While I didn't really give Windows a spin back on v2.0, I did use 3.0 when it first came out, and worked with it ever since.
The only real meaningful improvements to Windows I saw were 3.1 to '95, and then the release of Windows 2000. XP is a bunch of "candy coating" on top of 2000, and IMHO - all the "NT" versions (3.5, 3.51 and 4.0) were medicore at best.
Now, granted, I'm not even beginning to try to speak for all users. I'm only talking about what I've seen from my perspective. But I've worked in I.T. and computer support for the last 15 years, and I've tried practically all the OS's out at one time or another.
I spent 6 years rolling out NT 3.5, 3.51, 4.0 and finally some Win2K boxes for a mid-sized company, and frankly, it shocked me how many basic administration-related functions were non-existant or cumbersome to use on the server side. We were always buying one 3rd. party product or another to perform a function which I thought should really be handled by a "business class" OS on its own.
A couple years ago, I started switching to Macs and OS X - and now I only have one Windows XP PC left at home. I'm sure I'll hang onto it and it will always have its purposes... but the "magic" to Apple is that they're always making improvements that count. A modern OS X box always feels like a "fluid" work in progress. You never know when running the "Updates" tool will grab some new version of one of your Apple branded applications, a firmware update for a peripheral of theirs, or even a whole new update to OS X itself. When I run a "Windows Update" by contrast, I'm more annoyed than anything else when it has something new for me to download - because hell, other than "Media Player 10", what real new improvements to any of their apps did they send anyone lately? It's always boring "security fixes" for another broken detail in the OS allowing a hacker to compromise something. Basically, just another patch that'll tie up your computer for 10 minutes updating and requiring a reboot - and all so when it's done, things will still run and look exactly like they did before.
Well, they did offer to throw in a free copy of iWork '05 if you returned Tiger and waited another week to receive it again. So who knows? At least one or two people very well might have taken them up on the offer - figuring they get a decent free bonus out of the deal, and there's no pressing need to run a new OS 7 or 8 days before everyone else starts installing it.
I think you're absolutely right on the different philosophies of sales. But as I've thought more about Apple and the on-going debate about licensing their OS - I tend to side with Apple's current stance.
I think if Mac OS X was licensed to OEM's, what you'd see is a big initial increase in the popularity and usage of OS X, but it would also be the end of Apple as a hardware company. Right now, Apple's "1, 2 punch" of providing quality hardware PLUS the fact that it has the unique ability to run OS X makes it attractive to a percentage of buyers. If the ONLY selling point was the quality/looks of the hardware, but it no longer ran an OS that was unique to the machine - it'd lose too much appeal to remain viable.
Meanwhile, you'd see some reliability and compatibility inside OS X breaking, as OEMs cut corners on their versions of machines that could run the OS.... Just like Windows, users would tolerate it and keep buying it anyway, but it would mark a relative decline in the "respectability" of the OS.
I have to disagree. I, too, own a Powerbook, as well as a dual 2Ghz G5 tower, a Mac Mini, and an Athlon 64 based PC tower. I use PCs and Windows every day for work, so I'm not one of these stereotypical "graphics arts" Mac using guys or anything....
Microsoft loves to tout "the numbers" because that's really all they have going for them. Quantity does not equate to quality, however. There's something to be said for any company that strives to produce a top-tier product, even when that means not being capable of producing large numbers of it to "dominate the marketplace".
Many of the best musical instruments aren't cranked out by the millions by a manufacturer. Rather, they're painstakingly assembled by hand, in small numbers. If they weren't "niche" products, they wouldn't be worthwhile products at all.
The gaming market, right now, is all about quantity too - so it goes without saying that they're all over the Windows platform. Still, one can argue that many of the best/most entertaining games are only available for game consoles - not for Mac *or* PC. And it's beginning to look like this trend is only going to gain more momentum. (Again, when you're shooting for maximum sales numbers above all else, you start thinking in terms of "Why not write this for one specific hardware configuration we KNOW is in a given console, rather than trying to support all these potential PC software conflicts and gaming peripherals, etc.?")
Meanwhile, game consoles seem to be headed towards using the same processor that's in the Mac, not the PC... so maybe porting to OS X will become easier than porting to Windows in the future?
I use my PC pretty much only for gaming these days, and my Mac for everything else. If I invest a couple hundred bucks or so in a new generation console (XBox 2 or something), I could probably ditch the Windows PC completely and not really miss it.
A while back, I also recall reading a story in a local paper about penguins being the first (only?) animal besides humans observed to engage in prostitution.
Supposedly, the penguins collected up rocks in order to build shelters for themselves - and they found a penguin accepting stones from another penguin in return for sex.
I'm pretty used to organizing my files I need to find in sensibly named folders/directories - and I tend to delete the old stuff as soon as I know I'm done with it. So I've never felt the need for a more powerful search feature for locating my documents. (I've REALLY needed it on a couple other people's machines though, when I was doing work for them and was expected to locate/edit a number of specific files I had no idea where to find in their huge mess of 5+ years worth of documents.)
I have this nagging feeling, though, that OS-wide powerful/fast search capabilities will become the cornerstone of a whole new "metaphor" for using the computer. Right now, pretty much everybody is hung-up on organizing things in the metaphor of folders and sub-folders containing files. Just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean it's the only proper way to do it, right?
I mean, if everything was fast and friendly enough in its operation, perhaps we could free ourselves completely from *caring* about giving "filenames" to our files, and making an effort to store them in folder names that make sense to us. Instead of worrying about the functionality and features of a given "file manager" program - we could just ditch it completely. (Or at least turn it into a tool for software development or troubleshooting/repair, rather than a necessity for regular use.) Let the machine auto-save everything using some unique file name/structure that's best for it - and feel confident it could be pulled back up with any type of search on its contents.
People keep complaining about the Mini being "not so cheap" when you factor in the keyboard, mouse and monitor. But come on! How many people are really buying one of these as a "first machine" these days? Everyone I know has a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse lying around someplace - or at least can take the old ones off the system they're swapping out for the new Mini.
For that matter, people are constantly buying their own replacement mice and keyboards (and sometimes even displays) because they don't like whatever was original equipment with their PC. Every PC comes with a mouse and keyboard, yet every single office supply superstore and electronics/appliance place has a full aisle of nothing but mice and keyboards! This wouldn't happen if most people were just content with their original mice/kbds.
