The vlog community has known about this all summer. So if you were into vlogs, you had at least tried a vlog or two inside iTunes4.9. But it didn't support the few WMV vlogs out there, of course. Also, a lot of vlogs weren't using RSS2 enclosure tags correctly so their feeds didn't load into iTunes4.9.
I found I liked watching vlogs in iTunes better than FireAnt: fullscreen video mode... I follow Josh Leo's vlog and rocketboom regularly.
However, there aren't as many vlogs out there as there are podcasts, and many of them are of questionable entertainment value (I can only watch so many videos-of-my-trip-home-from-work-played-to-music.. .)
As an aside, I prefer vodcast to vlog. This will prove interesting to see what we ultimately call these things. Audio blogs has definately lost out to podcast, but the term for video blogging is wide open.;)
Your friend is right. Color fidelity in LCDs is in need of improvement.
I have a 17" flat panel iMac that I work with. Although the LCD display is crisper than CRT, and Apple LCD's are fairly high quality, I have a very hard time when matching colors (I design scrapbook papers for a living...). I have noticed that, at least with my monitor, the colors are warmer in the middle, then cooler as they move to the sides. This means that when matching colors to a specified palette I must match them relative to the same location on my LCD monitor, not just by color. Add my art editor's old CRT on a Wintel system into the mix and you have some awful color shifting to deal with.
I also find dead pixels very annoying. My personal pet peeve about LCD monitors.
Mr. Crankypants, how do you know he hasn't already donated money? Besides, if he sells his monitor how on earth is he going to read/.? Where are your priorities, man!?!:p
Man, I am sooo lucky I didn't have anything in my mouth when I read that! LOL I would have covered my screen with it.
Too bad others didn't get your post. If I had mod points I would have given them all to you. +5 funny.:)
First of all, Mormons would hold out panicking about this until the scientists all agreed on the age of the artifacts (as the article shows that they don't agree). Then Mormons would argue that Adam and his people began here in the Americas anyway so this isn't much of a surprise. They would also point out that the Nephites weren't the first people to settle back in the Americas since the Jaredite civilization had wiped itself out just as the Nephites discovered them and that there is no reason to believe that the Lord didn't bring other people here before the Jaredites, nevermind mentioning that there was a great antediluvian civilization here in the Americas before it was wiped out.
Civilizations rising and falling throughout the history of mankind is a common theme in Mormon literature. In fact, the lost book of Enoch has fragments that have survived to this day that detail the knowledge these civilizations had. Some of the apocryphal ones hint at ancient civilizations with strange technologies and polutions. Although that is fanciful even to Mormons, it is common belief that in almost every dispensation a prophet was shown all of the Lord's creations and how the worlds were made, thereby teaching the Lord's people about astronomy and the place the Earth has in the cosmos. This knowledge is lost when the Lord's people wane into carnality and reject the teachings of the prophets. Then they are wiped out by another, usually barbarous, civilization.
So discovering ancient people's in the Americas before the time of the Nephites really wouldn't hurt "the ol' church". However, they would take issue with the dating.
When I want to email with a new friend using PGP encryption, I send him my key one character at a time via snail mail using newspaper clippings. The only time this becomes a problem is when the post office laps itself and delivers more than one letter a day, or gets an earlier letter there later than a later letter, but it's the only way to be sure the key never falls into enemy hands. Of course, I don't get to email many people these days...
Although I'm all for investigative science, and although I'm willing to concede that we don't know everything, when I see how much money they're spending on this I have to suspect somebody's pulling somebody else's chain here. What is sad to me, however, is that if this sum of money was spent on the poor and the needy there would be an outcry about entitlements. There just isn't any balance out there.:/
Is Walmart perfect? No. I hope they get slammed in the current class action suit under Title VII (gender discrimination in wages). They deserve it.
My wife used to work at Wal*Mart as a CSM (Customer Service Manager) - basically a glorified cashier with lots more responsibility and headaches and only 50 an hour more. Despite the fact that my wife had worked there for over two years (while mangagement had to continually replace all those employees they let go for theft, sharing store discounts, price fixing, etc.), and was an exemplary employee, they refused to give her reasonable pay increases. She was stuck at $8.50 an hour and was too bone tired to find better work. So I found a job for her at Marriott at a better rate of pay with better benefits.
