I just watched a recent Nova that highlighted a similar technology, but using plastic rather than glass as the electrolyte. Check out a short clip about it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n.... Seems like it has the same advantages, but without issues of brittleness, given that his sample batteries are shown being flexed. On the other hand, the plastic might be more susceptible to cold than the glass electrolyte.
Actually, with existing TiVos, both 1 and 4 are available. It's called TiVoToGo. For downloading content to your TiVo, you simply encode video to MPEG-2 and put it in the correct folder on your computer, as determined when you installed the TiVo Desktop software. Yeah, you've got to re-encode to MPEG-2, but with ffmpeg and a shell script, that's no big deal. There's numerous programs for the PC that'll also do the re-encode for you. In fact, TiVo Desktop software might just do it now, too, but since I use a Mac, I don't know for sure.
As for four, again with TiVoToGo functionality, you can download programs off the TiVo and onto your local hard drive. They are DRM protected, but can be played back on Macs or PCs. Actually, with software that'll strip the DRM, you can also play the programs back on Linux. Apparently TiVoToGo functionality is not yet supported on the HD units, but is suppose to arrive soon. I'm guessing extra work had to be done to protect the content streams, since the content providers are extra paranoid about HD content. There's also numerous programs that'll automatically download shows off your TiVo when they record, download them to your PC, and re-encode them for common portable media players like iPods, Zunes, PSPs, etc...
You'll probably never see two on a commercial box. Yes, you've added the functionality as a plug-in to MCE, but if that plug-in starts to become popular, you'll probably see it disappear. Other companies before TiVo have been taken to court and heavily sued because they provided a PVR that stripped commercials. So far, they've either won in court or driven court costs so high, the defendants folded. Either way, if either the MCE plug-in or Myth plug-in becomes popular and comes under the radar of the media providers, you'll probably see those features going away. TiVo, as the most visible of the PVR solutions, has had to play a very delicate game of providing features customers want balanced against the desires of the media providers, who can make their life hell if they become too threatened by the technology.
Enterprise based mail offers more than traditional imap solutions. Good/Blackberry/ActiveSync (just gonna use AS after this) allow you to syncronize your contacts, mail, calendar, and even tasks with your work computer. Additionally they have support for instant notification and also allow tighter integration with your client. (Say for example you send an email from your phone, it does not go through the SMTP server, rather it follows the same path your client takes, looks like it was sent from your desktop client, deposits a copy in your sent items, etc).
Apparently, you've never used a good IMAP e-mail client. Much of what you describe is actually a function of the software using IMAP, not the IMAP protocol itself. Although you're right in one respect, IMAP only supports e-mail. However, the iPhone will sync your contacts, calendar, etc... every time you plug it into charge. For me, that works find, since I don't really need a new contact on my computer until I actually sit down to use my computer again. The iPhone will also be able to synch music, movies, and TV shows in a similar manner.
Likewise, while IMAP doesn't "send" mail, as it's primary used for managing mail boxes, most corporations also configure SMTP services, which, when you send mail through them will make it look like you e-mail is coming from one e-mail address. This is has been pretty standard e-mail practice since I started using SMTP in the early 90's. Remember, the iPhone is an internet device. That means it can use industry standard protocols used by millions of computers on the internet rather than having to rely on standards created for specialized mobile devices.
Another nice thing about IMAP is that it isn't limited to the iPhone. It's used all over the place. I like IMAP because I get the same view of my e-mail no matter which OS or computer I'm using. I currently access my e-mail from three different Macs using Mail, two different XP boxes using Thunderbird, and via the web (in a pinch) via Squirrel Mail. Being able to access my IMAP mail on my cell phone would just be an added bonus.
Finally, Apple themselves has said that the software for the iPhone is not yet complete. On top of that, Apple's Mail program for OS X supports Exchange, therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the iPhone's e-mail program may support Exchange before final release, especially if a lot of people call for it.
Also if you get a meeting request, you can accept it, and it will automatically add it to your calendar. Same with new contacts. These are all things that IMAP just was not designed to do.
Again, this is a function of your mail client, not the underlying protocol. When Apple's Mail program receives a meeting request, you simply click on the request and it's automatically added to your calendar. I expect the iPhone mail client will do the same.
My guess: the era of pre-loading software and packing computers with shit as an "added bonus" is over. Most people know the things they like and they have internet access to download them. This was not true 10 years ago -- you wanted burning software with your cd burner, media player software for your camera, etc. But now these apps just mess everything up.