Re:Offtopic, but I gotta vent
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Tracking Your Taxes
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, it doesn't look to me like owners of the Mac edition of Quicken 2005 are too pleased with the product either.
They may be once again "supporting the Mac" with their products, but it's half-baked.
I've been a Quicken user for keeping track of my checking and credit card accts. for years, and I recently migrated over to my Mac from Windows. (Mainly because I figure Windows has too many security risks like spyware apps that might potentially be able to upload my Quicken data someplace.)
I'm disappointed with Q2005 on the Mac though. The whole U.I. just feels "cumbersome" to me. I understand their reasoning behind trying to stick with the Mac concept of keeping everything in separate windows - but for this app, it seems to just get in my way. I'm constantly having one of my account registers disappearing behind my web browser when I have it open, trying to cross-check some data between my bank's web site and Quicken. I far prefer the way all the account registers feel like they're locked inside the main Quicken screen on a Windows platform.
Actually, I find it rather amusing that other than Dell (who moves more volume of product than ANY other computer vendor, period), there don't seem to really be any other PCs out there people are even TRYING to compare to the Mac Mini as "better buys for the price".
I grant you that Dell runs some pretty incredible deals on their hardware these days. (That 24" LCD panel for under $1200 is unbeatable, for example!) But with Dell, one also has to be very cautious about the "specials". My mother-in-law ordered one of their "bargain-priced entry level Dimension systems" last Xmas, only to have the bill arrive for hundreds more than the advertised sale price. To this day, she's still fighting Dell, trying to get a credit. She's faxed them copies of their ad, right out of a catalog, two different times now - but Dell keeps "losing" them, and making claims that "We've done so many different offers, we're not even sure which one you're referring to. " On another recent occasion, I saw some special deals on Dell notebooks that sounded too good to be true. Turned out, they basically were. Dell had a little disclaimer in their ad that they reserved the right to "withdraw the specials" at any time - and they did, within 2 or 3 hours of announcing them.
At least with Apple, the stated price is clear and consistent, and there won't be any fighting (or entering lengthy coupon codes) to get it.
But as others have stated, a Mac Mini is primarily of interest because it's an affordable OS X machine. If you don't subscribe to the belief that running OS X could be beneficial over running Windows XP - then yeah, there's little doubt you can build something "higher-spec" and with more hardware bundled for the money. Frankly though, I'm tired of all the B.S. with Windows operating systems. I have an AMD Athlon 64 tower that's almost only used for gaming now - and I'm moving practically everything else to my Macs. When I was thinking of buying a spare computer for use in my basement, the Mac Mini was a no-brainer purchase. It just works, virus and spyware free, and is fast enough for the tasks I'd ask of it.
This might sound like a stupid question, but I just spent the last few evenings fighting with DNS resolution problems on my home LAN, only to finally resolve it (at least for now) by a hard reboot of my Hotbrick LB-2 load-balancing router/firewall.
I have both a Charter cable modem and SBC DSL coming into my house, and the Hotbrick load-balances both connections and shares them to my PCs.
I started encountering an odd problem the other night where it seemed like after I initiated a file download, subsequent DNS requests (web pages, checking email, etc.) would just time out and fail. It was a bit erratic, but all my configuration settings appeared correct. (My Mac and PCs just use 192.168.0.1 as their DNS entries, since that gets them to the Hotbrick, which actually does the DNS resolution.)
Until now, I've had the Hotbrick running flawlessly for months on end, so the need to reboot it now puzzled me. This article made me wonder.
Well, if B.B. wasn't honoring your rewards program, you definitely should give them a call and look into it. But honestly. I've had their "rewards club" thing for the last year now, and practically every month, I get at least a $5 credit coupon in the mail from points I earned on misc. purchases.
(In fact, I originally became a rewards member only because I bought a big-screen TV from them and it was worth enough "points" on the program that I got more than double the money in credits back that the program cost to sign up for it at the time of the TV purchase. I ended up using that $50 or so in rewards credits to get a leather laptop carrying case I wanted for about $5 total.)
I will say, though, Best Buy has been going in the wrong direction recently. The changes to the rewards program (mail-in rebates issues by B.B. themselves subtract from the credits you earn in the program, for example!), make them look less attractive to shop at. And maybe it's just the stores around here, but I never really see those "red tag" type specials on a discount table like I used to? That used to be the #1 best reason to drop by Best Buy and look around. You could get some truly good deals on returned/opened box products on the discount tables or scattered around the shelves. But now, they seem like they try their best not to ever put something like that out - and if they do, the "discount" sucks... Like it'll be missing power adapters, manuals, cables, and everything, and will only be 10% off.
Yep! The most popular anti-virus packages for the PC are among the absolute worst you can use.
(As I've explained in other/. posts, I do on-site PC service for a living, so I run into a LOT of virus infections and spyware issues.)
In a HUGE number of cases, the customer already has the latest Norton 2005 Internet Security Suite installed and running with the latest updates. (Other times, they're still using 2004 but again, have a current subscription to it.) That product is awful! It fails to find a large number of the miscellaneous "trojan horse downloader" virii that cause machines to become progressively more and more filled with spyware/virii until they stop working completely. Not only that, but Symantec started using an authorization key code to validate the installation, so there's no way to reinstall the product on any other PC besides the one you initially loaded it on. (That means if you blew the $89 or whatever on your retail copy, and then find out it's not working for you - you can't even resell the thing to someone else. It's branded to your PC already!)
Personally, I've found AVG 7 Free anti-virus is far better than either Norton or McAfee at finding things - and you can't beat the price! (http://free.grisoft.com)
It's not perfect (one big problem with AVG is it can't seem to remove virus infections that are in specific files inside an archive like a ZIP file, though it can tell you the archive contains the infection) -- but it's quite good. For stubborn "left-overs" AVG isn't finding or cleaning, you can also try Kapersky's scanner. (http://www.mwti.net/antivirus/mwav.asp) It seems to find the really obscure stuff that everything else skips over.
Actually, I haven't taken out the time to do your proposed double-blind test, but I *have* compared songs played from my original CD and from a resulting MP3 ripped from it, several times, back and forth. I'm quite certain the MP3 versions sound considerably worse in some cases.
