Business models change over time. Companies can either attempt to adjust their business models to take advantage of those changes or try to fight those changes (RIAA).
It's a bit worse than the normal attempts to "fight changes" though. It may be possible that a company would fight "bad" changes. However, you run into a conflict of interest when the changes a company are fighting are innovative new business models that would benefit consumers. The hope in capitalism is that, in order to gain the consumer's money, businesses must necessarily please the consumers, and so what's good for the business aligns itself with that's good for the consumer. In certain circumstances, monopolies for example, this hope is defeated.
In order to preserve their business in the digital age, media companies will likely need to stifle innovation, or else reinvent themselves as fundamentally different businesses (which may be be both risky and costly). We should all vote with our dollars in favor of innovative approaches (providing these approaches are useful and innovative).
I know this is OT to begin with, but the problem isn't the PDF standard. For creating display documents, either for printing or online distribution, PDF is great. It allows you to distribute a single file, and you can be certain that anyone who views the file will see the same layout as you intended. It just isn't designed to be easy to *edit*, but for sharing documents in a format that will preserve your design/layout and in a format that you can be sure people will be able to view (meaning it's well supported), PDF is the best format around right now.
That's not to say there's no problem with Adobe Acrobat. Adobe's application is bloated and annoying, as well as being far to expensive if you only want a PDF writer, but there are other means to create and view PDFs.
Actually, I believe what Acrobat 7 does to improve load time is to load a bunch of stuff at the startup of your computer rather than when you start Acrobat reader. If you're on Windows, check your "startup" folder, and you'll see an "Adobe Acrobat Speed Launch", meaning it's still loading all the crap, it's just running it all the time, instead of only when you run Acrobat.
The Guru's claim is a bit of a red herring, and there's certainly something fishy about the puzzle. The whole solution here requires that each islander uses the Guru's statement as a method for commencing a sort of game, assuming that all the other people will use the same starting point for the same game.
It's the sort of game that could be deduced at any time, but would require agreement on both the eye color and starting time of the game. The puzzle requires that we assume that, these people being naturally "perfect logicians", they would all view the Guru's statement, which gives them absolutely no information, as an appropriate prompting to begin this game and select an eye color.
And it really would be a game. It requires not only logic, but action, strategy, knowledge of others' behavior and capabilities. No one would even think to leave the first night, and so everyone would need to wait for the 99th night and see what happened. Brown eyed people would need to wait for the hundredth, of course, but no one would be packing their bags in preparation before that 99th night.
Would the Guru's statement be sufficient for a bunch of "perfect logicians" to know to begin the game? After all, the game requires not only that each villager knows to begin the game, but that each feels entirely confident that everyone else will begin the same game at the same time. In any real, human behavior, it might be quite a stretch, but it is just a puzzle, after all. You're just supposed to take the hint.
In terms of going MP3, wouldn't the author have saved a lot in fees by going OGG, or is acceptance too much of a concern?
Do you have to pay fees to distribute MP3s? That stinks. I though they just charged for encoders/decoders.
And yes, I would think that if someone is trying to distribute audio to a mass audience, it would help to go with a file format that most people will have a decoder for. That's the problem with these things-- it's a catch 22. Pretty much no one will use it until the decoder is ubiquitous, and pretty much no one will bother distributing the decoder until people are using it.
The best way to stop piracy is to make the alternative more convenient
It's entirely too bad this was posted as an anonymous coward, and therefore very few people were likely to have read it. I wish I had mod points at the moment, but then I've already commented here anyhow.
While this statement is not new, and isn't something I've never heard before, it gets to the heart of the whole "piracy" issue. If you want to sell me something, all you have to do is offer me something of high enough value at a low enough price. "Value" often includes making things quick, easy, convenient, and hassle-free.
But when you realize that the iPod is a music player FIRST and a video player is an added bonus, it makes more sense. If you want a high capacity music player, then you want an iPod - everyone wants an iPod; they're cool. But then the video playing is just an added bonus.
Smartest post I've read here. Apple was doing well with the iPod, but they screwed up by releasing the a new iPod, with all the old iPod's features, plus some more, at the same price? Huh?
From the consumer's point of view, the iPod has lost *nothing* with the addition of these features-- except maybe some of the bulk, since these new ones are *thinner*. If the iPod was a good device before, then these features don't make it any more complicated or problematic. It just adds a couple features which you might not use. There's no downside here.
