Except it doesn't. Other than purely Free Linux apps and the odd game engine or two, pretty much everything that supports OGGs supports MP3, and given its licensing costs if OGG weren't there chances are they still wouldn't support MP3s.
Honesty. Simply put, both Miro and iTunes have some glaring design issues, but Miro acknowledges them while iTunes merely says "they're not bugs, they're features, or would be if you were using OSX you dirty heathen".
In theory, you'd be right. In theory. You see, in theory the big labels would hire the best bands out there, give them the best resources available so they can do the best work they can, while the indies only have lower prices to compensate for their lack of talent and resources.
However, what happens in *practice* is that the big labels hire whatever's more marketable (read: a young, attractive singer), then hire an engineer that destroys whatever semblance of music was there by making everything LOUD while the indies continue making actual music, many of which had more musical talent than the marketable hires even before they were hired so the end result is that the indie album produced on a shoestring budget ends up being a hundred times more pleasant than the LOUD trash of the big labels.
It's a pity though, as the best non-classical album I've ever heard was from a professional sound engineer making rock albums for pleasure. Makes one wonder how much better the labels' music would be if they didn't cripple themselves at every step of the way.
Apple never tried to get rid of USB with Firewire.
They did, they failed, and like so many of their failures the loyalists just try to pretend it never happened.
If Newton is the best flop you can come up with, then you haven't been paying attention.
No, I don't waste my time following every single Apple product ever released, why? do you?
Don't worry, that's purely rhetorical.
iPhones don't come in pink, and there's more to life than having the #1 market share. Notice I don't make predictions about Android success, but Apple haters love to make predictions (incorrect ones at that) about Apple.
iPhones do not, at least not yet, but eMacs did in the most garish colors imaginable. They initiated a fad that the Apple loyalists loved to praise as the final nail in the coffin of the "ugly, brown box", only to die a quick, merciful death a few years later. Just as the "haters" predicted, huh, who would've thought.
The one button mouse argument wasn't very good in 1995, let alone at any time during the 2000s. I've had a multiple button mouse ever since OS 7 or so.
Good for you, but I practically grew up with Apple idiots calling more than one button "too complicated for non-geeks to use". Until Apple released its own, official model and finally, *FINALLY*, the loyalists... admitted they were wrong? hell no, they just stopped talking about it and started bringing up some obscure third-party accessory produced for a year in the '90s to "prove" how Apple had always been in support of multi-button mice and we'd always been at war with Eurasia.
Apple didn't become the most valuable tech company in the world with pink iPhones and one-button mice, regardless of how you might want to think that true.
No, it became so the same way Scientology gained such momentum: a personality cult built around their leader, a massive propaganda campaign to make their members look part of a "distinguished elite" merely for being members, and the insane profits that come from selling new trash to your followers every month.
Face it, the zealots love to parade things like CmdrTaco's infamous comment on the iPod as "proof" of how "haters" always get it wrong but the fact is, they get it wrong just as often as they get it completely right, Steve Jobs isn't a divine, flawless being that can make no mistake and every word of his mouth is the absolute truth, and just because it's got an Apple logo doesn't mean it's the golden standard which all competing products must be measured against.
Still, fat chance of you ever admitting *that*, you're way too invested into the company (both emotionally as well as economically, judging from your initial post) to admit any flaw in your reasoning. Psychology is a bitch, isn't it?
Ahh, the inevitably incorrect Apple prediction. The most valuable tech company in the world that was predicted dead in 1997...the company that killed the floppy drive prematurely...the company that adopted USB too early...the company with the lame mp3 player.
The company with the failed PDA, the company that started the idiotic but mercifully short-lived "fruity colors" fad, the company that shouldn't have tried to replace USB with Firewire, the company that should've allowed mice with more than a single button, the company whose closed ecosystem would lead to its cellphone market being overtaken by a competitor's open alternative.
But I guess in your world none of those ever came to pass either, Android died a quick, merciful death just as Windows did due to its confusing idea of having a "right click", and the bright pink iPhones are a hit comparable only to the original Apple Newton. Pity that you somehow got transported to this world, though.
You're silly, and you've obviously never worked in tech support.
Here's the thing: even in the dreadful, woefully unsafe world of Windows '98 and ME, over 80% of malware infections could've been avoided by having the user learn some simple, seemingly obvious security tips such as do not install fucking Bonzi Buddy EVER AGAIN, you piece of useless, ignorant trash!!!, *ehem*. Yeah, like that.