About six months after she left she bumped into one of those guys whose sole job seems to be gathering carts. She found out he was making over $10 an hour. She was in lower management making $8.50 and this cart pusher was making over $10. The killer is that the upper management that refused to give her a raise was a woman.
I believe gender discrimination is criminal. I urged my wife to look into that class action lawsuit, but she was just happy to be free. Now we drive an extra mile and do our shopping at Target.
OGG seems to have heavier overhead than MP3. Maybe it's the fault of the plug-in for Quicktime, but OGG files take longer to start playing in iTunes on my Mac and they don't support crossfading. I find them a bit of a pain and usually delete them after listening to them once or twice. I guess that makes me a heather around these parts, but my Mummy always told me to be honest.;)
What? I don't get it. You mean Microsoft rushed to announce these bulletins because they were concerned about a 14-year-old girl that cut her finger on a Star-Kist tuna can?;)
I produce fractal art and need to use a PC to do it (existing fractal apps on the Mac don't compare with Fractal eXtreme or UltraFractal - and yes, I've tried several dozen), so using VirtualPC seemed the best choice when I switched over in 2000. But the best configuration for this process was VirtualPC4 under OS9. VirtualPC just didn't make the transition from OS9 to OSX very well. That meant I had to reboot into OS9 just for fractal exploration. Having migrated entirely to OSX over the years, working in OS9 was difficult. All the apps I used were in OSX! I soon was forced to get a PC just for fractal exploration. The GUI was sluggish in VirtualPC6 under OSX and the rendering times were abominable.
Honestly, anything that requires heavy calculations is either going to break the emulator or run abysmally slow. Although email and web browsing can be tollerable (I often proof webpages using VirtualPC to get a view from the other side of the pond), I can't see any of the iLife apps being usable under CherryOS. They typically tax my 800MHz iMac. I can't imagine how slowly they would run under emulation...
Version 5 caused me to lose faith
on
EMC Buying Dantz
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I never bothered upgrading from version 5. I was very irritated with v.5's inability to run scheduled backups, which is why I bought the software in the first place. I had to run a cron job just to launch the program. There was no support, no fix. Just a new version which required new money. As OSX has aged, v.5 hasn't aged well with it. Now the operation log frequently locks because Retrospect doesn't exit cleanly and I need to cold boot in order to free it (Haven't figured out how to do that any other way. Any tips?)
Requiring people to purchase upgrades in order to fix buggy software is poor customer support. It erodes customer loyalty. I didn't realize they had such a broad stranglehold on Mac backup solutions because of that patent. That explains their arrogance.
Being bought out may be good for Retrospect in the long run IF the code is sold, not the development team. At least we can hope.
I have to admit that the move to OSX has broken many companies. I have been surprised at how companies like Dantz and Palm haven't dedicated ample resources to embrace the new regime.;)
I've posted about this before, but the problem I see with Magnatune's business model is that they have no published playlists for their music streams, no searchable database on their website, and lousy customer support.
Playlists: If you listen to music in the background while you work like I do, then you've come across this problem. You heard a song you liked, but didn't look at its name before the next one started playing. How do you find out what you heard so you can buy it? Magnatune doesn't offer a playlist of the stream on their site.
Searchable Database: Since there's no playlist you decide to search for the song. But you can't. There is no searchable database on their site. You must listen to each individual song in whatever catagory you think the stream was in while crossing your fingers and hoping you'll find it within the first 50 or so... Too much work, IMO.
Customer Support: You really want that song, don't know what it was called and can't find it on their site, so you send an email to Punky, the Emailclown. The problem is that he doesn't respond. Any email stating "I am looking for a song played at x:xxpm write before (name of song I did catch). I have money and and prepared to give it to you." should elicit some sort of response - even a canned one. I've sent several. Even followups weeks later. Nothing.
I purchase music at Bleep [bleep.com] and Apple's iTMS. In contrast to Magnatunes, I have emailed Apple on several occassions and received replies. Both Bleep and iTMS allow me to search their catalogs. Magnatunes doesn't seem to want my business, so I'll spend my money elsewhere.
I see Magnatune praised a lot here. Some of you even rave about them. But do you just select music randomly and get lucky? Or do you go there with certain musicians in mind? Aside from using them as a proof of concept in the noble fight against the RIAA, I just don't see how anybody who doesn't have a lot of time on their hands can use their service..
