Actually, if it worked well (and didn't cost $1200) I would buy a pair in a second. I use bifocals all the time around the house and at work. However, for example, if I'm hiking, they're a pain because I'm looking down through the close up lenses and everything gets blurred.
In fact, I have 'outside' and 'inside' glasses for that reason. If you could adjust the magnification of the lenses for even closer work it would be even better.
Oh stop. That's true if you're listening to Madonna or Lady Gompa or whatever. There are large numbers of modern (typically Classical) CDs that are mastered quite well.
However, if you're tastes run to Country / Western then not so much. But at that point, you're your own worst enemy.
What I don't understand is why they don't sell well. Do so few people have decent speakers? Is everyone listening to earbuds these days?
"Most" people have had and will always have crappy speakers. Good speakers are expensive and differences subtle. The fact that most people listen to music on either the crap Apple buds or their generic PC equivalent is proof positive that musical fidelity is not high on their list of important things. Whatever. At least with earbuds they are only mushing their own brain.
If you want to see how dramatic the difference between an MP3 and a CD can be, sample a tape or an LP and burn it to disk, then rip your disk to CD. All the analog artifacts are GREATLY magnified in the MP3.
Are you serious? Think about it:
Source = old vinyl, poorly maintained
Initial playback = crappy turntable whose last pickup replacement was in the mid 1990's
Analog to Digital conversion on some generic.50 Chinese components
Write out to CD using bog knows what format / compression
Listen to said CD on cheapass generic hardware through aforementioned ear buds
By not being so masochistic that you try to watch TV or movies on a 3.5 inch screen or listen to crappy Internet radio using the tinny little 'speaker' or crappy ear buds.
throat and lung cancer is from smoking period not from nicotine. it doesn't matter what your smoking you really shouldn't be inhaling it. As for turning your brains into mush, long term effects are hard to judge, but every adult I have met who smoked pot back in the 60's and 70's are not what I call intelligent or well off anymore. But I have a limited pool to work from as most of them are also big drunks, and so have other problems that need to be accounted for.
Just because you have to work with politicians doesn't mean you can extrapolate that to the general public.
Truly amazing, indeed. Too lazy to look it up, but earlier reports had shown that Transocean (the rig owners, not BP like the stupid article mentions) had shut down many automatic warning systems because of too many false positives.
It's not like we've never seen this sort of thing before...
Democracy is not perfect but it is the best thing we have, don't go around crying for the tyranny of the majority.
We don't have a 'democracy' in the US. Never have. Wasn't designed as one, won't function as one. We're supposed to have a representative Republic whose powers are consciously hobbled by power sharing among three branches of government.
The concepts of checks and balances is central to the appropriate function of the US Federal government. It works better or worse at times, isn't perfect at all, is always frustrating and has the ability to devolve into one of several less savory governmental forms (kleptocracy, a 'true' democracy, a fascist state and others) if not attended to carefully.
Well, yes. And do you actually think this is a likely outcome? I can't see it happening. Not as long as linux is... well, linux.
It might... That's what I meant about 'growing up' (Linux is perfectly fine in many venues already). You could set it up to run under Red Hat or other distro, you could even make it run under several. Yes, I'm arm waving and likely smoking something, but it's not too ridiculous to imagine a scenario where Apple moves entirely into the appliance space and software companies might want to hedge their bets. Probably won't happen, everyone will eventually run Windows 14 on the desktop, iOS 6 on their iThingy and Linux in the background along with a scattering of Androids blithering back and forth but what the heck.
Hell, Jobs might even make an expandable mini tower and floor us all.
this is only the second time I've been hesitant about buying a new one, all because of my discomfort over the direction they're going.
Do you really think that one day you will wake up and find out that you can't buy OS X applications from whomever, only from His Jobness? It will take years for that transition to occur (if it ever does, which I doubt). Hell, if you had to stay at OS X 10.6.5 (the current version) for the rest of your machine's useful life, would that be too hard?
I suspect, if anything, Apple will just let OS X just fade off into irrelevance. People will have plenty of time to make the change. Personally, I think that Linux may be grown up enough to take over at that point. All that really would take is to have Adobe (who appears to have no love for Apple anyway) to port the Creative Suite to Linux. I suspect that most of the hardcore Apple folks in the graphics industry will just move over to yet another flavor of Unix. Hell, you could keep your own hardware, dual boot and run Parallels if you like. Many, many options.