Nope, this won't go away, no matter how much people whine, and you know why? Dell and other companies don't include all that great [eye-roll, please] software out of the goodness of their hearts. They're paid, by the software vendors to include it. In the end, you get what you pay for. Dell can cut $200 off the cost of the machine by including a bunch of software most people don't want. Enough people do want it that they'll pay for the full upgrade price to make it worth while for the software vendors to pay Dell to put the software on the machines.
So, the next time you see someone complaining about the "high" prices of Apple machines, just remember that one of the premiums you're paying to Apple is the right to get a machine without a huge amount of extra crap installed on it. That's not to say Apple doesn't include some extra software with their machines, but I've rarely seen people complain about iDVD or iMovie making their system unstable. I think the worst thing I've ever seen pre-installed by Apple is the trial version Office, and that's only because it takes up a fair amount of disk space. Then again, if you don't want it, all you have to do is drag and drop it into the trash.
So, basically, linking to almost anything on the Internet is now illegal in Australia. After all, the vast majority of what is on the Internet is copyright material.
No, this is most certainly not the case. Much of the material on the internet is copyrighted, but the copyright holder is allowed to state how that copyright is used. Most people on the internet understand that a lot of what makes the internet so useful is the cross linking of information, therefore, they include linking to their information as part of their copyright. In fact, they often encourage it.
However, that does not mean that people cannot deny this. There are situations when you cannot legally link to other information on the internet. For example, an online news paper, while making their articles freely available if you visit their web site, might explicitly prohibit directly linking to their articles from an external web site. Under this circumstance, yes, you are violating the news paper's copyright and could be prosecuted.
And what if you're not the one doing the linking? For example, your site is a forum and other people post the links there? Apparently, you're guilty, too. Even if you're the ISP hosting the site and had nothing at all to do with its content, you're guilty.
People seem to be missing the important guts of the article:
The ISP apparently had knowledge of the copyright infringement and did not try to stop it. Most ISP's, under these circumstances, would receive a take down notice from say the RIAA. Upon learning that a site hosted on their machines was distributing copyrighted material, they would take down the site. The ISP in this article apparently did not do that. This is now speculation, but I'm assuming that the ISP and the web site in question wanted to challenge this legally. They took a chance and they lost.
I got the impression that you had to be directly providing access to copyrighted material. They didn't, in this case, discuss indirect links. For example, this ruling doesn't cover linking to torrents, which could then be used to download copyrighted material. They also didn't rule on linking to a page that then links to copyrighted material, nor at which point such indirect links would become illegal.
Providing a direct link to an MP3 is not the same thing as providing a reference in a book, and I think the court was correct, in at least this part of their ruling. Having a direct link to a file is tantamount to providing tangible goods. Basically, you're not providing a link (reference), you're providing the goods themselves. Because of how the web works, this web site was, in effect, providing the downloads, even if the actual files did not reside on their server. This is the same reason why Napster was considered illegal in the U.S., Likewise, shutting down Napster didn't kill the internet.
Google and other search engines are not in the same boat, because they're not trying to profit by providing direct access to copyrighted material. Yes, you can find search results that lead to copyrighted files, but this is not an intentional act on Google's part, but a side effect of indexing information. Also, if Google is contacted by copyright holders, they will block specific search results. On the other hand, if Google was running around saying, "Hey everyone, come use Google to find MP3 files to download" and was refusing to remove those links at the behest of the copyright holders, then they could be held liable for the infringement.
Also, at least in the U.S., if Google and other search engines were found guilty of copyright infringement for the contents of their search results and were forced to shutdown, the public outcry would be so large that congress would most likely pass a law specifically making it legal again. This would also most likely occur in Australia. Since everyone is big on analogies, Google is like a phone book. In this regard, they're more like a common carrier. The phone comp
I am going to kill my neighbor. Every one here is guilty of not stopping me. Well, at least all Australians.
Sadly enough, you're right, at least in the U.S. If you have credible knowledge that someone is going to commit a crime and you do not report it, you can be held at least partially liable for the crime. Of course this can be difficult to prove, since it's hard to know what's in a person's head and whether or not the knowledge was truly credible. For example, we assume you're joking, given the context, but maybe you not, so is this credible? Probably not.
On the other hand, if you went into a sporting goods store and bought a shot gun, all the while bragging about how you were going to blow away your neighbor to the clerk, both the clerk and the store could be held partially liable for the murder, because they sold you the gun when there was a credible chance you were going to use it for a crime.
