Why can't Apple laptops come with split left/right mouse buttons like PC laptops
Most people I know don't use the trackpad button. They tap the trackpad itself to click. What are they supposed to do? Tap with the index finger for this function and with the ring finger for another function?
So you end up with a system where you just don't have as much flexibility with the mouse as you would with a Windows or Linux GUI.
Is "flexibility with the mouse" what we're calling "craptacular" these days?
Context menus are just bad user-interface design. Period. The fact that you have gotten accustomed to them doesn't change the fact that they're bad design. In particular, it's wrong of you to expect everybody else to get used to them just because you had to.
Those are all interesting details, but you kind of missed the point, didn't you?
It's not really accurate to say that Quartz 2D "uses a PDF imaging model." It's more correct to say that Quartz 2D's imaging model is PDF-like. That is, rather that dealing with individual pixels, the programmer deals with regions and fills those regions with paint. That's very different from QuickDraw.
But in terms of the application programming interface, in terms of how drawing commands are sent to Quartz Compositor, it's very much like QuickDraw. In Quartz 2D, you deal with a graphics context; in QuickDraw, you deal with a GrafPort. Same thing.
Quartz 2D a drawing model very similar to the one found in PDF, making it trivial to turn Quartz 2D drawings into PDF files, but in terms of the programming interface, it's very QuickDraw-like. For example, the Quartz 2D CGContextRef is very similar in most respects to the QuickDraw GrafPort.
To say that I "disagree" elevates it to a level that I don't think is appropriate. One wouldn't say that one "disagrees" with the Tooth Fairy or the Great Pumpkin. It doesn't even approach that point.
But if you want to set aside semantics for a minute and get to the crux of where you went wrong, it was with your first word: "When."
You should have said "If." And then qualified it with a whole bunch of maybes and hypotheticals. Because you're talking about something that's never, never, ever going to happen, ever.
Yeah... again, you've lost your grip. Take a step back. Re-secure your attachment to the world you actually live in, not the world of some activist's drug-fueled dream.
No, it's not just NeXT. It's a combination of some core technologies from NeXT and the Mac OS, along with some entirely new ideas. NeXT, for example, had nothing like Quartz. Quartz is largely informed by the word Bill Atkinson did on QuickDraw in the early 1980s.
I'm sure you think you're being responsibly concerned, but the fact is that somewhere along the line you crossed over into the realm of the deranged ravings of a lunatic.
Might want to take a step back there, to rejoin us in reality.
The MP3 format is acoustically inferior to the AAC format at the same bit rate. The sound quality of a 128 kbps MP3 is unacceptable, demanding the use of higher bit rates to achieve the same level of quality.
Higher bit rates equate to more storage; 50% more, at the very least. If Apple has a million songs and those songs average 4 MB each, that's 4 TB of music they have to store. You're talking about increasing it to 6 TB at least. That's a big difference.
Then there's bandwidth. Apple has sold a quarter of a billion songs. Again, if they average 4 MB each, that's a thousand terabytes of bandwidth they've consumed. You're saying that should have been 1,500 terabytes instead.
So let's review here. You're saying that, in order to make your life more convenient, Apple should store 6 TB of music instead of 4 TB, and they should have consumed 1,500 terabytes of bandwidth instead of a thousand. Because they didn't, you say they "went out of their way to make it annoying" for you. On the other hand, all you need to do to listen to your music in your car is to hit the "burn" button and stick in a blank CD. But you don't want to do that. You'd rather Apple increase by 50% the operating costs associated with running the store. (Without increasing prices, of course.) Because you think they "went out of their way to make it annoying" for you.
What does that have to do with Dave's question? The question was, "What's keeping you from having multiple copies on multiple hard drives?"
There's no barrier here to use. You can use your music in any way that you see fit. And yet you turn your back on the various ways that are available to you and seek, instead, a way that's less convenient, less easy and less useful to you, just so you can thumb your nose at the company that bent over backwards to sell you music in a new, more reasonably priced, more convenient way.
How does this not add up to your just being an asshole?
According to the goddamned LAW, copyright infringement is not theft.
According to "the goddamned LAW," copyright infringement is a crime covered by 18 USC 2319. The title of the relevant chapter is "Stolen Property." Other crimes specified in that chapter include "transportation of stolen vehicles," "transportation of stolen goods," "trafficking in counterfeit goods" and -- I'm not kidding -- cattle rustling.