Much depends on the type of music and the bitrate chosen though. (What's your definition of a "decent codec and bitrate" BTW? Personally, I've found I have to encode my MP3s at 192 bits before I consider them acceptably close to "CD quality". But I find the vast majority of MP3s in people's collections are only 128 bit. At 128-bits, such things as cymbal crashes sound "dull" compared to the original music, and sometimes the vocals even sound a bit "harsh" or "metallic" in nature.)
Nonethless, the DEFAULT setting for most MP3 encoders in software apps is 128-bits. Sometimes, I see a default of 160-bits, which is more sensible... But never have I seen them use 192-bit or higher as a default setting.
(And before people start telling me about variable bit-rate encoding being the "key" or whatever, understand that VBR breaks compatiblity with many devices, so I never considered it a real viable option. I've owned at least 2 or 3 set-top DVD players with supposed MP3 music capability that choked on VBR encoded MP3s.)
I can tell you, often times, the problem is largely a lack of knowledge by the computer user about the options they have available to them.
Sometimes, yes, you get the people with the attitude of "I don't WANT to know how to fix this thing. I just want to pay someone to come out here when it breaks, and make it right again! I just want to USE it!" But just as often, I see problems like spyware/virii preventing the system from running well enough to get a product like Ad-Aware or Spybot installed successfully.
Usually, you can get around that by booting into "Safe Mode" in Windows - but does Windows make it clear to people that holding down F8 at bootup will do that for them? Heck no! It's pretty much a "hidden feature", because Microsoft decided most people shouldn't see that option, lest it confuse them. So even the people who did their research ahead of time, and tried to install Ad-Aware, Spybot, etc. etc. can't always get that far.
Many times, a customer calls me out to fix/clean up a system, only to say "Wow... You didn't really do anything I couldn't have just done myself. This stuff isn't so hard, is it?" They're right, of course - but what they really paid me for is my knowledge of which buttons to press, and which tools to install to fix things.
This also brings up another point... It's insanity NOT to charge a somewhat steep price for this type of work, because more often than not, the customer gets an education from your repair work - and doesn't need to call you back ever again for a similar issue. If you don't get decent money up front, you're often just giving them an education in virus/spyware repair for well below the "going rate" for computer training - and teaching them how to do your job.
That's all well and good, but any true "audiophile" would surely agree that compressing a song into lossy MP3 format does far more to destroy the nuances of the original work than "imperfect rendering of the square wave" due to use of single-ended, capacitor-coupled output.
Realistically, the differences in audio quality between an iPod Shuffle and a comparable flash player from, say, Creative, aren't enough to matter for users using earbud headphones of the quality included with any of these units.
The complaints about a Shuffle "lowering the bar" for Apple quality weren't really referring to quality of audio output anyway. They're talking more about stooping to the level of presenting a product that has no display screen whatsoever, has very limited storage space for music, and no extra "PDA type" capabilities to enhance its value.
Again, I don't personally think it was necessarily a bad move on Apple's part at all. I'm just playing "devil's advocate" here a bit... But let me at least put it this way. It's unlike the Apple I usually think of to release rather "stripped down" products that are aimed at the "mass market". (In fact, one might say the iPod Shuffle is sort of like Hasselblad releasing a disposable point-and-shoot camera for sale at major chain stores.)
No, as both a Windows and a Mac user myself (typing this on my G5 right now) - I agree completely with you. The Mac "community" seems to enjoy hanging onto the belief that Mac apps are almost always "friendlier" and "easier to use" than their Windows counterparts.
I've found that to be entirely false as often as it's true. Basically, a wash....
There are lots of reasons I like my Mac, but an equal number of reasons to dislike it. Until somebody really "gets it all right", I feel like my best option is to keep using both platforms.
As you said, 3rd. party products can radically change the "interface philosophy" of the whole system. (EG. The latest version of Stuffit Expander for the Mac will automatically compress or decompress files simply by the user adding or removing the.sit extension from the end of them. Well, hey, that's pretty cool, EXCEPT, the whole design of Mac OS X has pivoted around the idea that file extensions aren't critical to a file's behavior. Mac users are trained to learn that their JPG doesn't have to end in.jpg for their favorite editor to view it properly by default. Extensions can just be completely left off of your documents, and it's pretty much just "optional". But now, StuffIt comes along and creates a situation where the.sit extension does have actual meaning/functionality.)
I don't know.... I can see the validity to the argument that the Shuffle lowers the bar for "Apple quality" - since it's just a "me too" flash player for people who only shop for "cheap".
On the other hand, it went along with the Mac Mini, which is another experiment by Apple to cater to the lower end of the market - and most people consider the Mac Mini a stunning success.
I'd never buy a Shuffle, but by the same token, I'd also never buy an iPod Mini. They seem like "all style, no substance" to me. You pay close to the price of a player that can store 4x as much music or more, and you get the exact same thing except in a little bit smaller, colored casing? But nonetheless, it was a huge success.
Sometimes, you can't just go by the "feature set for the $" to determine what will be a "hit". It may determine what the "technophiles" among us buy, but the general public has other motivations. I've talked to a number of iPod Mini customers, and generally - they don't do lots of MP3 downloading. They jusy buy a few things here and there off iTunes and rip the CDs they already own - so 5GB is plenty of space for 'em.
This is exactly where it seems to me like this whole thing gets "sticky".... Did Microsoft ever really promise people that Media Player was just a "front end shell" for all of these media capabilities in Windows, or were they implying/intending it to be their preferred *default method* of working with multimedia in Windows?
Personally, if I received a Media Player free version of Windows, I wouldn't expect files made for their format to play if I embedded them in, say, MS Word. I'd think the *expected* behavior would be for them to be "broken", at least until I installed 3rd. party products to handle the media.
Even the folks making the technical argument that the Media Player codecs should still be in Windows XP when MS removes the "player front-end" seem to me like they're treading on thin ice. This argument boils down to deciding if "Media Player" encompasses the codecs that "make it go" or not. Since competing players like Quicktime consider their media playing products as "one component" (deleting the.exe file makes it stop working properly), it seems like it would strengthen Microsoft's argument that they intended theirs to be looked at similarly.
Yes, as many others said, I think it's "ridiculous". Will it stop me from ever buying, say, a song on the iTunes music store? No... probably not. Frankly, when I do something like that, I consider the overall situation.