Actually, there's a very easy way to do this. Do the following for less used applications:
Create a folder somewhere. Personally, I created a folder called "Applications" in my home directory.
Create subfolders inside the folder of step one, if desired. I created folders such as "Adobe", "Office", "Admin", "Games", etc...
Open a second Finder window (this will make things easier)
Browse around and find applications you'd like to occasionally access, so our example, let's use "Adobe Photoshop CS3"
Click and drag the application from the second Finder window to where your subdirectories created in step 2 are displayed. Now, here's the tricky part, while holding down the command and option keys, drop the application into the "Adobe" (or other) folder. Note: This is creating a link to the original file, similar to a Window's shortcut (as opposed to symbolic link). You'll know you're doing the right operation if your cursor looks like an arrow sweeping up to the right.
Repeat until you've creating links to all applications you care about.
Now, drag the folder created in step 1 to your dock.
Finally, when you want to run one of these application, just click and hold the icon in the Dock. A hierarchical menu will appear with all your subfolders and applications. Note: If you have a two button mouse, you can just right click the icon for faster pop up.
It's that easy, but apparently, not obvious, even though Steve Jobs demoed doing something very similar in one of his keynotes when Apple added the ability to drag folders into the Dock.
I do agree with you. I use both. I tend to find Macs less annoying for the majority of my tasks, but there are things I tend to prefer on the PC.
As for your long start up times, it sounds like your machine isn't shutting down properly, as you mentioned. If the disks are not marked as "clean" during shutdown, the boot process runs FSCK, which can take quite a while on larger disks.
Anyways, the point of my response is that as of OS X 10.2 and beyond, Apple added journalling the HFS+. On 10.3 and 10.4, you can enable this by going into the Disk Manager application. Once Disk Manager opens up, you should see all your hard drives. Select a hard drive. If the drive / partition is formatted HFS+ and is not yet journalled, you should see a tool bar icon enable that says something like "Enable Journalling". Click this. Now, if you fail to shut down cleanly, the disk check should be much faster.
I didn't quite get this quote about Time Machine, either: "If your hard drive dies, you can buy a new hard drive, put it in your machine, and be right back where you were." So Time Machine backs up your HDD to the ether?;)
From what I read of the keynote, I haven't seen it yet, but you can have the backups go to another drive or even over a network to a central server.
But for the long term the best format is of course MPEG 4 (AVC or ASP) in a standard MPEG 4 (.mp4) container file.
Actually, the Quicktime container format is open. In fact, you can download a document describing the format from Apple's Quicktime developer website. It's the codecs that may or may not be closed. In fact,.mp4 files are Quicktime files. They're just Quicktime files with the.mov extension changed to.mp4 and are limited to using the MPEG 4 codecs. I believe the MP4 container also drops some of Quicktime's more advanced features, like sprites, but I could be wrong about that one.
In general, the problem with computer video is that most codecs are embroiled with patents. It's pretty much impossible to create a free video player that supports all video formats, because a large number of codecs require royalty payments. In fact, by using VLC in the U.S., you're probably breaking the law. If you want to be legal with your use of VLC, go visit the FFMPEG web site. There you can find a section about which parts of the FFMPEG library are implementations of proprietary codecs and who you should contact to license those portions.
Thankfully, most of those patent holders aren't coming after VLC or FFMPEG. However, try using FFMPEG in a commercial product and see how long before the lawyers come knocking at your door.
Go to the Apple Store and look on the opening page. Near the bottom on the right hand side you'll see a red "Sale" tag. Click that and then scroll down about 2/5 the way down the page.
In general, this is where Apple sells over stock and refurbished machines. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell the difference, but whether refurbished or old stock, they come with the same warrantees. No, they don't really advertise these in proud, bold print accross the front page of the store, as they want to sell new machines, but they're there for the buying, if you know where to look.
Keep in mind that the Obj-C to Java bridge is two way. If you have a java library, you can write a Cocoa application that calls the Java library just fine. The only minor issue is that Apple's tools for generating the Obj-C stub codes for calling Java objects doesn't work wonderfully well.
* Note, I'm not a lawyer, so exact legalese may be different
"But what did Yahoo do that was illegal? Her exboyfriend posted the info. It was his account, even if he used her name. Can Yahoo simply delete accounts because they contain personal info of yours? What's the legal precedent?"
Yahoo may, in this case, be considered a common carrier. Therefore, they're not directly responsible for something illegal that occurs on their networks.