Yeah, but that doesn't really get around the two advantages of:
not needing to set up recording ahead of time
not needed to get the channel that the show is on
If I want to get an episode of Lost on my Archos device, I have to get ABC, and I have to have the forethought to set up recording before it airs. If I want to get the episode of "Lost" that I missed 2 weeks ago, I have to wait for it to air again. iTMS lets me download it whenever I'm willing to part with $2.
Granted, ABC isn't hard to get, and it seems like it's worth a little forethought to save myself $2, but it's still an advantage in favor of the iPod. What if I don't have a satellite dish? What if I miss a show unexpectedly? Also, the second advantage I'm claiming gets to be a bigger deal if Apple gets cable networks on board. "What if I don't get ABC?" might sound kind of silly, but what if I don't get HBO and I suddenly want to watch last week's episode of the Sapranos? The Archos won't help me with that, but iTMS might (assuming they can get HBO shows).
I'm no expert, but it's been my understanding that some plenty of programs do, in fact, rely in some way on the processor architecture. Therefore, while porting applications from X11 on Linux on x86 to x11 on Linux on PPC is relatively easy, it does sometimes require some amount of work.
Therefore, (again, from what I understand) the Intel switch to x86 will make porting some Linux software to OSX slightly easier.
Does he mean does having the show for download 24-hrs-later mean we wouldnt want to watch the original show?.
For me, it's already make me a little less concerned about missing episodes of Lost. I'd rather catch them first time around for free, but this way I can go out on Wednesdays without worrying about being confused the next week. (Not that it's been a big concern anyway, but to the extent that it was a concern, it's not anymore)
The video ipod is classic Apple: as much as possible a one-way street from Content Owners through Apple to Consumers, with the ipod remaining as tethered as possible to a Mac/iTunes for operation. Making it harder than it should be for ipod owners to create and share their own content.
As someone else mentioned, iPods can also play mp3s or unprotected AACs, so there's no need to buy your stuff from iTunes if you don't want. Likewise, the chip included in the device is an mpeg4 decoder. Apple's protected music: AAC::Apple's protected video:mpeg4. You can put unprotected mpeg4s on your ipod and play them. There's no requirement to use iTMS-purchased media if you have another source that will provide you mpeg4s (optimally H.264 at up to 768 Kbps at 320 x 240, which is the best quality you're getting on the new iPod)
Too bad they did the video iPod so ghetto regarding to TV resolution and battery time (2-3 hours).
Where did you get the number of 2-3 hours? I'm not doubting you, just wondering, as I haven't seen any numbers on this thing except that Apple claims it has a maximum play time of 20 hours (which I assume is when you're playing music, not decoding mpeg4s.
Otherwise, if you check out the video quality, it's not bad. It's definitely not DVD quality, but it's entirely watchable.
Oh, and the other overlooked story in Apple's updates this time around? Apple now ships all iMacs with the "Mighty Mouse". That's right. Apple's default mouse is now a 3 button mouse with a 2D scroll wheel.
I'm not saying you can't prefer Archos. I was merely trying to give a vague indication of the reason why the iPod might succeed where pocket-sized TVs failed. I think the same thing I said also applies to why Archos devices might succeed where mini TVs failed.
You're right, though, that Archos devices are cool and have some advantages over the new ipods. Their screens are also bigger and higher res. As far as I can think of, the advantage that the iPod has over Archos devices is the iTMS, meaning that you don't have to record the TV shows (meaning you don't need the device plugged into your cable ahead of time) and you don't even need to receive a TV signal from anywhere. You just need a computer with an internet connection in order to download the show, and you can download it any time you want starting the day after it airs. If they get a lot more shows, the store could be pretty nice.
Of course, this advantage would be destroyed if someone opened another TV show store that supported Archos devices, or if Apple licensed the Fairplay DRM to Archos. Either one of those possibilities sounds good to me. Of course, there's always other illegal means to get recent shows, but I'm just thinking about what's legal and non-sketchy.
I agree portable TV is retarded, mainly because of the abysmal screen size, but that's totally not what this is about. It's about the ability to LEGALLY download television shows from the internet.