I think "Ok, I'm using iTunes already, and my immediate goal is to be able to listen to this song. If I buy this DRM'd track online, I can do that here and now, in this software app I'm already using." Furthermore, I know it'll go into my iPod and play there just fine, which is another expectation I'd have for it.
Ultimately though, I'm ok with the purchase because I know there are plenty of ways to get the DRM stripped back off of it after the fact, if and when it becomes necessary. (Simply use a utility that intercepts the audio stream while you're playing it back, and saves the results to a new file - if all else fails!)
So while "philosophically", I'm anti-DRM - "realistically", I find it more of an "inconvenience" than a "deal-breaker" for me. If and when they get DRM to the point where I really can't disable it (or make it so tough to disable that it's quite time-consuming), then I'll refuse to buy the crippled products anymore. It's that simple.
Actually, I think more companies bend those IRS definitions of "contractors" than you might realize.
A big offender? Most courier/delivery services. They often use only "contractors" to run all their deliveries - even though at first glance, this might seem impossible. (If the people are driving cars you own, and taking deliveries "on call" for you, then that would seem to immediately make them your "employees" rather than "contractors".)
To comply with the IRS rules of "contractors" though, they do such things as rent the cars out to the drivers (with compensation built into their pay to cover the rental costs), and instead of telling a specific driver to do a given delivery run, they simply get on the radio and "offer" the jobs to the drivers.
Uh... not likely. Long before we're all paying $20/gallon for gas, we'll have switched to other fuels. One big reason we don't burn any of a number of alternative fuel possibilities to gasoline is the cost. (Until just recently, a gallon of gasoline cost less than a gallon of practically any other fluid you bought off the shelf, other than maybe chlorine bleach! Refining other substances into comparative fuels to gasoline was usually estimated to cost consumers maybe $3-4/gallon, so it wasn't pursued.)
I'm for the concept of the "death penalty" - yet I never thought it was for reasons of either "retribution" or "prevention". I've never bought into that idea that putting folks to death for murder will scare others into not doing the same thing. (Most murderers act suddenly/swiftly because of intense anger. They're not thinking rationally when it happens. Still others do it because they're simply not quite right in the head. Insanity perhaps, or just an unwillingness to work with the rest of society and our "rules" of conduct.)
My only reason for the death penalty is because I feel that when someone reduces themselves to the level of an animal, and casts aside the *human* ability to think on a higher level than that - they deserve to be treated like one. When a wild animal goes on a rampage and starts killing innocent people, we put it down. Yet, when a human being decides he wants to act the same way - we have all of these issues?
This line of thinking is EXACTLY what organizations like the SPA and RIAA would *love* you to think.
But let's stop and think about this one for a minute, shall we?
Way back when Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS was still the most popular spreadsheet around (pre-1996) - accusations were flying left and right about "there being an illegal copy in use for every single legal one". Similar claims were made about WordPerfect and the early versions of MS Word too.
Of course, there's never any way to really *prove* any of these alleged numbers - but that's still true today, making that a moot point.
So I ask you, why was a claimed infringenent rate of 50% of these works not enough to justify legal penalties up until 1996, but it's suddenly different after that?
It's just the latest excuse to point the finger at the Internet and act like it's the source of all of our copyright woes. But before MP3s or even digital CDs of music, people were buying predominantly dual-deck cassette recorders for their home stereos too. (You think that was because most consumers were just making their "one legal backup copy" of their Styx and Doors tapes?) The technology for copying/distributing things is always going to be improving, like all technologies. But the motivating force behind copying a work of I.P. never changes. Therefore, I'd say that the relative number of infringements of a given work haven't really changed that much either. It might take "pirate A" less time to obtain the latest software than it did 10 years ago -- but either way, he/she was gonna do it if it meant saving the $495 retail store price or whatever.
Yeah, I find this annoying sometimes too - but I can understand one big reason they'd be motivated to do it.
It has to be a big booster of new hardware sales for them. Look at how often you see comments like "I'm *waiting* to purchase a new for...." It's not just in the Slashdot story heading... It's all over the place on any Mac fan site.
The whole point is, yeah, the OS and software updates aren't always worth the asking price - but that artificially high barrier to entry makes Mac owners feel better about the idea of upgrading systems or buying another new one. (Hey, I'm guilty of it too. I wanted iLife '05 but didn't really want to pay for it, after I just paid for iLife '04 last year. The fact that iLife '05 came bundled with every new Mac Mini, though, pushed me over the edge to buy one of 'em. You figure, $499 for a Mini minus a discount coupon I already had for an Apple store purchase - and then you factor in the price of iLife '05..... Starts to look pretty reasonable.)
Since generally, Macs have respectable resale value (assuming they're not TOO old), I think Apple is trying hard to get more folks to consider ebaying that 2-3 year old laptop or iMac and grabbing a shiny new model. (Hey, free Tiger with it!)
No - the part I think most people overlook is, these "warez groups" are notoriously competitive with each other, and elitist in their attitudes.
Far from simply "providing copies of hundreds of thousands of titles to basically anybody", they're extremely difficult to work with if you want them to provide you with anything.
With the massive distribution and communications power of the Internet, sure - these things leak out all over the place eventually. (If you need a particular application badly enough and have the time to spend hunting it down, you can beg and plead in numerous IRC chat rooms until someone you private message finally agrees to send the cracked version over to you, for example.) But groups like DoD weren't just running like a software charity - welcoming any and all onto high bandwidth distribution servers.
They've actually got a whole "power structure" in place, so only appointed "couriers" are even allowed to download their cracked software in the first place, and then they're only supposed to redistribute it to specific people/places that made previous arrangements/deals with their group leaders.
I agree that if you're a part of this and live/work in a country with copyright legislation in place and enforced (like the U.S.), then you better expect some punishment if you're caught. But extradition from another country for this? Like others said - truthfully, it's tough to pin an individual member of a group like this down to having done much worse than simply disabling copy protection mechanisms in code. The guys doing the cracking aren't the ones doing the actual distributing, and vice-versa. And ultimately, aren't the end-users installing this stuff the ones responsible? It'd seem pointless to prosecute everyone who cracked a piece of software if nobody was bothering to download it and install it afterwards, instead of just buying it instead.