However, once informed that something illegal is occurring, I believe they have a responsibility to remove or temporarily suspend the illegal information. But, we're talking about a pretty legal fine-line here. After all, commercial news servers will advertise that they can be used anonymously. It's reasonably well known that illegal material is posted to Usenet, and yet, that flow of information hasn't been stopped due to complaints. Then again, has that flow ever been challenged in court?
On the other hand, unlike Usenet, Yahoo is providing the community whereas Usenet is a flow of information without a central source. Yahoo also defines the rules for using their community in their terms of use. I'd be surprised if the boyfriend didn't violate Yahoo's terms of use. Therefore, this isn't necessarily a case of common carrier, because Yahoo does define rules governing the use of their servers, and once Yahoo was informed of the infraction, they may hold some responsibility for it.
Yes, you can argue that the images were legally posted. After all, if she took them with her boyfriend, or just gave them to her boyfriend, then he can pretty much do with them as he pleases. He doesn't, however, have a right to pretend to be her. On top of that, he's deluding other men into thinking they can just show up at her house or office and expect sex. That's potentially asking for a sexual assault to occur, a crime to which to boyfriend would be considered an accessory to.
All this being said, she should have immediately gone to the police. The police and courts could have put a restraining order on the boyfriend, seized the photos, and forced Yahoo to take down the bogus account as part of a criminal investigation.
Finally, this will be an interesting case. It will, without doubt, potentially shape the definition of common carrier and ISP responsibility. Personally, I do think Yahoo holds some responsibility here. Maybe not 3,000,000 worth of responsibility, but some. I don't think they're be found responsible for the act occurring, but rather for allowing it to continue to occur.
As a side note, I once received a threatening e-mail from someone who erroneously thought my company had sent him a spam e-mail message. When I got the e-mail, I just went to Yahoo, brought up the abuse page and reported the violation. Within 24 hours, Yahoo dealt with the situation. That makes me wonder how she went about informing Yahoo of the abuse, since they seemed quite responsive to and on top of dealing with abuse complaints.
Barnes sent Yahoo a letter in January saying she did not create the profiles and wanted them removed. Additional attempts to get Yahoo to remove them in February and March did not get a response, the lawsuit claims.
So, basically, she's suing because Yahoo left the images up for three months after being contacted and asked to take them down. Considering her personal information went along the photos, not acting on the information in a timely fashion is pretty serious, because it helped prolong her harassment.
As for the boyfriend, he should probably be brought up on criminal charges.
The PowerMac, besides things like expandability, have one huge advantage over the iMacs - bus speed. I was up at an Apple store when the new iMacs were first release and I did an informal benchmark where I transcoded a DVD straight from disk into a DiVX mpeg 4 file. Here's a rough idea of the results:
Power Mac G4 - Dual 1.0 Ghz - 12 fps
Power Mac 1.8Ghz - 13 fps
Power Mac G5 - Dual 1.8 Ghz - 64 fps
Yes, this is comparing a one processor system to a two processor system, but the particular program I was using didn't take strong advantage of the two processors.
So, looking at the specs, what's the big difference? Bus speed. This tests the bus speed because the computer is contantly moving data from from disk to memory back and then back to disk. And it's moving so much data around, you're testing the bus, not the on board chip cache.
That being said, the new iMac's also have a faster memory bus, although only modestly so. Still the bus speed on the Power Mac's is twice the speed, and it also uses dual channel memory. This all leads to a significant performance boost for anyone doing large data processing, like photoshop, video encoding, etc...
This just goes to show, there's a lot more to a fast computer than raw CPU speed.
PS. I threw the G4 PowerMac in there because it represents my current system, and I wanted to know how the new computers compared to that.
Uh, Apple's already doing this in Tiger. I quote from their web page:
Organically Organized
Thanks to the speed and flexibility of Spotlight, you will discover countless new ways to organize your files. Take the results of a search and save it as a Smart Folder that automatically updates as you add or remove documents from your Mac. Smart Folders contain files grouped together based on search criteria instead of physical location, so the same file can appear in multiple Smart Folders without moving from its original saved location on your system. No need to duplicate, shift or update files: Spotlight Smart Folders keep everything organized for you.
This is in addition to being able to organize the search results by things like file types, various attributes, icon (thumbnail), etc...
So what does Longhorn's search do that Spotlight doesn't?
