The next level to advance to was a test. The test was to implement a small web server (GET/HEAD commands basically) in C++ using *no external libraries of any kind*.
So you had to GET/HEAD over a weekend? Was your wife allowed to help you?
They do gain a benefit in that it makes it hard to use iTunes-purchased music on non-iPod MP3 players, true. However, it's also pretty well known (though I don't have a source, it's pretty well accepted as fact) that Jobs has fought with the record companies over the DRM. Jobs wanted cheap music, DRM free, at a flat fee, that could be transfered back-and-forth between the iPod and your computer. The labels wanted music with expensive variable pricing and extremely restrictive DRM. The current system, with mostly flat pricing (more expensive than what Apple wanted but cheaper than the label's intended), somewhat loose DRM, and one-way syncing from iTunes->iPod was the compromise.
Really, when you think of it in a certain way, why would Apple care terribly about the DRM? They don't make much off of these sales, and a lot of their cost probably comes from bandwidth, which isn't used except when someone actually buys something. On their end, it's largely promotional.
When you play the law game, the argument of the form "Look, there's a definition of X in the dictionary, under which X didn't happen. Therefore, I didn't do X. Ha-ha! Got you!" works about as well as I've made it sound.
Oh yeah, as if lawyers never exploit technicalities. The technicality here, of course, is that you are gaining access to the copyrighted work with permission of the copyright owner and through the approved method. It's being decoded into memory in the correct and legal means, and you then have a legally decoded copy in memory. The user is then copying that copy in accordance with fair use. There's no circumvention of the controlled access to the work, because it's an issue of what the user who has controlled access does with that access.
I'm not saying it's an iron-clad argument or anything, but it certainly could be argued on very technical grounds, and that's a large part of what lawyers do-- argue about the wording and meaning of laws in a very technical way. The point is, the transformation from a protected copy to an unprotected copy is done explicitly how the copyright holder has given permission for it to be done. Every time you play a song in iTunes, the program is making an unprotected copy in memory, and this program is simply a means to KEEP that copy.
If they license FairPlay to other MP3 players, then the iTMS ceases to be an advantage for the iPod. The only reason they're running the iTMS is to sell iPods, Macs, and now iTVs.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what the motivation would be to license Fairplay to other media sources. Apple gains a lot of credit for ease-of-use and reliability by managing the user experience end-to-end. If Real, for example, was selling a lot of media to iPod owners, then Apple has to deal with support issues related to Real's music store. Surely it's just not worth the complication.
Well of course Lucas could restore the original version, but you're missing the point. First he'll release the laserdisc transfer. In a few years, he'll miraculously find some missing negatives, completely undamaged, and release the real DVD transfer. Then he'll release a further cleaned-up version, and then finally an HD version, which will be included in the super-ultimate edition box set, which will also include his new super-special edition, where all actors have been replaced and the entire movie will be CGI.
This is called "milking it for all it's worth", and since he isn't making any more movies, Lucas has to re-release Star Wars every 5 years in order to pay for his thousand-dollar bill smoking habit.
Actually, I found another solution as well. Each song in the library has an "Album Artist" field, so you could make it "Soundtrack" or "Compilation", and then sort by "Album Artist". Of course, This will probably work best if you've entered a value for "Album Artist" for everything in your library.
It will still show you album art by artist. I'd bet they'll introduce some improvements in later versions for sorting, but it makes sense as a way to confront this problem.
Grouping complications together as an artist "Compilation" is a relatively new feature in iTunes, but even if the coverflow system grouped things the same way, you'd still get some duplicate cover art, because it will still list albums containing artist's songs under that artist. For example, I have a Shins album and the Garden State soundtrack in my iTunes library. If I make iTunes group by Compilation, then there's no "Zero 7" in my artist list, because I don't have any Zero 7 albums. However, if I select the Shins in my artist list, "The Garden State Soundtrack" still shows up.
And that is what should happen. The reason is, if I'm sorting by artist because I'm looking for a certain Shins song, and I find the Shins, it should show me all of the songs I have in the Library that are performed by the Shins. It shouldn't hide it in Compilations. Unless you tell it to do so-- manually.
Yeah... I don't know for sure. I grew up as a computer geek. I watched lots of TV and played lots of video games, and have always been of the opinion that it never did me much harm, so I'm not the sort who's trying to demonize video games. However, i recently realized that there was a pretty clear division in my growing up between the pre-cable years and the post-cable years. Once my family got cable TV, it put a sort of damper on a lot of activities. Up until that point, we did things just because we were bored. We'd know that there wasn't anything on any of the 5 TV stations we picked up, and so we'd find something else to do. We'd play cards, or talk about things-- or just other... stuff. Whatever.
