Why didn't they just add the video circuit to the iPod Video and let all the iPods keep Firewire? Just make the iPod video a tiny bit larger and everyone's happy. Video-watchers can watch video (and transfer it to their iPods at a reasonable speed, to boot), while the rest of us get a decent connection for our regular iPods.
Instead, they put form over function. It's something Apple does frequently. It's time to revisit that particular bad decision, IMHO.
And you've just tripped over the "slashdot-crowd mentality".
There's a small, yet very vocal segment of very nerdy nerds. They're so nerdy they have a yellow sticker on their foreheads that says "now with extra nerd essence".
These super-nerds constantly complain about not being able to waste their lives away controlling the exact folder structure that all music resides in on their iPods. What they fail to realize is that this lack of control is a feature to normal people, who simply wish for their music to appear on the iPod without fuss. Even those of us lacking the extra nerd essence who understand how this process works enjoy its benefits. It's not magic. It's automation. It prevents you from wasting your time fiddling with things that can be done by a computer. Yet these overly-vocal super-nerds are complaining. Why? My theory is that they don't want to be replaced by a very small shell script. Too late.
Apple is not "the Microsoft of the DAP market". Apple is the Apple of the DAP market.
Microsoft made a DAP, and they're the Microsoft of the DAP market. It was 1) overplanned, 2) underdelivered, 3) gimmicky, 4) locked-in, and 5) brown. Seriously, brown? WTF? Microsoft = greedy incompetence.
Apple, OTOH, is different in that they lack the incompetence. Just like with the PC market in the 70's and 80's, Apple make the best DAP out there very early in the market's lifetime. Not the first, mind you, but early. Then they proceeded to make it better. But in the process, it did more stuff for you and you could do less with it. This pisses off the "tinkerers" who will proceed to loudly complain for the next 25 years about everything Apple does, simply because of some perceived slight toward them on Apple's part. Am I describing the Mac or the iPod? The answer is "yes".
As far as I know, anything that's 3G+ is dead after 18 months these days.
My 4G iPod (40GB, monochrome screen) has a working battery after 3 years. It holds about 6 hours of charge. It originally got 10, then a firmware update increased it to 12, but it has dwindled due to age. In another year or two, if the battery dies or won't work for an acceptable period, I'll get a replacement battery. But I'm not giving up my Firewire.
Whenever the topic of mobile video comes up, my response is something akin to "who cares?"
Number of videos I've purchased from iTunes: about 5 or 6 Number of videos I've purchased from iTunes because I wanted a video: 1 (the rest were included with albums that I bought for the music) Number of videos I keep sync'ed to my iPod: 0 Number of videos I would keep sync'ed to my iPod if my iPod could play videos: 0
The first time I heard this, I was shocked and dismayed. Every time I've heard it since, I've been angry.
Via USB, my iPod takes 15 to 20 minutes to transfer my 18 GB of music.
Via Firewire, the same operation takes 8 minutes.
Why am I forced to put up with inferior mechanisms when I replace it? New iPods suck ass because of stupid people that don't know that Firewire is better. This isn't just simple anger, this is pure hate. I hate idiots and the stupidity they cause.
4G iPod forever! (Or at least until Apple puts Firewire support back in.)
The simplest way to know it's not distilled is to find if it lacks a power source.
"Distilled" means that it was evaporated, then condensed in a separate container. This bottle, lacking a heat source with which to evaporate the water, cannot distill anything. And before someone says that you could leave it in the sun and do that, remember, you don't have a second container with which to gather the condensate, either. It cannot distill.
- It only works for 1 tv ( you have to pay more of you want to receive it on more tv's )
Well, that's true, but only because you have to buy the equipment. Or did you mean there's some sort of tax on receiving broadcast TV? Only a backwards country with no respect for their citizens' property rights would do that. Like the UK. The US may be "bad", but it's not that bad. Yet.
Or did you think this was some sort of cable-vs.-OTA thing? It's not. It's analog OTA vs. digital OTA, and both are free.