I'm not sure I agree about portable TV being retarded, but I agree that the most overlooked aspect of this is that this is a new distribution model for TV shows. Haven't we (slashdotters) been asking for this? Whenever the stories have come up about bittorrenting TV shows, how many times has someone said, "It's not about stealing, I just want easy access to the show. I missed an episode." You know, people saying that they don't want to wait for the DVD, or it's not offered on DVD, or it's only on some channel that I can't get, or I just want to time-shift it, or whatever. The claim is always, "If someone would just make it easy to get the show I want, and watch it when I wanted it, I'd be willing to pay!" Well, here it is. Download when you want, available the day after it airs, watch it as many times as you want, it's here.
Whether you like Apple or iPods or whatever, it's a pretty big deal.
Thanks for the info! I hope they just decide to move the file/type information into the data fork, like MS did with properties. I really like the ability to associate files on a file-by-file basis.
You can associate files individually in OSX. If you do a "Get info" (Command I) one of the sections is "Open with". this can be set on a file-by-file basis, but file extensions have defaults. This means you can specify that you want a particular GIF to be opened through Photoshop, but if you specify Preview as the default application for files ending in ".GIF", then any new GIF that doesn't have a program specified in the resource fork will be opened in preview. Putting extra information into the data fork doesn't make sense, though. Let's say Apple arbitrarily added some information to the same portion of every file, in the data fork. If that information didn't match up with the specification for the file type, then viewers that didn't know how to deal with it would not be able to show that file. In other words, Apple can't put information into the data fork of all GIF files unless the GIF specification allows for it. The alternative would be to make Apple GIFs that could only be viewed by Apple GIF aware viewers, because they were packed with non-standard data.
I agree that resource forks are a problem; I would love to get rid of HFS entirely and use UFS, but there are too many programs that still use resources. Also, I think it's very inelegant that right now Mac OS X is on top of UNIX, but none of the native UNIX commands know anything about the resource fork.
Actually, in Tiger, mv, cp, and tar are all resource-fork aware. I'm not sure what else is, but it's something Apple has clearly been addressing over time.
I would like to see continued improvement on HFS+ (they have been working on it, including adding journaling and support for having it run case-sensitive) and possibly even a new file system, but resource forks can actually be rather nice at times, and I don't mind Apple keeping them around. If they did make a new file system, I'd hope it would also include space for metadata. However, UFS right now has a couple different problems for Apple. First, as you've noted, no resource forks. Apple actually has a way around this, though. MacOS will, in fact, write the resource fork data into another hidden file. So, if you copy "picture.gif" to a folder called "Folder", another file, called something like "._resource.picture.gif" (I forget what, exactly, the naming convention is, but it's something like that), also place it in "Folder", and it will remain hidden. Move that "picture.gif", and "._resource.picture.gif" moves with it. It's not ideal, but it works.
Another problem is that HFS+ is case sensitive when naming files, but case insensitive when calling those files. In other words, if I specify that a file should be named "Picture.gif", it will keep track that the file name has a capital "P", but if I ask OSX to do something with "picture.gif", it will assume I mean "Picture.gif". UFS, however, is completely case sensitive, which means if I ask OSX to do something with "picture.gif" on a UFS volume, it will tell me there is no such file, even if "Picture.gif' exists.
Now, it can easily be argued that being completely case sensitive is better. However, most developers have not been so careful with their apps to make sure they're calling files with the correct case. Therefore, many major applications won't work if you install them on a UFS volume. Apple has made it possible to make HFS+ case sensitive, which might indicate that Apple intends to encourage developers to develop on a case sensitive file system to make it easier for OSX to run on different file systems.
The iPod is just one place you can watch it. You can watch the video on your computer, or you can use the audio/video out of the iPod to watch the shows on your normal TV. Think about it like a TiVO, but no subscription fees, and you don't need reception for the channel the show is on. You don't need to tell it to record ahead of time, you just buy the show. Oh, and you can carry the TiVo in your pocket, use it as an mp3 player, address book, calendar, photo album, and play a couple games on it. Oh, and it has a little screen that you can watch your programs on if you feel like it.
I don't think everyone will go for it, but can't you see why someone might find it appealing?
No, it's not HDTV or even DVD quality, but it's not THAT much worse than cable TV.
I do feel though that the price needs to be slightly adjusted. Take a 22 episode TV season... that's almost $44 in iTunes. I could buy the DVD (if it was available) for less. TPTB need to keep that in mind.
I tried it out. I just downloaded a copy of Lost and watched it on my 20" computer monitor. Yes, it was pixelated. If you sat up close you could clearly see that there were compression artifacts. If you sat across the room, though, it was easily good enough to watch, though. The picture/sound was better than some of the reception I've seen on non-digital cable.