I'm seeing odd icons on my page that weren't there before the update. I'd like to know if others see the same. Just under the tagboard there will be a column of isolated media control icons that don't do anything. They aren't in my code. I'm thinking Safari is having a problem with the tag now. A quick peek at my site with IE 5, OmniWeb 5, and Camino shows that only Safari displays the mystery icons...
http://www.cootey.com/fractals/
Re:Can someone explain how this is different from.
on
Real Feels iTunes Backlash
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't think you'll find the difference so clean cut. Real didn't just reverse engineer FairPlay. That alone might have ticked off Apple, but been a fair move that Apple couldn't do anything about. Windows iPod users would get to buy from more than one store, Apple would sell more iPods. This news caused Mac guys to raise their eyebrows, but since it only affected PC users, who cared? We waited to see what Apple would do.
However, as I said, Real didn't just reverse engineer FairPlay. They also announced the very next day that they were going to license their own FairPlay compatible DRM to other businesses. Now they were encroaching upon Apple's business. Mac zealots still sat back and watched to see the fireworks. Most Mac guys had personal reasons to despise Real having used their products and having been left out in the orphaned cold one time or another, but this issue still didn't affect them. Only Windows users could use Real's online store.
But when Real foisted a propaganda website in the guise of a grass roots movement slamming Apple in the name of music loving people netwide, Mac users took notice. Mac users were the ones who put iTunes and the iPod on the map. Did you read the "interview" with Devo? It read like a commercial. Everything on the site was about choice, but Mac guys were once again left out in the cold. Where was the choice? Mac users couldn't access Real's Rhapsody. It was clear this was a manipulative, corporate powergrab benefitting only Real and Windows users. So most Mac guys laughed at it as some sort of joke. But if some of them were immature geeks with no self-restraint then try to forgive the Mac population as a whole. You don't write off all of/. as bigots because of the GNAA do you? Neither should you clump all Mac owners in with the pottymouthed zealots.
What I find interesting about this whole fiasco is the absence of Steve Jobs. If he hadn't had cancer surgery this month we would most likely have seen some strong action by Apple. And his one month hiatus is half over, so look for the real fireworks in September.
In the meantime, give Mac users a break. Not all of them plastered four lettered insults all over Real's music site. And if Apple spent time and money licensing and developing FairPlay, iPod, and iTMS, don't be so surprised they might take issue with some third party coming in and trying to make money off their labor. This issue isn't as clean cut as the Lexmark issue. Unless Bob's Cheap Ink was also licensing their cracked ink technology to third parties...
The problem with Magnatune's business model is that they have no published playlists for their music streams, no searchable database on their website, and lousy customer support.
Playlists: How many of you listen to music in the background? Almost all of you? Me, too. And when I am streaming one of Magnatune's internet radio stations and hear something I like, I have to stop everything I am doing and quickly call up iTunes before the song changes. Otherwise, there is no way to find out the name of that song. Unlike other internet radio stations, Magnatune doesn't offer a dynamically updated playlist on their website. So unless you got lucky, you're out of luck. The song has passed into the ether.
Searchable Database: Let's say you were too busy writing that report/paper/novel/webpage/program to bother switching tasks to see the title of a song you just heard and write it down to investigate later. I once heard some beautiful chamber music with recorders that I thought would be nice to buy. A trip to Magnatune's website reveals there is no way to search for "chamber music recorders". Sure, the entire catalog of chamber music is available for me to listen to for free, but if I want to purchase one in particular I have to listen to all of them one at a time until I find the one I heard. Effective searching? Not really. I don't have time for that.
Customer Support: Giving up on searching for that song and hoping to get help from Magnatune? They don't respond to email. I've sent multiple emails to Punky, the Emailclown, and not a single one of them has been responded to. If that guy wasn't having so much fun dying his hair and posing for the webcam maybe he'd be able to answer a few emails once in a while. Any email stating "I am looking for a song played at x:xxpm write before (name of song I did catch). I have money and and prepared to give it to you." should elicit some sort of response - even a canned one. But I received nothing, nor did I receive a response on a follow-up I sent later. Good-bye Magnatunes; Hello iTMS
In the end, as a consumer, I just don't feel any confidence in spending money with them. I've purchased well over a hundred songs at the iTMS. I've also purchased music at Bleep. In contrast to Magnatunes, I have emailed Apple on several occassions about authorization problems and even corrupt downloads and have always received courteous, prompt responses. Both Bleep and iTMS allow me to search their catalogs. Magnatunes doesn't. Guess where I spend my money.