- I have to pay money for each film i want to see later ( as appsosed to just recording it for free )
Why? OTA is free. Period. You can record it if you want, and there's not a damned thing anybody can do about it. Yes, even legally. Recording from OTA broadcasts is protected by several federal court decisions.
- There is no difference in quality , since i only have a regular tv ( the digital signal gets converted back to analog )
Another poster already addressed this.
So why would i pay more
You won't.
to have less ?
You won't.
If they force the switch , i'll just get everything i need from the internet.
Nobody's stopping you, but your assumptions about DTV are deeply flawed. You might want to rethink things.
There seems to be only one of these on the market right now. It's an ATSC/ClearQAM tuner from Samsung, and it comes equipped with video outputs for HDMI, component, composite (x2), and s-video. Audio outs are in the form of RCA L/R and TOSLink. It also has an antenna passthrough. It gets pretty good reviews from the enthusiast sites (News for TV-heads, stuff that matters?), and I'd go so far as to say you should probably get one of these if you don't already get ATSC TV in your home.
For the record, no, I don't work for any of the affiliated parties here, nor do I own one of these boxes (though after reading some of the reviews, I might within the week!).
Perhaps it's time for... *gasp*...a different business model!
There are basically 3 kinds of sites on the web.
1) Non-profit sites. 2) For-profit corporate sites, sometimes with an online store. 3) Aggregation sites, frequently ad-supported.
Type 1 will always be around, though quantity will fluctuate. There are always people who like to publish stuff just to provide information. Type 2 will always be around. Why would corporations remove their personal presence from the web? Type 3 will die. Soon. But it will be reborn.
Supporting a news site with ads is a surefire way to piss off web users. Sure, it worked great for "old media", since old media lacked the web's unequaled ability to deliver annoying crap to your eyeballs. So, how does a site like this get its funding without ads? The same way as anything else - corporate sponsors. Watch PBS sometime. Sure, there's "Viewers Like You" that make everything possible. But more importantly, there's special interest sponsorship money going into those programs. Norm Abram's Old Yankee Workshop? Delta woodworking tools. This Old House? GMC. America's Test Kitchen? Thermador appliances. So... Slashdot? Intel, Microsoft (they'd love to buy us all, right?), and whoever else sends in press releases for posting as "news". In between press releases, we could get real news, since the site would probably be swimming in dough. And everyone would be happy except the ad-banner people. They can starve for all I care, though.
REMOVE THE FUCKING BATTERY.... I really would have done that.
Uhm... It's an iPhone. The battery is soldered in and there's no access door. Did you forget that, or have you just been living under a rock for the last 3 months?
On Windows, your software is your babysitter. It prevents you from getting into trouble (poorly), and tries to keep you from breaking things, and limits you in what you can do. It's like having an appliance with gymnastics padding all over it and every sharp corner rounded off. Sure, it'll do the job, but usually not very well.
On Linux, your software is your toolbox. It consists of a lot of small, simple tools that do one thing and do it well. This is quite useful, especially when coming from babysitter-land (Windows), and you tend to get used to having absolute control. Unfortunately, this leads to an inflexible mindset about software. You'll see why in a moment...
In Apple's products, the system's software (not yours, really) is geared toward automation. The system brings itself to a stable, usable state, then attempts to maintain that stability and usability at all costs. Even when those costs conflict with your wishes.
iTunes is an example of this. You wish to have control over where files are stored, and you wish to use the toolset you learned in Linux. But iTunes uses those tools and many others in combinations that you probably haven't dreamed of. It uses them to automate the final expected result: a managed set of media files that you can organize and access with minimal fuss. It does this very well. Unfortunately, it does this its own way and expects you to only care about the final result. It's sort of a "the end justifies the means" viewpoint. If you can't get over the means, the end isn't going to please you either.