As far as price, I agree $2 an episode is a bit high. They seem to offer a package deal, though, like they do on albums. It's $2 an episode or $35 a season. Either way, I can understand the criticism that you'd rather buy the DVD and get better quality audio/video, but can you just buy the episodes you want on DVD? Can you buy the episodes on DVD the day after they air?
I'm hoping Apple will start making deals with HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, etc. I don't have cable at the moment, and there are just a few shows that I miss.
The iPod does have an advantage, though, over those pocket TVs. I can download the episodes I want, and watch them anywhere and at any time, without worrying about reception. It's like having a pocket-sized TiVo built into your miniTV with a video out to watch it on a normal TV if you like.
AFAIK, file types are determined in one of two ways. The resource fork takes priority. If the resource fork says it's a photoshop file, then it will open with photoshop. From there, photoshop must determine what kind of file it is (how photoshop determines that is an Adobe issue). This is the old Mac method you're talking about, and it still works. The OS will differentiate between a Mathematica.m file and a MATLAB.m file, so long as each program puts the correct data into the resource fork. Failing that, if there is no resource fork, the determination is done by the files extension. So, if you take your photoshop-created GIF and strip the resource fork, the OS will probably associate it with preview, since Preview is the default GIF viewer.
On top of this, Apple has basically told developers stop using resource forks to store any important data. Resource forks used to be used, in some cases (like font and icon files), to store the important data of a file. The problem with this is that resource forks have a nasty habit of getting stripped, since most file systems and transfer protocols don't support them (including ext3 and ntfs). Before doing this, Apple had a real problem. However much you liked resource forks, moving an extensionless file to a Windows/Unix machine will mean that they have no idea what to do with it. Downloading a file through FTP, SMB, HTTP, or really anything except AFP will strip the resource fork, rendering it useless, even on a Mac. Repairing resource forks can be difficult, and if there was important data in the resource fork, it was simply lost.
In other words, supporting extension recognition for file-types was a smart move on Apple's part in terms of reliability and compatibility. Requiring all important data be put in the data fork only makes sense. That some application developers fail to use resource forks isn't a fault with Apple or the OS, and it usually doesn't even bother me. Photoshop, for example... I wish they *wouldn't* associate files made in photoshop with photoshop. Just because I've created a file in photoshop doesn't mean I want to view it there. Preview is much faster.
agreed. The fact is, Slashdot is not a news source. They don't write their own articles or do their own investigations. It's a news aggregator paired with discussion forums.
By the very nature of being a news aggregator, it will never be the first place that a story appears. It will always be elsewhere on the net first, and someone will then notice it and submit it here. So ok, maybe you saw it somewhere else first. Maybe you got it from the original source. Good for you. Those who failed to happen upon the story elsewhere can still learn about it here, and even if you saw it someplace else first, you can still join in the discussion.
Evidently LiveJournal and other sites take care to scrub out JavaScript in user-provided web pages, but the rumors are that sometimes people do figure out how to obfuscate their HTML enough to deliver the payload, despite the scrubbers.
MySpace also scrubs javascript. This guy put obfuscated javascript into CSS for delivery.
It isn't just science education. It's the math education, too. Math education in this country sucks. Really sucks.
All I really need for evidence of this is the fact that people think math is completely boring. I can understand why kids would hate learning their multiplication tables and such (it's necessary, but not fun), but math is incredibly interesting once you get into some of the big ideas/questions, provided it's taught well. Really, if we're turning kids off from math, it might be sufficient explanation as to why they're uninterested in science.
Well, in there defense, I think they do better with Jobs at the helm. Their OS languished and died while he was gone, and they were revived by bringing his pet project in to take over the company. Just because they're playing with some skins, I don't think that means they aren't doing other things.
The OS has gotten faster as they've developed it. They've added lots of features, some of them pretty cutting edge. Yes, they're concerned with it being pretty, but if you've been keeping track, they've been doing pretty well adding real improvements. I have fewer problems with HFS+ and random file corruption recently, but I'm not sure what to attribute that to. But what's the problem with file types? You mean that it's tracked in the resource fork rather than the extension?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit worse than the normal attempts to "fight changes" though. It may be possible that a company would fight "bad" changes. However, you run into a conflict of interest when the changes a company are fighting are innovative new business models that would benefit consumers. The hope in capitalism is that, in order to gain the consumer's money, businesses must necessarily please the consumers, and so what's good for the business aligns itself with that's good for the consumer. In certain circumstances, monopolies for example, this hope is defeated.