And looking back, it seems like all of those activities died off when we had cable TV, because even if you couldn't find anything on that you wanted to watch, it takes half an hour now to flip through all the channels and be sure you're not interested in anything. By then, maybe something good came on, so you flip the channels again. Then there's the internet and pay-per-view and such.
It makes me wonder whether, if I were a little kid right now, I would experience the same kind of boredom I did when I was young. Would we have done the same "stuff", played the same stupid games and such. I think probably not, and for some reason that makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. I think I would have been worse off.
And so I think sometimes people aren't just looking for something new to demonize today's youth, and they're not just coming up with paranoid doomsday scenarios. It's just a little bit of worry, that maybe the reason we were able to cope is because we'd already learned a thing or two before becoming "plugged in", and that we don't know what it does to our kids to be so... surrounded. All the time. Without a larger real-life context.
Yeah, but at least you see the problem, right? You want to sort by artist, but when you have an album that contains multiple artists, where do you put it? Let's say Album A has songs by both Band X and Band Y. Essentially, you have 3 options:
Separate out the compilations, which means that when you're looking for songs by Band X or Band Y, and you sort by the artist, the songs on this album will not show up under either group. This could be annoying and frustrating.
Have some method to determine whether the album should appear under Band X or Band Y. This would be inconsistent at best, and just as confusing.
Have Album A show up twice, once with Band X and once with Band Y. This means you're likely to find what you're looking for, but the same album art will appear multiple times.
Personally, I think of those choices, the third is obviously the best. If you have OCD or something than it might offend your sensibilities, but insofar as it's a tool for sorting through your music collection to find something you want to listen to, it just seems like the best option. I guess it also makes sense if you just want to ask for more options in how things are sorted, but if there must be a single way, it seems to me that this is it.
No Apple stuff isn't always the coolest, but there stuff is consistently pretty cool, and they mix the coolness with usefulness. If Dell and Creative had as much of a knack for combining shiny+innovative+practical, I think people would get just as excited.
the cover view is made crappy by not grouping compilations - hence the same album art repeated for different artists.
It seems it shows you cover art in the order in which your music is sorted. If you're sorting by "Artist", for example, then yes, it will show you the same cover art multiple times if there are multiple artists on the album. That's because it's actually sorting the cover art by artist.
If you sort by Album, however, I think you'll find that your complaint goes away.
It's not "Apple's format". It's a normal format, as standard as other MPEGs or MP3. It seems to be a common mistake-- people think AAC and h264 are both Apple formats because Apple is one of the most prominent companies to use the formats, but Apple doesn't control either format, and there are other encoders/decoders for both formats.
Yeah, I guess what I was saying is that I couldn't tell whether you were implying it was dumb to advocate boycotting XP because 2000 was "perfectly fine". In fact, many businesses have done just that. I think there are really two questions going on here: Is Windows 2000 "perfectly fine"? You can certainly argue for "yes" or "no" as the answer to that question. On the other hand, if you have problems with Windows 2000, can your problems be solved by upgrading to Windows XP? It depends on your problems, but I'd say that most of the time the answer is "no". Therefore, in the context of talking about upgrading to Windows XP, I'd probably say that 2000 was "perfectly fine".
I'd have to think about it, but since Windows XP and Server 2003 have come out, I can't think of a time when I've run into a problem on 2000 that could be solved by the upgrade, and so I've never advocated spending money on the upgrade. In fact, unless you have the corporate version, Activation is enough reason for me to refuse to upgrade even if it were free. I'll try to reserve judgement on Vista until it comes out and I've evaluated it more, but I've been reading about it, and I've tried RC1. So far, I've seen a couple features that might be "nice to have", but I don't think there's anything that will actually help me in any significant way, yet there are many things that annoy me, so Windows 2000 might still be "perfectly fine" in the context of comparing it to newer versions of Windows.
I don't know that this particular thing bothers me very much, but I think the bundling wars are just over, and Microsoft won. They've displayed a willingness to just pay the fines and employ an army of lawyers and lobbyists, and that's worked well enough. I mean, the big test would be IE's role in Vista. The complaint has existed for years, and AFAIK, there's no way to install Vista without IE or uninstall IE in a Microsoft-supported way in Vista. WMP-- same deal.
I fail to see what competitive advantage Vista will give businesses who upgrade to it immediatly. Maybe companies could run into problems in 5 years time when compatability issues arise, but not in the short/medium term.