Social Engineering is still the surest method to gain control of another machine, and the user is still in nearly all cases the most vulnerable part of a given system's security. So far, the only thing that has kept Mac users relatively safe so far has been their relative insignificance in the world of computing as a whole, but if black hats start targeting them seriously they'll buckle just as fast as their Windows brethren.
Alarms themselves are neither necessary nor, for the vast majority of users, useful. But some people do need them and some of them *also* need more than one, so I can't see why we should just aim to please one group but not the other.
And for the record, I don't own any iToy whatsoever and I haven't used an alarm in at least a decade, not even a physical one let alone my freaking cellphone.
Probably because you're maintaining the assumption of old analog clocks of one alarm per clock.
Another poster showed screenshots of the dialogs in question, take a look at them and see if you can think of a better, more intuitive design for a device that can have more than one alarm and turn them on/off on an individual basis.
As much as I generally despise Apple, not only I can't think of a way to improve their design now, the UI it originally ocurred to me when hearing upon the problem was markedly worse.
And for that the only possible solution is for them to pick up a manual and read it from cover to cover. Or just assume they'll break up things eventually and take the appropiate measures (ask their savvy nephew to back up the data, for instance), either way there's nothing the programmer can do to solve the situation.
As the phrase goes, you can't make something completely idiot-proof because when you think you've done it, the Universe goes and throws a better idiot at you. Sure, sure, it's ignorance and not idiocy but the principle is the same: there'll *always* be a way to mess something up, there'll *always* be someone for whom that isn't obvious at first, and so there'll *always* be someone screwing things up by accident and perpetuating the image of computers as "magical, dangerous devices". You can't change that, so you may as well take it as an universal law or whatever rather than a "problem" per se, because it being a problem implies it could be solved given enough ingenuity, and it very much can't.
Not really. Other than maybe game consoles (never developed for one of them), none of them ban the use of interpreters so as long as you (or typically, someone else) are willing to spend the time required to port your favorite language's compiler/runtime/whatever to said platform, you can use it to build your end-product. Hell, make it polished enough and the platform maker may even adopt it as 'semi-official' (as with most non-Java languages for the JVM).
It may be hard to believe but really, the world outside iOS really *is* that welcoming and carefree. Come try it sometime.
You seem strangely idealistic for someone with such a low UID. I came here much later than you did (even accounting for my pre-account lurking time) and I still remember when outrageous laws made the people around here send emails to their representatives rather than simply snark to ourselves. Know what happened of it? absolutely fucking nothing. Oh wait, I remember one guy got a reply thanking him for sending his opinion once, but the law still passed with flying colors.
Welcome to the 21th century, where for every one of you there's at least a hundred morons happy with whatever politicians throw their way as long as they catch the latest episode of the latest Big Brother reenactment show.
Generalize it and it may become more palatable: local corporations should not be bound by laws of any locality other than their own. That means no British "super injuctions" in US territory, but also no "infinity minus a day" copyrights outside the US (*) and so on. Sounds nice, doesn't it? well, nicer at least than having to enforce every law cooked up by any corrupt politician or tinpot dictator anywhere else in the world.
(*) There's always the Berne convention to deal with, but that tops out at 50 years. Still pretty damn long, but better than the US' situation for either living persons or corporations.
It's funny yet sad how you prove the GP's point so well.
You'd do well to learn a lesson from the Free Software crowd: we readily admit the GPL does place additional restrictions on the user than an hypothetical, purely "Free" license (well, most of us but exceptions do exist), but we also state our support such restrictions for purely practical reasons.
And BTW yes, children do have a right to work, otherwise even toddlers would be played by grown adults on TV series and movies. They do, however, also have the right not to be forced to work by anyone, even their own guardians.
He did not discover the mechanism of action of the drugs. Rather, he took published protein structures and published compounds and re-ran some docking studies (of the same type Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies probably spend hundreds of thousands of processor hours on, with the difficulty that they had to check tens of thousands of compounds, not just two already known to work).
He was not the first to notice that different promising compounds in clinical trials have different points of interaction with the defective proteins of CF. Thinking that a drug combination may be useful is not exactly a new and brilliant insight, and this was for example even discussed a couple of months ago in CE&N (the general chemistry member journal of the American Chemical Society). I am very confident that is has been evaluated before, and probably there are patents already filed.
(Emphasis mine)
Thank you for so clearly demostrating what's wrong with the Pharmaceutical industry. First they brute-force through computer simulations looking for combinations that might work, then they file patents on those results as if they had done any actual research, and then just to add salt to the wound they don't even bring them to market and into the hands of patients or this kid wouldn't have even tried to do this experiment in the first place.