I have hundreds of CDs, cassettes, and LPs (ooh, dating myself there). I put my money where my mouth is. I buy, buy, buy. But not with Magnatunes. If they won't make it easy for me to find what I want, and won't help me find it when I can't, then I won't spend any money there.
I see Magnatune praised a lot here. I wonder if any of you have honestly bought music with them, or are just using them as a proof of concept in the noble fight against the RIAA.
My favorite quote: The beauty of this scheme is that ET wouldn't have to visit Earth to implant the message. A lot of junk DNA consists of genomic fragments inserted by viruses over the course of evolution. An alien civilisation could, for negligible cost, dispatch tiny packages across the galaxy, loaded with customised viral DNA. The cargo would be designed to infect, without harm, any DNA-based life it encountered.
It's patently foolish to believe an intelligent species would try to write a message in the genes of a developing species remotely from another star in the blind hopes that the virus doesn't wipe out the entire population instead. It's just silly. And who's to say which species the super intelligent shades of blue wrote the message in? Perhaps they thought another species altogether was bound to become dominant on this planet instead of man.
Wait! Could THIS be the real reason the dinosaurs went extinct! (^_-)
Boy, did you nail that! It took me a year and a half to finally get Norton to cough up my $50 rebate for Norton 7. I had to fax them several times, wait and call and wait. It became a test of will for me. LOL I was darned if I was going to let them win. So, yes, sometimes those rebate offers are not all they're cracked up to be. Or you could run into the problem I did with my Seagate rebate: their check bounced and my bank charged ME $5...
Back in 1969, Ryoichi Ikegami (of Mai, the Psychic Girl and Crying Freeman fame) wrote and illustrated a version of Spiderman. There were about 6 tankoban compilations of the series total, so it didn't run long. I used to own the manga. He didn't spend a lot of time in costume. Mostly dealt with yakuza and damsels in distress (that was an easy transition from culture to culture). The costumed villians and fights didn't seem to make the transition well. Overall, I found it rather dull and depressing. I wonder if the transition from color to black & white had more to do with those changes than the cultural differences between Japanese and American culture.
Here's a list of issues that were translated into English with some pix:
http://www.spiderfan.org/comics/title/spiderman_ma nga.html
I wonder how they handled the masterbation with porn scene in the first chapter? Right off the bat I knew this wasn't Stan Lee's Spidey! (-_-); The series wasn't heavy on nudity, but with mostly panels of talking heads I wondered if Ikegami was even familiar with the original story aside from the visual character designs.
My problem with this method (I use it too, but with a yahoo address) is Windows users and Windows viruses. I work on a Mac and am immune to all Outlook Express email viruses. However, user spam is still a problem. Idiot family members and friends have continued to bulk mail me moronic massforwards over the years. I complain and complain that they shouldn't share my address in the to: field with others I don't know, but they don't get it. I haven't received any dancing leprechaun emails in a while, but now some chump using Adelphia in Philidelphia is spamming me with Windows viruses. I don't know who it is. He's behind a cable firewall. I don't know anybody in PA. The only way he got my email address is by receiving the same massforward as I did, probably months ago - long deleted.
Adelphia doesn't respond to email. So I have to block this guy's dynamic IP address every few weeks when Adelphia changes it. But I now receive spam at my personal address after being clean for eight years. He's obviously spamming other dumb Windows users as well with my address and now the junk is starting to roll in. My address is out in the wild.:( Eight years without spam is pretty lucky, so I'm thankful, but I'd rather still not be getting spam.
Protecting your address relies on trusting the people you share it with to not get email viruses. Or to be Mac or *nix users. LOL Maybe I should make a new address and only share it with people willing to sign a contract that they won't use Outlook Express.:/
They did extend the contest, actually, though nobody seemed to notice. Originally, you had to register your winning iCap by March 31st, and redeem it by tomorrow. But well into April I could still register iCaps.