More to the point, I think any businesses who upgrade to Vista immediately will likely find themselves at a disadvantage. Even if we were to assume that Vista will be a great OS and offer lots of advantages, it still remains that there is not yet much support for it, and likely won't be for several months. It's never a good idea to be an "early adopter" with your vital systems. A short delay won't hurt anyone.
But further, I have yet to find any real reason why I would pay to upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP or Vista. Sure, I have XP systems and I see no reason to downgrade them either, but if those systems had 2000, it wouldn't cause a single problem.
Yeah, but I think we'll have passed the point I'm talking about, where it's no longer worth upgrading, before that happens. Me? I'm considering downgrading back to Windows/Office 2000.
How can they make it a mandatory patch, even if marked critical? It seems to me that the most they could do is impose a restriction that you couldn't install other patches until you installed this one, but they still can't force you to install it.
<microsoft bashing bitch session>It really makes me wonder whether, as Microsoft introduces more "security" and "protection" that diminish a user's capability, at what point will it cease to be worthwhile to upgrade/patch/fix? Sometimes I think that point was crossed with the introduction of Windows XP</microsoft bashing bitch session>
Microsoft is trying to sell their formats on the strength of the DRM. DRM is what record companies want. If the DRM is insecure and easily cracked, then it won't be used.
Of course, being OSS, if they don't work together, it's easy enough to take the attitude of "may the best fork win" from the sidelines. It may be just as well to have a choice. I agree that it might be better to have a version that's Mac-centric. I prefer Camino to Firefox, for example. I'm also rooting for the NeoOffice team because they took the initiative of working on an Aqua port back when OOo just didn't seem interested. Still... I'd be glad to see OOo support OSX themselves, even if I stuck with NeoOffice.
Mind you i would love to be able to start neo office without automagically loading a document and then selecting what you want from the menu bar.
I haven't gotten very far into playing with these things, but maybe you can find some helphere.
Yeah, this is going off-topic, but I wonder what's going to happen with NeoOffice now that OpenOffice.org has announced that they're working on an Aqua port. NeoOffice has a head-start, and I'm kind of rooting for them, but I'd also like to see an official OO Aqua port in the hopes that it would have more backing and be more integrated with the ongoing development for other platforms. I guess it's too much to hope that they can all work together?
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The next level to advance to was a test. The test was to implement a small web server (GET/HEAD commands basically) in C++ using *no external libraries of any kind*.
So you had to GET/HEAD over a weekend? Was your wife allowed to help you?
They do gain a benefit in that it makes it hard to use iTunes-purchased music on non-iPod MP3 players, true. However, it's also pretty well known (though I don't have a source, it's pretty well accepted as fact) that Jobs has fought with the record companies over the DRM. Jobs wanted cheap music, DRM free, at a flat fee, that could be transfered back-and-forth between the iPod and your computer. The labels wanted music with expensive variable pricing and extremely restrictive DRM. The current system, with mostly flat pricing (more expensive than what Apple wanted but cheaper than the label's intended), somewhat loose DRM, and one-way syncing from iTunes->iPod was the compromise.
Really, when you think of it in a certain way, why would Apple care terribly about the DRM? They don't make much off of these sales, and a lot of their cost probably comes from bandwidth, which isn't used except when someone actually buys something. On their end, it's largely promotional.
When you play the law game, the argument of the form "Look, there's a definition of X in the dictionary, under which X didn't happen. Therefore, I didn't do X. Ha-ha! Got you!" works about as well as I've made it sound.
Oh yeah, as if lawyers never exploit technicalities. The technicality here, of course, is that you are gaining access to the copyrighted work with permission of the copyright owner and through the approved method. It's being decoded into memory in the correct and legal means, and you then have a legally decoded copy in memory. The user is then copying that copy in accordance with fair use. There's no circumvention of the controlled access to the work, because it's an issue of what the user who has controlled access does with that access.
I'm not saying it's an iron-clad argument or anything, but it certainly could be argued on very technical grounds, and that's a large part of what lawyers do-- argue about the wording and meaning of laws in a very technical way. The point is, the transformation from a protected copy to an unprotected copy is done explicitly how the copyright holder has given permission for it to be done. Every time you play a song in iTunes, the program is making an unprotected copy in memory, and this program is simply a means to KEEP that copy.