You must have been using a pretty crappy CRT. Moving to a 22" Apple display from a crap CRT would be like getting a magical BJ from three angelic succubus hookers, simultaneously. If you had been using a really nice (and expensive) Trinitron CRT or similar, you might not have had those headaches.
Actually, it was a fairly expensive 21" CRT display. In fact, at the time it was purchased, it cost over $1000. Of course, at the time, 21" LCD's weren't available and a 15" LCD would have cost well over $2000. For the first two years that I used that display, I never had a problem. But CRT's have resisters and capacitors that drift off of spec over their life span. The end result is that as CRT's age, they tend to become out of focus. That's when I started having problems. Yes, this can be fixed, but it'll cost you around $200 to get a professional re-calibration of the monitor, as these generally require adjustments not available through the front panel.
I'm a big proponent of no maintenance products. Thus, an LCD monitor is worth it to me, because I just plug it in and it works. Besides, quite honestly, I've never experience the problems others seem to have with LCD displays, other than noticing that the contrast isn't quite as good as a CRT, and that's not an issue for my day to day use.
Before making blanket statements, please consider that different people have different needs.
I work in front of a computer for 8-12 hours a day. The last couple of years I worked with a CRT, after about 6-7 hours I would start to get a headache. In fact, I had to start wearing glasses to stop the headaches.
At my current job, I'm lucky enough that I get to use an Apple 22" Cinema Display most of the time, and pretty much, from day one, I haven't had a single headache at work.
Now, some of this I attribute to Apple's (Mac OS X's) excellent anti-aliased text, but the major thanks go to the LCD. It's just sharper. My eyes don't have to spend the entire day trying to focus the pixels on the screen, because they're already in focus. And, unlike CRT's, they don't go out of focus over time.
On top of that, the screen remains completely square at all times, and the colors, while maybe only 95% - 98% as rich as a CRT's, never have problems with divergence. Basically, unless your back light fails or you have a large number of pixels go dead, the LCD will look just as good after five years as it did on day one. Then again, you could by 5 reasonable quality CRT's for the cost one good quality LCD.
So, for me at least, LCD is better. In fact, a good flat panel display is worth it to me that when I eventually replace my home computer, I'll be paying the extra money for a good quality LCD display.
Well, unless LEP's or OLED's finally make their debut for computer displays...
Slashdot Mirror
I just watched a recent Nova that highlighted a similar technology, but using plastic rather than glass as the electrolyte. Check out a short clip about it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n.... Seems like it has the same advantages, but without issues of brittleness, given that his sample batteries are shown being flexed. On the other hand, the plastic might be more susceptible to cold than the glass electrolyte.
Actually, with existing TiVos, both 1 and 4 are available. It's called TiVoToGo. For downloading content to your TiVo, you simply encode video to MPEG-2 and put it in the correct folder on your computer, as determined when you installed the TiVo Desktop software. Yeah, you've got to re-encode to MPEG-2, but with ffmpeg and a shell script, that's no big deal. There's numerous programs for the PC that'll also do the re-encode for you. In fact, TiVo Desktop software might just do it now, too, but since I use a Mac, I don't know for sure.
As for four, again with TiVoToGo functionality, you can download programs off the TiVo and onto your local hard drive. They are DRM protected, but can be played back on Macs or PCs. Actually, with software that'll strip the DRM, you can also play the programs back on Linux. Apparently TiVoToGo functionality is not yet supported on the HD units, but is suppose to arrive soon. I'm guessing extra work had to be done to protect the content streams, since the content providers are extra paranoid about HD content. There's also numerous programs that'll automatically download shows off your TiVo when they record, download them to your PC, and re-encode them for common portable media players like iPods, Zunes, PSPs, etc...
You'll probably never see two on a commercial box. Yes, you've added the functionality as a plug-in to MCE, but if that plug-in starts to become popular, you'll probably see it disappear. Other companies before TiVo have been taken to court and heavily sued because they provided a PVR that stripped commercials. So far, they've either won in court or driven court costs so high, the defendants folded. Either way, if either the MCE plug-in or Myth plug-in becomes popular and comes under the radar of the media providers, you'll probably see those features going away. TiVo, as the most visible of the PVR solutions, has had to play a very delicate game of providing features customers want balanced against the desires of the media providers, who can make their life hell if they become too threatened by the technology.
And as a final note, I'd like three, too.