In order to preserve their business in the digital age, media companies will likely need to stifle innovation, or else reinvent themselves as fundamentally different businesses (which may be be both risky and costly). We should all vote with our dollars in favor of innovative approaches (providing these approaches are useful and innovative).
That's not to say there's no problem with Adobe Acrobat. Adobe's application is bloated and annoying, as well as being far to expensive if you only want a PDF writer, but there are other means to create and view PDFs.
Actually, I believe what Acrobat 7 does to improve load time is to load a bunch of stuff at the startup of your computer rather than when you start Acrobat reader. If you're on Windows, check your "startup" folder, and you'll see an "Adobe Acrobat Speed Launch", meaning it's still loading all the crap, it's just running it all the time, instead of only when you run Acrobat.
It's the sort of game that could be deduced at any time, but would require agreement on both the eye color and starting time of the game. The puzzle requires that we assume that, these people being naturally "perfect logicians", they would all view the Guru's statement, which gives them absolutely no information, as an appropriate prompting to begin this game and select an eye color.
And it really would be a game. It requires not only logic, but action, strategy, knowledge of others' behavior and capabilities. No one would even think to leave the first night, and so everyone would need to wait for the 99th night and see what happened. Brown eyed people would need to wait for the hundredth, of course, but no one would be packing their bags in preparation before that 99th night.
Would the Guru's statement be sufficient for a bunch of "perfect logicians" to know to begin the game? After all, the game requires not only that each villager knows to begin the game, but that each feels entirely confident that everyone else will begin the same game at the same time. In any real, human behavior, it might be quite a stretch, but it is just a puzzle, after all. You're just supposed to take the hint.
Do you have to pay fees to distribute MP3s? That stinks. I though they just charged for encoders/decoders.
And yes, I would think that if someone is trying to distribute audio to a mass audience, it would help to go with a file format that most people will have a decoder for. That's the problem with these things-- it's a catch 22. Pretty much no one will use it until the decoder is ubiquitous, and pretty much no one will bother distributing the decoder until people are using it.
It's entirely too bad this was posted as an anonymous coward, and therefore very few people were likely to have read it. I wish I had mod points at the moment, but then I've already commented here anyhow.
While this statement is not new, and isn't something I've never heard before, it gets to the heart of the whole "piracy" issue. If you want to sell me something, all you have to do is offer me something of high enough value at a low enough price. "Value" often includes making things quick, easy, convenient, and hassle-free.
On Macs, you can't boot from USB. If they've switched over to firewire only iPods, though, hopefully that allow booting from USB soon.
Smartest post I've read here. Apple was doing well with the iPod, but they screwed up by releasing the a new iPod, with all the old iPod's features, plus some more, at the same price? Huh?
From the consumer's point of view, the iPod has lost *nothing* with the addition of these features-- except maybe some of the bulk, since these new ones are *thinner*. If the iPod was a good device before, then these features don't make it any more complicated or problematic. It just adds a couple features which you might not use. There's no downside here.
If I want to get an episode of Lost on my Archos device, I have to get ABC, and I have to have the forethought to set up recording before it airs. If I want to get the episode of "Lost" that I missed 2 weeks ago, I have to wait for it to air again. iTMS lets me download it whenever I'm willing to part with $2.
Granted, ABC isn't hard to get, and it seems like it's worth a little forethought to save myself $2, but it's still an advantage in favor of the iPod. What if I don't have a satellite dish? What if I miss a show unexpectedly? Also, the second advantage I'm claiming gets to be a bigger deal if Apple gets cable networks on board. "What if I don't get ABC?" might sound kind of silly, but what if I don't get HBO and I suddenly want to watch last week's episode of the Sapranos? The Archos won't help me with that, but iTMS might (assuming they can get HBO shows).
Therefore, (again, from what I understand) the Intel switch to x86 will make porting some Linux software to OSX slightly easier.
