 54Mbps, if not quickly hitting 100Mbps/1Gbps UTP/fiber at the access points. Worst case would be a satallite / 3G uplink which is ~400Kbps IIRC. Assuming decent compression, I've had decent voice go over 1.5Kbps with no jitters (drag out some old MS NetMeeting modem codecs) wich would mean a nominal 200 CONCURRENT communications over one squadcar satallite uplink with "dedicated bandwidth" and likely 350+ using packet switching, forget about texting.
Oh, I don't have a Mac, I'm just pointing some things out.
And all the answers you gave are good ones, ones I'd give to help people use Opera. But they're not exactly obvious to many people (the people who go to Best Buy looking for techncial advice, and arguably the people targetted by these ads). And, they're not easy out of the box stuff.
It's the same as on Windows - if you buy a Mac for an out of the box, no hassle experiance - how is finding out (Quote user "I got a Mac to fix the broken browser - I STILL have to download and do something with a different one on the Mac??? Why did I bother?")about extra software you have to download or buy to do stuff any different than the PC?
"I now need a console for games? I had games on my PC." etc...
I need to buy a different stick for my Mac? Why doesn't it just work like all my friends PCs?
Etc...
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's not likely to be just plug it in and go either. It's still a computer after all.
And it doesn't help when you go to the local "Computer Geeks" AKA GeekSquad/FireDog/whatever and they say, "I don't know if that works with a Mac. - Is there a local Apple store somewhere?" And you can't get support if you need it unless you go to the Apple store.
Re:Only mean spirited if you are reading between l
on
New "Get a Mac" TV ads
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· Score: 1
I like the ads, I find several hilarious. I also don't use Macs, and don't really have a desire to, as I'm a techie.
There's one issue with all of this, and that is that Macs aren't quite as nice in some ways as portrayed (and it's not their fault) - that is compatibility.
Certain things work... like certain things work in Linux... like Most web sites work in Opera (my browser of choice, and I think I have a good feel for the frustration at a smaller level than a Mac user).
So, you have a Mac, no spyware. Great! But your online bank requires IE6 or newer. Bummer. Can't do my banking (you'd be suprised at the number of banks that require IE for "security". Read the Opera forums someday.).
I'm at school and I need to get hooked up to the wireless router my roommate put in, with secure easy setup(tm). But that CD doesn't work in my Mac, so now I have to get someone to do the WPA2 setup manually. I wander down to the local Geek Squad (tm). Mmm, they don't do Macs (some do, some don't).
While I'm at Best Buy, I thought I'd look at some games for my computer - but they don't sell Mac games. Sucks.
I got one of those awesome new flash drives with the cool security U3 software, and . . . it doesn't work on my Mac.(The software that is).
So, you'll be able to do out of the box what it comes with, but you'd be suprised at the frustration and time spent making sure it will work with other things. And, just like with using Opera, you'd think you could do what you HAD to do with it, but then the little gotchas start to catch up. Network effect in a big way.
I hope Macs do catch on more though, as it will make it better for the users as they get bigger, and I can hope that when website makers start to realise that they need sites that work in IE, Firefox, Safari and various mobile phones and maybe consoles, they'll just write to standards, and Opera will work too.
Well, most end users wouldn't put it like that, but they might notice the side effects of idle use - that is, fan noise (is it higher at 15% use than 1% use, the power use (especially with laptops, and especially if whatever is eating 15% CPU is also hitting the disk so it can't spin down), etc...
a) find the one CD/movie you like, out of the 100 the masses like, out of the 500 the big media companies chose, or b) find the one CD/move you like, out of the hundreds or even thousands of unfiltered independent ventures out there.
Actually, this is a technical problem that is partly solved by things like pandora.com and MusicIP.com
Plus there are cool programs out now that help do that. For instance there is MusicIP (horrible name I know) that will scan your songs, do a musical fingerprint on them and tell you if there are duplicates based on how it sounds! Then while you listen to songs in it's interface, it suggests songs that sound like the ones you already like that are free to download legally.
Of course, if you are paranoid, you may only want to use this on songs you ripped from CDs you own, and don't share out on P2P.
Except, in most states you can now take the Car back and demand a refund or that the dealership fix it, you know, within a reasonable period of time.
You don't get that with software. This is my biggest gripe - if it doesn't work right, or at all, or just sucks and I don't like it - I can't get a refund. I might be able to get a new copy of the exact same thing, but it's likely to fail in the same way unless it was a bad or damaged disc.
