The article mentions the fact that the iPod has quite a few moving parts, and I couldn't agree more.
Am I the only one that FREAKS OUT every time he sees the new batch of iPod ads?
To bring everyone up to speed, the 30-second spots feature silhouettes of people jamming to their iPods while the song "Are you gonna be my girl" rocks in the background.
Here's the problem: While the people are jamming, they are violently shaking the crap out of their ipods. At one point, one dude even uses it to play 'air drums'
My jaw dropped when I saw this ad. I can't imagine that Apple would encourage this type of abuse on their iPods. I mean, it's a hard drive, for crap's sake! It's NOT MEANT TO BE THROWN AROUND LIKE THAT. I'm sure it's sturdier than your average desktop drive for obvious reasons, but in the end it's still just some spinning platters with a constantly moving needle. This kind of hardware was not meant to be beaten like this.
If I was an Apple tech that handled iPod warranty repair, and I saw this ad, I'd quit.
Wow. This poster needs to do more research, and perhaps back off the sensationalism a bit re: Windows Messenger Service.
"...Windows Messenger Service, a mostly useless tool which Microsoft has left on by default!"
How is it useless? In a corporate environment, admins use the service all the time (at least I did) to inform users of server reboots, downtime, etc. I use it at home to send quick messages to other Windows users on my LAN. I also use it in conjunction with Linpopup, where my Linux router will pop up a message whenever something 'bad' happens (outside attacks, etc.)
"You can't block these pop-ups by shutting down ports, because Windows Messenger Service shares some ports with other useful services."
Um, exqueeze me? Messenger uses the netBIOS ports: 135, 137, and 139. If you block these ports, you're only disabling Windows' RPC communication, which isn't needed unless you're on an NT/2K-based domain, sharing folders, or want to actually use the messenger service. If you're on an NT/2K domain, you're most likely behind a firewall. If you're sharing your drive, and you don't have a firewall, then you're just dumb. If you don't want the Windows Messenger service running, set it to disabled! It takes 5 seconds.
If AOL is doing Very Bad Things to its users, that's fine. Report on that. Just back the sensationalism meter down a tad when you don't know what you're talking about.
Hmmm... just like itunes, which also doesn't list track # by default. Truth be told, I don't know if I would have found that tidbit in iTunes without my Mac friend giving me pointers, but such is life. If iTunes pisses me off for any reason, I'll give MusicMatch a shot.
Mods, mod the parent to informative, because he hit the nail on the head. I never maximize anything, so I never tried it on itunes. Thank you, sir (ma'am?).
My Mac friends told me to download iTunes for the PC. I leap at the chance to badmouth Apple products any chance I can, so I went ahead and downloaded it. I wasn't interested in the store side of things, I just wanted to see how the player stood up against Winamp.
Let me say that over the years, I have tried dozens of MP3 players, only to keep coming back to Winamp. And yes, I'm one of the few that admits to liking version 3 more than 2.x.
Anyways, I've been searching for a long time for an app that will create a good, reliable, playable index of all my songs. I remember when Freeamp came out, its big claim to fame was the ability to build an index of songs according to their ID3 tags. Unfortunately, the app would ALWAYS crash while indexing. I went back to Winamp.
Eventually, the app I found that came the closest to doing what I wanted was MusicMatch jukebox. The problem came in its sorting - it would sort by album/artist/whatever, but I wanted an app that would sub-sort the songs in the order they appeared on the album.
For the record, I have about 300 albums' worth of songs. Each album has its own folder, and the songs are numbered in the order they appear on the album. I'm a big stickler for listening to songs in the order they were intended to be heard.
So I download iTunes. No, I don't want it to be my default audio player. You gotta earn that trust. No, I DO NOT want Quicktime to be the default video player! Why the hell are you asking me this? I tell it to index all my music, and not to copy the songs into the My Music folder (this is just plain dangerous for people that don't know how to organize their local files. I see lots of disks filling up due to copies of their songs living in multiple folders).