I won 20 songs myself, but it was a pain to find them. Towards the end, the available iCaps had been picked over (Yes, I was a tilter). And Sierra Mist iCaps were rare. In fact, if there had been better Sierra Mist support I would have bought truckloads of bottles. I'm just not much of a cola drinker. Pepsi missed out by being cheap, in my opinion.
I'd love to know the behind the scenes story on this one. I can't find any yellow capped Pepsi products now. Haven't been available here in Salt Lake Valley for weeks. At least not in all the locations I've been in...
They don't have rights, and they know it. This is a desperate attempt to maintain a business model. The costs of filing a law suit far outweigh the profits they'll get if they win. They've already lost, so what do they lose if they try to overturn the law? Nothing. And sometimes these events play out in the corporation's favor. Utah's very conservative. Nobody here wants to be accused of being a [shudder] liberal! LOL Don't conservatives always have to vote in favor of business?
But since most people in Utah seem to own PCs, spyware and adware are touchy issues. We're already up in arms about the Matrix. I don't think this lawsuit really stands a snowball's chance in Dixie.
~Darkstream
I tried compiling the code to test it out using Xcode. Gave an error during compilation - couldn't find "Cocoa/Cocoa.h". I don't have this file. Anybody know where to get it?
I never understood why people distribute code, but not compiled binaries. They used to do this on the Amiga and now they do it in OSX. Allowing people to compile their own code makes sense for those running *nix under different configurations, but Amigas and Macs tend to be standardized. Why not make a binary available of Trailblazer? Not everybody knows how to compile software. I just like to use it. I'm not lazy. I'm busy! LOL
Slashdot Mirror
The vlog community has known about this all summer. So if you were into vlogs, you had at least tried a vlog or two inside iTunes4.9. But it didn't support the few WMV vlogs out there, of course. Also, a lot of vlogs weren't using RSS2 enclosure tags correctly so their feeds didn't load into iTunes4.9. I found I liked watching vlogs in iTunes better than FireAnt: fullscreen video mode... I follow Josh Leo's vlog and rocketboom regularly. However, there aren't as many vlogs out there as there are podcasts, and many of them are of questionable entertainment value (I can only watch so many videos-of-my-trip-home-from-work-played-to-music.. .)
As an aside, I prefer vodcast to vlog. This will prove interesting to see what we ultimately call these things. Audio blogs has definately lost out to podcast, but the term for video blogging is wide open. ;)
Your friend is right. Color fidelity in LCDs is in need of improvement. I have a 17" flat panel iMac that I work with. Although the LCD display is crisper than CRT, and Apple LCD's are fairly high quality, I have a very hard time when matching colors (I design scrapbook papers for a living...). I have noticed that, at least with my monitor, the colors are warmer in the middle, then cooler as they move to the sides. This means that when matching colors to a specified palette I must match them relative to the same location on my LCD monitor, not just by color. Add my art editor's old CRT on a Wintel system into the mix and you have some awful color shifting to deal with. I also find dead pixels very annoying. My personal pet peeve about LCD monitors.
Mr. Crankypants, how do you know he hasn't already donated money? Besides, if he sells his monitor how on earth is he going to read /.? Where are your priorities, man!?! :p
Man, I am sooo lucky I didn't have anything in my mouth when I read that! LOL I would have covered my screen with it. Too bad others didn't get your post. If I had mod points I would have given them all to you. +5 funny. :)
Civilizations rising and falling throughout the history of mankind is a common theme in Mormon literature. In fact, the lost book of Enoch has fragments that have survived to this day that detail the knowledge these civilizations had. Some of the apocryphal ones hint at ancient civilizations with strange technologies and polutions. Although that is fanciful even to Mormons, it is common belief that in almost every dispensation a prophet was shown all of the Lord's creations and how the worlds were made, thereby teaching the Lord's people about astronomy and the place the Earth has in the cosmos. This knowledge is lost when the Lord's people wane into carnality and reject the teachings of the prophets. Then they are wiped out by another, usually barbarous, civilization.
So discovering ancient people's in the Americas before the time of the Nephites really wouldn't hurt "the ol' church". However, they would take issue with the dating.