But then again, this is the kind of industry that blackmails governments for a living and even patents freakin' DNA so really, it shouldn't be surprising.
If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer.
Proof? I could just as well claim "if socialism were a success we'd be building homes on Mars by now", but that wouldn't prove anything other than my own ignorance of socialism and martian home-building.
We're just jaded. Companies in the past have made important gestures towards the privacy crowd when they've complained, but I can't remember any off the top of my head that's done something actually *effective* and not just a publicity stunt (see also: Apple) with regards to working conditions in China.
And if you give a 10-years-old kid a map and a list of cities, he can give you a decent-ish enough route to take between them in a day as well, but that doesn't prove that the Travelling Salesman problem is in P.
Yeah. Freedom also includes the right to shove my knife in between your ribs, but much like "being an asshole on a national level" we've decided to throw that freedom away in the name of having a fairer society, and that's why you still have to pay your taxes regardless of what Ayn Rand may have said.
And even if you weren't, a leader of Al-Qaeda in the neighborhood turning up dead shortly before you get inexplicably richer by the exact amount of his bounty doesn't really leave a lot for imagination. I'm guessing you could always pay some of the US officials that give you the reward to get you and your closest family out of the country, but that kinda sucks for anyone else you're related to.
You forgot Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, "new and shocking" footage of Lady Di's crash (which should get some traction again due to the british royal wedding), and of course all the fake reports on various entertainers' deaths. Poor Britney Spears died almost every week before I finally got my spam filter up and running.
I'm not trying to turn it into a war between christians and muslims, I'm simply mocking the fact that such trivialities are some of the largest differences you can find between both groups. Read the replies of this news, smell their bloodthirst and try to tell me they're a more civilized people than those "crazy ragheads". Read their rallies about the alleged triumph of "freedom" over this assassination, then recall the celebration of the blood-spill from the religion of "peace".
Murderers on one side, murderers on the other, extremists both killing one another.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it doesn't. Other than purely Free Linux apps and the odd game engine or two, pretty much everything that supports OGGs supports MP3, and given its licensing costs if OGG weren't there chances are they still wouldn't support MP3s.
Honesty. Simply put, both Miro and iTunes have some glaring design issues, but Miro acknowledges them while iTunes merely says "they're not bugs, they're features, or would be if you were using OSX you dirty heathen".
In theory, you'd be right. In theory. You see, in theory the big labels would hire the best bands out there, give them the best resources available so they can do the best work they can, while the indies only have lower prices to compensate for their lack of talent and resources.
However, what happens in *practice* is that the big labels hire whatever's more marketable (read: a young, attractive singer), then hire an engineer that destroys whatever semblance of music was there by making everything LOUD while the indies continue making actual music, many of which had more musical talent than the marketable hires even before they were hired so the end result is that the indie album produced on a shoestring budget ends up being a hundred times more pleasant than the LOUD trash of the big labels.
It's a pity though, as the best non-classical album I've ever heard was from a professional sound engineer making rock albums for pleasure. Makes one wonder how much better the labels' music would be if they didn't cripple themselves at every step of the way.
Apple never tried to get rid of USB with Firewire.
They did, they failed, and like so many of their failures the loyalists just try to pretend it never happened.
If Newton is the best flop you can come up with, then you haven't been paying attention.
No, I don't waste my time following every single Apple product ever released, why? do you?
Don't worry, that's purely rhetorical.
iPhones don't come in pink, and there's more to life than having the #1 market share. Notice I don't make predictions about Android success, but Apple haters love to make predictions (incorrect ones at that) about Apple.
iPhones do not, at least not yet, but eMacs did in the most garish colors imaginable. They initiated a fad that the Apple loyalists loved to praise as the final nail in the coffin of the "ugly, brown box", only to die a quick, merciful death a few years later. Just as the "haters" predicted, huh, who would've thought.
The one button mouse argument wasn't very good in 1995, let alone at any time during the 2000s. I've had a multiple button mouse ever since OS 7 or so.
Good for you, but I practically grew up with Apple idiots calling more than one button "too complicated for non-geeks to use". Until Apple released its own, official model and finally, *FINALLY*, the loyalists... admitted they were wrong? hell no, they just stopped talking about it and started bringing up some obscure third-party accessory produced for a year in the '90s to "prove" how Apple had always been in support of multi-button mice and we'd always been at war with Eurasia.
Apple didn't become the most valuable tech company in the world with pink iPhones and one-button mice, regardless of how you might want to think that true.