I fire it up, and nothing. Go into prefs, tell it where the songs live, and RE-TELL it not to associate Quicktime with my movie files (sigh).
This time it indexes all my songs. Pretty slick, if HUGE, interface. Still doesn't sub-organize songs by order on their album. But wait! Edit - Options - view track number! Huzzah!
Since my MP3 ripper of choice automatically puts the track number into my ID3 tags, suddenly I can see what order the songs are in! And it automatically sub-sorts by track number! This is huge!
The longest I used an MP3 player other than Winamp was probably the 2-day stint I did with Sonique back in 99 or so. But iTunes just might break that record. I'm very happy with it thus far. The only complaint I have is that it doesn't appear to have a 'compact' mode, where I can shrink the player to a reasonable size. Instead I have this huge monstrocity of an app on my desktop. But if it's the price I pay for a reliable, indexing MP3 player, so be it.
Wi-fi will most likely replace it. Just because it's the best technology doesn't mean it will survive. Haven't you ever seen Pirates of Silicon Valley?
"Come on people, electricity took 50 years to become commonplace. This is technology, not pet rocks."
No, actually, technology is the container for all the cool fads these days. Look at Push Technology. At the dot-com blowouts that were nothing but expensive fads. Look at the segway.
"Maybe NOW it is, since Microsoft introduced the concept of loss-leading on the hardware...made up by software licensing."
You've got your facts a little skewed. I believe Sony was the first to sell its PS1 consoles at a loss, to gain marketshare over the mighty N back when the PS1 first came out. They made their money from the game licensees.
At least, I think that's how it all started with the consoles. I may be fuzzy on the details, but I'm 99% sure that MS wasn't the first to use this strategy.
Those things were horrible. HORRIBLE. You needed a specific, mirrored mousepad to even use them. And if that mousepad wasn't completely spotless, the damn cursor jumped all over your desktop.
What's worse, at some point Sun redesigned the things, requiring a different mousepad! The new pads weren't compatible with the old mice, and vice versa.
Ugh. I forgot all aobut those things till reading this. Probably my subconcious blocking out the bad memories to spare me the trauma.
Look. I'm not, nor was I ever, comparing Dells to Suns. I only mentioned it in my second post as a retort to that other person's post.
What I'm doing is comparing Intel servers to the forthcoming AMD servers. that's all.
As for the shock of building an IIS farm - believe it or not, people do it. It was not my decision. When the company's product is written in ASP, and requires IIS to run, explain to me what I'm supposed to do with Solaris, or Linux, or any other non-Windows solution.
To go really low-end then build your own damn servers dammit... heck some of the custom servers we've built are at least at par with the 8450, if not better. 2U and/or 3U casings are not that expensive nowadays.
I love how all these so-called experts come out of the woodwork to defend their half-assed solutions. My point, as far as spending goes, was that corporations pay extra for reliability. They pay extra for a name. They pay extra for guaranteed uptime, and guaranteed support. All our servers were Dell, because Dell provided all of that. When you have major Fortune-500 companies using your systems, and downtime means you lose your job, the last thing you're going to do is use some generic solution. And don't ask me to build my own machine. At its peak, my company was buying half a dozen servers a week. Building each of those from scratch would have been a nightmare.
Have you ever had to design a Windows-based network from scratch? Have you ever had your boss come to you and tell you you have $100K to spend? I have.
No, it's not Sun. That's why I said in my original post that Intel is the only gig in town for x86, not for all servers. But, guess what? Not everyone wants a Sun solution. Tell me how you're going to build an IIS server farm on Sun machinery. I'd love to hear your solution.
Go price out an eight-way Dell 8450 server. Then tell me about low-end.
But Intel has something in the server market that AMD doesn't: a reputation. AMD is just breaking into this market, and we'll see how many companies jump on the bandwagon this early.
I've worked for enough good-sized companied to know that a difference of a few thousand (even a few hundred-thousand) dollars isn't as important as reliability when you get into enterprise-level systems. The old saying, 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM', rings true for Intel as well.
