digitalmars.D - Re: [Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:

 This is all based on your opinion.  And unfortunately it's all wrong -- I  
 know what is good and what is bad, you should just stop posting.

Aug 31 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:59:42 -0400, Kagamin <spam here.lot> wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:

 This is all based on your opinion.  And unfortunately it's all wrong --  
 I
 know what is good and what is bad, you should just stop posting.




I was just employing irony and sarcasm to demonstrate why your arguments  
were meaningless :)  The only measurable factor for "good" art is how many  
people use it/buy it.  For-sale software, books, movies do rather well, so  
I'm inclined to believe they are pretty good.  There are also some open  
source/free materials that do rather well, but they are not nearly as  
common as free materials that are crappy.  My point was that for-sale art  
by far outperforms freely available art in popularity and usage.  When you  
get paid to make something, you can do it more often, you get better at  
it, and your quality of work goes up.

Anyways, we can stop debating, clearly it's not going anywhere.

-Steve

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 I was just employing irony and sarcasm to demonstrate why your arguments 
 were meaningless :)  The only measurable factor for "good" art is how 
 many people use it/buy it.  For-sale software, books, movies do rather 
 well, so I'm inclined to believe they are pretty good.  There are also 
 some open source/free materials that do rather well, but they are not 
 nearly as common as free materials that are crappy.  My point was that 
 for-sale art by far outperforms freely available art in popularity and 
 usage.  When you get paid to make something, you can do it more often, 
 you get better at it, and your quality of work goes up.


Someone once told me that "capitalism doesn't support the arts". I asked him
how 
the Beatles got rich. Oops!

There's a subgroup of the theater crowd around here who regard producers as 
"sellouts" if their plays actually attract an audience.

Sep 01 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Walter,

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 
 I was just employing irony and sarcasm to demonstrate why your
 arguments were meaningless :)  The only measurable factor for "good"
 art is how many people use it/buy it.  For-sale software, books,
 movies do rather well, so I'm inclined to believe they are pretty
 good.  There are also some open source/free materials that do rather
 well, but they are not nearly as common as free materials that are
 crappy.  My point was that for-sale art by far outperforms freely
 available art in popularity and usage.  When you get paid to make
 something, you can do it more often, you get better at it, and your
 quality of work goes up.
 


 asked him how the Beatles got rich. Oops!
 
 There's a subgroup of the theater crowd around here who regard
 producers as "sellouts" if their plays actually attract an audience.
 


OTOH try and write a play that no one will watch. I'd be very surprised if 
it can be done.


-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ff1b3e78cd181e75ec7828 news.digitalmars.com...
 OTOH try and write a play that no one will watch. I'd be very surprised if 
 it can be done.


Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder tried that once. Hilarity ensued.

Sep 01 2010

Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisprog gmail.com> writes:

On Wednesday, September 01, 2010 18:56:03 BCS wrote:
 OTOH try and write a play that no one will watch. I'd be very surprised if
 it can be done.


LOL. There would always be someone who would want to watch it simply because no 
one else wants to.

- Jonathan M Davis

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Jonathan M Davis wrote:
 Music and movies are huge industries. Capitalism definitely supports them. 
 However, if you're dealing with less well-known, less generally-liked stuff,
then 
 capitalism isnt't really going to support it. Of course, arguably, that's for 
 the better, since if it doesn't do well that means that it's not something
that 
 the majority supports, but there is good stuff out there that never becomes 
 particularly popular or successful. However, since art is generally in the eye 
 of the beholder, there will always be people unhappy with how it gets handled 
 regardless of the economic system in use.


Try hiring someone to do some artwork for a web site or your program. Artists 
are definitely capitalists and don't work for free, even for small stuff.


 I hear that this sort of thing tends to happen with Indie artists as well.
There 
 are fans who like them until they get popular. I guess that there are people
who 
 _like_ it when the stuff that they like is niche.


I bet that deep down they know that they don't actually like it, they just like 
being in the in crowd where they all smugly congratulate each other about how 
they get it and nobody else does :-)

I love the case of Teri Horton who has an unauthenticated Pollock painting. If 
it is a real Pollock, it is worth millions. If not, it's just some paint 
dribbled on canvas. It matters not if it's a good painting or not.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5n87k$14uo$1 digitalmars.com...
 Jonathan M Davis wrote:
 I hear that this sort of thing tends to happen with Indie artists as 
 well. There are fans who like them until they get popular. I guess that 
 there are people who _like_ it when the stuff that they like is niche.


 I bet that deep down they know that they don't actually like it, they just 
 like being in the in crowd where they all smugly congratulate each other 
 about how they get it and nobody else does :-)


I hope not. If that's so, what would that mean about those of us who have 
been here in the D crowd for the last few years? ;)

 I love the case of Teri Horton who has an unauthenticated Pollock 
 painting. If it is a real Pollock, it is worth millions. If not, it's just 
 some paint dribbled on canvas. It matters not if it's a good painting or 
 not.


Classic :)

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
 news:i5n87k$14uo$1 digitalmars.com...
 Jonathan M Davis wrote:
 I hear that this sort of thing tends to happen with Indie artists as 
 well. There are fans who like them until they get popular. I guess that 
 there are people who _like_ it when the stuff that they like is niche.


 like being in the in crowd where they all smugly congratulate each other 
 about how they get it and nobody else does :-)


 I hope not. If that's so, what would that mean about those of us who have 
 been here in the D crowd for the last few years? ;)


If you leave when D goes mainstream, then you're here for all the wrong reasons!

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5ncem$1bp6$1 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
 news:i5n87k$14uo$1 digitalmars.com...
 Jonathan M Davis wrote:
 I hear that this sort of thing tends to happen with Indie artists as 
 well. There are fans who like them until they get popular. I guess that 
 there are people who _like_ it when the stuff that they like is niche.


 just like being in the in crowd where they all smugly congratulate each 
 other about how they get it and nobody else does :-)


 I hope not. If that's so, what would that mean about those of us who have 
 been here in the D crowd for the last few years? ;)


 If you leave when D goes mainstream, then you're here for all the wrong 
 reasons!


How's that for lock-in? :)

Sep 01 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Walter,

 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 
 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i5n87k$14uo$1 digitalmars.com...
 
 Jonathan M Davis wrote:
 
 I hear that this sort of thing tends to happen with Indie artists
 as well. There are fans who like them until they get popular. I
 guess that there are people who _like_ it when the stuff that they
 like is niche.
 


 they just like being in the in crowd where they all smugly
 congratulate each other about how they get it and nobody else does
 :-)
 


 have been here in the D crowd for the last few years? ;)
 


 wrong reasons!
 


s/when/because/ ???

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 02 2010

Brad Roberts <braddr puremagic.com> writes:

On 9/1/2010 6:56 PM, BCS wrote:
 OTOH try and write a play that no one will watch. I'd be very surprised if it
 can be done.


There's a book that was purposely written (by a collaboration of good authors)
to be as bad as it could be.  So, of course, I just had to get a copy.  I
couldn't make it past the second chapter, if I remember right.  It'd take a
seriously determined person to actually finish it.  Reading it might well void
any life insurance policies you might have.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights

Good luck,
Brad

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Brad Roberts" <braddr puremagic.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.60.1283405205.858.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...
 On 9/1/2010 6:56 PM, BCS wrote:
 OTOH try and write a play that no one will watch. I'd be very surprised 
 if it
 can be done.


 There's a book that was purposely written (by a collaboration of good 
 authors)
 to be as bad as it could be.


There was a videogame (freeware) a few years ago that was deliberately 
designed to serve as an example of all the typical "worst practices" in game 
design. The great thing though, was that a lot of people found it to fall 
into the "so bad it's good" category :)  I wish I could remember what it 
was.

 So, of course, I just had to get a copy.  I
 couldn't make it past the second chapter, if I remember right.  It'd take 
 a
 seriously determined person to actually finish it.  Reading it might well 
 void
 any life insurance policies you might have.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights


That sounds awesome :) The history and reasons behind it are really 
interesting, and I got a kick out of these parts of what Wikipedia said 
about it:

------------------------
...obvious grammatical errors, nonsensical passages, and a complete lack of 
a coherent plot....

The distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights include nonidentical chapters 
written by two different authors from the same segment of outline (13 and 
15), a missing chapter (21), two chapters that are word-for-word identical 
to each other (4 and 17), two different chapters with the same chapter 
number (12 and 12), and a chapter "written" by a computer program that 
generated random text based on patterns found in the previous chapters (34). 
Characters change gender and race; they die and reappear without 
explanation. Spelling and grammar are nonstandard and the formatting is 
inconsistent. The initials of characters who were named in the book spelled 
out the phrase "PublishAmerica is a vanity press."[7]

Under Macdonald's direction, the finale revealed that all the previous 
events of the plot had been a dream, although the book continues for several 
more chapters.
------------------------

That had to have been a really fun book to write.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Brad Roberts" <braddr puremagic.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.60.1283405205.858.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...
 On 9/1/2010 6:56 PM, BCS wrote:
 OTOH try and write a play that no one will watch. I'd be very surprised 
 if it
 can be done.


 There's a book that was purposely written (by a collaboration of good 
 authors)
 to be as bad as it could be.  So, of course, I just had to get a copy.  I
 couldn't make it past the second chapter, if I remember right.  It'd take 
 a
 seriously determined person to actually finish it.  Reading it might well 
 void
 any life insurance policies you might have.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights


I hope it started with "It was a dark and stormy night" :)

Sep 01 2010

Brad Roberts <braddr puremagic.com> writes:

On 9/1/2010 11:28 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 "Brad Roberts" <braddr puremagic.com> wrote in message 
 news:mailman.60.1283405205.858.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...
 On 9/1/2010 6:56 PM, BCS wrote:
 OTOH try and write a play that no one will watch. I'd be very surprised 
 if it
 can be done.


 There's a book that was purposely written (by a collaboration of good 
 authors)
 to be as bad as it could be.  So, of course, I just had to get a copy.  I
 couldn't make it past the second chapter, if I remember right.  It'd take 
 a
 seriously determined person to actually finish it.  Reading it might well 
 void
 any life insurance policies you might have.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights


 I hope it started with "It was a dark and stormy night" :)
 


Sadly no.. that'd be cliched but not bad enough.  Hopefully this doesn't push
the bounds of fair use too far.  The first several lines:

Chapter 1

  Pain.
  Whispering voices.
  Pain.
  Pain. Pain. Pain.
  Need pee -- new pain -- what are they sticking in me? ...
  Sleep.
  Pain.
  Whispering voices.
  "As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this hospital
will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
  "Yes, doctor."  The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy.

---

Actually, that part's not THAT bad, by itself.. but it certainly isn't anywhere
near good.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Brad Roberts" <braddr puremagic.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.61.1283409922.858.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...
 On 9/1/2010 11:28 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I hope it started with "It was a dark and stormy night" :)


 Sadly no.. that'd be cliched but not bad enough.  Hopefully this doesn't 
 push
 the bounds of fair use too far.  The first several lines:

 Chapter 1

  Pain.
  Whispering voices.
  Pain.
  Pain. Pain. Pain.
  Need pee -- new pain -- what are they sticking in me? ...
  Sleep.
  Pain.
  Whispering voices.
  "As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this 
 hospital
 will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
  "Yes, doctor."  The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy.

 ---

 Actually, that part's not THAT bad, by itself.. but it certainly isn't 
 anywhere
 near good.


lol, Oh man, that's great (in a bad way, of course) :) Now you've got me 
*really* wanting to read it. I haven't laughed that hard at, umm, 
"literature" since Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I keep laughing harder 
every time I re-read it, He said. His voice breathy, sweet, so sweet and 
sexy. Pain. Need pee

:)

Sep 02 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.victz4b5eav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 The only measurable factor for "good" art is how many  people use it/buy 
 it.


That's not a bad point - I can't think of many other metrics for art. 
Quality certainly can positively influence popularity. But I think we have 
to be careful not to conflate "popularity" with "quality" too much. Similar 
to the old saying: "What's popular is not always right. What's right is not 
always popular." PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar 
with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we 
have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and quality.

 For-sale software, books, movies do rather well, so  I'm inclined to 
 believe they are pretty good.  There are also some open  source/free 
 materials that do rather well, but they are not nearly as  common as free 
 materials that are crappy.  My point was that for-sale art  by far 
 outperforms freely available art in popularity and usage.  When you  get 
 paid to make something, you can do it more often, you get better at  it, 
 and your quality of work goes up.


I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenon you describe, but I think there are 
other contrary factors in play as well:

- For-sale anything tends to have more marketing behind it than free 
(because if you're trying to get money for it, you're more motivated to get 
it out in front of people), so that can be a factor in the popularity/usage 
of for-sale things. If you're trying to sell your paintings, you're more 
likely to try to go as as many art fairs as you can, get business cards made 
out to hand out, get a spot and display that people will really notice, push 
your website, etc. If your work is free, you have less reason to do all 
that, which in turn, works against popularity and usage.

- Free stuff is more likely to be a labor of love (because if you're not 
getting paid for it, why else bother if not because you truly care?), while 
for-sale tends to involve people who just don't give a crap about anything 
but the paycheck. They know something will sell as-is, so why waste the 
resources making it as good as they can make it, like the "labor of love" 
people would do?

Businessmen have long ago learned that, contrary to the old saying, "If you 
build a better mousetrap, the world will NOT beat a path to your door". 
Especially if the world doesn't even know you've done so. They'll just keep 
using their inferior, but popular, mousetraps. But if you can *convince* 
them you've built a better one, regardless of whether or not it's actualy 
true, then they *will*, metaphorically, beat a path to your door.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.vidd20ldeav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:34:00 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar
 with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we
 have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and 
 quality.


 Imagine if you had to pay for it ;)


There's a commerical web-app package for colleges called Blackboard. Hugely, 
enormously popular among college IT departments (ie, the target buyers). But 
it's undeniably total crap. Damn thing barely even works at all, and that's 
not just my observation, but the observation of many students at the 
colleges that use it.

Other commercial things that have been heavily used or popular and I would 
argue to have been of relatively poor quality (relative to either their 
price or to competing offerings) even at the time they were either heavily 
used or well-regarded (though I admit some might be debatable): Oracle DBMS, 
Lotus Notes, MS Visual SourceSafe, iPod, Cadillac/Oldsmobile, Visual Basic 
6, Classic ASP, Flash IDE, Photoshop, XBox 360.

 But one thing that for-sale art  does is weed out the unpopular artists.


I don't know, maybe, maybe not. I would argue that there were far more 
people who very vocally hated NSync, Spice Girls and the Macarena, then 
there were people who actually liked them. Those music acts were successful 
for a short while (at least for their labels), but I don't know about 
popular. Disliking and making fun of them was certainly very, very popular - 
far more popular than actually listening to them, from everything I could 
tell.

 Make a crappy product, and many  people won't buy your next one.  Look how 
 hard Vista hit Microsoft despite  their huge marketing machine.


Well, in many ways, Microsoft is unpopular ;) Although they're really a bit 
of an odd beast: They're heavily hated, but also heavily used. You could say 
they're both popular and unpopular at the same time.

And I don't know about "make a crappy product, and many people won't buy 
your next one": Vista didn't seem to prevent people from buying Win7 en 
masse.