So yeah. According to "the goddamned LAW," copyright infringement is theft. It's a crime punishable by up to five years in federal prison. And that's not even counting the various state laws that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Next time, before you get oh-so-passionate about something, you might consider lookin' it up.
You got this absolutely right...except you got a few words mixed up. Let me fix.
"No, in other words real stealing hurts people visibly, whereas online stealing only hurts people that we don't know in ways that we can't see."
The "utilitarian" thing is dead wrong, of course -- even if you weren't wrong in your first sentence, that's not what "utilitarian" means -- but you were almost right on the other thing.
Same reason they don't press charges for burglary or embezzlement or mail fraud. Because different types of stealing are covered by different laws because they differ in the details. Theft through breaking and entering: burglary. Theft from one's employer: embezzlement. Theft by committing fraud through the mail: the aptly named mail fraud. Theft by the unlawful copying of somebody else's property: copyright infringement.
Each one is a crime, the severity of which varies in proportion to the severity of the theft. Each one can result in fines or jail time.
Also, I don't think "Q.E.D." means what you think it does.
That's right. That's because the music's not in MP3 format. He can't burn a Windows Media CD either, or a CD with WAV files on it, or a CD that consists entirely of William Shatner describing the songs to him through the magic of the spoken word.
Because the music he bought isn't in that format.
Sounds like your problem -- because really we're not talking about anybody else, here, but rather about you --isn't with rights management. It's with the music format the Apple is selling.
Lucky for you there's plenty of choice in that arena. Go buy something else instead, rather than complaining that the thing Apple's selling isn't what you want.
That's not correct. In Apple's last earnings con-call, they said that the music store was a significant source of profit for Apple. Given that they've sold over a quarter of a billion songs at a per-song price that averages around 80, and their per-song revenue is on the order of about 20 per track, it's safe to assume that Apple has cleared somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million since the music store opened. Now granted, a significant chunk of that had to go into the hardware and software that run the store. But you know it didn't cost them $50 million to start the thing up.
So yes, Apple has made money with iTunes. Probably in excess of $40 million so far, and more every day.
Your life would have been oh so much easier if you'd just found that little "burn" button in the upper right-hand corner of the iTunes window.
Why did you choose to do it the hard way? And more important, are you trying to say that the only place you've got copies of these songs that you bought and paid for is on hard drives? Why didn't you burn them to CD anyway for permanent safe-keeping?
With iTunes, when I buy a song I CAN'T LISTEN TO IT IN MY CAR because it won't let me "export" the song to a format my hardware can parse.
That's an untrue statement, and it's kind of disappointing that you'd stoop to making it. You can burn an audio CD. A standard, no-funny-business, plays-everywhere audio CD. Which "your hardware" (we're talking about a stereo, right?) can "parse." (We're still talking about a stereo, right? Why all the jargon?)
If you want to then take that audio CD and go elsewhere with it to compile a CD of MP3s or something, knock yourself out. You're free to do whatever you like with the songs you buy from iTunes. They're yours. You own 'em.
Demonstrably false. Step one: Buy a song from iTunes. Step two: Click the little "burn" button in the upper right-hand corner of the window. Step three: Listen to songall the live-long day.
Now howzabout you quit being a dumbass and come join the conversation?
Like people who, I don't know, write or paint pictures or compose music or make movies, maybe? Those kinds of people? People who create instead of just consuming other people's creations?
Let's flip this on its head, shall we? Morally and legally, stealing somebody's physical property and stealing somebody's creating property are exactly the same thing. The only people who could possibly argue that they're different are people who really, really want to take other people's work without paying for it.
I'm sorry that you find little things like property annoying. I'm sorry that you find it annoying that you're not allowed to just, you know, take.
You know the part that baffled me? The part that absolutely left me with my jaw hanging slack? It was this part: "When you download a song online there is no loss except loss in your bandwidth (till the song finishes) and loss in your hard drive space." That was the part that just blew my mind. The idea that you could be so massively narcissistic that you fail to even acknowledge other people's losses and instead acknowledge only your own opportunity costs. "I stole this, but I could have used my time and resources to steal that instead, so really I'm only hurting myself here."
This one little sentence of yours was so carefully constructed, and so blindingly insane, that I can only conclude that you were trying to make a joke.