No, it became so the same way Scientology gained such momentum: a personality cult built around their leader, a massive propaganda campaign to make their members look part of a "distinguished elite" merely for being members, and the insane profits that come from selling new trash to your followers every month.
Face it, the zealots love to parade things like CmdrTaco's infamous comment on the iPod as "proof" of how "haters" always get it wrong but the fact is, they get it wrong just as often as they get it completely right, Steve Jobs isn't a divine, flawless being that can make no mistake and every word of his mouth is the absolute truth, and just because it's got an Apple logo doesn't mean it's the golden standard which all competing products must be measured against.
Still, fat chance of you ever admitting *that*, you're way too invested into the company (both emotionally as well as economically, judging from your initial post) to admit any flaw in your reasoning. Psychology is a bitch, isn't it?
Ahh, the inevitably incorrect Apple prediction. The most valuable tech company in the world that was predicted dead in 1997...the company that killed the floppy drive prematurely...the company that adopted USB too early...the company with the lame mp3 player.
The company with the failed PDA, the company that started the idiotic but mercifully short-lived "fruity colors" fad, the company that shouldn't have tried to replace USB with Firewire, the company that should've allowed mice with more than a single button, the company whose closed ecosystem would lead to its cellphone market being overtaken by a competitor's open alternative.
But I guess in your world none of those ever came to pass either, Android died a quick, merciful death just as Windows did due to its confusing idea of having a "right click", and the bright pink iPhones are a hit comparable only to the original Apple Newton. Pity that you somehow got transported to this world, though.
You're silly, and you've obviously never worked in tech support.
Here's the thing: even in the dreadful, woefully unsafe world of Windows '98 and ME, over 80% of malware infections could've been avoided by having the user learn some simple, seemingly obvious security tips such as do not install fucking Bonzi Buddy EVER AGAIN, you piece of useless, ignorant trash!!!, *ehem*. Yeah, like that.
Social Engineering is still the surest method to gain control of another machine, and the user is still in nearly all cases the most vulnerable part of a given system's security. So far, the only thing that has kept Mac users relatively safe so far has been their relative insignificance in the world of computing as a whole, but if black hats start targeting them seriously they'll buckle just as fast as their Windows brethren.
Alarms themselves are neither necessary nor, for the vast majority of users, useful. But some people do need them and some of them *also* need more than one, so I can't see why we should just aim to please one group but not the other.
And for the record, I don't own any iToy whatsoever and I haven't used an alarm in at least a decade, not even a physical one let alone my freaking cellphone.
Probably because you're maintaining the assumption of old analog clocks of one alarm per clock.
Another poster showed screenshots of the dialogs in question, take a look at them and see if you can think of a better, more intuitive design for a device that can have more than one alarm and turn them on/off on an individual basis.
As much as I generally despise Apple, not only I can't think of a way to improve their design now, the UI it originally ocurred to me when hearing upon the problem was markedly worse.
And for that the only possible solution is for them to pick up a manual and read it from cover to cover. Or just assume they'll break up things eventually and take the appropiate measures (ask their savvy nephew to back up the data, for instance), either way there's nothing the programmer can do to solve the situation.
As the phrase goes, you can't make something completely idiot-proof because when you think you've done it, the Universe goes and throws a better idiot at you. Sure, sure, it's ignorance and not idiocy but the principle is the same: there'll *always* be a way to mess something up, there'll *always* be someone for whom that isn't obvious at first, and so there'll *always* be someone screwing things up by accident and perpetuating the image of computers as "magical, dangerous devices". You can't change that, so you may as well take it as an universal law or whatever rather than a "problem" per se, because it being a problem implies it could be solved given enough ingenuity, and it very much can't.
Agreed, and I think it speaks very well of the EFF that they're still helping Apple in spite of their past attitude.
Not really. Other than maybe game consoles (never developed for one of them), none of them ban the use of interpreters so as long as you (or typically, someone else) are willing to spend the time required to port your favorite language's compiler/runtime/whatever to said platform, you can use it to build your end-product. Hell, make it polished enough and the platform maker may even adopt it as 'semi-official' (as with most non-Java languages for the JVM).
It may be hard to believe but really, the world outside iOS really *is* that welcoming and carefree. Come try it sometime.
You seem strangely idealistic for someone with such a low UID. I came here much later than you did (even accounting for my pre-account lurking time) and I still remember when outrageous laws made the people around here send emails to their representatives rather than simply snark to ourselves. Know what happened of it? absolutely fucking nothing. Oh wait, I remember one guy got a reply thanking him for sending his opinion once, but the law still passed with flying colors.