If they license FairPlay to other MP3 players, then the iTMS ceases to be an advantage for the iPod. The only reason they're running the iTMS is to sell iPods, Macs, and now iTVs.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what the motivation would be to license Fairplay to other media sources. Apple gains a lot of credit for ease-of-use and reliability by managing the user experience end-to-end. If Real, for example, was selling a lot of media to iPod owners, then Apple has to deal with support issues related to Real's music store. Surely it's just not worth the complication.
Well of course Lucas could restore the original version, but you're missing the point. First he'll release the laserdisc transfer. In a few years, he'll miraculously find some missing negatives, completely undamaged, and release the real DVD transfer. Then he'll release a further cleaned-up version, and then finally an HD version, which will be included in the super-ultimate edition box set, which will also include his new super-special edition, where all actors have been replaced and the entire movie will be CGI.
This is called "milking it for all it's worth", and since he isn't making any more movies, Lucas has to re-release Star Wars every 5 years in order to pay for his thousand-dollar bill smoking habit.
Actually, I found another solution as well. Each song in the library has an "Album Artist" field, so you could make it "Soundtrack" or "Compilation", and then sort by "Album Artist". Of course, This will probably work best if you've entered a value for "Album Artist" for everything in your library.
It will still show you album art by artist. I'd bet they'll introduce some improvements in later versions for sorting, but it makes sense as a way to confront this problem.
Grouping complications together as an artist "Compilation" is a relatively new feature in iTunes, but even if the coverflow system grouped things the same way, you'd still get some duplicate cover art, because it will still list albums containing artist's songs under that artist. For example, I have a Shins album and the Garden State soundtrack in my iTunes library. If I make iTunes group by Compilation, then there's no "Zero 7" in my artist list, because I don't have any Zero 7 albums. However, if I select the Shins in my artist list, "The Garden State Soundtrack" still shows up.
And that is what should happen. The reason is, if I'm sorting by artist because I'm looking for a certain Shins song, and I find the Shins, it should show me all of the songs I have in the Library that are performed by the Shins. It shouldn't hide it in Compilations. Unless you tell it to do so-- manually.
Yeah... I don't know for sure. I grew up as a computer geek. I watched lots of TV and played lots of video games, and have always been of the opinion that it never did me much harm, so I'm not the sort who's trying to demonize video games. However, i recently realized that there was a pretty clear division in my growing up between the pre-cable years and the post-cable years. Once my family got cable TV, it put a sort of damper on a lot of activities. Up until that point, we did things just because we were bored. We'd know that there wasn't anything on any of the 5 TV stations we picked up, and so we'd find something else to do. We'd play cards, or talk about things-- or just other... stuff. Whatever.
And looking back, it seems like all of those activities died off when we had cable TV, because even if you couldn't find anything on that you wanted to watch, it takes half an hour now to flip through all the channels and be sure you're not interested in anything. By then, maybe something good came on, so you flip the channels again. Then there's the internet and pay-per-view and such.
It makes me wonder whether, if I were a little kid right now, I would experience the same kind of boredom I did when I was young. Would we have done the same "stuff", played the same stupid games and such. I think probably not, and for some reason that makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. I think I would have been worse off.
And so I think sometimes people aren't just looking for something new to demonize today's youth, and they're not just coming up with paranoid doomsday scenarios. It's just a little bit of worry, that maybe the reason we were able to cope is because we'd already learned a thing or two before becoming "plugged in", and that we don't know what it does to our kids to be so... surrounded. All the time. Without a larger real-life context.
Yeah, but at least you see the problem, right? You want to sort by artist, but when you have an album that contains multiple artists, where do you put it? Let's say Album A has songs by both Band X and Band Y. Essentially, you have 3 options:
Personally, I think of those choices, the third is obviously the best. If you have OCD or something than it might offend your sensibilities, but insofar as it's a tool for sorting through your music collection to find something you want to listen to, it just seems like the best option. I guess it also makes sense if you just want to ask for more options in how things are sorted, but if there must be a single way, it seems to me that this is it.
We won't know for sure about the iTV until it's out, but if it's any indication, Front Row and and iTunes can play any video that Quicktime can play.
No Apple stuff isn't always the coolest, but there stuff is consistently pretty cool, and they mix the coolness with usefulness. If Dell and Creative had as much of a knack for combining shiny+innovative+practical, I think people would get just as excited.
the cover view is made crappy by not grouping compilations - hence the same album art repeated for different artists.
It seems it shows you cover art in the order in which your music is sorted. If you're sorting by "Artist", for example, then yes, it will show you the same cover art multiple times if there are multiple artists on the album. That's because it's actually sorting the cover art by artist.
If you sort by Album, however, I think you'll find that your complaint goes away.