Not to mention that Intel's profit margin is HUGE when it comes to the server market - such is the luxury of being the only x86 gig in town. Intel can stand to slash prices dramatically and still turn a profit. Remember how they almost bankrupted AMD a few years back when AMD promised its 6x86 chips would always be 25% cheaper than a comparable Pentium.
IBM had two different mice that allowed side-scrolling: One had a little pointing stick that was pretty much identical to the sticks found on Thinkpads. They came with AS/400s, I remember, and they were horrible.
The second type IBM offered was actually a second, horizontal wheel. It sat below the normal vertical wheel. This one also sucked.
MS's mouse is a different approach, if I read the article correctly. It is one vertically-oriented wheel, but it also pivots side-to-side. It sounds like it's similar to the IBM 'stick' mouse in how it goes horizontal, but is very different in overall design.
Regardless of my disdain for Microsoft, they do make good hardware. I swear by MS mice and keyboards. Too bad the bastards decided to change the arrow key layout on me. I refuse to use that new layout.
How does one wash these things? Can you put them in the dishwasher like all the other glasses? Will the waiters suddenly get a notice that 35 glasses need to be refilled every time the rinse cycle ends?
Also, what if you break one of these? I don't like the idea of being electrocuted when I'm trying to become inebriated!
Slashdot Mirror
"(Also Note: Fanless doesn't equal silent, you still get drive noise and monitor whine, unless you replace those with solid state components)"
Where do I get a solid state monitor?
Even funnier is the fact that I modded this as "funny".
Already created...
The article mentions the fact that the iPod has quite a few moving parts, and I couldn't agree more.
Am I the only one that FREAKS OUT every time he sees the new batch of iPod ads?
To bring everyone up to speed, the 30-second spots feature silhouettes of people jamming to their iPods while the song "Are you gonna be my girl" rocks in the background.
Here's the problem: While the people are jamming, they are violently shaking the crap out of their ipods. At one point, one dude even uses it to play 'air drums'
My jaw dropped when I saw this ad. I can't imagine that Apple would encourage this type of abuse on their iPods. I mean, it's a hard drive, for crap's sake! It's NOT MEANT TO BE THROWN AROUND LIKE THAT. I'm sure it's sturdier than your average desktop drive for obvious reasons, but in the end it's still just some spinning platters with a constantly moving needle. This kind of hardware was not meant to be beaten like this.
If I was an Apple tech that handled iPod warranty repair, and I saw this ad, I'd quit.
Wow. This poster needs to do more research, and perhaps back off the sensationalism a bit re: Windows Messenger Service.
"...Windows Messenger Service, a mostly useless tool which Microsoft has left on by default!"
How is it useless? In a corporate environment, admins use the service all the time (at least I did) to inform users of server reboots, downtime, etc. I use it at home to send quick messages to other Windows users on my LAN. I also use it in conjunction with Linpopup, where my Linux router will pop up a message whenever something 'bad' happens (outside attacks, etc.)
"You can't block these pop-ups by shutting down ports, because Windows Messenger Service shares some ports with other useful services."
Um, exqueeze me? Messenger uses the netBIOS ports: 135, 137, and 139. If you block these ports, you're only disabling Windows' RPC communication, which isn't needed unless you're on an NT/2K-based domain, sharing folders, or want to actually use the messenger service. If you're on an NT/2K domain, you're most likely behind a firewall. If you're sharing your drive, and you don't have a firewall, then you're just dumb. If you don't want the Windows Messenger service running, set it to disabled! It takes 5 seconds.
If AOL is doing Very Bad Things to its users, that's fine. Report on that. Just back the sensationalism meter down a tad when you don't know what you're talking about.
Hmmm... just like itunes, which also doesn't list track # by default. Truth be told, I don't know if I would have found that tidbit in iTunes without my Mac friend giving me pointers, but such is life. If iTunes pisses me off for any reason, I'll give MusicMatch a shot.