Welcome to the 21th century, where for every one of you there's at least a hundred morons happy with whatever politicians throw their way as long as they catch the latest episode of the latest Big Brother reenactment show.
Generalize it and it may become more palatable: local corporations should not be bound by laws of any locality other than their own. That means no British "super injuctions" in US territory, but also no "infinity minus a day" copyrights outside the US (*) and so on. Sounds nice, doesn't it? well, nicer at least than having to enforce every law cooked up by any corrupt politician or tinpot dictator anywhere else in the world.
(*) There's always the Berne convention to deal with, but that tops out at 50 years. Still pretty damn long, but better than the US' situation for either living persons or corporations.
It's funny yet sad how you prove the GP's point so well.
You'd do well to learn a lesson from the Free Software crowd: we readily admit the GPL does place additional restrictions on the user than an hypothetical, purely "Free" license (well, most of us but exceptions do exist), but we also state our support such restrictions for purely practical reasons.
And BTW yes, children do have a right to work, otherwise even toddlers would be played by grown adults on TV series and movies. They do, however, also have the right not to be forced to work by anyone, even their own guardians.
Paraphrasing Linus: given enough educated minds, all patents are obvious.
So no, the problem *is* that all patents are stupid.
He did not discover the mechanism of action of the drugs. Rather, he took published protein structures and published compounds and re-ran some docking studies (of the same type Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies probably spend hundreds of thousands of processor hours on, with the difficulty that they had to check tens of thousands of compounds, not just two already known to work).
He was not the first to notice that different promising compounds in clinical trials have different points of interaction with the defective proteins of CF. Thinking that a drug combination may be useful is not exactly a new and brilliant insight, and this was for example even discussed a couple of months ago in CE&N (the general chemistry member journal of the American Chemical Society). I am very confident that is has been evaluated before, and probably there are patents already filed.
(Emphasis mine)
Thank you for so clearly demostrating what's wrong with the Pharmaceutical industry. First they brute-force through computer simulations looking for combinations that might work, then they file patents on those results as if they had done any actual research, and then just to add salt to the wound they don't even bring them to market and into the hands of patients or this kid wouldn't have even tried to do this experiment in the first place.
But then again, this is the kind of industry that blackmails governments for a living and even patents freakin' DNA so really, it shouldn't be surprising.
Ahh, yes, guilt by association. Did you know Hitler liked sugar? I've even heard from reputable sources that he even breathed air daily.
Hear that sound? it's the sound of a thousand morons suffocating themselves in a futile effort not to be associated with "evil". Don't be one of them.
If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer.
Proof? I could just as well claim "if socialism were a success we'd be building homes on Mars by now", but that wouldn't prove anything other than my own ignorance of socialism and martian home-building.
We're just jaded. Companies in the past have made important gestures towards the privacy crowd when they've complained, but I can't remember any off the top of my head that's done something actually *effective* and not just a publicity stunt (see also: Apple) with regards to working conditions in China.
And if you give a 10-years-old kid a map and a list of cities, he can give you a decent-ish enough route to take between them in a day as well, but that doesn't prove that the Travelling Salesman problem is in P.
Ask a wrong question, get a wrong answer.
Yeah. Freedom also includes the right to shove my knife in between your ribs, but much like "being an asshole on a national level" we've decided to throw that freedom away in the name of having a fairer society, and that's why you still have to pay your taxes regardless of what Ayn Rand may have said.
And even if you weren't, a leader of Al-Qaeda in the neighborhood turning up dead shortly before you get inexplicably richer by the exact amount of his bounty doesn't really leave a lot for imagination. I'm guessing you could always pay some of the US officials that give you the reward to get you and your closest family out of the country, but that kinda sucks for anyone else you're related to.
You forgot Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, "new and shocking" footage of Lady Di's crash (which should get some traction again due to the british royal wedding), and of course all the fake reports on various entertainers' deaths. Poor Britney Spears died almost every week before I finally got my spam filter up and running.
In other words, you're just another nationalist nutjob that continues to see his own country as the "moderates" in a war between "good" and "evil".
I'm not trying to turn it into a war between christians and muslims, I'm simply mocking the fact that such trivialities are some of the largest differences you can find between both groups. Read the replies of this news, smell their bloodthirst and try to tell me they're a more civilized people than those "crazy ragheads". Read their rallies about the alleged triumph of "freedom" over this assassination, then recall the celebration of the blood-spill from the religion of "peace".
Murderers on one side, murderers on the other, extremists both killing one another.