To geeks and nerds, this is a bad thing. Windows is a pain, and we all know it. But Linux is good, right? But wait, Apple takes software design to the next level by not only providing the tools to do real work, but also by creating more tools that automate huge chunks of stuff. Linux gives us our tools, Apple takes them away, hides them, and uses them to replace us with a seemingly-bloated piece of automation software. It scaressss ussss it doessss. We've been replaced by a very large binary with a GUI. All those feebs we've threatened with obsolescence in the past, all those shell scripts we've written to replace the meat-bots, all of that will come back upon us in the end! Bad! Bad Apple!
You can have my Mac when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. (No, my proposal is not acceptable.)
iTunes will play any file that Quicktime will play. And most not-already-supported-out-of-the-box codecs have a QT plugin. Which iTunes will inherit. And play.
Or did you mean the bastard version on Windows? 'Cause that's not the real iTunes. It's the bastard Windows version that has stripped down, just-enough-to-make-the-iPod-work-and-play-a-few-f ormats functionality. Apple should've named it wTunes or something, just to make it clear that it's not the real deal.
iTunes is awesome. iTunes for Windows sucks balls. So which one are you comparing to Winamp? 'Cause I'm pretty sure Winamp falls between the two in functionality and probably just barely behind iTfW in usability.
And since it's not the retailer (NewEgg) offering the mail-in rebate through their special rebate center (usually a company with a large dumpster), it's not a problem. And also, since they list the actual selling price on their "shelf" (e-shelf maybe?), then that is also not a problem since they're being quite up-front about the actual immediate cost of the item.
I don't buy things with mail-in rebates. If retailers want to play games, they can find someone else. If they want me to buy stuff, they can put the real price on the shelf instead of the after-rebate price. Instant rebates are a different matter...
I have yet to see Java do anything better than.NET, and I've worked with both extensively.
I built all kinds of stuff in Java, mostly as Tomcat-hosted web-apps. It's a fair bit sturdier than PHP, but requires actual programming knowledge, so it was used mostly as a back-end, heavy processor. I even built a bulk-emailer/printer (not for spam!) in Java. It was multithreaded and beautiful and could send around 50k emails a second and fill a network print queue for hours (printed messages were rare compared to emails, so in practice it wasn't so bad).
Then my employment situation changed and I started working with.NET. The unified nature of everything is just comfortable. Yes, it feels like I've sold my soul to the devil. But things "just work". It's almost as if Microsoft figured out how Apple does their magic. I can write some C# or one of the VB-monkeys can write their trash, and we can commit it to the same repository and compile it into the same project. And it just works. I don't need to mire myself in VB. They don't need to learn how to actually program in a decent language. And we can call each others' code. It's awesome.
Uhh... ew? Remind me never to get anywhere near your iPod. I mean, yeah, it's a personal music player, but that's taking it a bit too far.
Anyway, click "up" until you don't hear the iPod clicking anymore. Then scroll down until you don't hear the iPod clicking anymore. Then click the center button. That's the Now Playing menu item. The only caveat is that it's not there when there's nothing playing and you'll end up turning on the backlight instead.
Hit menu until it stops clicking, scroll down/right/clockwise until it stops clicking, enter (center button). Done. You've just chosen the "Now Playing" menu option at the far bottom of the top-level menu. Sure, it takes a couple of seconds, but the functionality is there, and is in an easy to find (even when not looking at the screen) location.
Slashdot Mirror
For this exercise, I'm going to assume you're in management.
If your current IT environment isn't capable of supporting my needs then fix it.
If your current needs outstrip the capabilities of our current IT environment, then fund the upgrade.
mv shoe otherfoot
what makes smudgy and scratchy black and white ipods so much better?
They work as advertised.
So here's a thought...
Why didn't they just add the video circuit to the iPod Video and let all the iPods keep Firewire? Just make the iPod video a tiny bit larger and everyone's happy. Video-watchers can watch video (and transfer it to their iPods at a reasonable speed, to boot), while the rest of us get a decent connection for our regular iPods.
Instead, they put form over function. It's something Apple does frequently. It's time to revisit that particular bad decision, IMHO.