For me, it's already make me a little less concerned about missing episodes of Lost. I'd rather catch them first time around for free, but this way I can go out on Wednesdays without worrying about being confused the next week. (Not that it's been a big concern anyway, but to the extent that it was a concern, it's not anymore)
As someone else mentioned, iPods can also play mp3s or unprotected AACs, so there's no need to buy your stuff from iTunes if you don't want. Likewise, the chip included in the device is an mpeg4 decoder. Apple's protected music: AAC::Apple's protected video:mpeg4. You can put unprotected mpeg4s on your ipod and play them. There's no requirement to use iTMS-purchased media if you have another source that will provide you mpeg4s (optimally H.264 at up to 768 Kbps at 320 x 240, which is the best quality you're getting on the new iPod)
Where did you get the number of 2-3 hours? I'm not doubting you, just wondering, as I haven't seen any numbers on this thing except that Apple claims it has a maximum play time of 20 hours (which I assume is when you're playing music, not decoding mpeg4s.
Otherwise, if you check out the video quality, it's not bad. It's definitely not DVD quality, but it's entirely watchable.
Oh, and the other overlooked story in Apple's updates this time around? Apple now ships all iMacs with the "Mighty Mouse". That's right. Apple's default mouse is now a 3 button mouse with a 2D scroll wheel.
You're right, though, that Archos devices are cool and have some advantages over the new ipods. Their screens are also bigger and higher res. As far as I can think of, the advantage that the iPod has over Archos devices is the iTMS, meaning that you don't have to record the TV shows (meaning you don't need the device plugged into your cable ahead of time) and you don't even need to receive a TV signal from anywhere. You just need a computer with an internet connection in order to download the show, and you can download it any time you want starting the day after it airs. If they get a lot more shows, the store could be pretty nice.
Of course, this advantage would be destroyed if someone opened another TV show store that supported Archos devices, or if Apple licensed the Fairplay DRM to Archos. Either one of those possibilities sounds good to me. Of course, there's always other illegal means to get recent shows, but I'm just thinking about what's legal and non-sketchy.
I'm not sure I agree about portable TV being retarded, but I agree that the most overlooked aspect of this is that this is a new distribution model for TV shows. Haven't we (slashdotters) been asking for this? Whenever the stories have come up about bittorrenting TV shows, how many times has someone said, "It's not about stealing, I just want easy access to the show. I missed an episode." You know, people saying that they don't want to wait for the DVD, or it's not offered on DVD, or it's only on some channel that I can't get, or I just want to time-shift it, or whatever. The claim is always, "If someone would just make it easy to get the show I want, and watch it when I wanted it, I'd be willing to pay!" Well, here it is. Download when you want, available the day after it airs, watch it as many times as you want, it's here.
Whether you like Apple or iPods or whatever, it's a pretty big deal.
You can associate files individually in OSX. If you do a "Get info" (Command I) one of the sections is "Open with". this can be set on a file-by-file basis, but file extensions have defaults. This means you can specify that you want a particular GIF to be opened through Photoshop, but if you specify Preview as the default application for files ending in ".GIF", then any new GIF that doesn't have a program specified in the resource fork will be opened in preview. Putting extra information into the data fork doesn't make sense, though. Let's say Apple arbitrarily added some information to the same portion of every file, in the data fork. If that information didn't match up with the specification for the file type, then viewers that didn't know how to deal with it would not be able to show that file. In other words, Apple can't put information into the data fork of all GIF files unless the GIF specification allows for it. The alternative would be to make Apple GIFs that could only be viewed by Apple GIF aware viewers, because they were packed with non-standard data.
I agree that resource forks are a problem; I would love to get rid of HFS entirely and use UFS, but there are too many programs that still use resources. Also, I think it's very inelegant that right now Mac OS X is on top of UNIX, but none of the native UNIX commands know anything about the resource fork.
Actually, in Tiger, mv, cp, and tar are all resource-fork aware. I'm not sure what else is, but it's something Apple has clearly been addressing over time.
I would like to see continued improvement on HFS+ (they have been working on it, including adding journaling and support for having it run case-sensitive) and possibly even a new file system, but resource forks can actually be rather nice at times, and I don't mind Apple keeping them around. If they did make a new file system, I'd hope it would also include space for metadata. However, UFS right now has a couple different problems for Apple. First, as you've noted, no resource forks. Apple actually has a way around this, though. MacOS will, in fact, write the resource fork data into another hidden file. So, if you copy "picture.gif" to a folder called "Folder", another file, called something like "._resource.picture.gif" (I forget what, exactly, the naming convention is, but it's something like that), also place it in "Folder", and it will remain hidden. Move that "picture.gif", and "._resource.picture.gif" moves with it. It's not ideal, but it works.