Ancient versions of Photoshop didn't do a lot of things, but that was mostly a problem with old hardware. I'm not sure how old you are, but us geezers fondly recall those days when RAM was measured in megabytes and when hard drives were finally getting into megabytes range we were in computing Nirvana (and financial hell).
I recall starting an Unsharp Mask filter on a 640 x 480 pixel, 8 bit image - and then going to lunch. Now, please ask the nurse to get me my morning meds. And get off my shuffleboard court. And pull your pants up.
That's OK. If Adobe drops out of creating OS X applications AND Apple lets the Mac Pros wither away nothing will happen for a while. CS3 / 4 / 5 will still work. The MacPros will buzz along for another couple of years.
Then, when CS 12 comes along (Now with 3D puppet warp! And the same friggen bugs as CS 1!) and the MacPro goes to recycle heaven, we'll go buy a 12 Core Intel i747 with 128 terabytes of RAM and Windows 16). Or maybe Adobe will wise up and port things to Linux. Folks will just deal with the changes.
In addition to a Dropbox-like service, it seems reasonable for Apple to fully integrate MobileMe into the next version of OS X, and as you mentioned backup/sync for iOS seems obvious. They might even extend that service to the Mac App Store.
Well, if they integrate Dropbox, that would work. MobileMe not so much. But this is exactly what 'normal' people want. They DON'T want to think about backups, where the data is, WHAT the data is or much of anything else. Asked carefully, they might be able to make a distinction between data on their own computer and data on, for example, Flickr. They might.
It's all Fucking Magic to 'them'. Hell, I was talking to the nurse running the 120K brand new telemetry system last night (Hey, it runs Linux). No conceptual framework for understanding that it was a 'computer', she has yet to grasp the fact that it's a modified WIMP interface (it has a touchscreen for some functions) and that that cute little bar along the top of the application has all sorts of little options that she's written down on 4 post it notes that magically appear when you run the mouse cursor over them. Sigh.
THOSE are the people that Apple (and pretty much everyone else) is trying to woo with the new shiny. And there are LOTS and LOTS of them. Eternal September over and over and over again. Slashdotters tend to get all wound up about this ("Look, it's not hard, just put the little arrow over the menu text and it tells you what it will do - neat eh?"). Apple just takes it a couple steps further and off to the bank.
DIY railguns, anthrax, C-4 manufacturing, drug reasearch, including how to extract cannaboids, hydrocodone and other substances from their mixed or natural state, radiant gas heaters, naval bases, and porn are all subjects I have searched for and looked at articles related, in the last 48 hours.
Please do be careful not to mix anything up. Things could go very bad for you.
I've wired my own house and a bunch of reasonably large networks. That's hardly an issue. The problem is hooking up to the outside. I'm damn sure not wiring the whole town, nor am I going to drop that submarine cable to the mainland. You can go radio - and everybody needs to realize that Amateur radio already has a low speed, low bandwidth, low infrastructure cost system already in place - that basically does email and simple video. Given frequency and power constraints (controlled by the Government) it will never be the high speed, high bandwidth arrangement that the Internet currently is.
Light (terrahertz radiation) suffers from the same issues as radio with even more problems with range.
So I don't see how you're going to wire the big thing together.
You are speaking in generalities. Look at what has actually happened on the Internet over time: usenet was driven out by moderated web boards. Home pages were driven out by Facebook. Decentralized email is being driven out by a small handful of huge webmail providers. Now, even the idea of general-purpose computing is being driven out by handhelds and tablets that only run software from a manufacturer-approved "app store."
You're correct, he is - and to some extent you are as well (overly generalizing). While Facebook seems all the rage, nothing at all prevents you from firing up your favorite HTML editor and making your own webpage, website or even a new Facebook competitor.
You can still set up your own email server as well as access it from a general purpose computing device running code that you've hand picked and even compiled (I suppose Gentoo is still around...).
So yes, the trend is towards all of the consolidation efforts you mention, but we still are able to work at the corners. We just need to keep it that way....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if it worked well (and didn't cost $1200) I would buy a pair in a second. I use bifocals all the time around the house and at work. However, for example, if I'm hiking, they're a pain because I'm looking down through the close up lenses and everything gets blurred.
In fact, I have 'outside' and 'inside' glasses for that reason. If you could adjust the magnification of the lenses for even closer work it would be even better.