When I want to email with a new friend using PGP encryption, I send him my key one character at a time via snail mail using newspaper clippings. The only time this becomes a problem is when the post office laps itself and delivers more than one letter a day, or gets an earlier letter there later than a later letter, but it's the only way to be sure the key never falls into enemy hands. Of course, I don't get to email many people these days...
Although I'm all for investigative science, and although I'm willing to concede that we don't know everything, when I see how much money they're spending on this I have to suspect somebody's pulling somebody else's chain here. What is sad to me, however, is that if this sum of money was spent on the poor and the needy there would be an outcry about entitlements. There just isn't any balance out there. :/
My wife used to work at Wal*Mart as a CSM (Customer Service Manager) - basically a glorified cashier with lots more responsibility and headaches and only 50 an hour more. Despite the fact that my wife had worked there for over two years (while mangagement had to continually replace all those employees they let go for theft, sharing store discounts, price fixing, etc.), and was an exemplary employee, they refused to give her reasonable pay increases. She was stuck at $8.50 an hour and was too bone tired to find better work. So I found a job for her at Marriott at a better rate of pay with better benefits.
About six months after she left she bumped into one of those guys whose sole job seems to be gathering carts. She found out he was making over $10 an hour. She was in lower management making $8.50 and this cart pusher was making over $10. The killer is that the upper management that refused to give her a raise was a woman.
I believe gender discrimination is criminal. I urged my wife to look into that class action lawsuit, but she was just happy to be free. Now we drive an extra mile and do our shopping at Target.
Or a heathen. I could wear a wig if you'd prefer "heather"... lol
OGG seems to have heavier overhead than MP3. Maybe it's the fault of the plug-in for Quicktime, but OGG files take longer to start playing in iTunes on my Mac and they don't support crossfading. I find them a bit of a pain and usually delete them after listening to them once or twice. I guess that makes me a heather around these parts, but my Mummy always told me to be honest. ;)
What? I don't get it. You mean Microsoft rushed to announce these bulletins because they were concerned about a 14-year-old girl that cut her finger on a Star-Kist tuna can? ;)
Honestly, anything that requires heavy calculations is either going to break the emulator or run abysmally slow. Although email and web browsing can be tollerable (I often proof webpages using VirtualPC to get a view from the other side of the pond), I can't see any of the iLife apps being usable under CherryOS. They typically tax my 800MHz iMac. I can't imagine how slowly they would run under emulation...
I never bothered upgrading from version 5. I was very irritated with v.5's inability to run scheduled backups, which is why I bought the software in the first place. I had to run a cron job just to launch the program. There was no support, no fix. Just a new version which required new money. As OSX has aged, v.5 hasn't aged well with it. Now the operation log frequently locks because Retrospect doesn't exit cleanly and I need to cold boot in order to free it (Haven't figured out how to do that any other way. Any tips?) Requiring people to purchase upgrades in order to fix buggy software is poor customer support. It erodes customer loyalty. I didn't realize they had such a broad stranglehold on Mac backup solutions because of that patent. That explains their arrogance. Being bought out may be good for Retrospect in the long run IF the code is sold, not the development team. At least we can hope. I have to admit that the move to OSX has broken many companies. I have been surprised at how companies like Dantz and Palm haven't dedicated ample resources to embrace the new regime. ;)
- Playlists: If you listen to music in the background while you work like I do, then you've come across this problem. You heard a song you liked, but didn't look at its name before the next one started playing. How do you find out what you heard so you can buy it? Magnatune doesn't offer a playlist of the stream on their site.
- Searchable Database: Since there's no playlist you decide to search for the song. But you can't. There is no searchable database on their site. You must listen to each individual song in whatever catagory you think the stream was in while crossing your fingers and hoping you'll find it within the first 50 or so... Too much work, IMO.
- Customer Support: You really want that song, don't know what it was called and can't find it on their site, so you send an email to Punky, the Emailclown. The problem is that he doesn't respond. Any email stating "I am looking for a song played at x:xxpm write before (name of song I did catch). I have money and and prepared to give it to you." should elicit some sort of response - even a canned one. I've sent several. Even followups weeks later. Nothing.