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While I didn't really give Windows a spin back on v2.0, I did use 3.0 when it first came out, and worked with it ever since.
... but the "magic" to Apple is that they're always making improvements that count. A modern OS X box always feels like a "fluid" work in progress. You never know when running the "Updates" tool will grab some new version of one of your Apple branded applications, a firmware update for a peripheral of theirs, or even a whole new update to OS X itself. When I run a "Windows Update" by contrast, I'm more annoyed than anything else when it has something new for me to download - because hell, other than "Media Player 10", what real new improvements to any of their apps did they send anyone lately? It's always boring "security fixes" for another broken detail in the OS allowing a hacker to compromise something. Basically, just another patch that'll tie up your computer for 10 minutes updating and requiring a reboot - and all so when it's done, things will still run and look exactly like they did before.
The only real meaningful improvements to Windows I saw were 3.1 to '95, and then the release of Windows 2000. XP is a bunch of "candy coating" on top of 2000, and IMHO - all the "NT" versions (3.5, 3.51 and 4.0) were medicore at best.
Now, granted, I'm not even beginning to try to speak for all users. I'm only talking about what I've seen from my perspective. But I've worked in I.T. and computer support for the last 15 years, and I've tried practically all the OS's out at one time or another.
I spent 6 years rolling out NT 3.5, 3.51, 4.0 and finally some Win2K boxes for a mid-sized company, and frankly, it shocked me how many basic administration-related functions were non-existant or cumbersome to use on the server side. We were always buying one 3rd. party product or another to perform a function which I thought should really be handled by a "business class" OS on its own.
A couple years ago, I started switching to Macs and OS X - and now I only have one Windows XP PC left at home. I'm sure I'll hang onto it and it will always have its purposes
Well, they did offer to throw in a free copy of iWork '05 if you returned Tiger and waited another week to receive it again. So who knows? At least one or two people very well might have taken them up on the offer - figuring they get a decent free bonus out of the deal, and there's no pressing need to run a new OS 7 or 8 days before everyone else starts installing it.
I think you're absolutely right on the different philosophies of sales. But as I've thought more about Apple and the on-going debate about licensing their OS - I tend to side with Apple's current stance.
I think if Mac OS X was licensed to OEM's, what you'd see is a big initial increase in the popularity and usage of OS X, but it would also be the end of Apple as a hardware company. Right now, Apple's "1, 2 punch" of providing quality hardware PLUS the fact that it has the unique ability to run OS X makes it attractive to a percentage of buyers. If the ONLY selling point was the quality/looks of the hardware, but it no longer ran an OS that was unique to the machine - it'd lose too much appeal to remain viable.
Meanwhile, you'd see some reliability and compatibility inside OS X breaking, as OEMs cut corners on their versions of machines that could run the OS.... Just like Windows, users would tolerate it and keep buying it anyway, but it would mark a relative decline in the "respectability" of the OS.
I have to disagree. I, too, own a Powerbook, as well as a dual 2Ghz G5 tower, a Mac Mini, and an Athlon 64 based PC tower. I use PCs and Windows every day for work, so I'm not one of these stereotypical "graphics arts" Mac using guys or anything....
... so maybe porting to OS X will become easier than porting to Windows in the future?
Microsoft loves to tout "the numbers" because that's really all they have going for them. Quantity does not equate to quality, however. There's something to be said for any company that strives to produce a top-tier product, even when that means not being capable of producing large numbers of it to "dominate the marketplace".
Many of the best musical instruments aren't cranked out by the millions by a manufacturer. Rather, they're painstakingly assembled by hand, in small numbers. If they weren't "niche" products, they wouldn't be worthwhile products at all.
The gaming market, right now, is all about quantity too - so it goes without saying that they're all over the Windows platform. Still, one can argue that many of the best/most entertaining games are only available for game consoles - not for Mac *or* PC. And it's beginning to look like this trend is only going to gain more momentum. (Again, when you're shooting for maximum sales numbers above all else, you start thinking in terms of "Why not write this for one specific hardware configuration we KNOW is in a given console, rather than trying to support all these potential PC software conflicts and gaming peripherals, etc.?")
Meanwhile, game consoles seem to be headed towards using the same processor that's in the Mac, not the PC
I use my PC pretty much only for gaming these days, and my Mac for everything else. If I invest a couple hundred bucks or so in a new generation console (XBox 2 or something), I could probably ditch the Windows PC completely and not really miss it.
A while back, I also recall reading a story in a local paper about penguins being the first (only?) animal besides humans observed to engage in prostitution.
Supposedly, the penguins collected up rocks in order to build shelters for themselves - and they found a penguin accepting stones from another penguin in return for sex.
Hmm.... I think I'm somewhere in between.
I'm pretty used to organizing my files I need to find in sensibly named folders/directories - and I tend to delete the old stuff as soon as I know I'm done with it. So I've never felt the need for a more powerful search feature for locating my documents. (I've REALLY needed it on a couple other people's machines though, when I was doing work for them and was expected to locate/edit a number of specific files I had no idea where to find in their huge mess of 5+ years worth of documents.)
I have this nagging feeling, though, that OS-wide powerful/fast search capabilities will become the cornerstone of a whole new "metaphor" for using the computer. Right now, pretty much everybody is hung-up on organizing things in the metaphor of folders and sub-folders containing files. Just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean it's the only proper way to do it, right?
I mean, if everything was fast and friendly enough in its operation, perhaps we could free ourselves completely from *caring* about giving "filenames" to our files, and making an effort to store them in folder names that make sense to us. Instead of worrying about the functionality and features of a given "file manager" program - we could just ditch it completely. (Or at least turn it into a tool for software development or troubleshooting/repair, rather than a necessity for regular use.) Let the machine auto-save everything using some unique file name/structure that's best for it - and feel confident it could be pulled back up with any type of search on its contents.
People keep complaining about the Mini being "not so cheap" when you factor in the keyboard, mouse and monitor. But come on! How many people are really buying one of these as a "first machine" these days? Everyone I know has a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse lying around someplace - or at least can take the old ones off the system they're swapping out for the new Mini.
For that matter, people are constantly buying their own replacement mice and keyboards (and sometimes even displays) because they don't like whatever was original equipment with their PC. Every PC comes with a mouse and keyboard, yet every single office supply superstore and electronics/appliance place has a full aisle of nothing but mice and keyboards! This wouldn't happen if most people were just content with their original mice/kbds.