Mods, mod the parent to informative, because he hit the nail on the head. I never maximize anything, so I never tried it on itunes. Thank you, sir (ma'am?).
My Mac friends told me to download iTunes for the PC. I leap at the chance to badmouth Apple products any chance I can, so I went ahead and downloaded it. I wasn't interested in the store side of things, I just wanted to see how the player stood up against Winamp.
Let me say that over the years, I have tried dozens of MP3 players, only to keep coming back to Winamp. And yes, I'm one of the few that admits to liking version 3 more than 2.x.
Anyways, I've been searching for a long time for an app that will create a good, reliable, playable index of all my songs. I remember when Freeamp came out, its big claim to fame was the ability to build an index of songs according to their ID3 tags. Unfortunately, the app would ALWAYS crash while indexing. I went back to Winamp.
Eventually, the app I found that came the closest to doing what I wanted was MusicMatch jukebox. The problem came in its sorting - it would sort by album/artist/whatever, but I wanted an app that would sub-sort the songs in the order they appeared on the album.
For the record, I have about 300 albums' worth of songs. Each album has its own folder, and the songs are numbered in the order they appear on the album. I'm a big stickler for listening to songs in the order they were intended to be heard.
So I download iTunes. No, I don't want it to be my default audio player. You gotta earn that trust. No, I DO NOT want Quicktime to be the default video player! Why the hell are you asking me this? I tell it to index all my music, and not to copy the songs into the My Music folder (this is just plain dangerous for people that don't know how to organize their local files. I see lots of disks filling up due to copies of their songs living in multiple folders).
I fire it up, and nothing. Go into prefs, tell it where the songs live, and RE-TELL it not to associate Quicktime with my movie files (sigh).
This time it indexes all my songs. Pretty slick, if HUGE, interface. Still doesn't sub-organize songs by order on their album. But wait! Edit - Options - view track number! Huzzah!
Since my MP3 ripper of choice automatically puts the track number into my ID3 tags, suddenly I can see what order the songs are in! And it automatically sub-sorts by track number! This is huge!
The longest I used an MP3 player other than Winamp was probably the 2-day stint I did with Sonique back in 99 or so. But iTunes just might break that record. I'm very happy with it thus far. The only complaint I have is that it doesn't appear to have a 'compact' mode, where I can shrink the player to a reasonable size. Instead I have this huge monstrocity of an app on my desktop. But if it's the price I pay for a reliable, indexing MP3 player, so be it.
Wi-fi will most likely replace it. Just because it's the best technology doesn't mean it will survive. Haven't you ever seen Pirates of Silicon Valley?
"Come on people, electricity took 50 years to become commonplace. This is technology, not pet rocks."
No, actually, technology is the container for all the cool fads these days. Look at Push Technology. At the dot-com blowouts that were nothing but expensive fads. Look at the segway.
Heh... glad to see you got the cover changed... no more CD-ROM drive... ;-p
It's not me that's afraid. It's my wallet.
Of course the light will be off! But once you turn that camera off, bam! - the light comes back on.
Dude... most excellent Dead Milkmen reference.
"You know what Stuart? I like you. You're not like the others here, in the trailer park..."
"Maybe NOW it is, since Microsoft introduced the concept of loss-leading on the hardware...made up by software licensing."
You've got your facts a little skewed. I believe Sony was the first to sell its PS1 consoles at a loss, to gain marketshare over the mighty N back when the PS1 first came out. They made their money from the game licensees.
At least, I think that's how it all started with the consoles. I may be fuzzy on the details, but I'm 99% sure that MS wasn't the first to use this strategy.
-JC
Those things were horrible. HORRIBLE. You needed a specific, mirrored mousepad to even use them. And if that mousepad wasn't completely spotless, the damn cursor jumped all over your desktop.
What's worse, at some point Sun redesigned the things, requiring a different mousepad! The new pads weren't compatible with the old mice, and vice versa.