And you've just tripped over the "slashdot-crowd mentality".
There's a small, yet very vocal segment of very nerdy nerds. They're so nerdy they have a yellow sticker on their foreheads that says "now with extra nerd essence".
These super-nerds constantly complain about not being able to waste their lives away controlling the exact folder structure that all music resides in on their iPods. What they fail to realize is that this lack of control is a feature to normal people, who simply wish for their music to appear on the iPod without fuss. Even those of us lacking the extra nerd essence who understand how this process works enjoy its benefits. It's not magic. It's automation. It prevents you from wasting your time fiddling with things that can be done by a computer. Yet these overly-vocal super-nerds are complaining. Why? My theory is that they don't want to be replaced by a very small shell script. Too late.
You fail Fanboy 101.
Apple is not "the Microsoft of the DAP market". Apple is the Apple of the DAP market.
Microsoft made a DAP, and they're the Microsoft of the DAP market. It was 1) overplanned, 2) underdelivered, 3) gimmicky, 4) locked-in, and 5) brown. Seriously, brown? WTF? Microsoft = greedy incompetence.
Apple, OTOH, is different in that they lack the incompetence. Just like with the PC market in the 70's and 80's, Apple make the best DAP out there very early in the market's lifetime. Not the first, mind you, but early. Then they proceeded to make it better. But in the process, it did more stuff for you and you could do less with it. This pisses off the "tinkerers" who will proceed to loudly complain for the next 25 years about everything Apple does, simply because of some perceived slight toward them on Apple's part. Am I describing the Mac or the iPod? The answer is "yes".
As far as I know, anything that's 3G+ is dead after 18 months these days.
My 4G iPod (40GB, monochrome screen) has a working battery after 3 years. It holds about 6 hours of charge. It originally got 10, then a firmware update increased it to 12, but it has dwindled due to age. In another year or two, if the battery dies or won't work for an acceptable period, I'll get a replacement battery. But I'm not giving up my Firewire.
Whenever the topic of mobile video comes up, my response is something akin to "who cares?"
Number of videos I've purchased from iTunes: about 5 or 6
Number of videos I've purchased from iTunes because I wanted a video: 1 (the rest were included with albums that I bought for the music)
Number of videos I keep sync'ed to my iPod: 0
Number of videos I would keep sync'ed to my iPod if my iPod could play videos: 0
I want Firewire back, dammit.
It simply doesn't support Firewire any more.
The first time I heard this, I was shocked and dismayed. Every time I've heard it since, I've been angry.
Via USB, my iPod takes 15 to 20 minutes to transfer my 18 GB of music.
Via Firewire, the same operation takes 8 minutes.
Why am I forced to put up with inferior mechanisms when I replace it? New iPods suck ass because of stupid people that don't know that Firewire is better. This isn't just simple anger, this is pure hate. I hate idiots and the stupidity they cause.
4G iPod forever! (Or at least until Apple puts Firewire support back in.)
So what you're saying is...
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Right?
I think we all already knew this.
The simplest way to know it's not distilled is to find if it lacks a power source.
"Distilled" means that it was evaporated, then condensed in a separate container. This bottle, lacking a heat source with which to evaporate the water, cannot distill anything. And before someone says that you could leave it in the sun and do that, remember, you don't have a second container with which to gather the condensate, either. It cannot distill.
- It only works for 1 tv ( you have to pay more of you want to receive it on more tv's )
.
Well, that's true, but only because you have to buy the equipment. Or did you mean there's some sort of tax on receiving broadcast TV? Only a backwards country with no respect for their citizens' property rights would do that. Like the UK. The US may be "bad", but it's not that bad. Yet.
Or did you think this was some sort of cable-vs.-OTA thing? It's not. It's analog OTA vs. digital OTA, and both are free.
- I have to pay money for each film i want to see later ( as appsosed to just recording it for free )
Why? OTA is free. Period. You can record it if you want, and there's not a damned thing anybody can do about it. Yes, even legally. Recording from OTA broadcasts is protected by several federal court decisions.