Apparently, you've never used a good IMAP e-mail client. Much of what you describe is actually a function of the software using IMAP, not the IMAP protocol itself. Although you're right in one respect, IMAP only supports e-mail. However, the iPhone will sync your contacts, calendar, etc... every time you plug it into charge. For me, that works find, since I don't really need a new contact on my computer until I actually sit down to use my computer again. The iPhone will also be able to synch music, movies, and TV shows in a similar manner.
Likewise, while IMAP doesn't "send" mail, as it's primary used for managing mail boxes, most corporations also configure SMTP services, which, when you send mail through them will make it look like you e-mail is coming from one e-mail address. This is has been pretty standard e-mail practice since I started using SMTP in the early 90's. Remember, the iPhone is an internet device. That means it can use industry standard protocols used by millions of computers on the internet rather than having to rely on standards created for specialized mobile devices.
Another nice thing about IMAP is that it isn't limited to the iPhone. It's used all over the place. I like IMAP because I get the same view of my e-mail no matter which OS or computer I'm using. I currently access my e-mail from three different Macs using Mail, two different XP boxes using Thunderbird, and via the web (in a pinch) via Squirrel Mail. Being able to access my IMAP mail on my cell phone would just be an added bonus.
Finally, Apple themselves has said that the software for the iPhone is not yet complete. On top of that, Apple's Mail program for OS X supports Exchange, therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the iPhone's e-mail program may support Exchange before final release, especially if a lot of people call for it.
Also if you get a meeting request, you can accept it, and it will automatically add it to your calendar. Same with new contacts. These are all things that IMAP just was not designed to do.Again, this is a function of your mail client, not the underlying protocol. When Apple's Mail program receives a meeting request, you simply click on the request and it's automatically added to your calendar. I expect the iPhone mail client will do the same.
Nope, this won't go away, no matter how much people whine, and you know why? Dell and other companies don't include all that great [eye-roll, please] software out of the goodness of their hearts. They're paid, by the software vendors to include it. In the end, you get what you pay for. Dell can cut $200 off the cost of the machine by including a bunch of software most people don't want. Enough people do want it that they'll pay for the full upgrade price to make it worth while for the software vendors to pay Dell to put the software on the machines.
So, the next time you see someone complaining about the "high" prices of Apple machines, just remember that one of the premiums you're paying to Apple is the right to get a machine without a huge amount of extra crap installed on it. That's not to say Apple doesn't include some extra software with their machines, but I've rarely seen people complain about iDVD or iMovie making their system unstable. I think the worst thing I've ever seen pre-installed by Apple is the trial version Office, and that's only because it takes up a fair amount of disk space. Then again, if you don't want it, all you have to do is drag and drop it into the trash.
So, basically, linking to almost anything on the Internet is now illegal in Australia. After all, the vast majority of what is on the Internet is copyright material.
No, this is most certainly not the case. Much of the material on the internet is copyrighted, but the copyright holder is allowed to state how that copyright is used. Most people on the internet understand that a lot of what makes the internet so useful is the cross linking of information, therefore, they include linking to their information as part of their copyright. In fact, they often encourage it.
However, that does not mean that people cannot deny this. There are situations when you cannot legally link to other information on the internet. For example, an online news paper, while making their articles freely available if you visit their web site, might explicitly prohibit directly linking to their articles from an external web site. Under this circumstance, yes, you are violating the news paper's copyright and could be prosecuted.
And what if you're not the one doing the linking? For example, your site is a forum and other people post the links there? Apparently, you're guilty, too. Even if you're the ISP hosting the site and had nothing at all to do with its content, you're guilty.
People seem to be missing the important guts of the article:
Sadly enough, you're right, at least in the U.S. If you have credible knowledge that someone is going to commit a crime and you do not report it, you can be held at least partially liable for the crime. Of course this can be difficult to prove, since it's hard to know what's in a person's head and whether or not the knowledge was truly credible. For example, we assume you're joking, given the context, but maybe you not, so is this credible? Probably not.
On the other hand, if you went into a sporting goods store and bought a shot gun, all the while bragging about how you were going to blow away your neighbor to the clerk, both the clerk and the store could be held partially liable for the murder, because they sold you the gun when there was a credible chance you were going to use it for a crime.
Actually, there's a very easy way to do this. Do the following for less used applications:
It's that easy, but apparently, not obvious, even though Steve Jobs demoed doing something very similar in one of his keynotes when Apple added the ability to drag folders into the Dock.