I purchase music at Bleep [bleep.com] and Apple's iTMS. In contrast to Magnatunes, I have emailed Apple on several occassions and received replies. Both Bleep and iTMS allow me to search their catalogs. Magnatunes doesn't seem to want my business, so I'll spend my money elsewhere.I see Magnatune praised a lot here. Some of you even rave about them. But do you just select music randomly and get lucky? Or do you go there with certain musicians in mind? Aside from using them as a proof of concept in the noble fight against the RIAA, I just don't see how anybody who doesn't have a lot of time on their hands can use their service..
Should have previewed... dirty darn! LOL That would be the iframes tag that I believe is giving Safari fits now.
I'm seeing odd icons on my page that weren't there before the update. I'd like to know if others see the same. Just under the tagboard there will be a column of isolated media control icons that don't do anything. They aren't in my code. I'm thinking Safari is having a problem with the tag now. A quick peek at my site with IE 5, OmniWeb 5, and Camino shows that only Safari displays the mystery icons... http://www.cootey.com/fractals/
However, as I said, Real didn't just reverse engineer FairPlay. They also announced the very next day that they were going to license their own FairPlay compatible DRM to other businesses. Now they were encroaching upon Apple's business. Mac zealots still sat back and watched to see the fireworks. Most Mac guys had personal reasons to despise Real having used their products and having been left out in the orphaned cold one time or another, but this issue still didn't affect them. Only Windows users could use Real's online store.
But when Real foisted a propaganda website in the guise of a grass roots movement slamming Apple in the name of music loving people netwide, Mac users took notice. Mac users were the ones who put iTunes and the iPod on the map. Did you read the "interview" with Devo? It read like a commercial. Everything on the site was about choice, but Mac guys were once again left out in the cold. Where was the choice? Mac users couldn't access Real's Rhapsody. It was clear this was a manipulative, corporate powergrab benefitting only Real and Windows users. So most Mac guys laughed at it as some sort of joke. But if some of them were immature geeks with no self-restraint then try to forgive the Mac population as a whole. You don't write off all of /. as bigots because of the GNAA do you? Neither should you clump all Mac owners in with the pottymouthed zealots.
What I find interesting about this whole fiasco is the absence of Steve Jobs. If he hadn't had cancer surgery this month we would most likely have seen some strong action by Apple. And his one month hiatus is half over, so look for the real fireworks in September.
In the meantime, give Mac users a break. Not all of them plastered four lettered insults all over Real's music site. And if Apple spent time and money licensing and developing FairPlay, iPod, and iTMS, don't be so surprised they might take issue with some third party coming in and trying to make money off their labor. This issue isn't as clean cut as the Lexmark issue. Unless Bob's Cheap Ink was also licensing their cracked ink technology to third parties...
- Playlists: How many of you listen to music in the background? Almost all of you? Me, too. And when I am streaming one of Magnatune's internet radio stations and hear something I like, I have to stop everything I am doing and quickly call up iTunes before the song changes. Otherwise, there is no way to find out the name of that song. Unlike other internet radio stations, Magnatune doesn't offer a dynamically updated playlist on their website. So unless you got lucky, you're out of luck. The song has passed into the ether.
- Searchable Database: Let's say you were too busy writing that report/paper/novel/webpage/program to bother switching tasks to see the title of a song you just heard and write it down to investigate later. I once heard some beautiful chamber music with recorders that I thought would be nice to buy. A trip to Magnatune's website reveals there is no way to search for "chamber music recorders". Sure, the entire catalog of chamber music is available for me to listen to for free, but if I want to purchase one in particular I have to listen to all of them one at a time until I find the one I heard. Effective searching? Not really. I don't have time for that.
- Customer Support: Giving up on searching for that song and hoping to get help from Magnatune? They don't respond to email. I've sent multiple emails to Punky, the Emailclown, and not a single one of them has been responded to. If that guy wasn't having so much fun dying his hair and posing for the webcam maybe he'd be able to answer a few emails once in a while. Any email stating "I am looking for a song played at x:xxpm write before (name of song I did catch). I have money and and prepared to give it to you." should elicit some sort of response - even a canned one. But I received nothing, nor did I receive a response on a follow-up I sent later. Good-bye Magnatunes; Hello iTMS
In the end, as a consumer, I just don't feel any confidence in spending money with them. I've purchased well over a hundred songs at the iTMS. I've also purchased music at Bleep. In contrast to Magnatunes, I have emailed Apple on several occassions about authorization problems and even corrupt downloads and have always received courteous, prompt responses. Both Bleep and iTMS allow me to search their catalogs. Magnatunes doesn't. Guess where I spend my money.I have hundreds of CDs, cassettes, and LPs (ooh, dating myself there). I put my money where my mouth is. I buy, buy, buy. But not with Magnatunes. If they won't make it easy for me to find what I want, and won't help me find it when I can't, then I won't spend any money there.