This is the major difference for a lot of software and games. Music you can hear on the radio, and listen to in the store before buying. Movies you can rent. You can test drive a car.
But PC Games? It's like playing craps - you usually can't even try it out till you bought it, and you can't take it back after trying it out for a refund in a day or two if it sucks. And there's no warrenty on the thing. Actually, it's the same for all PC software.
So I like shareware, I at least get a little time to see if it's going to FUBAR my system, or crash a lot, or do what I want. I've bought a lot of shareware recently as I can see if it's going to be decent - Clipmate, Directory Opus.
I'd feel a lot safer buying a game for the PC if I could take it back like the laser tag system I bought that sucked. But with the equivelent game, my choice is to uninstall it? Yay, that's like I could stop driving the car. Great - what about the money I paid for a POS? If I could take the game back to the store 2 days after buying it and say "This sucks, it doesn't run well even though I have over the minimum requirements, crashes all the time, and the gameplay is inane (Warlords 4?), give me my money back, here's the POS!" and get a refund, we'd be talking.
I don't believe that the Internet has changed the world so much in the last 10 years that kids need the internet for doing their school work. Are the even any reputable essay sources you can use on the Internet without paying?
You'd be incorrect. First, even when I was back in Highschool ~ 7 years ago, it was common for there to be a requirement for one source for a paper to be web based. Of course, back then, that wasn't allowed to be your main source, but it was thrown in to get you used to figuring out credible web sources.
By the time I was finishing College ~ 2 years ago, most papers were done soley with web sources, and some of the library databases. In fact, for several classes, due to age restrictions - that is, sources had to be within the last 3 years or so, and the state of the library (SUNY school, not bad, but not rich), the only choice was web and database sources. I imagine similar things will trickle down to highschool soon enough if they haven't already.
Not to mention, the average Highschool library may not be that amazing, compared to the sources available online (primarily database sites paid for by the school system, but also Wikipedia and straight up journal sites).
And I'm not really sure it's that anonymous, at least compared to the more well known Freenet or I2P or TOR. And it seems more difficult to use for trusted VPNs than Hamachi.
Consider the costs of blocking malware downloads -- which as we all know is easier said than done. And the cost of removing the stuff that gets downloaded anyway. Some of it can take hours or days to exorcise.
That's just not doing it right. At the least, there ought to be a sysprepped image ready to redeploy in under 40 minutes on any borked access terminal.
Better would be just deep freezing the machine.
Best likely would be a Knoppix CD that's used to provide the web access, and no local HD or nothing installed on it.
Ahh I see - some different methods. I personally use different drives for data or a network share on a RAID server depending on how critical the data is. Then Acronis supports incremental backups, so I do that pretty frequently.
Drive Imaging, say with Acronis True Image - even possibly using the secure zone, is far better than System Restore. Not only does it give you an option for hardware tolerant recovery (that is, the drive can die, and if you imaged to DVD or another drive, you can slot in a new HD and restore), it also gets the entire state of the system. I've never seen it be unable to restore due to software issues, unlike System Restore.
I don't know, I usually only close Opera when I reboot my PC. I mean, it manages memory correctly, and why would I turn it off? I will want/need to reference some web page pretty often, if not just to check on the weather, or slashdot!
To me, it's like having a TV guide and newspaper in one, why would you throw it out (close the browser) when later in the day you'll just want to check it again?
Then again, I'm a person who ENJOYS forums, and commenting on them (well,/.) and at work often have to look up wiki refernece pages or other vendor pages. YM(obviously)V.
Actually, I've gotten it and tried it out. It seems pretty seamless - once you install it. It's not that it's difficult - just extract the zip file to the Trillian Pro\Downloads directory.
Cerulean didn't write this plugin, so it's not restricted by them - the forum is to paying members (as the free version of Trillian doesn't support plugins, so if you haven't bought the pro version, this won't help you anyway) - but the author's site is actually here: http://trillianotr.kittyfox.net/downloads.php
In Trillian, once it's in the plugins dir - the option shows up in the control panel, right with AIM, MSN and whatever plugins you have. There is a GUI for the plugin for creating a key, and for verifying other's keys. It adds a menu to IM windows for OTR options. It also seems to work inside of the built in Trillian Encryption - not sure if I ought to now turn that off.
I have yet to try it with another non-Trillian user, hopefully soon.