It looks like Apple bought CoverFlow. link
It's natural to fear what you don't understand
In this case, I'm no afraid of what I don't understand. I'm afraid of what the scientists running the experiment don't understand.
It's not "Apple's format". It's a normal format, as standard as other MPEGs or MP3. It seems to be a common mistake-- people think AAC and h264 are both Apple formats because Apple is one of the most prominent companies to use the formats, but Apple doesn't control either format, and there are other encoders/decoders for both formats.
Yeah, I guess what I was saying is that I couldn't tell whether you were implying it was dumb to advocate boycotting XP because 2000 was "perfectly fine". In fact, many businesses have done just that. I think there are really two questions going on here: Is Windows 2000 "perfectly fine"? You can certainly argue for "yes" or "no" as the answer to that question. On the other hand, if you have problems with Windows 2000, can your problems be solved by upgrading to Windows XP? It depends on your problems, but I'd say that most of the time the answer is "no". Therefore, in the context of talking about upgrading to Windows XP, I'd probably say that 2000 was "perfectly fine".
I'd have to think about it, but since Windows XP and Server 2003 have come out, I can't think of a time when I've run into a problem on 2000 that could be solved by the upgrade, and so I've never advocated spending money on the upgrade. In fact, unless you have the corporate version, Activation is enough reason for me to refuse to upgrade even if it were free. I'll try to reserve judgement on Vista until it comes out and I've evaluated it more, but I've been reading about it, and I've tried RC1. So far, I've seen a couple features that might be "nice to have", but I don't think there's anything that will actually help me in any significant way, yet there are many things that annoy me, so Windows 2000 might still be "perfectly fine" in the context of comparing it to newer versions of Windows.
I stared at this post for a long time, trying to figure out whether it was serious or ironic. I still don't know.
I don't know that this particular thing bothers me very much, but I think the bundling wars are just over, and Microsoft won. They've displayed a willingness to just pay the fines and employ an army of lawyers and lobbyists, and that's worked well enough. I mean, the big test would be IE's role in Vista. The complaint has existed for years, and AFAIK, there's no way to install Vista without IE or uninstall IE in a Microsoft-supported way in Vista. WMP-- same deal.
Microsoft-bundled apps are here to stay.
More to the point, I think any businesses who upgrade to Vista immediately will likely find themselves at a disadvantage. Even if we were to assume that Vista will be a great OS and offer lots of advantages, it still remains that there is not yet much support for it, and likely won't be for several months. It's never a good idea to be an "early adopter" with your vital systems. A short delay won't hurt anyone.
But further, I have yet to find any real reason why I would pay to upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP or Vista. Sure, I have XP systems and I see no reason to downgrade them either, but if those systems had 2000, it wouldn't cause a single problem.
Yeah, but I think we'll have passed the point I'm talking about, where it's no longer worth upgrading, before that happens. Me? I'm considering downgrading back to Windows/Office 2000.
How can they make it a mandatory patch, even if marked critical? It seems to me that the most they could do is impose a restriction that you couldn't install other patches until you installed this one, but they still can't force you to install it.
<microsoft bashing bitch session>It really makes me wonder whether, as Microsoft introduces more "security" and "protection" that diminish a user's capability, at what point will it cease to be worthwhile to upgrade/patch/fix? Sometimes I think that point was crossed with the introduction of Windows XP</microsoft bashing bitch session>
Microsoft is trying to sell their formats on the strength of the DRM. DRM is what record companies want. If the DRM is insecure and easily cracked, then it won't be used.
dammit. apparently my computer isn't BD/HD ready.
Of course, being OSS, if they don't work together, it's easy enough to take the attitude of "may the best fork win" from the sidelines. It may be just as well to have a choice. I agree that it might be better to have a version that's Mac-centric. I prefer Camino to Firefox, for example. I'm also rooting for the NeoOffice team because they took the initiative of working on an Aqua port back when OOo just didn't seem interested. Still... I'd be glad to see OOo support OSX themselves, even if I stuck with NeoOffice.
Mind you i would love to be able to start neo office without automagically loading a document and then selecting what you want from the menu bar.
I haven't gotten very far into playing with these things, but maybe you can find some helphere.
Yeah, this is going off-topic, but I wonder what's going to happen with NeoOffice now that OpenOffice.org has announced that they're working on an Aqua port. NeoOffice has a head-start, and I'm kind of rooting for them, but I'd also like to see an official OO Aqua port in the hopes that it would have more backing and be more integrated with the ongoing development for other platforms. I guess it's too much to hope that they can all work together?