 But I think you would agree the truly great free products/software don't 
 have a problem with marketing because growth today is viral when someone 
 finds something that is awesome, free or not.


True, but there's still a lot of difficulty in getting that viral ball 
rolling in the first place, it has to reach a certain critical mass first. D 
had faced an uphill battle for mindshare for a long time and the viral 
effect is only now starting to produce results.

 I think most good products are labors of love, even ones that are not 
 free.


Agreed.

 But if something is good, and people will pay  for it, why wouldn't you 
 want to charge for it so you can continue doing  it?  I don't understand 
 the thought process that necessarily links love  for a job or quality of 
 art to working for free.


In many cases I agree, but sometimes the market just isn't there, or maybe 
it's something that would just be very difficult to market as a commercial 
offering. In those cases getting it used by more than a handful of people 
(if any) requires it be free. For instance, the market for commercial 
languages is pretty much dead. D's reference compiler *needed* to be free or 
else it never would have gotten serious attention.

Or it could be a vehicle for something else: Like how MS doesn't even charge 
for their compilers (just their IDEs and platforms) because their real 
products are their platforms. Same with Apple and the iTunes software: it's 
free to help boost iPod and music/video sales.

(Of course, there is still room for commercial compilers: like the Intel 
C/C++ one, because it supposedly produces far better optimized code than the 
free C/C++ compilers. But a language that doesn't have at least some good 
free compiler is doomed to failure these days.)

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar 
 with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we 
 have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and quality.


On the other hand, PHP may have a quality that other languages utterly lack and 
fail to recognize. The book "The Innovator's Dilemma" explains many examples of 
this.


 I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenon you describe, but I think there are 
 other contrary factors in play as well:
 
 - For-sale anything tends to have more marketing behind it than free 
 (because if you're trying to get money for it, you're more motivated to get 
 it out in front of people), so that can be a factor in the popularity/usage 
 of for-sale things. If you're trying to sell your paintings, you're more 
 likely to try to go as as many art fairs as you can, get business cards made 
 out to hand out, get a spot and display that people will really notice, push 
 your website, etc. If your work is free, you have less reason to do all 
 that, which in turn, works against popularity and usage.
 
 - Free stuff is more likely to be a labor of love (because if you're not 
 getting paid for it, why else bother if not because you truly care?), while 
 for-sale tends to involve people who just don't give a crap about anything 
 but the paycheck. They know something will sell as-is, so why waste the 
 resources making it as good as they can make it, like the "labor of love" 
 people would do?


There's the old saw in making a product that the last 10% takes 90% of the time 
and money. If you're doing something for free, you tend to not bother with
that. 
If you're doing it for pay, you spend the time and money to make it a quality 
product.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5n8lu$15kq$1 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar with a variety of 
 languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we have to be 
 careful with assuming connections between popularity and quality.


 On the other hand, PHP may have a quality that other languages utterly 
 lack and fail to recognize. The book "The Innovator's Dilemma" explains 
 many examples of this.


Yea, may be so in a lot of cases, but with PHP, I really can't even fathom 
that.

 There's the old saw in making a product that the last 10% takes 90% of the 
 time and money. If you're doing something for free, you tend to not bother 
 with that. If you're doing it for pay, you spend the time and money to 
 make it a quality product.


Then it would seem most of the tech world either hadn't heard that saying or 
doesn't beleive it. It seems like every time I turn around there's another 
completely unpolished commercial tech offering. I can't even think of the 
last time I saw a commercial tech product (hardware or software) that seemed 
to have gone that final 10% - or even the first half of that final 5% (not 
counting digital mars, of course ;) ). The Apple II is the first thing that 
comes to mind - but I might be biased since that's what I started on. 
Resident Evil 4 or Megaman 9, maybe, if videogames count. The 
graffitti-1-era PalmOS devces, maybe? That's all I can think of. Certainly 
nothing from Apple since Woz left, and that's the company most people try to 
point to as a shining example of alleged "polish".

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 That's all I can think of. Certainly 
 nothing from Apple since Woz left, and that's the company most people try to 
 point to as a shining example of alleged "polish". 


All I can say is you need to look at the product before it was polished to see 
if progress was made during the polishing process. Looking at just the end 
result doesn't tell much.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5nco0$1bp6$3 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 That's all I can think of. Certainly nothing from Apple since Woz left, 
 and that's the company most people try to point to as a shining example 
 of alleged "polish".


 All I can say is you need to look at the product before it was polished to 
 see if progress was made during the polishing process. Looking at just the 
 end result doesn't tell much.


The pre-release iterations are completely irrelevant. If the end result is 
something with nearly-zero tactile feedback, super-ultra-hyperly-modal 
interface, and can't be turned off with the "power" button, but only by 
holding "Up" for five seconds, or has tiny ui elements that can't be 
accessed with a stylus or fingernail but is far too small to do reliably 
with a finger, or is a closed-locked-down-platform, or is branded as being a 
PDA-like device but still doesn't support something as basic as copy-paste 
that PalmOS devices already had nearly ten years prior even in smartphone 
form (Handspring Treo), then yes, the polish is crap no matter how much 
crappier the early iterations were. Apple's "polish" exists as nothing more 
than aesthetic-oriented graphic design, and it fools most people.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message 
news:i5ne55$1efe$1 digitalmars.com...
 Apple's "polish" exists as nothing more than aesthetic-oriented graphic 
 design


...and gimmicks.

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 iPhone is hands down the best phone I've ever used.  I thought when I 
 got it, I would have a hard time accessing small things like the 
 on-screen keyboard keys, but I'm surprised at how accurate I am with it, 
 even after only having it for a few months.  I regularly go to webnews 
 on digitalmars and can click the minuscule links pretty accurately.


There's a special style sheet on digitalmars.com for printing which redoes the 
layout to make it print nicer. I looked in to doing a special style sheet for 
the iPod, but couldn't find a consistent way to make it work. I want such a 
style sheet to reorganize it as the 3-pane style is not the best for the tiny 
screen.

Sep 02 2010

Michel Fortin <michel.fortin michelf.com> writes:

On 2010-09-02 15:05:26 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> said:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 iPhone is hands down the best phone I've ever used.  I thought when I 
 got it, I would have a hard time accessing small things like the 
 on-screen keyboard keys, but I'm surprised at how accurate I am with 
 it, even after only having it for a few months.  I regularly go to 
 webnews on digitalmars and can click the minuscule links pretty 
 accurately.


 There's a special style sheet on digitalmars.com for printing which 
 redoes the layout to make it print nicer. I looked in to doing a 
 special style sheet for the iPod, but couldn't find a consistent way to 
 make it work. I want such a style sheet to reorganize it as the 3-pane 
 style is not the best for the tiny screen.


Basically, you wanted to do what I did with my website. What was the 
problem exactly? Creating a style sheet that displays the contents well 
when read linearly? Or was it about how to trigger this particular 
style sheet for iPhone and iPods? The later's quite simple, just use 
this media attribute:

	media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"

The "handheld, " part isn't really relevant for iOS devices, but it'll 
trigger the stylesheet with Opera-based handheld browsers.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin michelf.com
http://michelf.com/

Sep 02 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Michel Fortin wrote:
 Basically, you wanted to do what I did with my website. What was the 
 problem exactly? Creating a style sheet that displays the contents well 
 when read linearly? Or was it about how to trigger this particular style 
 sheet for iPhone and iPods? The later's quite simple, just use this 
 media attribute:
 
     media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
 
 The "handheld, " part isn't really relevant for iOS devices, but it'll 
 trigger the stylesheet with Opera-based handheld browsers.



The problem was that I googled it and every hit used a radically different 
method and they'd refer to it as "seems" to work. I'm not comfortable using
such 
hacks. I'd like one that officially works and is standards compliant.

Sep 02 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5pl44$jfi$2 digitalmars.com...
 Michel Fortin wrote:
 Basically, you wanted to do what I did with my website. What was the 
 problem exactly? Creating a style sheet that displays the contents well 
 when read linearly? Or was it about how to trigger this particular style 
 sheet for iPhone and iPods? The later's quite simple, just use this media 
 attribute:

     media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"

 The "handheld, " part isn't really relevant for iOS devices, but it'll 
 trigger the stylesheet with Opera-based handheld browsers.



 The problem was that I googled it and every hit used a radically different 
 method and they'd refer to it as "seems" to work. I'm not comfortable 
 using such hacks. I'd like one that officially works and is standards 
 compliant.


Then you're best off avoiding the web enitrely, or else you're in for a 
world of hurt ;) The web has no such things.

Sep 02 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
 news:i5pl44$jfi$2 digitalmars.com...
 Michel Fortin wrote:
 Basically, you wanted to do what I did with my website. What was the 
 problem exactly? Creating a style sheet that displays the contents well 
 when read linearly? Or was it about how to trigger this particular style 
 sheet for iPhone and iPods? The later's quite simple, just use this media 
 attribute:

     media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"

 The "handheld, " part isn't really relevant for iOS devices, but it'll 
 trigger the stylesheet with Opera-based handheld browsers.


 The problem was that I googled it and every hit used a radically different 
 method and they'd refer to it as "seems" to work. I'm not comfortable 
 using such hacks. I'd like one that officially works and is standards 
 compliant.


 Then you're best off avoiding the web enitrely, or else you're in for a 
 world of hurt ;) The web has no such things.


The print style sheet is standard and works great.

Sep 02 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Walter,

 Michel Fortin wrote:
 
 Basically, you wanted to do what I did with my website. What was the
 problem exactly? Creating a style sheet that displays the contents
 well when read linearly? Or was it about how to trigger this
 particular style sheet for iPhone and iPods? The later's quite
 simple, just use this media attribute:
 
 media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
 
 The "handheld, " part isn't really relevant for iOS devices, but
 it'll trigger the stylesheet with Opera-based handheld browsers.
 


 different method and they'd refer to it as "seems" to work. I'm not
 comfortable using such hacks. I'd like one that officially works and
 is standards compliant.
 


Setup a mobile.digitalmars.com that has hosts the same files as www.* but 
a different .css?

A little work with the config files and you might even need only one copy 
of the files on the server.


-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 03 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

BCS wrote:
 Setup a mobile.digitalmars.com that has hosts the same files as www.* 
 but a different .css?
 
 A little work with the config files and you might even need only one 
 copy of the files on the server.


That might work.

Sep 03 2010

Michel Fortin <michel.fortin michelf.com> writes:

On 2010-09-02 22:04:39 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> said:

 Michel Fortin wrote:
 Basically, you wanted to do what I did with my website. What was the 
 problem exactly? Creating a style sheet that displays the contents well 
 when read linearly? Or was it about how to trigger this particular 
 style sheet for iPhone and iPods? The later's quite simple, just use 
 this media attribute:
 
     media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
 
 The "handheld, " part isn't really relevant for iOS devices, but it'll 
 trigger the stylesheet with Opera-based handheld browsers.


 The problem was that I googled it and every hit used a radically 
 different method and they'd refer to it as "seems" to work. I'm not 
 comfortable using such hacks. I'd like one that officially works and is 
 standards compliant.


Call it a hack if you want, but this is the most standard-compliant 
solution as it is based on the CSS3 Media Queries specification:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/>

It'll be officially standard-compliant once the specification becomes a 
W3C recommendation (it's currently a candidate recommendation). 
Currently, WebKit (Safari, Chrome), Gecko (Firefox) and Opera all 
support media queries.
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/media_queries>
<http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto25/css/mediaqueries/>

IE 9 will support media queries too when it ships (I believe it's in 
beta currently) so it'll probably work with Windows Phone 7 too (when 
it becomes available). Here's a showcase they've made:
<http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/85CSS3_MediaQueries/Default.html>

So good luck finding something more standard-compliant.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin michelf.com
http://michelf.com/

Sep 04 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Michel Fortin wrote:
 On 2010-09-02 22:04:39 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> 
 said:
 
 Michel Fortin wrote:
 Basically, you wanted to do what I did with my website. What was the 
 problem exactly? Creating a style sheet that displays the contents 
 well when read linearly? Or was it about how to trigger this 
 particular style sheet for iPhone and iPods? The later's quite 
 simple, just use this media attribute:

     media="handheld, only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"

 The "handheld, " part isn't really relevant for iOS devices, but 
 it'll trigger the stylesheet with Opera-based handheld browsers.


 The problem was that I googled it and every hit used a radically 
 different method and they'd refer to it as "seems" to work. I'm not 
 comfortable using such hacks. I'd like one that officially works and 
 is standards compliant.


 Call it a hack if you want, but this is the most standard-compliant 
 solution as it is based on the CSS3 Media Queries specification:
 <http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/>
 
 It'll be officially standard-compliant once the specification becomes a 
 W3C recommendation (it's currently a candidate recommendation). 
 Currently, WebKit (Safari, Chrome), Gecko (Firefox) and Opera all 
 support media queries.
 <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/media_queries>
 <http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto25/css/mediaqueries/>
 
 IE 9 will support media queries too when it ships (I believe it's in 
 beta currently) so it'll probably work with Windows Phone 7 too (when it 
 becomes available). Here's a showcase they've made:
 <http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/85CSS3_MediaQueries/Default.html>
 
 So good luck finding something more standard-compliant.
 


This is good information. Thanks!

Sep 04 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.vieozxaleav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:53:41 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 The pre-release iterations are completely irrelevant. If the end result 
 is
 something with nearly-zero tactile feedback, super-ultra-hyperly-modal
 interface, and can't be turned off with the "power" button, but only by
 holding "Up" for five seconds, or has tiny ui elements that can't be
 accessed with a stylus or fingernail but is far too small to do reliably
 with a finger, or is a closed-locked-down-platform, or is branded as 
 being a
 PDA-like device but still doesn't support something as basic as 
 copy-paste
 that PalmOS devices already had nearly ten years prior even in smartphone
 form (Handspring Treo), then yes, the polish is crap no matter how much
 crappier the early iterations were. Apple's "polish" exists as nothing 
 more
 than aesthetic-oriented graphic design, and it fools most people.


 Love my iPhone.  Love it.  My last two phones were a Palm Treo and a 
 Samsung touch-screen (w/stylus) smartphone with Windows mobile 6.  They 
 are absolute garbage compared to this.  Granted, I started with the 3gs, 
 and upgraded to iOS4 about a month after I got it, so my phone is the 
 result of 3 years of polish, but I feel apple has the right focus for it.

 iPhone is hands down the best phone I've ever used.  I thought when I got 
 it, I would have a hard time accessing small things like the on-screen 
 keyboard keys, but I'm surprised at how accurate I am with it, even after 
 only having it for a few months.  I regularly go to webnews on digitalmars 
 and can click the minuscule links pretty accurately.

 You can not like them if you want, you are entitled to your opinion, but 
 it seems like you have a very negative view of almost everything :)  I bet 
 your glass is half empty, huh...


I'm a "technical-ist": The glass is half-empty and half-full at the same 
time. Problem is, most glasses I've seen are only a quarter full and with 
overly-sweetened content (or three-quarters empty if you prefer ;) ).

I just have standards.

A. Search "you're holding it wrong".

B. Closed platforms are evil (not to be confused with closed source).

C. Gatekeeping is evil. See also http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html

D. Service provider lock-in is evil. My phone works with *any* service 
provider (and didn't become uselessly obsolete after a year or two): 
http://www.uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=EXAI398  And I 
really do like this phone a lot.