Indeed, this is a big issue - it needs to be interoperable. I like to use Trillian, some of my Friends like AIM, others use GAIM... etc. I'd like a secure setup that worked between Trillian and the others!
Why is it cheaper to buy the processor + motherboard then just the damn processor? I already have a 939 pin A64 3500+. I just want to slot in an X2 4400+ or better for a reasonable price. Say $150-$250ish...
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As far as I can tell, all iTunes did was have better advertising than any other tool. Anytime anyone says X brought something to the masses, it just meant they hit the masses over the head with it more than anyone else.
Anybody who wanted to rip CDs befoer iTunes on windows just needed to type RIP CDs into GOOGLE, and likely would have found CDex for instance, and many commercial tools as well. I find it sad how most of the world seems incapable of finding something without 50 loops of a TV commercial or the equivelent. Now, that the iPod was what brought MP3 players into the mainstream and gave someone the impetus to rip CDs then is no real testament to iTunes - it's the same as claiming Windows brought computing to the masses . . no, it's what came with the hardware.
I could go on as to why I find iTunes supposed usibility (on the PC anyway) to be a lot of hot air, but whatever. Of course, it may just be that I don't quite get the "Apple" way, and so many of the UI conventions require explaining for me.
And the big problem is something that MS probably ought have come up with 10 years ago, like a search box for stuff in your start menu, turns out to not be quite what I expected, and I already have a program to do that in XP.
The eye candy is nice, but mostly a waste of resources - plus the major difference is retraining time spent finding things which seem to have been moved for no good reason.
You know what I really liked about Vista so far? The Mahjong game... But not worth all the differences.
At least with XP they got something right - the ability to get the classic interface back. And that is possible with Vista too - to a point, I didn't see a classic version of the control panel, for instince - but I may have missed it.
Wouldn't someone figure out how this works and write a proxomitron filter, userJS and or Greasemonky script to kill it, forget about those who care and run with JS off and turn it on in site specific prefs, use NoScript or something similar in proxomitron?
I disagree. Everything I've ever learned states you should reference as close to primary sources as is practical. So there would be no reason to reference something else you wrote, you'd reference whatever is applicable from the references of the other paper on this one - otherwise you're just making people run around more for no good reason. Of course, if you want to say "for further reading on related topics" etc, that's fine, but not required.
Specifically, if I wrote a paper last year on topic A referencing study B, and this year I'm writing another paper that has a mention of Topic A again, I would expect to reference study B in this paper as well.
Even if you're copying your text for part of this paper from your older paper - it shouldn't need a reference. You can't plagerize yourself, just like you can't violate your own copyright.
I also like this method because it means you have a secured connection wherever the users are with a laptop, not just on the local wireless net.
Well, I would think that wireless that has decent antennas which consumer grade products get ~ 50% signal at 600 feet unobstructed, and usually 100 feet with walls and such with supported ad hoc and autoconnect to unencrypted access points + auto connect with predetermined keys for the emergency connections might do well.
Don't use the wireless infrastructure for security, layer a VPN over it so you can also jump on other non secured access points and such, and still hit the server securily. Something like Hamachi embedded that will tunnel/relay out through basically any internet connection.
This would likely be pretty fault tolerant - one access point goes - no biggie, hit the next nearest. No infrastructure points within ~ 600 feet? Ad hoc across a water brigade like chain of your comrades radio's till someone is near an infrastructure point.
No infrastructure points withing range of that? Well, adhoc across the entire mesh to everyone near enough to everyone else - on something like 9/11 that's still going to cover a pretty large area.
Want to make it even better? Have infrastructure points on every patrol car with a 3G uplink connection, or better, a satallite uplink. With buffering, it might not be instant, but it'd get through better than there being nothing there.
Again, at the armageddon level disaster, you might not get an instant turn around, it might even be 10-20 minutes round trip through slow links and such, but even that has got to be better than no chance of getting a message through at all. And most of the time, there would be enough infrastructure and mesh to have the backbone of this be at at least 54Mbps, if not quickly hitting 100Mbps/1Gbps UTP/fiber at the access points. Worst case would be a satallite / 3G uplink which is ~400Kbps IIRC. Assuming decent compression, I've had decent voice go over 1.5Kbps with no jitters (drag out some old MS NetMeeting modem codecs) wich would mean a nominal 200 CONCURRENT communications over one squadcar satallite uplink with "dedicated bandwidth" and likely 350+ using packet switching, forget about texting.