I see Magnatune praised a lot here. I wonder if any of you have honestly bought music with them, or are just using them as a proof of concept in the noble fight against the RIAA.
The beauty of this scheme is that ET wouldn't have to visit Earth to implant the message. A lot of junk DNA consists of genomic fragments inserted by viruses over the course of evolution. An alien civilisation could, for negligible cost, dispatch tiny packages across the galaxy, loaded with customised viral DNA. The cargo would be designed to infect, without harm, any DNA-based life it encountered.
It's patently foolish to believe an intelligent species would try to write a message in the genes of a developing species remotely from another star in the blind hopes that the virus doesn't wipe out the entire population instead. It's just silly. And who's to say which species the super intelligent shades of blue wrote the message in? Perhaps they thought another species altogether was bound to become dominant on this planet instead of man.
Wait! Could THIS be the real reason the dinosaurs went extinct! (^_-)
Gotta love those rebates...
Back in 1969, Ryoichi Ikegami (of Mai, the Psychic Girl and Crying Freeman fame) wrote and illustrated a version of Spiderman. There were about 6 tankoban compilations of the series total, so it didn't run long. I used to own the manga. He didn't spend a lot of time in costume. Mostly dealt with yakuza and damsels in distress (that was an easy transition from culture to culture). The costumed villians and fights didn't seem to make the transition well. Overall, I found it rather dull and depressing. I wonder if the transition from color to black & white had more to do with those changes than the cultural differences between Japanese and American culture. Here's a list of issues that were translated into English with some pix: http://www.spiderfan.org/comics/title/spiderman_ma nga.html
I wonder how they handled the masterbation with porn scene in the first chapter? Right off the bat I knew this wasn't Stan Lee's Spidey! (-_-); The series wasn't heavy on nudity, but with mostly panels of talking heads I wondered if Ikegami was even familiar with the original story aside from the visual character designs.
Adelphia doesn't respond to email. So I have to block this guy's dynamic IP address every few weeks when Adelphia changes it. But I now receive spam at my personal address after being clean for eight years. He's obviously spamming other dumb Windows users as well with my address and now the junk is starting to roll in. My address is out in the wild. :( Eight years without spam is pretty lucky, so I'm thankful, but I'd rather still not be getting spam.
Protecting your address relies on trusting the people you share it with to not get email viruses. Or to be Mac or *nix users. LOL Maybe I should make a new address and only share it with people willing to sign a contract that they won't use Outlook Express. :/
They did extend the contest, actually, though nobody seemed to notice. Originally, you had to register your winning iCap by March 31st, and redeem it by tomorrow. But well into April I could still register iCaps. I won 20 songs myself, but it was a pain to find them. Towards the end, the available iCaps had been picked over (Yes, I was a tilter). And Sierra Mist iCaps were rare. In fact, if there had been better Sierra Mist support I would have bought truckloads of bottles. I'm just not much of a cola drinker. Pepsi missed out by being cheap, in my opinion. I'd love to know the behind the scenes story on this one. I can't find any yellow capped Pepsi products now. Haven't been available here in Salt Lake Valley for weeks. At least not in all the locations I've been in...
But since most people in Utah seem to own PCs, spyware and adware are touchy issues. We're already up in arms about the Matrix. I don't think this lawsuit really stands a snowball's chance in Dixie. ~Darkstream
I tried compiling the code to test it out using Xcode. Gave an error during compilation - couldn't find "Cocoa/Cocoa.h". I don't have this file. Anybody know where to get it? I never understood why people distribute code, but not compiled binaries. They used to do this on the Amiga and now they do it in OSX. Allowing people to compile their own code makes sense for those running *nix under different configurations, but Amigas and Macs tend to be standardized. Why not make a binary available of Trailblazer? Not everybody knows how to compile software. I just like to use it. I'm not lazy. I'm busy! LOL