Well, it doesn't look to me like owners of the Mac edition of Quicken 2005 are too pleased with the product either.
They may be once again "supporting the Mac" with their products, but it's half-baked.
I've been a Quicken user for keeping track of my checking and credit card accts. for years, and I recently migrated over to my Mac from Windows. (Mainly because I figure Windows has too many security risks like spyware apps that might potentially be able to upload my Quicken data someplace.)
I'm disappointed with Q2005 on the Mac though. The whole U.I. just feels "cumbersome" to me. I understand their reasoning behind trying to stick with the Mac concept of keeping everything in separate windows - but for this app, it seems to just get in my way. I'm constantly having one of my account registers disappearing behind my web browser when I have it open, trying to cross-check some data between my bank's web site and Quicken. I far prefer the way all the account registers feel like they're locked inside the main Quicken screen on a Windows platform.
Actually, I find it rather amusing that other than Dell (who moves more volume of product than ANY other computer vendor, period), there don't seem to really be any other PCs out there people are even TRYING to compare to the Mac Mini as "better buys for the price".
I grant you that Dell runs some pretty incredible deals on their hardware these days. (That 24" LCD panel for under $1200 is unbeatable, for example!) But with Dell, one also has to be very cautious about the "specials". My mother-in-law ordered one of their "bargain-priced entry level Dimension systems" last Xmas, only to have the bill arrive for hundreds more than the advertised sale price. To this day, she's still fighting Dell, trying to get a credit. She's faxed them copies of their ad, right out of a catalog, two different times now - but Dell keeps "losing" them, and making claims that "We've done so many different offers, we're not even sure which one you're referring to. " On another recent occasion, I saw some special deals on Dell notebooks that sounded too good to be true. Turned out, they basically were. Dell had a little disclaimer in their ad that they reserved the right to "withdraw the specials" at any time - and they did, within 2 or 3 hours of announcing them.
At least with Apple, the stated price is clear and consistent, and there won't be any fighting (or entering lengthy coupon codes) to get it.
But as others have stated, a Mac Mini is primarily of interest because it's an affordable OS X machine. If you don't subscribe to the belief that running OS X could be beneficial over running Windows XP - then yeah, there's little doubt you can build something "higher-spec" and with more hardware bundled for the money. Frankly though, I'm tired of all the B.S. with Windows operating systems. I have an AMD Athlon 64 tower that's almost only used for gaming now - and I'm moving practically everything else to my Macs. When I was thinking of buying a spare computer for use in my basement, the Mac Mini was a no-brainer purchase. It just works, virus and spyware free, and is fast enough for the tasks I'd ask of it.
This might sound like a stupid question, but I just spent the last few evenings fighting with DNS resolution problems on my home LAN, only to finally resolve it (at least for now) by a hard reboot of my Hotbrick LB-2 load-balancing router/firewall.
I have both a Charter cable modem and SBC DSL coming into my house, and the Hotbrick load-balances both connections and shares them to my PCs.
I started encountering an odd problem the other night where it seemed like after I initiated a file download, subsequent DNS requests (web pages, checking email, etc.) would just time out and fail. It was a bit erratic, but all my configuration settings appeared correct. (My Mac and PCs just use 192.168.0.1 as their DNS entries, since that gets them to the Hotbrick, which actually does the DNS resolution.)
Until now, I've had the Hotbrick running flawlessly for months on end, so the need to reboot it now puzzled me. This article made me wonder.
Well, if B.B. wasn't honoring your rewards program, you definitely should give them a call and look into it. But honestly. I've had their "rewards club" thing for the last year now, and practically every month, I get at least a $5 credit coupon in the mail from points I earned on misc. purchases.
(In fact, I originally became a rewards member only because I bought a big-screen TV from them and it was worth enough "points" on the program that I got more than double the money in credits back that the program cost to sign up for it at the time of the TV purchase. I ended up using that $50 or so in rewards credits to get a leather laptop carrying case I wanted for about $5 total.)
I will say, though, Best Buy has been going in the wrong direction recently. The changes to the rewards program (mail-in rebates issues by B.B. themselves subtract from the credits you earn in the program, for example!), make them look less attractive to shop at. And maybe it's just the stores around here, but I never really see those "red tag" type specials on a discount table like I used to? That used to be the #1 best reason to drop by Best Buy and look around. You could get some truly good deals on returned/opened box products on the discount tables or scattered around the shelves. But now, they seem like they try their best not to ever put something like that out - and if they do, the "discount" sucks... Like it'll be missing power adapters, manuals, cables, and everything, and will only be 10% off.
Yep! The most popular anti-virus packages for the PC are among the absolute worst you can use.
/. posts, I do on-site PC service for a living, so I run into a LOT of virus infections and spyware issues.)
(As I've explained in other
In a HUGE number of cases, the customer already has the latest Norton 2005 Internet Security Suite installed and running with the latest updates. (Other times, they're still using 2004 but again, have a current subscription to it.) That product is awful! It fails to find a large number of the miscellaneous "trojan horse downloader" virii that cause machines to become progressively more and more filled with spyware/virii until they stop working completely. Not only that, but Symantec started using an authorization key code to validate the installation, so there's no way to reinstall the product on any other PC besides the one you initially loaded it on. (That means if you blew the $89 or whatever on your retail copy, and then find out it's not working for you - you can't even resell the thing to someone else. It's branded to your PC already!)
Personally, I've found AVG 7 Free anti-virus is far better than either Norton or McAfee at finding things - and you can't beat the price! (http://free.grisoft.com)
It's not perfect (one big problem with AVG is it can't seem to remove virus infections that are in specific files inside an archive like a ZIP file, though it can tell you the archive contains the infection) -- but it's quite good. For stubborn "left-overs" AVG isn't finding or cleaning, you can also try Kapersky's scanner. (http://www.mwti.net/antivirus/mwav.asp)
It seems to find the really obscure stuff that everything else skips over.
Actually, I haven't taken out the time to do your proposed double-blind test, but I *have* compared songs played from my original CD and from a resulting MP3 ripped from it, several times, back and forth. I'm quite certain the MP3 versions sound considerably worse in some cases.