E. A die-hard Apple fan I know recently showed me his beloved iPad. 
Accurately setting the text-cursor was nearly impossible. But that would 
have been an incredibly simple fix: Use a screen that worked with a stylus 
or fingernail. There's millions of them out there. Even if that would have 
prevented multi-touch (and I don't know that it would or would not have), 
after using the multi-touch, I felt it added no real value other than a 
"gee-whiz" gimmick factor. Stylus/fingernail support would have added at 
least some real value.

F. Like all Apple software, the software on the iPad/iPhone are appallingly 
slim on settings/options.

G. A *phone* without tactile dial buttons is just plain wrong. What is it 
with Apple's long-standing war against tactile feedback? It detracts from 
usability and the only thing it adds is high-tech-gee-whiz-gimmick.

H. What's there to protect the highly-prominent screen?

I. I don't give a crap how thin they can make it. But Apple seems to think I 
should care. Heck, I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on something 
that I'll constantly feel I'm about to accidentally snap in half. But that's 
exactly how I felt with the iPad.

That's a lot of issues for something that's supposedly well-polished.

Sep 02 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message 
news:i5ov60$2c5c$1 digitalmars.com...
 "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message 
 news:op.vieozxaleav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 Love my iPhone.  Love it.  My last two phones were a Palm Treo and a 
 Samsung touch-screen (w/stylus) smartphone with Windows mobile 6.  They 
 are absolute garbage compared to this.  Granted, I started with the 3gs, 
 and upgraded to iOS4 about a month after I got it, so my phone is the 
 result of 3 years of polish, but I feel apple has the right focus for it.

 iPhone is hands down the best phone I've ever used.  I thought when I got 
 it, I would have a hard time accessing small things like the on-screen 
 keyboard keys, but I'm surprised at how accurate I am with it, even after 
 only having it for a few months.  I regularly go to webnews on 
 digitalmars and can click the minuscule links pretty accurately.

 You can not like them if you want, you are entitled to your opinion, but 
 it seems like you have a very negative view of almost everything :)  I 
 bet your glass is half empty, huh...


 I'm a "technical-ist": The glass is half-empty and half-full at the same 
 time. Problem is, most glasses I've seen are only a quarter full and with 
 overly-sweetened content (or three-quarters empty if you prefer ;) ).

 I just have standards.

 A. Search "you're holding it wrong".

 B. Closed platforms are evil (not to be confused with closed source).

 C. Gatekeeping is evil. See also http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html

 D. Service provider lock-in is evil. My phone works with *any* service 
 provider (and didn't become uselessly obsolete after a year or two): 
 http://www.uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=EXAI398  And I 
 really do like this phone a lot.

 E. A die-hard Apple fan I know recently showed me his beloved iPad. 
 Accurately setting the text-cursor was nearly impossible. But that would 
 have been an incredibly simple fix: Use a screen that worked with a stylus 
 or fingernail. There's millions of them out there. Even if that would have 
 prevented multi-touch (and I don't know that it would or would not have), 
 after using the multi-touch, I felt it added no real value other than a 
 "gee-whiz" gimmick factor. Stylus/fingernail support would have added at 
 least some real value.

 F. Like all Apple software, the software on the iPad/iPhone are 
 appallingly slim on settings/options.

 G. A *phone* without tactile dial buttons is just plain wrong. What is it 
 with Apple's long-standing war against tactile feedback? It detracts from 
 usability and the only thing it adds is high-tech-gee-whiz-gimmick.

 H. What's there to protect the highly-prominent screen?

 I. I don't give a crap how thin they can make it. But Apple seems to think 
 I should care. Heck, I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on 
 something that I'll constantly feel I'm about to accidentally snap in 
 half. But that's exactly how I felt with the iPad.

 That's a lot of issues for something that's supposedly well-polished.


J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?

Sep 02 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

retard wrote:
 Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 
 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


 You buy a new one, of course. Why this will never happen is that once a 
 new model of the iShit comes out, as a die hard Apple fan you simply MUST 
 buy it and get rid of the old one. I heard they don't even replace the 
 batteries in Apple's repair services. They just hand you a new phone.


It's the subscription model for hardware. It also effectively kills the market 
for used iPods.

Sep 02 2010

Sean Kelly <sean invisibleduck.org> writes:

Walter Bright Wrote:

 retard wrote:
 Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 
 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


 You buy a new one, of course. Why this will never happen is that once a 
 new model of the iShit comes out, as a die hard Apple fan you simply MUST 
 buy it and get rid of the old one. I heard they don't even replace the 
 batteries in Apple's repair services. They just hand you a new phone.


 It's the subscription model for hardware. It also effectively kills the market 
 for used iPods.


Then the model is broken somewhere, because Apple hardware has an incredibly
high resale value.

Sep 02 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Sean Kelly wrote:
 Walter Bright Wrote:
 
 retard wrote:
 Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


 new model of the iShit comes out, as a die hard Apple fan you simply MUST 
 buy it and get rid of the old one. I heard they don't even replace the 
 batteries in Apple's repair services. They just hand you a new phone.


 for used iPods.


 Then the model is broken somewhere, because Apple hardware has an incredibly
high resale value.


I wouldn't buy a used ipod because of the non-replaceable battery. One has no 
idea how much life is left in it. I've had a number of gadgets become useless 
once the battery would no longer take a charge.

Sep 02 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5q1u1$1bf3$1 digitalmars.com...
 Sean Kelly wrote:
 Walter Bright Wrote:

 retard wrote:
 Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


 new model of the iShit comes out, as a die hard Apple fan you simply 
 MUST buy it and get rid of the old one. I heard they don't even replace 
 the batteries in Apple's repair services. They just hand you a new 
 phone.


 market for used iPods.


 Then the model is broken somewhere, because Apple hardware has an 
 incredibly high resale value.


 I wouldn't buy a used ipod because of the non-replaceable battery. One has 
 no idea how much life is left in it. I've had a number of gadgets become 
 useless once the battery would no longer take a charge.


I miss the days when there was such a thing as standard battery types.

[old guy swinging a cane at some kids] Why, when *I* was a lad (*cough* 
*wheeze*), all the battery and device manufacturers...(*hack*)...well they 
got together, and they decided on what they called these "standards". Yup, 
that was the name a' 'em (*hack* *wheeze*) And then, you could go into any 
store...didn't matter where ([blows nose])...and get a gadget. Any company's 
gadget, ain't never mattered. And when the batteries run out...well, we'd go 
and we'd get us s'more batteries. Yessirree. And those batteries would work 
with ([leans foreward]) ANYTHIN'! Ya hear me? Anythin'! Didn't matter where 
ya got 'em or who's name was on 'em . They'd just werk, dernnit. And you 
could bet on that! Yup. ([lights a pipe]) And they didn't cost no arm or 
leg, nether! Or void your warranty. They *made* them to werk that way. Not 
like you kinds these days and yer ten-packs of disposable telleyphones and 
single-use laptops and whatnot. Now go fetch me my pillow, boy, I'm tired!

Sep 02 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I miss the days when there was such a thing as standard battery types.


Me too. My first bad experience with custom batteries was my trusty TI SR-50A 
calculator, vintage 1975. After a year, it would no longer hold a charge, but I 
could still use it with the charger plugged in. And so I used it that way for 
the next 6 years or so. Then the battery got so bad even that didn't work 
anymore, and an EE friend of mine devised a load that behaved like a battery. I 
soldered that in in place of the battery, and got a few more years out of the 
calculator until it completely expired.

Of course, this was in the years before there were desktop computers with 
calculator apps. Gosh I'm old!

(Just for grins, I pulled it out of a drawer and plugged it in. Random led's 
flash. Still busted. Oh well!)

Sep 02 2010

domino <effect none.org> writes:

Sean Kelly Wrote:

 Walter Bright Wrote:
 
 retard wrote:
 Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 
 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


 You buy a new one, of course. Why this will never happen is that once a 
 new model of the iShit comes out, as a die hard Apple fan you simply MUST 
 buy it and get rid of the old one. I heard they don't even replace the 
 batteries in Apple's repair services. They just hand you a new phone.


 It's the subscription model for hardware. It also effectively kills the market 
 for used iPods.


 Then the model is broken somewhere, because Apple hardware has an incredibly
high resale value.


Apple faggots buy legacy expensive hardware even when it's broken because it
compensates the lacking in their dick department.

Sep 06 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:op.vigl6wxpeav7ka localhost.localdomain...
On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message
news:i5ov60$2c5c$1 digitalmars.com...
B. Closed platforms are evil (not to be confused with closed source).

s/evil/stable. It's one of the reasons my previous company was in
business. They built server appliances. When you control everything on
the platform, there's less things to test, less things that can go wrong,
and any bugs you fix for one customer automatically translate to all other
customers.

In theory. In practice, I really don't believe it's quite so simple. And
there's still the ethical issue.

D. Service provider lock-in is evil. My phone works with *any* service
provider (and didn't become uselessly obsolete after a year or two):
http://www.uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=EXAI398 And I
really do like this phone a lot.

Then I guess 99% of phones are evil?

99% of phones? Certainly not.

99% of *cell* phones? Absolutely, yes. Service provider lock-in is one of
the primary reasons I've never bought one.

I also have co-workers and friends who use jailbroken iphones on other
GSM networks.

In an allegedly capitalist society (or "mixed-economy with capitalist
leanings" as the case may be), no one should ever have any reason to devise
or use such hacks for such a basic freedom as consumer choice.

I could never do that with most of my verizon phones.

Verizon is one of the worst cell companies out there anyway.

Besides, who switches phone service providers within the life of a phone?

No one, but you're overlooking the *reasons* that doesn't happen: contract
lock-in and hardware that's not built to last.

Not to mention that the two biggest service providers are incompatible
with eachother, so you couldn't switch between them even if you wanted
to.

If there's a fundamental difference in protocols (as opposed to the
artificially-created incompatibilities), then yes, of course that's fine.
However, outside the cell phone world, such situations are likely to result
in dual-use devices: DVD-R and DVD+R were incompatible, but both widely
used. So instead of going the absolutely idiotic cell-phone route of
*maintaining* a dividing chasm, they just made devices support both. And I
don't believe "extra cost" is necessarily a good argument against this
practice, because of how quickly dual+/- DVD player/burner prices became
dirt cheap.

E. A die-hard Apple fan I know recently showed me his beloved iPad.
Accurately setting the text-cursor was nearly impossible. But that would
have been an incredibly simple fix: Use a screen that worked with a
stylus
or fingernail. There's millions of them out there. Even if that would
have
prevented multi-touch (and I don't know that it would or would not
have),
after using the multi-touch, I felt it added no real value other than a
"gee-whiz" gimmick factor. Stylus/fingernail support would have added at
least some real value.

Your friend is doing it wrong.

Well, I was the one using it and noticing that.

I can accurately set the cursor whenever I want using the magnifying
glass.

See an example here:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781430231295/typing_numbers_and_symbols

That's nothing more than a workaround. How is that *not* worse than being
able to just use the tip of your fingernail?

F. Like all Apple software, the software on the iPad/iPhone are
appallingly slim on settings/options.

*shrug* Most of the settings suit me well. What options do you miss?

I admit, "I don't remember" and "I'd have to use it more to see".

But I have spent a fair amount of time with other Apple products. I even
used OSX as my primary system for about a year or two. And (aside from the
Apple II, which obviously doesn't quite count) there has never been a piece
of Apple software I've used more than a little for which I haven't found
large amounts of things that would be ideal as setting or even obvious as
settings but were sorely lacking. Same goes for features (such as the
iPod/iTunes's inexcusable lack of Vorbis support, and for a *long* time
iTunes couldn't read CD audio if track 1 was data (which was not entirely
uncommon) but everything else could). So judging by the very sparse options
on the iPad, I have fairly strong reason to believe it would be the same.

G. A *phone* without tactile dial buttons is just plain wrong. What is
it
with Apple's long-standing war against tactile feedback? It detracts
from
usability and the only thing it adds is high-tech-gee-whiz-gimmick.

What do you need tactile feedback for?

See, now I just can't even fathom that kind of stance, so it's difficult for
me to argue against it. For me it's just a fundamental thing: With tactile
feedback > without tactile feedback, by a large degree.

You get audible feedback, and the phone number buttons are extremely
responsive.
Plus, if you want to dial without looking at the phone, you can use
voice-activation.

That hardly makes it better to not have tactile feedback.

Blackberry tried a touch-screen with tactile feedback, it sucked.

Which is exactly why it's idiotic for Apple to make the entire interface
touchscreen. You do that and you lose tactile feedback and you can't just
hack it back in. If you took my Palm Pilot, replaced the up/down/left/right
and app buttons with touchscreen input, that would be a step *backwards*.
You'd gain nothing but a questionable "cool factor", and the UI would just
simply be worse.

H. What's there to protect the highly-prominent screen?

The screen is made of pretty durable glass. Like all touch-screen phones,
it's highly advisable to get a screen protector for it. I don't get what
your problem is here, do you want a screen or not? If you do, then what
possible way could a manufacturer design a destruction-proof screen? Put
little airbags around it in case you drop it?

Oh, please, it's not that difficult to come up with ways around it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_SP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_phone

Or a different approach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_PC#Convertibles

And other things can no doubt be thought up, especially if Apple is as
clever as people claim they are.

Or hell, a built-in or even just pre-packaged protector.

This is *far* from an insurmountable obstacle.

I. I don't give a crap how thin they can make it. But Apple seems to
think
I should care. Heck, I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on
something that I'll constantly feel I'm about to accidentally snap in
half. But that's exactly how I felt with the iPad.

This is petty :)

In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other design
compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say, petty.

I can't speak for the ipad, but the iphone feels more durable than any
phone I've had. Maybe you'd prefer this phone:
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20100829/BIZ/708299922/1005/biz

I don't understand what you mean. According to that it's even thinner than
Apple's stuff.

But it does make me think of another thing: a perfectly flat rectangle (with
a touchscreen on the side against your head) is a rather awkward form factor
for a phone (and I have tried such phones, like my sister's Palm...umm, the
other WebOS one that isn't a Pre). My phone is far more comfortable:
http://www.uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=EXAI398

Note that the ipad directly competes with e-Reader devices, so they need
to appeal to those people too.

That still doesn't necessitate "as thin as conceivably possible".

J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?

When I was looking at getting a palm pre as a verizon customer, and I
discovered that palm pre doesn't support voice dialing, I mentioned I'd
just be switching to AT&T for the iPhone. The Verizon guy identified the
battery issue as a reason not to get one. So I looked up the details. I
think apple provides a $100 service to change your battery. I don't know
the details, but I think they just swap out your entire phone. If they
don't swap out your phone, that's crappy, but I can't complain yet because
it hasn't happened to me ;)

$100 is pretty steep, but most phone batteries cost $40-60, so it's not
unreasonable. I think by making the battery internal they can make it
more powerful and make the device smaller (sorry, some of us like the
small size ;).

I honestly find the vast majority of cell phones to be *too* small.
Problematically so. (And yes, I *have* used a number of cell phones, even
though I've never owned one) Small is obviously good to a certain
point...but...well, only to a certain point. Sorry, but some of us don't
like super-small ;)

I also have read if you don't care about your warranty or your warranty is
expired, you can buy an actual iphone battery online for about $20 and a
kit for $10 more so you can change it yourself.