Looks like a technology to keep an eye on.
Oh stop. That's true if you're listening to Madonna or Lady Gompa or whatever. There are large numbers of modern (typically Classical) CDs that are mastered quite well.
However, if you're tastes run to Country / Western then not so much. But at that point, you're your own worst enemy.
What I don't understand is why they don't sell well. Do so few people have decent speakers? Is everyone listening to earbuds these days?
"Most" people have had and will always have crappy speakers. Good speakers are expensive and differences subtle. The fact that most people listen to music on either the crap Apple buds or their generic PC equivalent is proof positive that musical fidelity is not high on their list of important things. Whatever. At least with earbuds they are only mushing their own brain.
Are you serious? Think about it:
.50 Chinese components
Source = old vinyl, poorly maintained
Initial playback = crappy turntable whose last pickup replacement was in the mid 1990's
Analog to Digital conversion on some generic
Write out to CD using bog knows what format / compression
Listen to said CD on cheapass generic hardware through aforementioned ear buds
Of course it's going to sound like crap....
Kids these days.
Yeah, nobody has ever heard of the Apple 2. Right.
Apple II
Get it right. There a pedants lurking about.
It goes *ding* and moves to the right.
I'm afraid that most Slashdotters are too young to get that.
That was AppStore not App Store. Different enough for trademark work? Perhaps.
And in English, this means?
150MB is more than most use a in month?
How?
By not being so masochistic that you try to watch TV or movies on a 3.5 inch screen or listen to crappy Internet radio using the tinny little 'speaker' or crappy ear buds.
You know, like most people with real computer.
throat and lung cancer is from smoking period not from nicotine. it doesn't matter what your smoking you really shouldn't be inhaling it. As for turning your brains into mush, long term effects are hard to judge, but every adult I have met who smoked pot back in the 60's and 70's are not what I call intelligent or well off anymore. But I have a limited pool to work from as most of them are also big drunks, and so have other problems that need to be accounted for.
Just because you have to work with politicians doesn't mean you can extrapolate that to the general public.
Truly amazing, indeed. Too lazy to look it up, but earlier reports had shown that Transocean (the rig owners, not BP like the stupid article mentions) had shut down many automatic warning systems because of too many false positives.
...
It's not like we've never seen this sort of thing before
"You are about to do something."
CANCEL, or ALLOW?
We don't have a 'democracy' in the US. Never have. Wasn't designed as one, won't function as one. We're supposed to have a representative Republic whose powers are consciously hobbled by power sharing among three branches of government.
The concepts of checks and balances is central to the appropriate function of the US Federal government. It works better or worse at times, isn't perfect at all, is always frustrating and has the ability to devolve into one of several less savory governmental forms (kleptocracy, a 'true' democracy, a fascist state and others) if not attended to carefully.
But it is by no means a 'democracy'.
iirc, the F22 project was defunded so that they could move the money to the F35 project, which seems to be progressing nicely...
You must work in Marketing. "Progressing Nicely?"
Problem is, that if I laugh, I loose some good friends.
Then what happens? Is their grip on reality so tenuous that they float off into the sky or something?
Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Go here. Don't watch the movie though, it sucked.
That is cool! Thanks.
It might... That's what I meant about 'growing up' (Linux is perfectly fine in many venues already). You could set it up to run under Red Hat or other distro, you could even make it run under several. Yes, I'm arm waving and likely smoking something, but it's not too ridiculous to imagine a scenario where Apple moves entirely into the appliance space and software companies might want to hedge their bets. Probably won't happen, everyone will eventually run Windows 14 on the desktop, iOS 6 on their iThingy and Linux in the background along with a scattering of Androids blithering back and forth but what the heck.
Hell, Jobs might even make an expandable mini tower and floor us all.
Do you really think that one day you will wake up and find out that you can't buy OS X applications from whomever, only from His Jobness? It will take years for that transition to occur (if it ever does, which I doubt). Hell, if you had to stay at OS X 10.6.5 (the current version) for the rest of your machine's useful life, would that be too hard?
I suspect, if anything, Apple will just let OS X just fade off into irrelevance. People will have plenty of time to make the change. Personally, I think that Linux may be grown up enough to take over at that point. All that really would take is to have Adobe (who appears to have no love for Apple anyway) to port the Creative Suite to Linux. I suspect that most of the hardcore Apple folks in the graphics industry will just move over to yet another flavor of Unix. Hell, you could keep your own hardware, dual boot and run Parallels if you like. Many, many options.