I do agree with you. I use both. I tend to find Macs less annoying for the majority of my tasks, but there are things I tend to prefer on the PC. As for your long start up times, it sounds like your machine isn't shutting down properly, as you mentioned. If the disks are not marked as "clean" during shutdown, the boot process runs FSCK, which can take quite a while on larger disks. Anyways, the point of my response is that as of OS X 10.2 and beyond, Apple added journalling the HFS+. On 10.3 and 10.4, you can enable this by going into the Disk Manager application. Once Disk Manager opens up, you should see all your hard drives. Select a hard drive. If the drive / partition is formatted HFS+ and is not yet journalled, you should see a tool bar icon enable that says something like "Enable Journalling". Click this. Now, if you fail to shut down cleanly, the disk check should be much faster.
From what I read of the keynote, I haven't seen it yet, but you can have the backups go to another drive or even over a network to a central server.
Check this out. There's a sound clip of the text to speech. It's actually one of the better one's I've heard.
But for the long term the best format is of course MPEG 4 (AVC or ASP) in a standard MPEG 4 (.mp4) container file.
Actually, the Quicktime container format is open. In fact, you can download a document describing the format from Apple's Quicktime developer website. It's the codecs that may or may not be closed. In fact, .mp4 files are Quicktime files. They're just Quicktime files with the .mov extension changed to .mp4 and are limited to using the MPEG 4 codecs. I believe the MP4 container also drops some of Quicktime's more advanced features, like sprites, but I could be wrong about that one.
In general, the problem with computer video is that most codecs are embroiled with patents. It's pretty much impossible to create a free video player that supports all video formats, because a large number of codecs require royalty payments. In fact, by using VLC in the U.S., you're probably breaking the law. If you want to be legal with your use of VLC, go visit the FFMPEG web site. There you can find a section about which parts of the FFMPEG library are implementations of proprietary codecs and who you should contact to license those portions.
Thankfully, most of those patent holders aren't coming after VLC or FFMPEG. However, try using FFMPEG in a commercial product and see how long before the lawyers come knocking at your door.
Go to the Apple Store and look on the opening page. Near the bottom on the right hand side you'll see a red "Sale" tag. Click that and then scroll down about 2/5 the way down the page.
In general, this is where Apple sells over stock and refurbished machines. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell the difference, but whether refurbished or old stock, they come with the same warrantees. No, they don't really advertise these in proud, bold print accross the front page of the store, as they want to sell new machines, but they're there for the buying, if you know where to look.
Keep in mind that the Obj-C to Java bridge is two way. If you have a java library, you can write a Cocoa application that calls the Java library just fine. The only minor issue is that Apple's tools for generating the Obj-C stub codes for calling Java objects doesn't work wonderfully well.
* Note, I'm not a lawyer, so exact legalese may be different
"But what did Yahoo do that was illegal? Her exboyfriend posted the info. It was his account, even if he used her name. Can Yahoo simply delete accounts because they contain personal info of yours? What's the legal precedent?"
Yahoo may, in this case, be considered a common carrier. Therefore, they're not directly responsible for something illegal that occurs on their networks.
However, once informed that something illegal is occurring, I believe they have a responsibility to remove or temporarily suspend the illegal information. But, we're talking about a pretty legal fine-line here. After all, commercial news servers will advertise that they can be used anonymously. It's reasonably well known that illegal material is posted to Usenet, and yet, that flow of information hasn't been stopped due to complaints. Then again, has that flow ever been challenged in court?
On the other hand, unlike Usenet, Yahoo is providing the community whereas Usenet is a flow of information without a central source. Yahoo also defines the rules for using their community in their terms of use. I'd be surprised if the boyfriend didn't violate Yahoo's terms of use. Therefore, this isn't necessarily a case of common carrier, because Yahoo does define rules governing the use of their servers, and once Yahoo was informed of the infraction, they may hold some responsibility for it.
Yes, you can argue that the images were legally posted. After all, if she took them with her boyfriend, or just gave them to her boyfriend, then he can pretty much do with them as he pleases. He doesn't, however, have a right to pretend to be her. On top of that, he's deluding other men into thinking they can just show up at her house or office and expect sex. That's potentially asking for a sexual assault to occur, a crime to which to boyfriend would be considered an accessory to.
All this being said, she should have immediately gone to the police. The police and courts could have put a restraining order on the boyfriend, seized the photos, and forced Yahoo to take down the bogus account as part of a criminal investigation.
Finally, this will be an interesting case. It will, without doubt, potentially shape the definition of common carrier and ISP responsibility. Personally, I do think Yahoo holds some responsibility here. Maybe not 3,000,000 worth of responsibility, but some. I don't think they're be found responsible for the act occurring, but rather for allowing it to continue to occur.