Unfortunately, the world is filled with impressionable people. It's entirely possible that somebody might come along and read your joke, fail to see the absurdity of it, and get fooled into believing something that is obviously false. So for those people, I say this:
Of what do you deprive someone when you steal his property? Three things: his right of self-determination over his own property, the revenue he would have earned by selling you what he had to offer, and finally his right to choose whether to sell you a copy of his work.
Stealing isn't just against the law. Everybody knows it's against the law, and despite the fact that depressingly few people seem to give a damn, nobody argues that it's not against the law. But more than that, it's a violation of fundamental civil rights: the right to self-determination, the right to sell one's work, the right to choose who to do business with. These aren't small things. They're huge and important things. And the fact that you're not bothered by them because you don't personally know the people who are being harmed tells me one thing, and one thing only: that you're a deeply selfish person who has no sense of self-respect whatsoever.
You can take your ridiculous "if life were like a television show" analogies and blow them right out your ass.
Apart from the fact that yes, it was a good football game, that's just plain bad writing. "It's as forgotten as this thing that I, the author, remember in perfect detail." Dumbass writer, and a double dumbass on the editor who let it slip through.
am i mistaken to think that "NSFW" is not a commonly used acronym here..?
Yes. You are also mistaken to think that sentences aren't supposed to begin with capital letters, that the personal pronoun "I" can be used without capitalization, that two periods followed by a question mark is a punctuation mark and that it's okay to end a sentence with an ellipsis without a period.
Furthermore, please avoid the use of acronyms that aren't already accepted as words themselves. You can say things like "DVD" and "CPU" because they're universally understood, but generally acronyms serve only to hinder communication, not to facilitate it. This isn't 1850. You're not Western Union by the letter.
At this very moment, this Web site is running a story called "Don't Write FORTRAN" that cleverly (or, you know, not) admonishes computer programmers for writing illiterate computer code. Might I humbly suggest that we hold ourselves to the same standard when it comes to things meant to be read by other human beings?
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Why can't Apple laptops come with split left/right mouse buttons like PC laptops
Most people I know don't use the trackpad button. They tap the trackpad itself to click. What are they supposed to do? Tap with the index finger for this function and with the ring finger for another function?
So you end up with a system where you just don't have as much flexibility with the mouse as you would with a Windows or Linux GUI.
Is "flexibility with the mouse" what we're calling "craptacular" these days?
Context menus are just bad user-interface design. Period. The fact that you have gotten accustomed to them doesn't change the fact that they're bad design. In particular, it's wrong of you to expect everybody else to get used to them just because you had to.
Those are all interesting details, but you kind of missed the point, didn't you?
It's not really accurate to say that Quartz 2D "uses a PDF imaging model." It's more correct to say that Quartz 2D's imaging model is PDF-like. That is, rather that dealing with individual pixels, the programmer deals with regions and fills those regions with paint. That's very different from QuickDraw.
But in terms of the application programming interface, in terms of how drawing commands are sent to Quartz Compositor, it's very much like QuickDraw. In Quartz 2D, you deal with a graphics context; in QuickDraw, you deal with a GrafPort. Same thing.
Quartz 2D a drawing model very similar to the one found in PDF, making it trivial to turn Quartz 2D drawings into PDF files, but in terms of the programming interface, it's very QuickDraw-like. For example, the Quartz 2D CGContextRef is very similar in most respects to the QuickDraw GrafPort.
To say that I "disagree" elevates it to a level that I don't think is appropriate. One wouldn't say that one "disagrees" with the Tooth Fairy or the Great Pumpkin. It doesn't even approach that point.
But if you want to set aside semantics for a minute and get to the crux of where you went wrong, it was with your first word: "When."
You should have said "If." And then qualified it with a whole bunch of maybes and hypotheticals. Because you're talking about something that's never, never, ever going to happen, ever.
Yeah ... again, you've lost your grip. Take a step back. Re-secure your attachment to the world you actually live in, not the world of some activist's drug-fueled dream.
No, it's not just NeXT. It's a combination of some core technologies from NeXT and the Mac OS, along with some entirely new ideas. NeXT, for example, had nothing like Quartz. Quartz is largely informed by the word Bill Atkinson did on QuickDraw in the early 1980s.
I'm sure you think you're being responsibly concerned, but the fact is that somewhere along the line you crossed over into the realm of the deranged ravings of a lunatic.