Another problem is that HFS+ is case sensitive when naming files, but case insensitive when calling those files. In other words, if I specify that a file should be named "Picture.gif", it will keep track that the file name has a capital "P", but if I ask OSX to do something with "picture.gif", it will assume I mean "Picture.gif". UFS, however, is completely case sensitive, which means if I ask OSX to do something with "picture.gif" on a UFS volume, it will tell me there is no such file, even if "Picture.gif' exists.
Now, it can easily be argued that being completely case sensitive is better. However, most developers have not been so careful with their apps to make sure they're calling files with the correct case. Therefore, many major applications won't work if you install them on a UFS volume. Apple has made it possible to make HFS+ case sensitive, which might indicate that Apple intends to encourage developers to develop on a case sensitive file system to make it easier for OSX to run on different file systems.
I don't think everyone will go for it, but can't you see why someone might find it appealing?
I do feel though that the price needs to be slightly adjusted. Take a 22 episode TV season... that's almost $44 in iTunes. I could buy the DVD (if it was available) for less. TPTB need to keep that in mind.
I tried it out. I just downloaded a copy of Lost and watched it on my 20" computer monitor. Yes, it was pixelated. If you sat up close you could clearly see that there were compression artifacts. If you sat across the room, though, it was easily good enough to watch, though. The picture/sound was better than some of the reception I've seen on non-digital cable.
As far as price, I agree $2 an episode is a bit high. They seem to offer a package deal, though, like they do on albums. It's $2 an episode or $35 a season. Either way, I can understand the criticism that you'd rather buy the DVD and get better quality audio/video, but can you just buy the episodes you want on DVD? Can you buy the episodes on DVD the day after they air?
I'm hoping Apple will start making deals with HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, etc. I don't have cable at the moment, and there are just a few shows that I miss.
The iPod does have an advantage, though, over those pocket TVs. I can download the episodes I want, and watch them anywhere and at any time, without worrying about reception. It's like having a pocket-sized TiVo built into your miniTV with a video out to watch it on a normal TV if you like.
On top of this, Apple has basically told developers stop using resource forks to store any important data. Resource forks used to be used, in some cases (like font and icon files), to store the important data of a file. The problem with this is that resource forks have a nasty habit of getting stripped, since most file systems and transfer protocols don't support them (including ext3 and ntfs). Before doing this, Apple had a real problem. However much you liked resource forks, moving an extensionless file to a Windows/Unix machine will mean that they have no idea what to do with it. Downloading a file through FTP, SMB, HTTP, or really anything except AFP will strip the resource fork, rendering it useless, even on a Mac. Repairing resource forks can be difficult, and if there was important data in the resource fork, it was simply lost.
In other words, supporting extension recognition for file-types was a smart move on Apple's part in terms of reliability and compatibility. Requiring all important data be put in the data fork only makes sense. That some application developers fail to use resource forks isn't a fault with Apple or the OS, and it usually doesn't even bother me. Photoshop, for example... I wish they *wouldn't* associate files made in photoshop with photoshop. Just because I've created a file in photoshop doesn't mean I want to view it there. Preview is much faster.
By the very nature of being a news aggregator, it will never be the first place that a story appears. It will always be elsewhere on the net first, and someone will then notice it and submit it here. So ok, maybe you saw it somewhere else first. Maybe you got it from the original source. Good for you. Those who failed to happen upon the story elsewhere can still learn about it here, and even if you saw it someplace else first, you can still join in the discussion.
MySpace also scrubs javascript. This guy put obfuscated javascript into CSS for delivery.
All I really need for evidence of this is the fact that people think math is completely boring. I can understand why kids would hate learning their multiplication tables and such (it's necessary, but not fun), but math is incredibly interesting once you get into some of the big ideas/questions, provided it's taught well. Really, if we're turning kids off from math, it might be sufficient explanation as to why they're uninterested in science.
The OS has gotten faster as they've developed it. They've added lots of features, some of them pretty cutting edge. Yes, they're concerned with it being pretty, but if you've been keeping track, they've been doing pretty well adding real improvements. I have fewer problems with HFS+ and random file corruption recently, but I'm not sure what to attribute that to. But what's the problem with file types? You mean that it's tracked in the resource fork rather than the extension?