Ugh. I forgot all aobut those things till reading this. Probably my subconcious blocking out the bad memories to spare me the trauma.
When you drop all the erroneous U's from your alphabet (colour, etc.).
Oh, and drive on the correct side of the road, too!
I first read the title as "Japanese Deploying Powered Executions for Elderly" I was going to say - I knew that Japan was overpopulated, but wow!
Wow. I've seen zealotry before, but jeez.
Look. I'm not, nor was I ever, comparing Dells to Suns. I only mentioned it in my second post as a retort to that other person's post.
What I'm doing is comparing Intel servers to the forthcoming AMD servers. that's all.
As for the shock of building an IIS farm - believe it or not, people do it. It was not my decision. When the company's product is written in ASP, and requires IIS to run, explain to me what I'm supposed to do with Solaris, or Linux, or any other non-Windows solution.
To go really low-end then build your own damn servers dammit... heck some of the custom servers we've built are at least at par with the 8450, if not better. 2U and/or 3U casings are not that expensive nowadays.
I love how all these so-called experts come out of the woodwork to defend their half-assed solutions. My point, as far as spending goes, was that corporations pay extra for reliability. They pay extra for a name. They pay extra for guaranteed uptime, and guaranteed support. All our servers were Dell, because Dell provided all of that. When you have major Fortune-500 companies using your systems, and downtime means you lose your job, the last thing you're going to do is use some generic solution. And don't ask me to build my own machine. At its peak, my company was buying half a dozen servers a week. Building each of those from scratch would have been a nightmare.
Have you ever had to design a Windows-based network from scratch? Have you ever had your boss come to you and tell you you have $100K to spend? I have.
No, it's not Sun. That's why I said in my original post that Intel is the only gig in town for x86, not for all servers. But, guess what? Not everyone wants a Sun solution. Tell me how you're going to build an IIS server farm on Sun machinery. I'd love to hear your solution.
Go price out an eight-way Dell 8450 server. Then tell me about low-end.
But Intel has something in the server market that AMD doesn't: a reputation. AMD is just breaking into this market, and we'll see how many companies jump on the bandwagon this early.
I've worked for enough good-sized companied to know that a difference of a few thousand (even a few hundred-thousand) dollars isn't as important as reliability when you get into enterprise-level systems. The old saying, 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM', rings true for Intel as well.
Not to mention that Intel's profit margin is HUGE when it comes to the server market - such is the luxury of being the only x86 gig in town. Intel can stand to slash prices dramatically and still turn a profit. Remember how they almost bankrupted AMD a few years back when AMD promised its 6x86 chips would always be 25% cheaper than a comparable Pentium.
Yeah, this will be very interesting.
No, you're thinking of something different.
IBM had two different mice that allowed side-scrolling: One had a little pointing stick that was pretty much identical to the sticks found on Thinkpads. They came with AS/400s, I remember, and they were horrible.
The second type IBM offered was actually a second, horizontal wheel. It sat below the normal vertical wheel. This one also sucked.
MS's mouse is a different approach, if I read the article correctly. It is one vertically-oriented wheel, but it also pivots side-to-side. It sounds like it's similar to the IBM 'stick' mouse in how it goes horizontal, but is very different in overall design.
Regardless of my disdain for Microsoft, they do make good hardware. I swear by MS mice and keyboards. Too bad the bastards decided to change the arrow key layout on me. I refuse to use that new layout.
I have five moderator points. Can I trade them in towards credit on a shirt?
Or, any karma-deficient slashdotters want to buy some points? All proceeds go to the get JerkyChew a shirt fund.
How does one wash these things? Can you put them in the dishwasher like all the other glasses? Will the waiters suddenly get a notice that 35 glasses need to be refilled every time the rinse cycle ends?
Also, what if you break one of these? I don't like the idea of being electrocuted when I'm trying to become inebriated!
Like most things in life, they get much friendlier when beer is involved.
Lest this happens to them. Make sure you check out those pictures!