Much depends on the type of music and the bitrate chosen though. (What's your definition of a "decent codec and bitrate" BTW? Personally, I've found I have to encode my MP3s at 192 bits before I consider them acceptably close to "CD quality". But I find the vast majority of MP3s in people's collections are only 128 bit. At 128-bits, such things as cymbal crashes sound "dull" compared to the original music, and sometimes the vocals even sound a bit "harsh" or "metallic" in nature.)
Nonethless, the DEFAULT setting for most MP3 encoders in software apps is 128-bits. Sometimes, I see a default of 160-bits, which is more sensible... But never have I seen them use 192-bit or higher as a default setting.
(And before people start telling me about variable bit-rate encoding being the "key" or whatever, understand that VBR breaks compatiblity with many devices, so I never considered it a real viable option. I've owned at least 2 or 3 set-top DVD players with supposed MP3 music capability that choked on VBR encoded MP3s.)
I can tell you, often times, the problem is largely a lack of knowledge by the computer user about the options they have available to them.
Sometimes, yes, you get the people with the attitude of "I don't WANT to know how to fix this thing. I just want to pay someone to come out here when it breaks, and make it right again! I just want to USE it!" But just as often, I see problems like spyware/virii preventing the system from running well enough to get a product like Ad-Aware or Spybot installed successfully.
Usually, you can get around that by booting into "Safe Mode" in Windows - but does Windows make it clear to people that holding down F8 at bootup will do that for them? Heck no! It's pretty much a "hidden feature", because Microsoft decided most people shouldn't see that option, lest it confuse them. So even the people who did their research ahead of time, and tried to install Ad-Aware, Spybot, etc. etc. can't always get that far.
Many times, a customer calls me out to fix/clean up a system, only to say "Wow... You didn't really do anything I couldn't have just done myself. This stuff isn't so hard, is it?" They're right, of course - but what they really paid me for is my knowledge of which buttons to press, and which tools to install to fix things.
This also brings up another point... It's insanity NOT to charge a somewhat steep price for this type of work, because more often than not, the customer gets an education from your repair work - and doesn't need to call you back ever again for a similar issue. If you don't get decent money up front, you're often just giving them an education in virus/spyware repair for well below the "going rate" for computer training - and teaching them how to do your job.
That's all well and good, but any true "audiophile" would surely agree that compressing a song into lossy MP3 format does far more to destroy the nuances of the original work than "imperfect rendering of the square wave" due to use of single-ended, capacitor-coupled output.
Realistically, the differences in audio quality between an iPod Shuffle and a comparable flash player from, say, Creative, aren't enough to matter for users using earbud headphones of the quality included with any of these units.
The complaints about a Shuffle "lowering the bar" for Apple quality weren't really referring to quality of audio output anyway. They're talking more about stooping to the level of presenting a product that has no display screen whatsoever, has very limited storage space for music, and no extra "PDA type" capabilities to enhance its value.
Again, I don't personally think it was necessarily a bad move on Apple's part at all. I'm just playing "devil's advocate" here a bit... But let me at least put it this way. It's unlike the Apple I usually think of to release rather "stripped down" products that are aimed at the "mass market". (In fact, one might say the iPod Shuffle is sort of like Hasselblad releasing a disposable point-and-shoot camera for sale at major chain stores.)
No, as both a Windows and a Mac user myself (typing this on my G5 right now) - I agree completely with you. The Mac "community" seems to enjoy hanging onto the belief that Mac apps are almost always "friendlier" and "easier to use" than their Windows counterparts.
.sit extension from the end of them. Well, hey, that's pretty cool, EXCEPT, the whole design of Mac OS X has pivoted around the idea that file extensions aren't critical to a file's behavior. Mac users are trained to learn that their JPG doesn't have to end in .jpg for their favorite editor to view it properly by default. Extensions can just be completely left off of your documents, and it's pretty much just "optional". But now, StuffIt comes along and creates a situation where the .sit extension does have actual meaning/functionality.)
I've found that to be entirely false as often as it's true. Basically, a wash....
There are lots of reasons I like my Mac, but an equal number of reasons to dislike it. Until somebody really "gets it all right", I feel like my best option is to keep using both platforms.
As you said, 3rd. party products can radically change the "interface philosophy" of the whole system. (EG. The latest version of Stuffit Expander for the Mac will automatically compress or decompress files simply by the user adding or removing the
I don't know.... I can see the validity to the argument that the Shuffle lowers the bar for "Apple quality" - since it's just a "me too" flash player for people who only shop for "cheap".
On the other hand, it went along with the Mac Mini, which is another experiment by Apple to cater to the lower end of the market - and most people consider the Mac Mini a stunning success.
I'd never buy a Shuffle, but by the same token, I'd also never buy an iPod Mini. They seem like "all style, no substance" to me. You pay close to the price of a player that can store 4x as much music or more, and you get the exact same thing except in a little bit smaller, colored casing? But nonetheless, it was a huge success.
Sometimes, you can't just go by the "feature set for the $" to determine what will be a "hit". It may determine what the "technophiles" among us buy, but the general public has other motivations. I've talked to a number of iPod Mini customers, and generally - they don't do lots of MP3 downloading. They jusy buy a few things here and there off iTunes and rip the CDs they already own - so 5GB is plenty of space for 'em.
This is exactly where it seems to me like this whole thing gets "sticky".... Did Microsoft ever really promise people that Media Player was just a "front end shell" for all of these media capabilities in Windows, or were they implying/intending it to be their preferred *default method* of working with multimedia in Windows?
.exe file makes it stop working properly), it seems like it would strengthen Microsoft's argument that they intended theirs to be looked at similarly.
Personally, if I received a Media Player free version of Windows, I wouldn't expect files made for their format to play if I embedded them in, say, MS Word. I'd think the *expected* behavior would be for them to be "broken", at least until I installed 3rd. party products to handle the media.
Even the folks making the technical argument that the Media Player codecs should still be in Windows XP when MS removes the "player front-end" seem to me like they're treading on thin ice. This argument boils down to deciding if "Media Player" encompasses the codecs that "make it go" or not. Since competing players like Quicktime consider their media playing products as "one component" (deleting the
Yes, as many others said, I think it's "ridiculous". Will it stop me from ever buying, say, a song on the iTunes music store? No... probably not. Frankly, when I do something like that, I consider the overall situation.