Which only goes to prove that the typical $40-100 you mentioned above *is*
exorbitant.

Furthermore, there is absolutely *no* excuse for a company pushing a device
that you actually have to *hack* just to change the damn battery.

That's a lot of issues for something that's supposedly well-polished.

Wait, most of these aren't actual problems, but just design decisions you
disagree with. In fact, only one is a bug (the iphone 4 antenna problem),
which has already been addressed.

I didn't say it was buggy, I said it wasn't polished. A big part of polish
*is* having solid *design decisions*. Many people seem to think polish is
just gloss, glitz and gimmick.

"I hate how they think they're so cool because their devices are thin"
isn't even a problem, its just a form of name calling.

My stance did *not* amount to that, and I've added another reason above.

Note that for all these "problems" you mentioned, the iphone's good
features are *really* good. Even the tiny details have thought put into
them. One example: I listen to music at work with the enclosed headphones
(w/ mic and volume control inline on the wire), and I listen to it low, so
I can hear when other people want to talk to me. When I get in the car, I
have to turn the volume on the iphone all the way up to normalize the
input to the stereo.

I noticed that once I set the respective volumes, I didn't have to change
them -- the iphone knows the difference between the two headphone types
and auto-adjusts the volume to the last setting. It's one of those
features that is trivial, but just make the iphone a pleasant experience.

Yea, I never said there wasn't anything good about it. Hell, I'll even admit
the iPad was a lot better than I expected. I'd still never buy one though.

Oh, I completely forgot, there's another iPad issue:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/ipad-fails-networking-101-how-to-earn-it-a-passing-grade.ars

The guy I know that has an iPad, he was at a hotel once where there just
happend to be a bunch of other iPad users on the hotel's WiFi network. It
brought the whole network to a crawl - slower than dial-up from what he was
saying.

I'll tell you a few things that I've found annoying:

1. I disabled downloading graphics in emails (as everyone should), but in
emails I know are not spam, I want to download the images. There is no
button for that...

Lack of basic settings, features or any sort of customizability.

2. A couple times, the phone had a hard time connecting to a wireless
network that it previously had no problem with. It mistakes a bad signal
with a bad password, so it asks you for the password. If you don't hit
"cancel" and just hit "ok", it forgets the password that it used to have.
I then have to go look up the password as it's some hex string.

Lack of polish, and frankly, sounds downright rushed.

3. The calendar app doesn't allow you to jump ahead quickly by months or
years. This is annoying when setting a future appointment. You can
quickly scroll via the day, they should give you wheels to do the month
and year also.

Very *blatant* lack of polish. Jumping by month/year is just plain obvious
for any calender app.

It's exactly these sorts of appallingly *obvious* things that Apple
constantly gets wrong anyway, and in fairly large quantities, that make me
say "Apple's sense of 'polish' is little more than gimmicks and graphic
design." Showing attention to detail on one or two things here and there,
but then utterly failing on the basics (consistently) - that's not polish.

-------------------------------
Not sent from an iPhone.

Sep 03 2010

Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:

On 9/3/10 16:51 CDT, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 Well, it's just that they haven't got to it yet, or maybe they don't
 feel it's as important as other issues. If something is 99% perfect and
 you want to point out the 1%, I guess you're entitled to it. But if
 everything else out there is only 90% perfect, then it's just pointless
 griping. It's a phone, it calls just fine (best in-call interface by far
 I've seen), it surfs the internet very well (best web browser experience
 on a phone I've had by far), and has lots of attention to detail. The
 frilly petty stuff isn't what makes the phone bad or good. My opinion is
 that the obvious stuff *does* work well, it's the niche stuff that has
 issues, and they are issues I'm willing to live with.


I totally agree. Before the iPhone, I'd always complained that cell 
phones were designed by villains who made them tedious to use on 
purpose. When criticizing it's always good to keep in mind what baseline 
we're talking about.

Andrei

Sep 03 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 But I have spent a fair amount of time with other Apple products. I even 
 used OSX as my primary system for about a year or two. And (aside from the 
 Apple II, which obviously doesn't quite count) there has never been a piece 
 of Apple software I've used more than a little for which I haven't found 
 large amounts of things that would be ideal as setting or even obvious as 
 settings but were sorely lacking. Same goes for features (such as the 
 iPod/iTunes's inexcusable lack of Vorbis support, and for a *long* time 
 iTunes couldn't read CD audio if track 1 was data (which was not entirely 
 uncommon) but everything else could). So judging by the very sparse options 
 on the iPad, I have fairly strong reason to believe it would be the same.


Yeah, I'm mystified by some of this stuff, too. Like why WMP will not recognize 
CDTEXT info. (I sent them a bug report on it 5 years ago at least.) Like how 
FLAC format does not allow for track info - you have to have a separate "cue" 
file for that. Yee gawds. The image convert program on Linux to convert between 
audio formats loses the tag information in the process.

Sep 03 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

It still makes no sense to have it as a separate file.

Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
 I'm pretty sure that's only for albums which are stored as a single
 flac file. They usually come with a .cue file which stores track
 lengths so you can split up the huge flac file into each track as a
 flac. Then you can have per-track info stored in the flac files
 themselves. As for splitting a .flac file that has a .cue file,
 Medieval cue splitter is probably the best free tool for the job.
 
 On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 3:36 AM, Walter Bright
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:
 Like how FLAC format does not allow for track info - you have to
 have a separate "cue" file for that.

Sep 03 2010

Max Samukha <spam spam.com> writes:

On 04.09.2010 5:50, Walter Bright wrote:
 It still makes no sense to have it as a separate file.


Yeah. Just like it makes no sense to have headers separate from object 
files.

Sep 04 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Max Samukha wrote:
 On 04.09.2010 5:50, Walter Bright wrote:
 It still makes no sense to have it as a separate file.


 Yeah. Just like it makes no sense to have headers separate from object 
 files.


If I invented an object file format, you can bet it'd be quite a bit different 
from existing ones!

Sep 04 2010

Max Samukha <spambox d-coding.com> writes:

On 09/04/2010 08:56 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
 Max Samukha wrote:
 On 04.09.2010 5:50, Walter Bright wrote:
 It still makes no sense to have it as a separate file.


 Yeah. Just like it makes no sense to have headers separate from object
 files.


 If I invented an object file format, you can bet it'd be quite a bit
 different from existing ones!


Hm. From one of your posts I concluded that you are quite comfortable 
with the separation. I apologize if it's not the case.

Sep 06 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
 But, you can't embed multiple track info in mp3's either..?


Isn't it interesting that people keep inventing new audio formats and fail to 
solve obvious fundamental problems with them, like providing fields for things 
like artwork, lyrics, etc.?

Sep 04 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.vig8crpreav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 And OMG, you've never bought a cell phone?  Why are you punishing yourself 
 ;)  I suppose with the attitude you have towards them it would just raise 
 your blood pressure carrying it around...


It would :) But I have other reasons for not having one. One of them is that 
I just don't do anywhere near enough yapping (outside of NG text, of course 
;) ) for it to be worthwhile. Cell companies don't even have a plan that 
would be small enough to be appropriate for me. But the landlines do, and 
with the tiny amount of talking I do, waiting until I get home to use the 
phone is a complete non-issue (especially since I'd be the only cell owner 
in the world to that would refuse to use it while driving). And I don't even 
*want* to be reachable 24/7. Unlimited minutes? Forget it. Back when pay 
phones still existed, my away-from-home phone usage never totaled more than 
$5/yr. Try finding a cell plan that competes with that.

 Your lack of experience with cell phones does not give any boost to your 
 position...


I never said I lacked experience with them, I said I never owned one. I've 
used them plenty, and I've even done WAP/WML sites (I'm glad that's gone!) 
and C/J2ME on Symbian.

 Huh?  Why should verizon go out of its way to allow you to use its phones 
 with other services?  Maybe you don't understand capitalism...


1. Anti-competitive practices are illegal under capitalism (...but then 
again, so is having the government in your company's pocket). In any case, 
the destruction of consumer choice is a hallmark of communism, not 
capitalism. Contrary to popular belief, capitalism doesn't bean bending over 
a table and taking it so big business can make a couple extra bucks.

2. Companies like Verizon doesn't make phones. They pay companies like Nokia 
and Samsung to slap on branded stickers, or just commission them to build 
proprietary phones.

People used to rent phones from the land-line companies. Then cross-provider 
for-purchase phones came around. That was a good thing. Now people want to 
go backwards.

 But cell phones and  computers change so fast that the hardware is 
 obsolete before it's broken.


That just absurd. Just because a newer fizzbarwidget comes out doesn't mean 
you can't keep using your old one...unless you happen to be an Apple 
customer.

Do I need to link to my phone again? I've had that probably close to ten 
years and all the cell phones and smart phone features in the world aren't 
doing a damn thing to make my phone suddenly cease functioning. How would 
they? Seek-and-destroy mini-missiles?

Obsolescence comes from three things:

1. Forced by big business strong-arming people into buying products via 
subscription model.

2. Physical breaking down.

3. The consumer *themself* deciding to get the new one *despite* the old one 
still working fine (If it didn't still work fine, it would fall under #1 or 
#2) .

Notice that "a newer one came out and proceeded to break all the old ones" 
isn't in there.

 However, outside the cell phone world, such situations are likely to 
 result
 in dual-use devices


 There were some phones like that.  Nobody cared ;)


Yea, widespread contract lock-in, along with cable-card-style 
sweeping-it-under-the-rug will do that. (You don't expect me to believe the 
carriers didn't try to steer people away from those phones, do you?)

 I've had two old-style touch screen phones before this.  They suck.  They 
 break, require calibration, and require a stylus.  My samsung phone got to 
 be so inaccurate that I pretty much avoided using the touch screen as much 
 as possible.  I'll pay the price of lost accuracy when positioning a 
 cursor in order to avoid having to pop out a stylus to press on-screen 
 buttons.


*Shrug* Both of my PalmOS devices still work fine, the accuracy always 
worked fine, calibration takes about two seconds and is a one-time deal, I 
never had a problem with a fingernail, and I like syluses (stylii?).

 Which is exactly why it's idiotic for Apple to make the entire interface
 touchscreen.  You do that and you lose tactile feedback and you can't 
 just
 hack it back in. If you took my Palm Pilot, replaced the 
 up/down/left/right
 and app buttons with touchscreen input, that would be a step *backwards*.
 You'd gain nothing but a questionable "cool factor", and the UI would 
 just
 simply be worse.


 But PalmOS is not iOS.  I've had about 5 palms, starting with the palm 
 III, and I like the apple interface significantly more.


Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting iOS used the exact same buttonset as 
PalmOS.

 The screen is made of pretty durable glass.  Like all touch-screen 
 phones,
 it's highly advisable to get a screen protector for it.  I don't get 
 what
 your problem is here, do you want a screen or not?  If you do, then what
 possible way could a manufacturer design a destruction-proof screen? 
 Put
 little airbags around it in case you drop it?


 Oh, please, it's not that difficult to come up with ways around it:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptop
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_SP
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_phone


 So you mean, it should fold?  You can just say that you know :)


While I would consider that an improvement, I was just pointing that out 
your implication that there were no other realistic options was absurd.

 Note that with a folding device, it's probably *less* durable because the 
 folding part can break, and wires can more easily come loose.  Less moving 
 parts == more reliable.


That's kind of like saying "VMs are better than native-code because 
native-code languages tend to lack high-level expressiveness." So what, 
avoid the whole group just because *some* aren't up to par?

I've had a laptop for about 10 years. It's dead now, but the screen and 
hinge still work flawlessly. And I have an original-model DS from one of the 
first few production runs (no more than half a year after initial release). 
To this day, I've never had any hinged-screen-related problem. I've never 
even heard of a case of a non-abused original-model DS "Phat" having hinge 
problems. The DS Lite was known to have that problem, but the fact that the 
particular model makes such a difference indicates that it's *not* an 
inevitable problem for hinged-screens in general. Just like native-code 
languages and high-level features.

 No, but its *far* from a failed design also :)  Protecting the screen from 
 breakage by having a hard cover detracts from the usability.  Besides, I 
 think the phone is pretty darned durable, it's not a cheap feeling thing. 
 I'm not going to throw it against the wall, but I wouldn't do that with a 
 folding phone either.  I also have a rubber protective case on it too (but 
 the screen is exposed).


You've never had stray button presses? Anyway, I'm just saying, 
exposed-screen isn't perfect.

 In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other design
 compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say, petty.


 What compromises?  What is it missing that could be there if it were 
 thicker?


Compromises that often need to be made for ultra-thin devices:

- Low battery life.
- Inability to self-service the battery.
- Low storage space due to lack of room for hard drive.
- Reduced variety of i/o ports.
- Reduced or eliminated potential for expandability.

That's just off the top of my head. There's probably others.

 Note that the ipad directly competes with e-Reader devices, so they need
 to appeal to those people too.


 That still doesn't necessitate "as thin as conceivably possible".


 It doesn't necessitate it, but it does score points with that crowd. 
 People want a thin book-sized device to read all their books.


Heh, well, most of the dead-tree books I own or have read are far thicker 
than any ultra-thin device (0.75" to 1.5"). And a lot of them have roughly 
8.5"x11" pages, which is bigger than any book reader I've seen. I think my 
old Pentium 2 laptop would technically qualify as "book-sized" ;) (I have 
books that are still bigger than it.)

 You might like this: 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Cm8MFqxWw&feature=fvst


Heh, yea, that's good. The MacBook Wheel was really good too. Funnier, but 
didn't make quite the variety of good jabs as that Mactini does :)

 I agree, smaller isn't always better.  But I mean smaller as in, if it was 
 an external battery, then it would have to be larger than you would like. 
 The iPhone size isn't too small.


I do agree the iPhone isn't too small. But I'd rather have a 1" thick 
handheld with a hard drive, buttons, good variety of i/o and a replaceable 
battery than a 0.3" with none of that.

If some company took the first-generation Zune, ripped out all the arbitrary 
lock-outs, added a stylus touchscreen and maybe a convertible-tablet-style 
keyboard, and added PDA software, I would buy it in a heartbeat (well, 
poverty notwithstanding ;) )

Or, better yet, if they took the best features of the Palm Zire 71 and 72, 
updated it for PalmOS 6 (not WebOS), gave it roughly the size of the 
original Zune, a replaceable battery, and tossed in a hard drive and an 
option to go back to v1 of Grafitti, I'd be in love :)

 No, polish is making something behave the way it should behave.  This 
 includes fixing bugs and usability issues, but not "designs you don't 
 like."


Polish is attention to detail and a lack of (metaphorical) rough edges. I 
still maintain that implies quality in both technical *and* design issues, 
but I suppose we're both running out of ways to effectively debate the 
meaning of "polish".

 Well, I did misunderstand your stance, but my point is that "thin is 
 better" *is* a major selling point for most people.


I'm convinced that's mostly just because they've been lead to blindly 
believe that "thinner is always better" and don't think for themselves.

If you start asking random people if wireless or wired is better, most won't 
hesitate to say "wireless". If they're asked to explain why, they'll either 
say something about "convenience", or in a lot of cases (and I've observed 
this) they'll admit they believe wireless is better just because that's what 
they've heard. But *very* few people will know that wired is generally 
faster, more reliable, and more secure. But they don't know that because all 
they've heard is "Wireless wireless wireless!! Get yours here! Cheap! 
Everyone else wants wireless, you should too!" Oh really? They do? Well 
shit! I want to be just like all the other people that the obviously biased 
ad told me about!