Might want to take a step back there, to rejoin us in reality.
Let's consider.
The MP3 format is acoustically inferior to the AAC format at the same bit rate. The sound quality of a 128 kbps MP3 is unacceptable, demanding the use of higher bit rates to achieve the same level of quality.
Higher bit rates equate to more storage; 50% more, at the very least. If Apple has a million songs and those songs average 4 MB each, that's 4 TB of music they have to store. You're talking about increasing it to 6 TB at least. That's a big difference.
Then there's bandwidth. Apple has sold a quarter of a billion songs. Again, if they average 4 MB each, that's a thousand terabytes of bandwidth they've consumed. You're saying that should have been 1,500 terabytes instead.
So let's review here. You're saying that, in order to make your life more convenient, Apple should store 6 TB of music instead of 4 TB, and they should have consumed 1,500 terabytes of bandwidth instead of a thousand. Because they didn't, you say they "went out of their way to make it annoying" for you. On the other hand, all you need to do to listen to your music in your car is to hit the "burn" button and stick in a blank CD. But you don't want to do that. You'd rather Apple increase by 50% the operating costs associated with running the store. (Without increasing prices, of course.) Because you think they "went out of their way to make it annoying" for you.
How unbelievably narcissistic can a person be?
What does that have to do with Dave's question? The question was, "What's keeping you from having multiple copies on multiple hard drives?"
There's no barrier here to use. You can use your music in any way that you see fit. And yet you turn your back on the various ways that are available to you and seek, instead, a way that's less convenient, less easy and less useful to you, just so you can thumb your nose at the company that bent over backwards to sell you music in a new, more reasonably priced, more convenient way.
How does this not add up to your just being an asshole?
According to the goddamned LAW, copyright infringement is not theft.
According to "the goddamned LAW," copyright infringement is a crime covered by 18 USC 2319. The title of the relevant chapter is "Stolen Property." Other crimes specified in that chapter include "transportation of stolen vehicles," "transportation of stolen goods," "trafficking in counterfeit goods" and -- I'm not kidding -- cattle rustling.
So yeah. According to "the goddamned LAW," copyright infringement is theft. It's a crime punishable by up to five years in federal prison. And that's not even counting the various state laws that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Next time, before you get oh-so-passionate about something, you might consider lookin' it up.
You got this absolutely right ...except you got a few words mixed up. Let me fix.
"No, in other words real stealing hurts people visibly, whereas online stealing only hurts people that we don't know in ways that we can't see."
The "utilitarian" thing is dead wrong, of course -- even if you weren't wrong in your first sentence, that's not what "utilitarian" means -- but you were almost right on the other thing.
Same reason they don't press charges for burglary or embezzlement or mail fraud. Because different types of stealing are covered by different laws because they differ in the details. Theft through breaking and entering: burglary. Theft from one's employer: embezzlement. Theft by committing fraud through the mail: the aptly named mail fraud. Theft by the unlawful copying of somebody else's property: copyright infringement.
Each one is a crime, the severity of which varies in proportion to the severity of the theft. Each one can result in fines or jail time.
Also, I don't think "Q.E.D." means what you think it does.
That's right. That's because the music's not in MP3 format. He can't burn a Windows Media CD either, or a CD with WAV files on it, or a CD that consists entirely of William Shatner describing the songs to him through the magic of the spoken word.
Because the music he bought isn't in that format.
Sounds like your problem -- because really we're not talking about anybody else, here, but rather about you --isn't with rights management. It's with the music format the Apple is selling.
Lucky for you there's plenty of choice in that arena. Go buy something else instead, rather than complaining that the thing Apple's selling isn't what you want.
That's not correct. In Apple's last earnings con-call, they said that the music store was a significant source of profit for Apple. Given that they've sold over a quarter of a billion songs at a per-song price that averages around 80, and their per-song revenue is on the order of about 20 per track, it's safe to assume that Apple has cleared somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million since the music store opened. Now granted, a significant chunk of that had to go into the hardware and software that run the store. But you know it didn't cost them $50 million to start the thing up.
So yes, Apple has made money with iTunes. Probably in excess of $40 million so far, and more every day.
Your life would have been oh so much easier if you'd just found that little "burn" button in the upper right-hand corner of the iTunes window.
Why did you choose to do it the hard way? And more important, are you trying to say that the only place you've got copies of these songs that you bought and paid for is on hard drives? Why didn't you burn them to CD anyway for permanent safe-keeping?