I think "Ok, I'm using iTunes already, and my immediate goal is to be able to listen to this song. If I buy this DRM'd track online, I can do that here and now, in this software app I'm already using." Furthermore, I know it'll go into my iPod and play there just fine, which is another expectation I'd have for it.
Ultimately though, I'm ok with the purchase because I know there are plenty of ways to get the DRM stripped back off of it after the fact, if and when it becomes necessary. (Simply use a utility that intercepts the audio stream while you're playing it back, and saves the results to a new file - if all else fails!)
So while "philosophically", I'm anti-DRM - "realistically", I find it more of an "inconvenience" than a "deal-breaker" for me. If and when they get DRM to the point where I really can't disable it (or make it so tough to disable that it's quite time-consuming), then I'll refuse to buy the crippled products anymore. It's that simple.
Actually, I think more companies bend those IRS definitions of "contractors" than you might realize.
A big offender? Most courier/delivery services. They often use only "contractors" to run all their deliveries - even though at first glance, this might seem impossible. (If the people are driving cars you own, and taking deliveries "on call" for you, then that would seem to immediately make them your "employees" rather than "contractors".)
To comply with the IRS rules of "contractors" though, they do such things as rent the cars out to the drivers (with compensation built into their pay to cover the rental costs), and instead of telling a specific driver to do a given delivery run, they simply get on the radio and "offer" the jobs to the drivers.
Uh... not likely. Long before we're all paying $20/gallon for gas, we'll have switched to other fuels. One big reason we don't burn any of a number of alternative fuel possibilities to gasoline is the cost. (Until just recently, a gallon of gasoline cost less than a gallon of practically any other fluid you bought off the shelf, other than maybe chlorine bleach! Refining other substances into comparative fuels to gasoline was usually estimated to cost consumers maybe $3-4/gallon, so it wasn't pursued.)
I'm for the concept of the "death penalty" - yet I never thought it was for reasons of either "retribution" or "prevention". I've never bought into that idea that putting folks to death for murder will scare others into not doing the same thing. (Most murderers act suddenly/swiftly because of intense anger. They're not thinking rationally when it happens. Still others do it because they're simply not quite right in the head. Insanity perhaps, or just an unwillingness to work with the rest of society and our "rules" of conduct.)
My only reason for the death penalty is because I feel that when someone reduces themselves to the level of an animal, and casts aside the *human* ability to think on a higher level than that - they deserve to be treated like one. When a wild animal goes on a rampage and starts killing innocent people, we put it down. Yet, when a human being decides he wants to act the same way - we have all of these issues?
This line of thinking is EXACTLY what organizations like the SPA and RIAA would *love* you to think.
But let's stop and think about this one for a minute, shall we?
Way back when Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS was still the most popular spreadsheet around (pre-1996) - accusations were flying left and right about "there being an illegal copy in use for every single legal one". Similar claims were made about WordPerfect and the early versions of MS Word too.
Of course, there's never any way to really *prove* any of these alleged numbers - but that's still true today, making that a moot point.
So I ask you, why was a claimed infringenent rate of 50% of these works not enough to justify legal penalties up until 1996, but it's suddenly different after that?
It's just the latest excuse to point the finger at the Internet and act like it's the source of all of our copyright woes. But before MP3s or even digital CDs of music, people were buying predominantly dual-deck cassette recorders for their home stereos too. (You think that was because most consumers were just making their "one legal backup copy" of their Styx and Doors tapes?) The technology for copying/distributing things is always going to be improving, like all technologies. But the motivating force behind copying a work of I.P. never changes. Therefore, I'd say that the relative number of infringements of a given work haven't really changed that much either. It might take "pirate A" less time to obtain the latest software than it did 10 years ago -- but either way, he/she was gonna do it if it meant saving the $495 retail store price or whatever.
Yeah, I find this annoying sometimes too - but I can understand one big reason they'd be motivated to do it.
...." It's not just in the Slashdot story heading... It's all over the place on any Mac fan site.
It has to be a big booster of new hardware sales for them. Look at how often you see comments like "I'm *waiting* to purchase a new for
The whole point is, yeah, the OS and software updates aren't always worth the asking price - but that artificially high barrier to entry makes Mac owners feel better about the idea of upgrading systems or buying another new one. (Hey, I'm guilty of it too. I wanted iLife '05 but didn't really want to pay for it, after I just paid for iLife '04 last year. The fact that iLife '05 came bundled with every new Mac Mini, though, pushed me over the edge to buy one of 'em. You figure, $499 for a Mini minus a discount coupon I already had for an Apple store purchase - and then you factor in the price of iLife '05..... Starts to look pretty reasonable.)
Since generally, Macs have respectable resale value (assuming they're not TOO old), I think Apple is trying hard to get more folks to consider ebaying that 2-3 year old laptop or iMac and grabbing a shiny new model. (Hey, free Tiger with it!)
No - the part I think most people overlook is, these "warez groups" are notoriously competitive with each other, and elitist in their attitudes.
Far from simply "providing copies of hundreds of thousands of titles to basically anybody", they're extremely difficult to work with if you want them to provide you with anything.
With the massive distribution and communications power of the Internet, sure - these things leak out all over the place eventually. (If you need a particular application badly enough and have the time to spend hunting it down, you can beg and plead in numerous IRC chat rooms until someone you private message finally agrees to send the cracked version over to you, for example.) But groups like DoD weren't just running like a software charity - welcoming any and all onto high bandwidth distribution servers.
They've actually got a whole "power structure" in place, so only appointed "couriers" are even allowed to download their cracked software in the first place, and then they're only supposed to redistribute it to specific people/places that made previous arrangements/deals with their group leaders.
I agree that if you're a part of this and live/work in a country with copyright legislation in place and enforced (like the U.S.), then you better expect some punishment if you're caught. But extradition from another country for this? Like others said - truthfully, it's tough to pin an individual member of a group like this down to having done much worse than simply disabling copy protection mechanisms in code. The guys doing the cracking aren't the ones doing the actual distributing, and vice-versa. And ultimately, aren't the end-users installing this stuff the ones responsible? It'd seem pointless to prosecute everyone who cracked a piece of software if nobody was bothering to download it and install it afterwards, instead of just buying it instead.