I see the same happening with size and thinness. People just assume it's 
better because all the marketing subtly implies it's inherently better. It's 
brainwash marketing, and that people are stupid enough to fall for it 
doesn't excuse it.

 Oh, one other thing that's annoying, but I think it's because of pressure 
 from the phone companies who want to charge you an extra $15/month for 
 "enterprise access", it doesn't read ics calendar appointments unless you 
 use microsoft exchange.  That is *extremely* crappy and pointless.


I've had an eye on the cell scene since pagers died out, and this sort of 
thing is one constant that never seems to go away. It'll change forms - at 
one point it'll be the ringtones, then maybe your photos, maybe your 
appointment book, or maybe something else. But there's always something they 
arbitrarily restrict and then charge for. I don't reward such scams by 
buying into them. PalmOS never pulled that crap. Desktops, laptops and 
netbooks don't either.

 Compare this to my list of issues with Windows mobile 6, you will find 
 they haven't even opened the polish can yet :)


If someone lined up twenty piles of dog doo, and one of them seemed less 
stinky then the others, I'm not going to jump up and say "This one smells 
great!". Even if the iPhone is the best cell phone in history (and I'm not 
saying I think it is or isn't), that's still how I see the situation.

Sep 04 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

 "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message


 
 1. Forced by big business strong-arming people into buying products
 via subscription model.
 
 2. Physical breaking down.
 
 3. The consumer *themself* deciding to get the new one *despite* the
 old one still working fine (If it didn't still work fine, it would
 fall under #1 or #2) .
 
 Notice that "a newer one came out and proceeded to break all the old
 ones" isn't in there.
 


However #3 can easily turn into the old one being such a small fraction of 
the market that it's not worth anyone's time to support it.

 In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other
 design compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say, petty.
 


 thicker?
 


 
 - Low storage space due to lack of room for hard drive.


http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=32+gb+micro+sd&x=0&y=0

 - Reduced variety of i/o ports.


In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a cell phone needs 
more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports.

 - Reduced or eliminated potential for expandability.


Aside from a memeory card, name one things you've ever known someone else 
to want to add to a phone?


-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 06 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

BCS wrote:
 Aside from a memeory card, name one things you've ever known someone 
 else to want to add to a phone?


A keyboard.

Sep 06 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Walter,

 BCS wrote:
 
 Aside from a memeory card, name one things you've ever known someone
 else to want to add to a phone?
 


 


People want a phone that has a key board from the get go. How many people 
actually want to /add/ one to the phone they have?

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 06 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

BCS wrote:
 People want a phone that has a key board from the get go. How many 
 people actually want to /add/ one to the phone they have?



I like being able now and then to attach a full size keyboard.

Sep 07 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
news:a6268ff1b9068cd1bc36b696570 news.digitalmars.com...
Hello Nick,

In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other
design compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say, petty.

thicker?

- Low storage space due to lack of room for hard drive.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=32+gb+micro+sd&x=0&y=0

Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already too small
if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now MicroSD, well I
can't say anything about it without raising my blood pressure...

Besides:
http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?N=4294966955+4294953566&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct&

- Reduced variety of i/o ports.

In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a cell phone
needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports.

I consider there to be a big difference between a cell phone and a smart
phone. A cell phone is for making calls, and for those, I agree with you.
But a smartphone is a PDA that also makes cell calls, and that changes
things. Plus, I was kind of talking both smartphone and iPad-style stuff.

- Reduced or eliminated potential for expandability.

Aside from a memeory card, name one things you've ever known someone else
to want to add to a phone?

- Headphone jack
- Audio line-input
- User's choice of portable Keyboard
- TV Out (for picture/video-viewing, and there's a million different kinds
of TV-Out these days)
- GPS
- Back before built-in cameras became common, I could have said "camera".

All just off the top of my head, there's probably others.

Sep 06 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message
news:i63jvb$29fu$1 digitalmars.com...
"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
news:a6268ff1b9068cd1bc36b696570 news.digitalmars.com...
Hello Nick,

In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other
design compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say, petty.

thicker?

- Low storage space due to lack of room for hard drive.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=32+gb+micro+sd&x=0&y=0

Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already too
small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now MicroSD,
well I can't say anything about it without raising my blood pressure...

Besides:
http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?N=4294966955+4294953566&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct&

- Reduced variety of i/o ports.

In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a cell phone
needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports.

- Reduced or eliminated potential for expandability.

Aside from a memeory card, name one things you've ever known someone else
to want to add to a phone?

All just off the top of my head, there's probably others.

And domain-specific things, like various kinds of sensors for in-field
scientific data gathering, or barcode scanning, for instance.

Sep 06 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message 
news:i63k4d$29qm$1 digitalmars.com...
 "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message 
 news:i63jvb$29fu$1 digitalmars.com...
 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message 
 news:a6268ff1b9068cd1bc36b696570 news.digitalmars.com...
 Aside from a memeory card, name one things you've ever known someone 
 else to want to add to a phone?


 - Headphone jack
 - Audio line-input
 - User's choice of portable Keyboard
 - TV Out (for picture/video-viewing, and there's a million different 
 kinds of TV-Out these days)
 - GPS
 - Back before built-in cameras became common, I could have said "camera".

 All just off the top of my head, there's probably others.


 And domain-specific things, like various kinds of sensors for in-field 
 scientific data gathering, or barcode scanning, for instance.


*Alternate* types of memory card...

Sep 06 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

 "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message
 news:i63k4d$29qm$1 digitalmars.com...
 
 "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message
 news:i63jvb$29fu$1 digitalmars.com...
 
 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9068cd1bc36b696570 news.digitalmars.com...
 
 Aside from a memeory card, name one things you've ever known
 someone else to want to add to a phone?
 


 - Audio line-input
 - User's choice of portable Keyboard
 - TV Out (for picture/video-viewing, and there's a million different
 kinds of TV-Out these days)
 - GPS
 - Back before built-in cameras became common, I could have said
 "camera".
 All just off the top of my head, there's probably others.
 


 in-field scientific data gathering, or barcode scanning, for
 instance.
 


 


Consumer choice (in form factors) is a good thing for new markets, but at 
some point it just drive up prices and causes compatibility problems. At 
some point it's cheaper to just pick a good enough standard and make it a 
commodity.


-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 06 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
news:a6268ff1b9068cd1bc36b696570 news.digitalmars.com...

Hello Nick,

In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other
design compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say,
petty.

were thicker?

- Low storage space due to lack of room for hard drive.

eywords=32+gb+micro+sd&x=0&y=0

small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now
MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my blood
pressure...

My point was that space (volume) is not what limits how much space (GB) a
phone has.

Besides:
http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?N=4294966955+42
94953566&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct&

If I wanted more sortage than I can put on flash cards, I'd breing a lap-top.
OTOH: this is the class of phone I use:
http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/Motorola-Stature-i9-US-EN

- Reduced variety of i/o ports.

phone needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports.

smart phone. A cell phone is for making calls, and for those, I agree
with you. But a smartphone is a PDA that also makes cell calls, and
that changes things. Plus, I was kind of talking both smartphone and
iPad-style stuff.

In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a smart phone/PDA
needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports. You might, just maybe, talk me into
believing that an HDMI port could be handy. But that would really push it.

- Reduced or eliminated potential for expandability.

else to want to add to a phone?

- Audio line-input

Many have the first and the second wouldn't be hard to add to the same jack

- User's choice of portable Keyboard

USB

- TV Out (for picture/video-viewing, and there's a million different
kinds
of TV-Out these days)

USB can do that, and at the image quality a smart phone can drive it wouldn't
be a bottle neck.

- GPS

You would be hard pressed to find a (cell) phone that doesn't have that
hardware
already.

- Back before built-in cameras became common, I could have said
"camera".
All just off the top of my head, there's probably others.

And as I pointed out to Walter, are those things you want to ADD or do you
want them in there to begin with?

--
... <IXOYE><

Sep 06 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
news:a6268ff1b9958cd1bfa012970d8 news.digitalmars.com...
Hello Nick,

Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already too
small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now
MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my blood
pressure...

My point was that space (volume) is not what limits how much space (GB) a
phone has.

And my link dispelled that myth. Try putting 200GB+ into a MicroSD form
factor at the cost of a 2.5" HDD. Yea, eventually that'll happen, but by
then I could get a HDD many times bigger than that for the same price.

Besides:
http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?N=4294966955+42
94953566&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct&

If I wanted more sortage than I can put on flash cards, I'd breing a
lap-top. OTOH: this is the class of phone I use:
http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/Motorola-Stature-i9-US-EN

You're not everyone. Some people would rather have HDD-level storage
capacity.

In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a smart
phone/PDA needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports. You might, just maybe,
talk me into believing that an HDMI port could be handy. But that would
really push it.

Ugh, I hate HDMI, but that's a whole other discussion ;)

- TV Out (for picture/video-viewing, and there's a million different
kinds
of TV-Out these days)

USB can do that, and at the image quality a smart phone can drive it
wouldn't be a bottle neck.

News to me.

- Back before built-in cameras became common, I could have said
"camera".
All just off the top of my head, there's probably others.

And as I pointed out to Walter, are those things you want to ADD or do you
want them in there to begin with?

1. I don't want to pay for features I don't need, or don't need right away.
And I'm the only one who can effectively decide what I do or don't need/want
and when. Therefore, a system that's based around expandability beats the
hell out of "You get whatever we choose to pre-package together for you."

2. Expandability provides a level of future-proofing (much moreso if you
don't limit it to USB). Unlike all the sheep out there, I'm not interested
in disposable gadgets.

Sep 06 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9958cd1bfa012970d8 news.digitalmars.com...
 
 Hello Nick,
 
 Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already
 too small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now
 MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my blood
 pressure...
 


 (GB) a phone has.
 


 form factor at the cost of a 2.5" HDD. Yea, eventually that'll happen,
 but by then I could get a HDD many times bigger than that for the same
 price.
 


I wouldn't. I'd put it in a package about 4-5 times as big and mount it on 
the PC board. Besides, what the heck do you need more than about 32GB for 
on a phone? If you need to shoot that much video, get a real camera!

 Besides:
 http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?N=4294966955+
 42 94953566&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct&
 


 lap-top. OTOH: this is the class of phone I use:
 http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services
 /Mobile-Phones/Motorola-Stature-i9-US-EN
 


 capacity.
 


1) I don't want an HDD in my phone. Moving parts? Ouch!
2) That will always be cheaper as an external HDD. Some people will want 
to use their phone as a weapon, should that also be a design criteria?

 In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a smart
 phone/PDA needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports. You might, just
 maybe, talk me into believing that an HDMI port could be handy. But
 that would really push it.
 


 


I just picked the smallest video connector I could think of.

 - TV Out (for picture/video-viewing, and there's a million different
 kinds
 of TV-Out these days)


 wouldn't be a bottle neck.
 


 


Which part:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=usb+video+card

http://www.acousticpc.com/images/a_zalman_rhs88_heatsink_instaled_views.jpg

(yes, I know you don't need that big a heatsink but, video sinks lots of 
watts.

 - Back before built-in cameras became common, I could have said
 "camera".
 All just off the top of my head, there's probably others.


 do you want them in there to begin with?
 


 away. And I'm the only one who can effectively decide what I do or
 don't need/want and when. Therefore, a system that's based around
 expandability beats the hell out of "You get whatever we choose to
 pre-package together for you."


YAGNI: The trade off for expandability is increased size (off hand, I'd say 
2-3x) and cost (??x) and MOST people will never use it. And I'm including 
the people who think they will like you. Unless you can say up front what 
you will be adding and when, I'd bet money you would never add anything to 
a phone. OTOH factory options... Maybe.

 
 2. Expandability provides a level of future-proofing (much moreso if
 you don't limit it to USB). Unlike all the sheep out there, I'm not
 interested in disposable gadgets.


Neither am I and I still think you are on a wild goose chase.
-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 06 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ff1b9ca8cd1c2c66c866ba news.digitalmars.com...
 Hello Nick,

 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9958cd1bfa012970d8 news.digitalmars.com...

 Hello Nick,

 Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already
 too small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now
 MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my blood
 pressure...


 (GB) a phone has.


 form factor at the cost of a 2.5" HDD. Yea, eventually that'll happen,
 but by then I could get a HDD many times bigger than that for the same
 price.


 I wouldn't. I'd put it in a package about 4-5 times as big and mount it on 
 the PC board. Besides, what the heck do you need more than about 32GB for 
 on a phone? If you need to shoot that much video, get a real camera!


Like I said, there's two kinds of "phones": "phone" phones, and PDA 
"phones". For the former, I *still* agree with you. For the latter: If I 
were going to blow the money on a "smartphone" (as they're calling them now) 
or on some sort of iPad-like device (which is the other thing I've been 
talking about), I would expect it to replace a dedicated camera and a 
dedicated portable music player. And they can easily do so just by slapping 
a HDD in there. (BTW, by current music player, which also does video - a 
feature I rather like is 40GB and I find it uncomfortably tight. Plus, with 
that tightness, I can't really use it as an external HDD, which I used to 
do, and found very helpful.) I'm not interested in toting around twenty 
different gadgets. There can be only one!

Sep 07 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9ca8cd1c2c66c866ba news.digitalmars.com...
 
 Hello Nick,
 
 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9958cd1bfa012970d8 news.digitalmars.com...
 Hello Nick,
 
 Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already
 too small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway.
 Now MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my
 blood pressure...
 


 (GB) a phone has.
 


 form factor at the cost of a 2.5" HDD. Yea, eventually that'll
 happen, but by then I could get a HDD many times bigger than that
 for the same price.
 


 it on the PC board. Besides, what the heck do you need more than
 about 32GB for on a phone? If you need to shoot that much video, get
 a real camera!
 


 "phones". For the former, I *still* agree with you. For the latter: If
 I were going to blow the money on a "smartphone" (as they're calling
 them now) or on some sort of iPad-like device (which is the other
 thing I've been talking about), I would expect it to replace a
 dedicated camera and a dedicated portable music player. And they can
 easily do so just by slapping a HDD in there. (BTW, by current music
 player, which also does video - a feature I rather like is 40GB and I
 find it uncomfortably tight. Plus, with that tightness, I can't really
 use it as an external HDD, which I used to do, and found very
 helpful.) I'm not interested in toting around twenty different
 gadgets. There can be only one!
 


Stuff a person has to store expands to fit the space they have to store it 
in. It's some kind of immutable law of nature that transcends computers and 
closet space. If you had 4.5TB of storage space, then you'd just want to 
store 5TB. The solution isn't more storage space as that just stalls the 
problem for about 10min/Mb.


-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 07 2010

domino <effect sitemine.org> writes:

BCS Wrote:

 Hello Nick,
 
 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9ca8cd1c2c66c866ba news.digitalmars.com...
 
 Hello Nick,
 
 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9958cd1bfa012970d8 news.digitalmars.com...
 Hello Nick,
 
 Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already
 too small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway.
 Now MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my
 blood pressure...
 