- There is no difference in quality , since i only have a regular tv ( the digital signal gets converted back to analog )
Another poster already addressed this.
So why would i pay more
You won't.
to have less ?
You won't.
If they force the switch , i'll just get everything i need from the internet
Nobody's stopping you, but your assumptions about DTV are deeply flawed. You might want to rethink things.
But, I can't go to Best Buy or Wal-Mart and buy a $100 tuner off the shelf.
No, but you can go to Best Buy or Circuit City and buy a $180 tuner off the shelf.
Best Buy's product page
Circuit City's product page
There seems to be only one of these on the market right now. It's an ATSC/ClearQAM tuner from Samsung, and it comes equipped with video outputs for HDMI, component, composite (x2), and s-video. Audio outs are in the form of RCA L/R and TOSLink. It also has an antenna passthrough. It gets pretty good reviews from the enthusiast sites (News for TV-heads, stuff that matters?), and I'd go so far as to say you should probably get one of these if you don't already get ATSC TV in your home.
For the record, no, I don't work for any of the affiliated parties here, nor do I own one of these boxes (though after reading some of the reviews, I might within the week!).
String theory's inability to accommodate inflation has been driving me nuts ever since we converted everything to type string.
.NET guys) are for.
That's what StringBuffers (StringBuilders for all you
Perhaps it's time for... *gasp* ...a different business model!
There are basically 3 kinds of sites on the web.
1) Non-profit sites.
2) For-profit corporate sites, sometimes with an online store.
3) Aggregation sites, frequently ad-supported.
Type 1 will always be around, though quantity will fluctuate. There are always people who like to publish stuff just to provide information.
Type 2 will always be around. Why would corporations remove their personal presence from the web?
Type 3 will die. Soon. But it will be reborn.
Supporting a news site with ads is a surefire way to piss off web users. Sure, it worked great for "old media", since old media lacked the web's unequaled ability to deliver annoying crap to your eyeballs. So, how does a site like this get its funding without ads? The same way as anything else - corporate sponsors. Watch PBS sometime. Sure, there's "Viewers Like You" that make everything possible. But more importantly, there's special interest sponsorship money going into those programs. Norm Abram's Old Yankee Workshop? Delta woodworking tools. This Old House? GMC. America's Test Kitchen? Thermador appliances. So... Slashdot? Intel, Microsoft (they'd love to buy us all, right?), and whoever else sends in press releases for posting as "news". In between press releases, we could get real news, since the site would probably be swimming in dough. And everyone would be happy except the ad-banner people. They can starve for all I care, though.
REMOVE THE FUCKING BATTERY. ... I really would have done that.
Uhm... It's an iPhone. The battery is soldered in and there's no access door. Did you forget that, or have you just been living under a rock for the last 3 months?
Bar associations are not courts. They're unions for lawyers. You can sue unions. You can sue bar associations.
My BS detector went off. Then it quit going off. It seems things that explode tend not to explode (or exist) ever again.
Apple has their own software style.
On Windows, your software is your babysitter. It prevents you from getting into trouble (poorly), and tries to keep you from breaking things, and limits you in what you can do. It's like having an appliance with gymnastics padding all over it and every sharp corner rounded off. Sure, it'll do the job, but usually not very well.
On Linux, your software is your toolbox. It consists of a lot of small, simple tools that do one thing and do it well. This is quite useful, especially when coming from babysitter-land (Windows), and you tend to get used to having absolute control. Unfortunately, this leads to an inflexible mindset about software. You'll see why in a moment...
In Apple's products, the system's software (not yours, really) is geared toward automation. The system brings itself to a stable, usable state, then attempts to maintain that stability and usability at all costs. Even when those costs conflict with your wishes.
iTunes is an example of this. You wish to have control over where files are stored, and you wish to use the toolset you learned in Linux. But iTunes uses those tools and many others in combinations that you probably haven't dreamed of. It uses them to automate the final expected result: a managed set of media files that you can organize and access with minimal fuss. It does this very well. Unfortunately, it does this its own way and expects you to only care about the final result. It's sort of a "the end justifies the means" viewpoint. If you can't get over the means, the end isn't going to please you either.