I love a thing that rewrites the HTML that I recieve - when I'm in control of it, like with proxomitron.
Oh, I don't have a Mac, I'm just pointing some things out.
And all the answers you gave are good ones, ones I'd give to help people use Opera. But they're not exactly obvious to many people (the people who go to Best Buy looking for techncial advice, and arguably the people targetted by these ads). And, they're not easy out of the box stuff.
It's the same as on Windows - if you buy a Mac for an out of the box, no hassle experiance - how is finding out (Quote user "I got a Mac to fix the broken browser - I STILL have to download and do something with a different one on the Mac??? Why did I bother?")about extra software you have to download or buy to do stuff any different than the PC?
"I now need a console for games? I had games on my PC." etc...
I need to buy a different stick for my Mac? Why doesn't it just work like all my friends PCs?
Etc...
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's not likely to be just plug it in and go either. It's still a computer after all.
And it doesn't help when you go to the local "Computer Geeks" AKA GeekSquad/FireDog/whatever and they say, "I don't know if that works with a Mac. - Is there a local Apple store somewhere?" And you can't get support if you need it unless you go to the Apple store.
I like the ads, I find several hilarious. I also don't use Macs, and don't really have a desire to, as I'm a techie.
There's one issue with all of this, and that is that Macs aren't quite as nice in some ways as portrayed (and it's not their fault) - that is compatibility.
Certain things work... like certain things work in Linux... like Most web sites work in Opera (my browser of choice, and I think I have a good feel for the frustration at a smaller level than a Mac user).
So, you have a Mac, no spyware. Great! But your online bank requires IE6 or newer. Bummer. Can't do my banking (you'd be suprised at the number of banks that require IE for "security". Read the Opera forums someday.).
I'm at school and I need to get hooked up to the wireless router my roommate put in, with secure easy setup(tm). But that CD doesn't work in my Mac, so now I have to get someone to do the WPA2 setup manually. I wander down to the local Geek Squad (tm). Mmm, they don't do Macs (some do, some don't).
While I'm at Best Buy, I thought I'd look at some games for my computer - but they don't sell Mac games. Sucks.
I got one of those awesome new flash drives with the cool security U3 software, and . . . it doesn't work on my Mac.(The software that is).
So, you'll be able to do out of the box what it comes with, but you'd be suprised at the frustration and time spent making sure it will work with other things. And, just like with using Opera, you'd think you could do what you HAD to do with it, but then the little gotchas start to catch up. Network effect in a big way.
I hope Macs do catch on more though, as it will make it better for the users as they get bigger, and I can hope that when website makers start to realise that they need sites that work in IE, Firefox, Safari and various mobile phones and maybe consoles, they'll just write to standards, and Opera will work too.
Well, most end users wouldn't put it like that, but they might notice the side effects of idle use - that is, fan noise (is it higher at 15% use than 1% use, the power use (especially with laptops, and especially if whatever is eating 15% CPU is also hitting the disk so it can't spin down), etc...
a) find the one CD/movie you like, out of the 100 the masses like, out of the 500 the big media companies chose, or b) find the one CD/move you like, out of the hundreds or even thousands of unfiltered independent ventures out there.
Actually, this is a technical problem that is partly solved by things like pandora.com and MusicIP.com
Isn't that what MySpace was supposed to be?
Plus there are cool programs out now that help do that. For instance there is MusicIP (horrible name I know) that will scan your songs, do a musical fingerprint on them and tell you if there are duplicates based on how it sounds! Then while you listen to songs in it's interface, it suggests songs that sound like the ones you already like that are free to download legally.
Of course, if you are paranoid, you may only want to use this on songs you ripped from CDs you own, and don't share out on P2P.
Except, in most states you can now take the Car back and demand a refund or that the dealership fix it, you know, within a reasonable period of time.
You don't get that with software. This is my biggest gripe - if it doesn't work right, or at all, or just sucks and I don't like it - I can't get a refund. I might be able to get a new copy of the exact same thing, but it's likely to fail in the same way unless it was a bad or damaged disc.
This is the major difference for a lot of software and games. Music you can hear on the radio, and listen to in the store before buying. Movies you can rent. You can test drive a car.
But PC Games? It's like playing craps - you usually can't even try it out till you bought it, and you can't take it back after trying it out for a refund in a day or two if it sucks. And there's no warrenty on the thing. Actually, it's the same for all PC software.