Ancient versions of Photoshop didn't do a lot of things, but that was mostly a problem with old hardware. I'm not sure how old you are, but us geezers fondly recall those days when RAM was measured in megabytes and when hard drives were finally getting into megabytes range we were in computing Nirvana (and financial hell).
I recall starting an Unsharp Mask filter on a 640 x 480 pixel, 8 bit image - and then going to lunch. Now, please ask the nurse to get me my morning meds. And get off my shuffleboard court. And pull your pants up.
That's OK. If Adobe drops out of creating OS X applications AND Apple lets the Mac Pros wither away nothing will happen for a while. CS3 / 4 / 5 will still work. The MacPros will buzz along for another couple of years.
Then, when CS 12 comes along (Now with 3D puppet warp! And the same friggen bugs as CS 1!) and the MacPro goes to recycle heaven, we'll go buy a 12 Core Intel i747 with 128 terabytes of RAM and Windows 16). Or maybe Adobe will wise up and port things to Linux. Folks will just deal with the changes.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our cloud-based overlords.
Don't worry. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Yeah. It used to be your silver. Now it belongs to them.
In addition to a Dropbox-like service, it seems reasonable for Apple to fully integrate MobileMe into the next version of OS X, and as you mentioned backup/sync for iOS seems obvious. They might even extend that service to the Mac App Store.
Well, if they integrate Dropbox, that would work. MobileMe not so much. But this is exactly what 'normal' people want. They DON'T want to think about backups, where the data is, WHAT the data is or much of anything else. Asked carefully, they might be able to make a distinction between data on their own computer and data on, for example, Flickr. They might.
It's all Fucking Magic to 'them'. Hell, I was talking to the nurse running the 120K brand new telemetry system last night (Hey, it runs Linux). No conceptual framework for understanding that it was a 'computer', she has yet to grasp the fact that it's a modified WIMP interface (it has a touchscreen for some functions) and that that cute little bar along the top of the application has all sorts of little options that she's written down on 4 post it notes that magically appear when you run the mouse cursor over them. Sigh.
THOSE are the people that Apple (and pretty much everyone else) is trying to woo with the new shiny. And there are LOTS and LOTS of them. Eternal September over and over and over again. Slashdotters tend to get all wound up about this ("Look, it's not hard, just put the little arrow over the menu text and it tells you what it will do - neat eh?"). Apple just takes it a couple steps further and off to the bank.
DIY railguns, anthrax, C-4 manufacturing, drug reasearch, including how to extract cannaboids, hydrocodone and other substances from their mixed or natural state, radiant gas heaters, naval bases, and porn are all subjects I have searched for and looked at articles related, in the last 48 hours.
Please do be careful not to mix anything up. Things could go very bad for you.
It its unregulated and commercially useful, corporate control will follow.
So the answer might be to make the (or an) internet useless for corporations.
More Flash! Much more Flash! That ought to do them in.
Have you never wired your own place?
I've wired my own house and a bunch of reasonably large networks. That's hardly an issue. The problem is hooking up to the outside. I'm damn sure not wiring the whole town, nor am I going to drop that submarine cable to the mainland. You can go radio - and everybody needs to realize that Amateur radio already has a low speed, low bandwidth, low infrastructure cost system already in place - that basically does email and simple video. Given frequency and power constraints (controlled by the Government) it will never be the high speed, high bandwidth arrangement that the Internet currently is.
Light (terrahertz radiation) suffers from the same issues as radio with even more problems with range.
So I don't see how you're going to wire the big thing together.
You are speaking in generalities. Look at what has actually happened on the Internet over time: usenet was driven out by moderated web boards. Home pages were driven out by Facebook. Decentralized email is being driven out by a small handful of huge webmail providers. Now, even the idea of general-purpose computing is being driven out by handhelds and tablets that only run software from a manufacturer-approved "app store."
You're correct, he is - and to some extent you are as well (overly generalizing). While Facebook seems all the rage, nothing at all prevents you from firing up your favorite HTML editor and making your own webpage, website or even a new Facebook competitor.
You can still set up your own email server as well as access it from a general purpose computing device running code that you've hand picked and even compiled (I suppose Gentoo is still around...).
So yes, the trend is towards all of the consolidation efforts you mention, but we still are able to work at the corners. We just need to keep it that way....