With iTunes, when I buy a song I CAN'T LISTEN TO IT IN MY CAR because it won't let me "export" the song to a format my hardware can parse.
That's an untrue statement, and it's kind of disappointing that you'd stoop to making it. You can burn an audio CD. A standard, no-funny-business, plays-everywhere audio CD. Which "your hardware" (we're talking about a stereo, right?) can "parse." (We're still talking about a stereo, right? Why all the jargon?)
If you want to then take that audio CD and go elsewhere with it to compile a CD of MP3s or something, knock yourself out. You're free to do whatever you like with the songs you buy from iTunes. They're yours. You own 'em.
Demonstrably false. Step one: Buy a song from iTunes. Step two: Click the little "burn" button in the upper right-hand corner of the window. Step three: Listen to songall the live-long day.
Now howzabout you quit being a dumbass and come join the conversation?
You say they're not the same, but I don't recall giving you the power to tell me what my moral system should be.
And as for calling people who demand that the law recognize their God-given property rights "greedy," that's just you being a dumbass.
Like people who, I don't know, write or paint pictures or compose music or make movies, maybe? Those kinds of people? People who create instead of just consuming other people's creations?
Let's flip this on its head, shall we? Morally and legally, stealing somebody's physical property and stealing somebody's creating property are exactly the same thing. The only people who could possibly argue that they're different are people who really, really want to take other people's work without paying for it.
I'm sorry that you find little things like property annoying. I'm sorry that you find it annoying that you're not allowed to just, you know, take.
You know the part that baffled me? The part that absolutely left me with my jaw hanging slack? It was this part: "When you download a song online there is no loss except loss in your bandwidth (till the song finishes) and loss in your hard drive space." That was the part that just blew my mind. The idea that you could be so massively narcissistic that you fail to even acknowledge other people's losses and instead acknowledge only your own opportunity costs. "I stole this, but I could have used my time and resources to steal that instead, so really I'm only hurting myself here."
This one little sentence of yours was so carefully constructed, and so blindingly insane, that I can only conclude that you were trying to make a joke.
Unfortunately, the world is filled with impressionable people. It's entirely possible that somebody might come along and read your joke, fail to see the absurdity of it, and get fooled into believing something that is obviously false. So for those people, I say this:
Of what do you deprive someone when you steal his property? Three things: his right of self-determination over his own property, the revenue he would have earned by selling you what he had to offer, and finally his right to choose whether to sell you a copy of his work.
Stealing isn't just against the law. Everybody knows it's against the law, and despite the fact that depressingly few people seem to give a damn, nobody argues that it's not against the law. But more than that, it's a violation of fundamental civil rights: the right to self-determination, the right to sell one's work, the right to choose who to do business with. These aren't small things. They're huge and important things. And the fact that you're not bothered by them because you don't personally know the people who are being harmed tells me one thing, and one thing only: that you're a deeply selfish person who has no sense of self-respect whatsoever.
You can take your ridiculous "if life were like a television show" analogies and blow them right out your ass.
In other words, it's harder to rationalize stealing from a real store than it is to rationalize stealing from an online-only store.
It's got nothing to do with either law or morality. It's just got to do with how far you're willing to delude yourself. Is that it?
Apart from the fact that yes, it was a good football game, that's just plain bad writing. "It's as forgotten as this thing that I, the author, remember in perfect detail." Dumbass writer, and a double dumbass on the editor who let it slip through.
am i mistaken to think that "NSFW" is not a commonly used acronym here..?
Yes. You are also mistaken to think that sentences aren't supposed to begin with capital letters, that the personal pronoun "I" can be used without capitalization, that two periods followed by a question mark is a punctuation mark and that it's okay to end a sentence with an ellipsis without a period.
Furthermore, please avoid the use of acronyms that aren't already accepted as words themselves. You can say things like "DVD" and "CPU" because they're universally understood, but generally acronyms serve only to hinder communication, not to facilitate it. This isn't 1850. You're not Western Union by the letter.
At this very moment, this Web site is running a story called "Don't Write FORTRAN" that cleverly (or, you know, not) admonishes computer programmers for writing illiterate computer code. Might I humbly suggest that we hold ourselves to the same standard when it comes to things meant to be read by other human beings?
You'd suggest what instead?