So I like shareware, I at least get a little time to see if it's going to FUBAR my system, or crash a lot, or do what I want. I've bought a lot of shareware recently as I can see if it's going to be decent - Clipmate, Directory Opus.
I'd feel a lot safer buying a game for the PC if I could take it back like the laser tag system I bought that sucked. But with the equivelent game, my choice is to uninstall it? Yay, that's like I could stop driving the car. Great - what about the money I paid for a POS? If I could take the game back to the store 2 days after buying it and say "This sucks, it doesn't run well even though I have over the minimum requirements, crashes all the time, and the gameplay is inane (Warlords 4?), give me my money back, here's the POS!" and get a refund, we'd be talking.
I don't believe that the Internet has changed the world so much in the last 10 years that kids need the internet for doing their school work. Are the even any reputable essay sources you can use on the Internet without paying?
You'd be incorrect. First, even when I was back in Highschool ~ 7 years ago, it was common for there to be a requirement for one source for a paper to be web based. Of course, back then, that wasn't allowed to be your main source, but it was thrown in to get you used to figuring out credible web sources.
By the time I was finishing College ~ 2 years ago, most papers were done soley with web sources, and some of the library databases. In fact, for several classes, due to age restrictions - that is, sources had to be within the last 3 years or so, and the state of the library (SUNY school, not bad, but not rich), the only choice was web and database sources. I imagine similar things will trickle down to highschool soon enough if they haven't already.
Not to mention, the average Highschool library may not be that amazing, compared to the sources available online (primarily database sites paid for by the school system, but also Wikipedia and straight up journal sites).
And I'm not really sure it's that anonymous, at least compared to the more well known Freenet or I2P or TOR. And it seems more difficult to use for trusted VPNs than Hamachi.
Consider the costs of blocking malware downloads -- which as we all know is easier said than done. And the cost of removing the stuff that gets downloaded anyway. Some of it can take hours or days to exorcise.
That's just not doing it right. At the least, there ought to be a sysprepped image ready to redeploy in under 40 minutes on any borked access terminal.
Better would be just deep freezing the machine.
Best likely would be a Knoppix CD that's used to provide the web access, and no local HD or nothing installed on it.
Ahh I see - some different methods. I personally use different drives for data or a network share on a RAID server depending on how critical the data is. Then Acronis supports incremental backups, so I do that pretty frequently.
Drive Imaging, say with Acronis True Image - even possibly using the secure zone, is far better than System Restore. Not only does it give you an option for hardware tolerant recovery (that is, the drive can die, and if you imaged to DVD or another drive, you can slot in a new HD and restore), it also gets the entire state of the system. I've never seen it be unable to restore due to software issues, unlike System Restore.
I don't know, I usually only close Opera when I reboot my PC. I mean, it manages memory correctly, and why would I turn it off? I will want/need to reference some web page pretty often, if not just to check on the weather, or slashdot!
/.) and at work often have to look up wiki refernece pages or other vendor pages. YM(obviously)V.
To me, it's like having a TV guide and newspaper in one, why would you throw it out (close the browser) when later in the day you'll just want to check it again?
Then again, I'm a person who ENJOYS forums, and commenting on them (well,
Actually, I've gotten it and tried it out. It seems pretty seamless - once you install it. It's not that it's difficult - just extract the zip file to the Trillian Pro\Downloads directory.
Cerulean didn't write this plugin, so it's not restricted by them - the forum is to paying members (as the free version of Trillian doesn't support plugins, so if you haven't bought the pro version, this won't help you anyway) - but the author's site is actually here: http://trillianotr.kittyfox.net/downloads.php
In Trillian, once it's in the plugins dir - the option shows up in the control panel, right with AIM, MSN and whatever plugins you have. There is a GUI for the plugin for creating a key, and for verifying other's keys. It adds a menu to IM windows for OTR options. It also seems to work inside of the built in Trillian Encryption - not sure if I ought to now turn that off.
I have yet to try it with another non-Trillian user, hopefully soon.
Indeed, this is a big issue - it needs to be interoperable. I like to use Trillian, some of my Friends like AIM, others use GAIM... etc. I'd like a secure setup that worked between Trillian and the others!
XFX and ASUS are good in my experiance.
Why is it cheaper to buy the processor + motherboard then just the damn processor? I already have a 939 pin A64 3500+. I just want to slot in an X2 4400+ or better for a reasonable price. Say $150-$250ish...
What about proxy filtering at the edge of the network?