To geeks and nerds, this is a bad thing. Windows is a pain, and we all know it. But Linux is good, right? But wait, Apple takes software design to the next level by not only providing the tools to do real work, but also by creating more tools that automate huge chunks of stuff. Linux gives us our tools, Apple takes them away, hides them, and uses them to replace us with a seemingly-bloated piece of automation software. It scaressss ussss it doessss. We've been replaced by a very large binary with a GUI. All those feebs we've threatened with obsolescence in the past, all those shell scripts we've written to replace the meat-bots, all of that will come back upon us in the end! Bad! Bad Apple!
You can have my Mac when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. (No, my proposal is not acceptable.)
Not likely.
f ormats functionality. Apple should've named it wTunes or something, just to make it clear that it's not the real deal.
iTunes will play any file that Quicktime will play. And most not-already-supported-out-of-the-box codecs have a QT plugin. Which iTunes will inherit. And play.
Or did you mean the bastard version on Windows? 'Cause that's not the real iTunes. It's the bastard Windows version that has stripped down, just-enough-to-make-the-iPod-work-and-play-a-few-
iTunes is awesome. iTunes for Windows sucks balls. So which one are you comparing to Winamp? 'Cause I'm pretty sure Winamp falls between the two in functionality and probably just barely behind iTfW in usability.
Seemingly simple tasks like copying music from your hard drive to your mp3 player have to be done in roundabout ways
Yeah. Like plugging in said mp3 player. Pshaw. Who ever does that?
Maybe if you spent less time fighting the software and let it do its job, you'd have better success. In short, PEBKAC.
And since it's not the retailer (NewEgg) offering the mail-in rebate through their special rebate center (usually a company with a large dumpster), it's not a problem. And also, since they list the actual selling price on their "shelf" (e-shelf maybe?), then that is also not a problem since they're being quite up-front about the actual immediate cost of the item.
In short, NewEgg rocks.
I don't buy things with mail-in rebates. If retailers want to play games, they can find someone else. If they want me to buy stuff, they can put the real price on the shelf instead of the after-rebate price. Instant rebates are a different matter...
I have yet to see Java do anything better than .NET, and I've worked with both extensively.
.NET. The unified nature of everything is just comfortable. Yes, it feels like I've sold my soul to the devil. But things "just work". It's almost as if Microsoft figured out how Apple does their magic. I can write some C# or one of the VB-monkeys can write their trash, and we can commit it to the same repository and compile it into the same project. And it just works. I don't need to mire myself in VB. They don't need to learn how to actually program in a decent language. And we can call each others' code. It's awesome.
I built all kinds of stuff in Java, mostly as Tomcat-hosted web-apps. It's a fair bit sturdier than PHP, but requires actual programming knowledge, so it was used mostly as a back-end, heavy processor. I even built a bulk-emailer/printer (not for spam!) in Java. It was multithreaded and beautiful and could send around 50k emails a second and fill a network print queue for hours (printed messages were rare compared to emails, so in practice it wasn't so bad).
Then my employment situation changed and I started working with
I am balls-deep in an artist's albums
Uhh... ew? Remind me never to get anywhere near your iPod. I mean, yeah, it's a personal music player, but that's taking it a bit too far.
Anyway, click "up" until you don't hear the iPod clicking anymore. Then scroll down until you don't hear the iPod clicking anymore. Then click the center button. That's the Now Playing menu item. The only caveat is that it's not there when there's nothing playing and you'll end up turning on the backlight instead.
Hit menu until it stops clicking, scroll down/right/clockwise until it stops clicking, enter (center button). Done. You've just chosen the "Now Playing" menu option at the far bottom of the top-level menu. Sure, it takes a couple of seconds, but the functionality is there, and is in an easy to find (even when not looking at the screen) location.