 (GB) a phone has.
 


 form factor at the cost of a 2.5" HDD. Yea, eventually that'll
 happen, but by then I could get a HDD many times bigger than that
 for the same price.
 


 it on the PC board. Besides, what the heck do you need more than
 about 32GB for on a phone? If you need to shoot that much video, get
 a real camera!
 


 "phones". For the former, I *still* agree with you. For the latter: If
 I were going to blow the money on a "smartphone" (as they're calling
 them now) or on some sort of iPad-like device (which is the other
 thing I've been talking about), I would expect it to replace a
 dedicated camera and a dedicated portable music player. And they can
 easily do so just by slapping a HDD in there. (BTW, by current music
 player, which also does video - a feature I rather like is 40GB and I
 find it uncomfortably tight. Plus, with that tightness, I can't really
 use it as an external HDD, which I used to do, and found very
 helpful.) I'm not interested in toting around twenty different
 gadgets. There can be only one!
 


 Stuff a person has to store expands to fit the space they have to store it 
 in. It's some kind of immutable law of nature that transcends computers and 
 closet space. If you had 4.5TB of storage space, then you'd just want to 
 store 5TB. The solution isn't more storage space as that just stalls the 
 problem for about 10min/Mb.


That's only true when you're working for Google and steal personal wifi data.
Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard movie/audio
CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection. According to DMCA breaking
the encryption is illegal. Online shops only rent the same material. Software
developers may need more space, but 99.9% of people are not software
developers. Thus q.e.d, you don't need that much space.

Sep 07 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

domino wrote:
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard movie/audio
 CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.


CDs are not copy protected.

I'm running around .5 TB these days, and none of it is DRM'd material. (Family 
movies eat up space like you wouldn't believe, too.)

Sep 07 2010

domino <effect sitemine.org> writes:

Walter Bright Wrote:

 domino wrote:
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard movie/audio
 CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.


 CDs are not copy protected.


False.

I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg rootkit
protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At least the cactus
shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on purpose and it's audible even
with a legal authentic cd audio player. If you place these discs in a standard
PC cd/dvd drive, it just spins and spins and spins and spins and the OS either
hangs or refuses to open the cd tray. I'm 100% sure you are not allowed to
break these.

Sep 07 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"domino" <effect sitemine.org> wrote in message 
news:i666vt$1581$1 digitalmars.com...
 Walter Bright Wrote:

 domino wrote:
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard movie/audio
 CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.


 CDs are not copy protected.


 False.

 I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg rootkit 
 protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At least the 
 cactus shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on purpose and it's 
 audible even with a legal authentic cd audio player. If you place these 
 discs in a standard PC cd/dvd drive, it just spins and spins and spins and 
 spins and the OS either hangs or refuses to open the cd tray. I'm 100% 
 sure you are not allowed to break these.


The vast majority of CDs don't have that. I have approx 250 commercial audio 
CDs, and not a single one of them has any DRM. And if I did want something 
that only came on a DRMed CD, I'd just say "Fuck you Sony" and pirate it.

Sep 07 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 The vast majority of CDs don't have that. I have approx 250 commercial audio 
 CDs, and not a single one of them has any DRM. And if I did want something 
 that only came on a DRMed CD, I'd just say "Fuck you Sony" and pirate it. 


I have around 400 CDs, and also exactly zero of them have any form of DRM on 
them. I ripped them with Windows Media Player, not exactly a cracking tool.

Sep 07 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

 "domino" <effect sitemine.org> wrote in message
 news:i666vt$1581$1 digitalmars.com...
 
 Walter Bright Wrote:
 
 domino wrote:
 
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard
 movie/audio CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.
 


 


 
 I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg
 rootkit protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At
 least the cactus shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on
 purpose and it's audible even with a legal authentic cd audio player.
 If you place these discs in a standard PC cd/dvd drive, it just spins
 and spins and spins and spins and the OS either hangs or refuses to
 open the cd tray. I'm 100% sure you are not allowed to break these.
 


 audio CDs, and not a single one of them has any DRM. And if I did want
 something that only came on a DRMed CD, I'd just say "Fuck you Sony"
 and pirate it.
 


I'd buy the disk, put it on the shelf and let it collect dust with the rest 
and download the tracks I really care about.
-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 07 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ff1bb248cd1ce96dc11abc news.digitalmars.com...
 Hello Nick,

 "domino" <effect sitemine.org> wrote in message
 news:i666vt$1581$1 digitalmars.com...

 Walter Bright Wrote:

 domino wrote:

 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard
 movie/audio CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.





 I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg
 rootkit protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At
 least the cactus shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on
 purpose and it's audible even with a legal authentic cd audio player.
 If you place these discs in a standard PC cd/dvd drive, it just spins
 and spins and spins and spins and the OS either hangs or refuses to
 open the cd tray. I'm 100% sure you are not allowed to break these.


 audio CDs, and not a single one of them has any DRM. And if I did want
 something that only came on a DRMed CD, I'd just say "Fuck you Sony"
 and pirate it.


 I'd buy the disk, put it on the shelf and let it collect dust with the 
 rest and download the tracks I really care about.


That's what I've mostly been doing lately (Except I rip the disc. Everything 
online is MP3 - meh).

Sep 08 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1bb248cd1ce96dc11abc news.digitalmars.com...
 
 Hello Nick,
 
 "domino" <effect sitemine.org> wrote in message
 news:i666vt$1581$1 digitalmars.com...
 Walter Bright Wrote:
 
 domino wrote:
 
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard
 movie/audio CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.
 


 


 
 I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg
 rootkit protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At
 least the cactus shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on
 purpose and it's audible even with a legal authentic cd audio
 player. If you place these discs in a standard PC cd/dvd drive, it
 just spins and spins and spins and spins and the OS either hangs or
 refuses to open the cd tray. I'm 100% sure you are not allowed to
 break these.
 


 commercial audio CDs, and not a single one of them has any DRM. And
 if I did want something that only came on a DRMed CD, I'd just say
 "Fuck you Sony" and pirate it.
 


 the rest and download the tracks I really care about.
 


 Everything online is MP3 - meh).
 


That's what I do, assuming I can read the disk.

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 09 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello domino,

 Walter Bright Wrote:
 
 domino wrote:
 
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard
 movie/audio CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.
 


 


 
 I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg
 rootkit protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At
 least the cactus shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on purpose
 and it's audible even with a legal authentic cd audio player. If you
 place these discs in a standard PC cd/dvd drive, it just spins and
 spins and spins and spins and the OS either hangs or refuses to open
 the cd tray. I'm 100% sure you are not allowed to break these.
 


I've never owned a CD player that wasn't a CD-ROM drive. I've never come 
across a disk I couldn't play.

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 07 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

retard wrote:
 You must be young then. I got my first CD-ROM drive with my Pentium 75. 
 The first 1x external CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive. I think one 
 used to cost around $600..800.


Eh, my first CD-ROM drive was $1100 or so.


 Before 1994 I only had a CD walkman and a moderately cheap entry level hi-fi
system.


I had a Sony Discman back in the early 80's. Still have it somewhere.

Sep 08 2010

Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com> writes:

retard schrieb:
 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:15:15 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
 
 retard wrote:
 You must be young then. I got my first CD-ROM drive with my Pentium 75.
 The first 1x external CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive. I think one
 used to cost around $600..800.




 Was it that expensive? Anyway, the world has changed so much. You can 
 probably find a decent dvd+rw drive for $30 or $40 now. My original point 
 was that people like us who listened to CDs in the 80's quite likely 
 still possess real hi-fi cd players or integrated cd/amp/tuner systems. 
 These systems are unaffected by the cd copy protection methods. 


Not necessarily - I've heard of "copy protections" (they should actually 
be called listening preventions) that caused trouble on old as well as 
some new CD players (not CD ROM drives).
Also Car CD player seem to be massively affected by such problems.
Why the hell should someone buy a CD he can't listen to in his car?!

I'd never buy a CD with copy protection - I like to rip them so I don't 
have to mess around with the discs (and also my car radio has a USB port 
and plays MP3s).
As mentioned before ripping copy protected CDs is illegal (also in 
Germany where I live) - so if I gotta do something illegal just to 
listen to the CD I just payed 15EUR for I can as well download it for free.

Fortunately the kind of music I listen to (Heavy Metal) is mostly 
unaffected by copy protection and DRM on CDs.
Metallica is probably one of the few exceptions, because they're so big 
or at the wrong lable or something.

Sep 08 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Daniel Gibson" <metalcaedes gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:i69lsq$20gt$2 digitalmars.com...
 Fortunately the kind of music I listen to (Heavy Metal) is mostly 
 unaffected by copy protection and DRM on CDs.
 Metallica is probably one of the few exceptions, because they're so big or 
 at the wrong lable or something.


Metallica are well-known for being strongly against file sharing. There was 
even a big PR fiasco a while back where they sued a number of their fans 
over it. So I'm sure they're pro-DRM. (I'm more a Megadeth kinda guy, anyway 
:P ) But yea, it's mostly just whatever mainstream pop/rock the labels 
(mainly Sony) are heavily pushing that get the DRM. Heavy metal is sort of 
non-mainstream almost by definition.

Sep 08 2010

Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com> writes:

retard schrieb:
 Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:55:46 +0200, Daniel Gibson wrote:
 
 retard schrieb:
 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:15:15 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

 retard wrote:
 You must be young then. I got my first CD-ROM drive with my Pentium
 75. The first 1x external CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive. I
 think one used to cost around $600..800.




 probably find a decent dvd+rw drive for $30 or $40 now. My original
 point was that people like us who listened to CDs in the 80's quite
 likely still possess real hi-fi cd players or integrated cd/amp/tuner
 systems. These systems are unaffected by the cd copy protection
 methods.


 be called listening preventions) that caused trouble on old as well as
 some new CD players (not CD ROM drives). Also Car CD player seem to be
 massively affected by such problems. Why the hell should someone buy a
 CD he can't listen to in his car?!


 Ah, true. The reason (IIRC) was that the DRMed CDs also had a data cd TOC 
 or multiple sessions or something like that. If the car CD player 
 supported MP3 CDs via the data cd format, that made it "too intelligent" 
 to play the disks.


Yeah, and there also was this tric with manipulating the CIRC checksums, 
resulting in read errors that are ignored/interpolated by (most?) CD 
players, but CD ROM drives fail and apparently car radios fail as well.
Those "CDs" are not CDs anyway, because they violate the red book standard.

Sep 09 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i69g05$2cbt$2 digitalmars.com...
 retard wrote:
 You must be young then. I got my first CD-ROM drive with my Pentium 75. 
 The first 1x external CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive. I think one 
 used to cost around $600..800.


 Eh, my first CD-ROM drive was $1100 or so.


 Before 1994 I only had a CD walkman and a moderately cheap entry level 
 hi-fi system.


 I had a Sony Discman back in the early 80's. Still have it somewhere.


I must be young. My first CD player was a $200 (IIRC) Sega CD (Mega CD for 
those outside the states and Canada).

Sep 08 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I must be young. My first CD player was a $200 (IIRC) Sega CD (Mega CD for 
 those outside the states and Canada).


I also remember paying $600 for 64K (that's K, not M) of memory. It was worth 
every penny at the time, too!

Sep 09 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i6a576$19jv$2 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I must be young. My first CD player was a $200 (IIRC) Sega CD (Mega CD 
 for those outside the states and Canada).


 I also remember paying $600 for 64K (that's K, not M) of memory. It was 
 worth every penny at the time, too!


Heh. The most I ever paid per-byte was $180 for 4MB.

Sep 09 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of 
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data side 
 of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some slight 
 distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I would 
 expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues though.  It's 
 not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who would notice?

Sep 08 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:58:39 -0400, Walter Bright 
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:
 
 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of 
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data 
 side of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some 
 slight distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I 
 would expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues 
 though.  It's not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who would 
 notice?


 You notice in the cymbals the most :)  And Ulrich uses a lot of cymbals.
 
 But you are right, the guitars aren't as noticeable (you can still hear 
 it though).



Back in the 80's, it wasn't unusual for a compiler vendor to release a
"student" 
version or some such, that was missing a feature like floating point. The 
problem, though, was that the compiler would earn a reputation as not having 
floating point and people would turn elsewhere when they would want to buy a 
professional compiler.

In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of being labeled 
a band with lousy sound.

Sep 08 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

retard wrote:
 I doubt they have any power to fight the record company in these kinds of 
 issues. A friend of a friend signed a deal with a record company owned by 
 a multinational mother record company. Now they are told where to play 
 concerts, how the cd distribution is organized, and when they are 
 supposed to release the next two albums. That's like slavery.


To put it mildly, to say such a thing is like slavery is patently absurd. 
Contract or no, a record company cannot make you do anything, regardless of
what 
you signed. (Sign a contract with the military, however, and they *can* make
you.)

Secondly, people ought to read contracts before they sign them. It's their own 
fault if they don't. Contracts with children aren't legally binding because 
children are not considered legally competent. Adults are.

Third, record company contracts are well known and you can google them. There's 
no reason anyone should be surprised.


 Another thing is, I doubt the degraded audio quality matters as much as 
 the pesky DRM protection scheme. I once had few of these sony key2audio 
 (iirc) discs. They refused to play on windows so I just made an illegal 
 copy for backup purposes and used that instead. There are far worse 
 things than CD DRM systems decreasing the audio quality, e.g. the 
 loudness war, the audio artefacts in mp3 distributions, and terrible 
 (it's subjective) effects like autotune in modern pop music..


I always get the old versions of CDs before they were remastered :-) as I don't 
care for the audio leveling.

Sep 08 2010

Eric Poggel <dnewsgroup2 yage3d.net> writes:

On 9/8/2010 11:15 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
 Contracts with children aren't legally binding because children are not
 considered legally competent.


I may have to find some new minions.

Sep 08 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i69jg8$2muo$1 digitalmars.com...
 retard wrote:
 I doubt they have any power to fight the record company in these kinds of 
 issues. A friend of a friend signed a deal with a record company owned by 
 a multinational mother record company. Now they are told where to play 
 concerts, how the cd distribution is organized, and when they are 
 supposed to release the next two albums. That's like slavery.


 To put it mildly, to say such a thing is like slavery is patently absurd. 
 Contract or no, a record company cannot make you do anything, regardless 
 of what you signed. (Sign a contract with the military, however, and they 
 *can* make you.)

 Secondly, people ought to read contracts before they sign them. It's their 
 own fault if they don't.


Until recent years, if you wanted to be a successful musician (aside from 
scoring, and there's really only so much demand for that) you *had* to sign 
one of those constracts. There was no choice - they had an oligopoly on the 
entire market, and if you wanted in they had you by the balls.

 Contracts with children aren't legally binding because children are not 
 considered legally competent. Adults are.


I've seen very few adults I'd consider "competent", but oh well ;)

 I always get the old versions of CDs before they were remastered :-) as I 
 don't care for the audio leveling.


I've always been unclear on what that is. Is that where they make the 
volume-level relatively consistent? (If so, then I wish the DVD companies 
would start doing it. I hate when I have to turn the volume *waaay* up just 
to hear the dialog and then *waaay* down again to not bust my eardrums as 
soon as music or sound effects come on. And then tough shit whenever a 
character talks during an action scene. Never had to deal with that crap on 
VHS.)