As a side note, I once received a threatening e-mail from someone who erroneously thought my company had sent him a spam e-mail message. When I got the e-mail, I just went to Yahoo, brought up the abuse page and reported the violation. Within 24 hours, Yahoo dealt with the situation. That makes me wonder how she went about informing Yahoo of the abuse, since they seemed quite responsive to and on top of dealing with abuse complaints.
From the article:
Barnes sent Yahoo a letter in January saying she did not create the profiles and wanted them removed. Additional attempts to get Yahoo to remove them in February and March did not get a response, the lawsuit claims.
So, basically, she's suing because Yahoo left the images up for three months after being contacted and asked to take them down. Considering her personal information went along the photos, not acting on the information in a timely fashion is pretty serious, because it helped prolong her harassment.
As for the boyfriend, he should probably be brought up on criminal charges.
The PowerMac, besides things like expandability, have one huge advantage over the iMacs - bus speed. I was up at an Apple store when the new iMacs were first release and I did an informal benchmark where I transcoded a DVD straight from disk into a DiVX mpeg 4 file. Here's a rough idea of the results:
Yes, this is comparing a one processor system to a two processor system, but the particular program I was using didn't take strong advantage of the two processors.
So, looking at the specs, what's the big difference? Bus speed. This tests the bus speed because the computer is contantly moving data from from disk to memory back and then back to disk. And it's moving so much data around, you're testing the bus, not the on board chip cache.
That being said, the new iMac's also have a faster memory bus, although only modestly so. Still the bus speed on the Power Mac's is twice the speed, and it also uses dual channel memory. This all leads to a significant performance boost for anyone doing large data processing, like photoshop, video encoding, etc...
This just goes to show, there's a lot more to a fast computer than raw CPU speed.
PS. I threw the G4 PowerMac in there because it represents my current system, and I wanted to know how the new computers compared to that.
Uh, Apple's already doing this in Tiger. I quote from their web page:
This is in addition to being able to organize the search results by things like file types, various attributes, icon (thumbnail), etc...
So what does Longhorn's search do that Spotlight doesn't?
You must have been using a pretty crappy CRT. Moving to a 22" Apple display from a crap CRT would be like getting a magical BJ from three angelic succubus hookers, simultaneously. If you had been using a really nice (and expensive) Trinitron CRT or similar, you might not have had those headaches.
Actually, it was a fairly expensive 21" CRT display. In fact, at the time it was purchased, it cost over $1000. Of course, at the time, 21" LCD's weren't available and a 15" LCD would have cost well over $2000. For the first two years that I used that display, I never had a problem. But CRT's have resisters and capacitors that drift off of spec over their life span. The end result is that as CRT's age, they tend to become out of focus. That's when I started having problems. Yes, this can be fixed, but it'll cost you around $200 to get a professional re-calibration of the monitor, as these generally require adjustments not available through the front panel.
I'm a big proponent of no maintenance products. Thus, an LCD monitor is worth it to me, because I just plug it in and it works. Besides, quite honestly, I've never experience the problems others seem to have with LCD displays, other than noticing that the contrast isn't quite as good as a CRT, and that's not an issue for my day to day use.
Before making blanket statements, please consider that different people have different needs.
I work in front of a computer for 8-12 hours a day. The last couple of years I worked with a CRT, after about 6-7 hours I would start to get a headache. In fact, I had to start wearing glasses to stop the headaches.
At my current job, I'm lucky enough that I get to use an Apple 22" Cinema Display most of the time, and pretty much, from day one, I haven't had a single headache at work.
Now, some of this I attribute to Apple's (Mac OS X's) excellent anti-aliased text, but the major thanks go to the LCD. It's just sharper. My eyes don't have to spend the entire day trying to focus the pixels on the screen, because they're already in focus. And, unlike CRT's, they don't go out of focus over time.
On top of that, the screen remains completely square at all times, and the colors, while maybe only 95% - 98% as rich as a CRT's, never have problems with divergence. Basically, unless your back light fails or you have a large number of pixels go dead, the LCD will look just as good after five years as it did on day one. Then again, you could by 5 reasonable quality CRT's for the cost one good quality LCD.
So, for me at least, LCD is better. In fact, a good flat panel display is worth it to me that when I eventually replace my home computer, I'll be paying the extra money for a good quality LCD display.
Well, unless LEP's or OLED's finally make their debut for computer displays...