Sep 08 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
 Secondly, people ought to read contracts before they sign them. It's their 
 own fault if they don't.


 Until recent years, if you wanted to be a successful musician (aside from 
 scoring, and there's really only so much demand for that) you *had* to sign 
 one of those constracts. There was no choice - they had an oligopoly on the 
 entire market, and if you wanted in they had you by the balls.


Of course there was a choice. You could go with a major and get a tiny cut, or 
an independent with a larger cut, or do it yourself and keep 100%.


 Contracts with children aren't legally binding because children are not 
 considered legally competent. Adults are.


 I've seen very few adults I'd consider "competent", but oh well ;)


A marketplace is impossible without the ability to make binding contracts. 
Nobody is going to invest in you or lend you money if you can just walk away 
from it later if you change your mind.


 I always get the old versions of CDs before they were remastered :-) as I 
 don't care for the audio leveling.


 I've always been unclear on what that is.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Marketing

And here's why I shoot for the old ones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cd_loudness_trend-something.gif

Sep 08 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i69vov$o6e$1 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 Secondly, people ought to read contracts before they sign them. It's 
 their own fault if they don't.


 Until recent years, if you wanted to be a successful musician (aside from 
 scoring, and there's really only so much demand for that) you *had* to 
 sign one of those constracts. There was no choice - they had an oligopoly 
 on the entire market, and if you wanted in they had you by the balls.


 Of course there was a choice. You could go with a major and get a tiny 
 cut, or an independent with a larger cut, or do it yourself and keep 100%.


100% of nothing is still nothing. Only the labels had all the means of 
largescale marketing and distribution. These days there's internet.

 Contracts with children aren't legally binding because children are not 
 considered legally competent. Adults are.


 I've seen very few adults I'd consider "competent", but oh well ;)


 A marketplace is impossible without the ability to make binding contracts. 
 Nobody is going to invest in you or lend you money if you can just walk 
 away from it later if you change your mind.


I wasn't arguing against contracts, I was diving further off-topic by using 
"competent" as a springboard for bitching about...well, general lack of 
competence among most people.

 I always get the old versions of CDs before they were remastered :-) as 
 I don't care for the audio leveling.


 I've always been unclear on what that is.



 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Marketing

 And here's why I shoot for the old ones:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cd_loudness_trend-something.gif


Ahh, yea, that's what I thought. Maybe it's gone too far with CDs, I dunno. 
Never noticed a difference between original and remastered myself (but I've 
never gone and compared them side-by-side). I do think DVD Video creators 
have gone waaay to far the other way though, because of the 
"Volume-fiddling-test" reason I mentioned before: If I set the volume to a 
comfortable level, and the damn volume keeps changing anyway, enough that I 
have to re-adjust over and over back to where I had it, then there's too 
fucking much dynamic range.

I once recorded an Elvis Vinyl my dad had to put on a CD for him. There was 
one song (forget what it was) that had a spot in the middle that was SO 
quiet in relation to the rest (and you could tell it wasn't just from it 
being an old album) that it was completely imperceptible without boosting 
the volume all the away up. But being as quiet as it was, there was SO 
little actual data there that the quality turned to shit when it was loud 
enough to hear. Avoiding low dynamic range seems to be all the rage these 
days (among consumers), but people never seem to learn "more is not always 
better".

Sep 09 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Nick,

 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i69jg8$2muo$1 digitalmars.com...
 
 retard wrote:
 
 I doubt they have any power to fight the record company in these
 kinds of issues. A friend of a friend signed a deal with a record
 company owned by a multinational mother record company. Now they are
 told where to play concerts, how the cd distribution is organized,
 and when they are supposed to release the next two albums. That's
 like slavery.
 


 absurd. Contract or no, a record company cannot make you do anything,
 regardless of what you signed. (Sign a contract with the military,
 however, and they *can* make you.)
 
 Secondly, people ought to read contracts before they sign them. It's
 their own fault if they don't.
 


 from scoring, and there's really only so much demand for that) you
 *had* to sign one of those constracts. There was no choice - they had
 an oligopoly on the entire market, and if you wanted in they had you
 by the balls.
 
 Contracts with children aren't legally binding because children are
 not considered legally competent. Adults are.
 


 
 I always get the old versions of CDs before they were remastered :-)
 as I don't care for the audio leveling.
 


 volume-level relatively consistent? (If so, then I wish the DVD
 companies would start doing it. I hate when I have to turn the volume
 *waaay* up just to hear the dialog and then *waaay* down again to not
 bust my eardrums as soon as music or sound effects come on. And then
 tough shit whenever a character talks during an action scene. Never
 had to deal with that crap on VHS.)
 


Subtitles, man. Subtitles. Heck, even at the right volume, I still can't 
understand what they are saying(/mumbleing) some of the time. (And my hearing 
is just fine.)

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 09 2010

Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com> writes:

BCS schrieb:
 Hello Nick,
 
 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i69jg8$2muo$1 digitalmars.com...

 retard wrote:

 I doubt they have any power to fight the record company in these
 kinds of issues. A friend of a friend signed a deal with a record
 company owned by a multinational mother record company. Now they are
 told where to play concerts, how the cd distribution is organized,
 and when they are supposed to release the next two albums. That's
 like slavery.


 absurd. Contract or no, a record company cannot make you do anything,
 regardless of what you signed. (Sign a contract with the military,
 however, and they *can* make you.)

 Secondly, people ought to read contracts before they sign them. It's
 their own fault if they don't.


 from scoring, and there's really only so much demand for that) you
 *had* to sign one of those constracts. There was no choice - they had
 an oligopoly on the entire market, and if you wanted in they had you
 by the balls.

 Contracts with children aren't legally binding because children are
 not considered legally competent. Adults are.



 I always get the old versions of CDs before they were remastered :-)
 as I don't care for the audio leveling.


 volume-level relatively consistent? (If so, then I wish the DVD
 companies would start doing it. I hate when I have to turn the volume
 *waaay* up just to hear the dialog and then *waaay* down again to not
 bust my eardrums as soon as music or sound effects come on. And then
 tough shit whenever a character talks during an action scene. Never
 had to deal with that crap on VHS.)


 Subtitles, man. Subtitles. Heck, even at the right volume, I still can't 
 understand what they are saying(/mumbleing) some of the time. (And my 
 hearing is just fine.)
 


I've got the same problems with many american movies/series.
Synchronizations usually fix that, but translations often suck..

And I thought this was just a bad combination of "not native speaker" 
(so I have more trouble understanding spoken english) and "too many 
Mot�rhead concerts" =)

Anyway: Subtitles are definitely helpful.

Sep 09 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ff1bcc78cd1e04645018c2 news.digitalmars.com...
 Hello Nick,

 I've always been unclear on what that is. Is that where they make the
 volume-level relatively consistent? (If so, then I wish the DVD
 companies would start doing it. I hate when I have to turn the volume
 *waaay* up just to hear the dialog and then *waaay* down again to not
 bust my eardrums as soon as music or sound effects come on. And then
 tough shit whenever a character talks during an action scene. Never
 had to deal with that crap on VHS.)


 Subtitles, man. Subtitles. Heck, even at the right volume, I still can't 
 understand what they are saying(/mumbleing) some of the time. (And my 
 hearing is just fine.)


Heh, yea I've actually ended up doing that suprisingly often (but then 
sometimes discs with english audio will lack english subtitles which is 
annoying). It's pretty sad when a native english speaker with perfectly 
normal hearing has to turn on subtitles just to know what they're saying in 
an english audio track.

Sep 09 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i69fr8$2cbt$1 digitalmars.com...
 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of being 
 labeled a band with lousy sound.


IIRC, A lot of Metallica fans felt they had started putting out "lousy 
sound" back around the "Load" and "Reload" albums. And that was before CD 
DRM.

Sep 08 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.viri2yp3eav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:05:45 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i69fr8$2cbt$1 digitalmars.com...
 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of being
 labeled a band with lousy sound.


 IIRC, A lot of Metallica fans felt they had started putting out "lousy
 sound" back around the "Load" and "Reload" albums. And that was before CD
 DRM.


 Load was the beginning of the downhill slide.  There are a couple alright 
 songs, but all albums before that were filled with good songs.  Reload was 
 utter crap (Unforgiven 2?  Really!???).  St. Anger I never really liked, 
 although I've heard that some people like it.


I was avoiding stating my own Metallica opinions, but now that you mention 
it, that's exactly how I feel (and yea, I have heard a lot of other people 
say Load was the start of a downfall). I did kind of like "Until it Sleeps" 
and maybe one other (forget what), but yea, most of Load/Reload I just never 
got into. "Black album" was filed with good stuff, and I never understood 
people that said "St. Anger" was a return to Metallica's former glory. Just 
sounded like noise to me, and I'm a big metal fan!

Speaking of all this, am I correct in my understanding that Load was right 
after Megadeth split off? (And that "black album" was right before?)

Sep 09 2010

Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky schrieb:

 Speaking of all this, am I correct in my understanding that Load was right 
 after Megadeth split off? (And that "black album" was right before?)
 


No, Megadeth was found in 1983 - Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica 
before they recorded their first album.

(Don't like Metallica though.. neither the pop stuff of the Black Album 
nor the older slightly better stuff like Master of Puppets.. I guess I 
just don't like Hetfields singing voice)

Sep 09 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.vir8rzjeeav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 As Daniel wrote, Mustane left before Kill 'em All (their first album), but 
 his name is listed as the one of the authors for many of those songs.

 If you are looking for "what was the trigger that started making Metallica 
 suck", it was that James Hetfield kind of let some of the other band 
 members take the creative wheel.  Before that, Hetfield was basically the 
 main writer, and was in charge of what made it into songs.


Ahh, I had it completely wrong then :)

 The alright songs from Load: Bleeding me, 2x4, King nothing, Hero of the 
 day.

 At least IMO :)  I didn't really like Until it Sleeps.

 But, they are still my favorite band of all time.


There has been a fair amount of Metallica I've liked, but ever since the 
PR-fiasco back around the time of Napster I haven't been able to bring 
myself to listen to them anymore. *Not* out of deliberate spite or 
difference-of-opinion, but I just have trouble seeing them the same way 
anymore. I dunno...

But like I said in another branch, I'm more a Megadeth kinda guy anyway. 
Mainly the albums "Countdown to Extinction" and (other Megadeth fans are 
probably gonna lynch me for saying this) "Cryptic Writings". Although 
they're still not one of my favorite bands. Those would be more like Iron 
Maiden (mainly the newer stuff, but also Powerslave and Seventh Son), 
earlier Nine Inch Nails (With Teeth and Year Zero weren't bad, but they were 
the beginning of a downfall), KMFDM (both old- and new-style), and My Life 
With The Thrill Kill Kult. (And yea, a lot of that's not really metal.)

Sep 09 2010

Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer schrieb:
 On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:12:37 -0400, Walter Bright 
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:
 
 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:58:39 -0400, Walter Bright 
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of 
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data 
 side of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some 
 slight distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  
 I would expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues 
 though.  It's not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who 
 would notice?


 cymbals.
  But you are right, the guitars aren't as noticeable (you can still 
 hear it though).



 Back in the 80's, it wasn't unusual for a compiler vendor to release a 
 "student" version or some such, that was missing a feature like 
 floating point. The problem, though, was that the compiler would earn 
 a reputation as not having floating point and people would turn 
 elsewhere when they would want to buy a professional compiler.

 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of 
 being labeled a band with lousy sound.


 Note that the sound is fine if you are playing the CD, it's if you rip 
 the tracks to MP3s when the sound degrades.
 
 BTW, I think they abandoned this, the Death Magnetic album does not have 
 this protection.
 
 -Steve


The Death Magnetic album had crappy sound anyway, according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Magnetic#Criticism_regarding_production
(But not because of the copy protection but because of the 
aforementioned loudness war).

Sep 09 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:17:33 +0000, BCS wrote:

 Hello domino,
 
 Walter Bright Wrote:
 
 domino wrote:
 
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard
 movie/audio CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.
 


 


 
 I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg
 rootkit protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At
 least the cactus shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on purpose
 and it's audible even with a legal authentic cd audio player. If you
 place these discs in a standard PC cd/dvd drive, it just spins and
 spins and spins and spins and the OS either hangs or refuses to open
 the cd tray. I'm 100% sure you are not allowed to break these.
 
 


 across a disk I couldn't play.


You must be young then. I got my first CD-ROM drive with my Pentium 75. 
The first 1x external CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive. I think one 
used to cost around $600..800. Before 1994 I only had a CD walkman and a 
moderately cheap entry level hi-fi system.

On top of that, the first CD-ROM drives provided ridiculously bad audio 
quality and connectivity. Also the 16-bit SB clones were trash.

Sep 08 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello retard,

 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:17:33 +0000, BCS wrote:
 
 I've never owned a CD player that wasn't a CD-ROM drive. I've never
 come across a disk I couldn't play.
 




Nope, just cheap. The first CD-ROM drive I got was after high school.

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 09 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:15:15 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

 retard wrote:
 You must be young then. I got my first CD-ROM drive with my Pentium 75.
 The first 1x external CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive. I think one
 used to cost around $600..800.


 Eh, my first CD-ROM drive was $1100 or so.


Was it that expensive? Anyway, the world has changed so much. You can 
probably find a decent dvd+rw drive for $30 or $40 now. My original point 
was that people like us who listened to CDs in the 80's quite likely 
still possess real hi-fi cd players or integrated cd/amp/tuner systems. 
These systems are unaffected by the cd copy protection methods.

Sep 08 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:55:46 +0200, Daniel Gibson wrote:

 retard schrieb:
 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:15:15 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
 
 retard wrote:
 You must be young then. I got my first CD-ROM drive with my Pentium
 75. The first 1x external CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive. I
 think one used to cost around $600..800.




 Was it that expensive? Anyway, the world has changed so much. You can
 probably find a decent dvd+rw drive for $30 or $40 now. My original
 point was that people like us who listened to CDs in the 80's quite
 likely still possess real hi-fi cd players or integrated cd/amp/tuner
 systems. These systems are unaffected by the cd copy protection
 methods.


 Not necessarily - I've heard of "copy protections" (they should actually
 be called listening preventions) that caused trouble on old as well as
 some new CD players (not CD ROM drives). Also Car CD player seem to be
 massively affected by such problems. Why the hell should someone buy a
 CD he can't listen to in his car?!


Ah, true. The reason (IIRC) was that the DRMed CDs also had a data cd TOC 
or multiple sessions or something like that. If the car CD player 
supported MP3 CDs via the data cd format, that made it "too intelligent" 
to play the disks.

Sep 08 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:23:25 -0400, domino <effect sitemine.org> wrote:

 Walter Bright Wrote:

 domino wrote:
 Ordinary man cannot have 5 TB of data because ALL standard movie/audio
 CD/DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD discs have DRM copy protection.


 CDs are not copy protected.


 False.

 I have 10--20 discs with cactus data protection. Two with sony bmg  
 rootkit protection system. And several with mediamax protection. At  
 least the cactus shit is annoying. They corrupted the audio on purpose  
 and it's audible even with a legal authentic cd audio player. If you  
 place these discs in a standard PC cd/dvd drive, it just spins and spins  
 and spins and spins and the OS either hangs or refuses to open the cd  
 tray. I'm 100% sure you are not allowed to break these.


perhaps it's time for a new CD drive?

FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of anti-copy  
distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data side of the disc.   
The result when you encode it via MP3 is some slight distortion, even at  
160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I would expect that a bit-for-bit  
copy would not have any issues though.  It's not copy protection, it's  
ripping protection.

-Steve

Sep 08 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:58:39 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data side
 of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some slight
 distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I would
 expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues though.  It's
 not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who would
 notice?


That particular album consists of covers, but in general Metallica also 
has pretty calm ballads. Ever heard of 'Nothing else matters'? Even my 
grandmother used to love it.

Sep 08 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"retard" <re tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:i68qac$7l0$1 digitalmars.com...
 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:58:39 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data side
 of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some slight
 distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I would
 expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues though.  It's
 not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who would
 notice?


 That particular album consists of covers, but in general Metallica also
 has pretty calm ballads. Ever heard of 'Nothing else matters'? Even my
 grandmother used to love it.


Weird. 'Nothing else matters' is such a depressing-sounding song, I still 
can't imagine any grandmothers liking it. (But then who am I to talk? My 
granda's in her 80's, drives a Celica, and is the only person in my family 
to own an HDTV.)

Sep 08 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Weird. 'Nothing else matters' is such a depressing-sounding song, I still 
 can't imagine any grandmothers liking it. (But then who am I to talk? My 
 granda's in her 80's, drives a Celica, and is the only person in my family 
 to own an HDTV.)


I talked my dad into getting a 60" HDTV. He loves it, as his vision is poor and 
he can see it easily. Big TV sets are a godsend for the elderly.

Sep 09 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i6a52a$19jv$1 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Weird. 'Nothing else matters' is such a depressing-sounding song, I still 
 can't imagine any grandmothers liking it. (But then who am I to talk? My 
 granda's in her 80's, drives a Celica, and is the only person in my 
 family to own an HDTV.)


 I talked my dad into getting a 60" HDTV. He loves it, as his vision is 
 poor and he can see it easily. Big TV sets are a godsend for the elderly.


My grandma's HDTV is only about 13". Actually, the only reason she got it 
was because her old small bedroom TV finally died (And by "old" I mean it 
had two knobs: one for VHF, one for UHF - hardware wasn't always designed to 
be disposable like it is now) and the only new ones available were HD.

Interesting thing to note is that this HD set with a rather expensive 
brand-new antenna and digital broadcast gets her *fewer* watchable channels 
than that ultra-old set did back before the analog cutoff. My dad's been 
even more worse off - since the switch he gets about one realistically 
watchable channel if he's lucky (used to get most of the local channels). 
And he's understandably pissed about it (partly because now he can't watch 
Letterman.) Neither of them live in rural areas. Broadcast DTV is shit. I 
honestly can't believe anyone was ever stupid enough to buy into the "DTV 
will give you more channels at better quality" bullshit. I mean seriously: 
you get interference on an analog signal and you get a little static 
overlaid - you get interference on digital signal and you get a dead fucking 
signal. Basic fucking electronic signaling. I saw through it from the start, 
but it's not like there was a damn thing I could have done about it - the 
overwhelming hordes of corporate lobbyists and consumer whores (Just visit 
"engadget") had spoken.

Sep 09 2010

Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:

On 09/09/2010 03:40 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Broadcast DTV is shit. I
 honestly can't believe anyone was ever stupid enough to buy into the "DTV
 will give you more channels at better quality" bullshit. I mean seriously:
 you get interference on an analog signal and you get a little static
 overlaid - you get interference on digital signal and you get a dead fucking
 signal. Basic fucking electronic signaling. I saw through it from the start,
 but it's not like there was a damn thing I could have done about it - the
 overwhelming hordes of corporate lobbyists and consumer whores (Just visit
 "engadget") had spoken.


Actually DTV has error correction capabilities that are simply 
impossible with analog signal. Clearly at a point you do end up simply 
losing the carrier (I'm not sure what the noise margins are for digital 
vs. analog) but clearly an ok-signal DTV broadcast is much better than 
an ok-signal analog broadcast.

Andrei

Sep 09 2010

dsimcha <dsimcha yahoo.com> writes:

== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org)'s article
 On 09/09/2010 03:40 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Broadcast DTV is shit. I
 honestly can't believe anyone was ever stupid enough to buy into the "DTV
 will give you more channels at better quality" bullshit. I mean seriously:
 you get interference on an analog signal and you get a little static
 overlaid - you get interference on digital signal and you get a dead fucking
 signal. Basic fucking electronic signaling. I saw through it from the start,
 but it's not like there was a damn thing I could have done about it - the
 overwhelming hordes of corporate lobbyists and consumer whores (Just visit
 "engadget") had spoken.


 impossible with analog signal. Clearly at a point you do end up simply
 losing the carrier (I'm not sure what the noise margins are for digital
 vs. analog) but clearly an ok-signal DTV broadcast is much better than
 an ok-signal analog broadcast.
 Andrei


Yea, but the problem with ATSC (the American DTV standard) is that it's
ridiculously susceptible to multipath distortion.  I live about a mile and
change
from the transmitter and have trouble watching stuff with only an indoor
antenna.

Sep 09 2010

Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:

On 9/9/10 12:19 CDT, dsimcha wrote:
 == Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org)'s article
 On 09/09/2010 03:40 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Broadcast DTV is shit. I
 honestly can't believe anyone was ever stupid enough to buy into the "DTV
 will give you more channels at better quality" bullshit. I mean seriously:
 you get interference on an analog signal and you get a little static
 overlaid - you get interference on digital signal and you get a dead fucking
 signal. Basic fucking electronic signaling. I saw through it from the start,
 but it's not like there was a damn thing I could have done about it - the
 overwhelming hordes of corporate lobbyists and consumer whores (Just visit
 "engadget") had spoken.


 impossible with analog signal. Clearly at a point you do end up simply
 losing the carrier (I'm not sure what the noise margins are for digital
 vs. analog) but clearly an ok-signal DTV broadcast is much better than
 an ok-signal analog broadcast.
 Andrei


 Yea, but the problem with ATSC (the American DTV standard) is that it's
 ridiculously susceptible to multipath distortion.  I live about a mile and
change
 from the transmitter and have trouble watching stuff with only an indoor
antenna.


USA latching onto an inferior TV standard and then fighting tooth and 
nail to improve equipment that puts up with it? I cry deja vu :o).

Andrei

Sep 09 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:58:39 -0400, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of  
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data side  
 of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some slight  
 distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I would  
 expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues though.  It's  
 not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who would  
 notice?


You notice in the cymbals the most :)  And Ulrich uses a lot of cymbals.

But you are right, the guitars aren't as noticeable (you can still hear it  
though).

-Steve

Sep 08 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:12:37 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:58:39 -0400, Walter Bright
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:
 
 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data
 side of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some
 slight distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I
 would expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues
 though.  It's not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who would
 notice?


 You notice in the cymbals the most :)  And Ulrich uses a lot of
 cymbals.
 
 But you are right, the guitars aren't as noticeable (you can still hear
 it though).


 
 Back in the 80's, it wasn't unusual for a compiler vendor to release a
 "student" version or some such, that was missing a feature like floating
 point. The problem, though, was that the compiler would earn a
 reputation as not having floating point and people would turn elsewhere
 when they would want to buy a professional compiler.
 
 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of being
 labeled a band with lousy sound.


I doubt they have any power to fight the record company in these kinds of 
issues. A friend of a friend signed a deal with a record company owned by 
a multinational mother record company. Now they are told where to play 
concerts, how the cd distribution is organized, and when they are 
supposed to release the next two albums. That's like slavery.

Another thing is, I doubt the degraded audio quality matters as much as 
the pesky DRM protection scheme. I once had few of these sony key2audio 
(iirc) discs. They refused to play on windows so I just made an illegal 
copy for backup purposes and used that instead. There are far worse 
things than CD DRM systems decreasing the audio quality, e.g. the 
loudness war, the audio artefacts in mp3 distributions, and terrible 
(it's subjective) effects like autotune in modern pop music..

Sep 08 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"retard" <re tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:i69i7v$2ben$2 digitalmars.com...
 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:12:37 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of being
 labeled a band with lousy sound.


 I doubt they have any power to fight the record company in these kinds of
 issues.


From my understanding, Metallica would have been more likely to urge the 
labels into using DRM.

Sep 08 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:25:51 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i69jg8$2muo$1 digitalmars.com...
 I always get the old versions of CDs before they were remastered :-) as
 I don't care for the audio leveling.


 I've always been unclear on what that is. Is that where they make the
 volume-level relatively consistent? (If so, then I wish the DVD
 companies would start doing it. I hate when I have to turn the volume
 *waaay* up just to hear the dialog and then *waaay* down again to not
 bust my eardrums as soon as music or sound effects come on. And then
 tough shit whenever a character talks during an action scene. Never had
 to deal with that crap on VHS.)


Movies tend to have a large dynamic range. And that's good. I paid serious 
money to get almost flat freq response from 18 Hz to 25 kHz and power 
handling levels up to 750W RMS. Your amp might have a "evening/night 
mode" that automatically compresses the dynamic range by say 16 or 24 dB. 
The atmosphere feels dull and unsurprising if your dynamic range is very 
limited (but your crappy audio equipment might like it).

The loudness war ruins all modern albums. They've decided that each year 
the same music should contain less and less information. This is really 
bad for true art. But it increases the record sales of disappointing pop 
albums.

Sep 09 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:10:00 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Marketing

 And here's why I shoot for the old ones:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cd_loudness_trend-something.gif


 Ahh, yea, that's what I thought. Maybe it's gone too far with CDs, I
 dunno. Never noticed a difference between original and remastered myself
 (but I've never gone and compared them side-by-side). I do think DVD
 Video creators have gone waaay to far the other way though, because of
 the "Volume-fiddling-test" reason I mentioned before: If I set the
 volume to a comfortable level, and the damn volume keeps changing
 anyway, enough that I have to re-adjust over and over back to where I
 had it, then there's too fucking much dynamic range.
 
 I once recorded an Elvis Vinyl my dad had to put on a CD for him. There
 was one song (forget what it was) that had a spot in the middle that was
 SO quiet in relation to the rest (and you could tell it wasn't just from
 it being an old album) that it was completely imperceptible without
 boosting the volume all the away up. But being as quiet as it was, there
 was SO little actual data there that the quality turned to shit when it
 was loud enough to hear. Avoiding low dynamic range seems to be all the
 rage these days (among consumers), but people never seem to learn "more
 is not always better".


Vinyls have a bad dynamic range. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
RIAA_equalization )

Most consumers have absolutely no idea what the dynamic range is. They're 
actually happier when the range gets smaller and smaller because the 
louder somehow sounds better. And like you say, they don't need to touch 
the volume knob anymore.

You can try it yourself, use some basic audio library like OpenAL and 
play sounds   1% .. 100% volume. You need a decent hi-fi system for this 
(preferably an amp with 1000+W per channel power). Even the 16-bit 44 kHz 
LPCM is enough for most people. DVD soundtracks have a 24-bit dynamic 
range. Modern compressed CDs only cover a ridiculously small part of the 
range.

Sep 09 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:12:37 -0400, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:58:39 -0400, Walter Bright  
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of  
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data  
 side of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some  
 slight distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.  I  
 would expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues  
 though.  It's not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who would  
 notice?


 cymbals.
  But you are right, the guitars aren't as noticeable (you can still  
 hear it though).



 Back in the 80's, it wasn't unusual for a compiler vendor to release a  
 "student" version or some such, that was missing a feature like floating  
 point. The problem, though, was that the compiler would earn a  
 reputation as not having floating point and people would turn elsewhere  
 when they would want to buy a professional compiler.

 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of being  
 labeled a band with lousy sound.


Note that the sound is fine if you are playing the CD, it's if you rip the  
tracks to MP3s when the sound degrades.

BTW, I think they abandoned this, the Death Magnetic album does not have  
this protection.

-Steve

Sep 09 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:05:45 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i69fr8$2cbt$1 digitalmars.com...
 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of being
 labeled a band with lousy sound.


 IIRC, A lot of Metallica fans felt they had started putting out "lousy
 sound" back around the "Load" and "Reload" albums. And that was before CD
 DRM.


Load was the beginning of the downhill slide.  There are a couple alright  
songs, but all albums before that were filled with good songs.  Reload was  
utter crap (Unforgiven 2?  Really!???).  St. Anger I never really liked,  
although I've heard that some people like it.  It's not my style, but you  
can't really say it was Metallica "selling out".

Death Magnetic is a complete return to their original style.  I feel some  
of the solos are rehashed, but there is a lot of good stuff on there.

-Steve

Sep 09 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 07:28:12 -0400, Daniel Gibson <metalcaedes gmail.com>  
wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer schrieb:
 On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:12:37 -0400, Walter Bright  
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:58:39 -0400, Walter Bright  
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 FWIW, Metallica's Garage Inc (the second disc) has some sort of  
 anti-copy distortion.  You can actually see a pattern on the data  
 side of the disc.  The result when you encode it via MP3 is some  
 slight distortion, even at 160kb/s.  It's pretty bearable though.   
 I would expect that a bit-for-bit copy would not have any issues  
 though.  It's not copy protection, it's ripping protection.


 Given that Metallica uses heavily distorted guitars anyway, who  
 would notice?


 cymbals.
  But you are right, the guitars aren't as noticeable (you can still  
 hear it though).



 Back in the 80's, it wasn't unusual for a compiler vendor to release a  
 "student" version or some such, that was missing a feature like  
 floating point. The problem, though, was that the compiler would earn  
 a reputation as not having floating point and people would turn  
 elsewhere when they would want to buy a professional compiler.

 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of  
 being labeled a band with lousy sound.


 the tracks to MP3s when the sound degrades.
  BTW, I think they abandoned this, the Death Magnetic album does not  
 have this protection.
  -Steve


 The Death Magnetic album had crappy sound anyway, according to Wikipedia:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Magnetic#Criticism_regarding_production
 (But not because of the copy protection but because of the  
 aforementioned loudness war).


*shrug* sounds good to me ;)  The production quality is low, but I'm  
pretty sure that was on purpose.  I've never heard of the dynamic range  
thing, and I've never really noticed it.

On another note, ...And Justice for All is an album that you can turn up  
all the way and it's never loud enough :)

Crappy sound that I'm talking about is like a "wishuwishuwishu" sound over  
the whole recording.  I can only hear it on my ripped tracks of Garage Inc  
(and only the second disc, the one they recorded for the album  
specifically), the actual disc doesn't exhibit the sound.  I think they  
did something to the high frequencies that messes up mp3 encoders.

-Steve

Sep 09 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:05:34 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message
 news:op.viri2yp3eav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:05:45 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i69fr8$2cbt$1 digitalmars.com...
 In introducing such subtle distortion, Metallica runs the risk of  
 being
 labeled a band with lousy sound.


 IIRC, A lot of Metallica fans felt they had started putting out "lousy
 sound" back around the "Load" and "Reload" albums. And that was before  
 CD
 DRM.


 Load was the beginning of the downhill slide.  There are a couple  
 alright
 songs, but all albums before that were filled with good songs.  Reload  
 was
 utter crap (Unforgiven 2?  Really!???).  St. Anger I never really liked,
 although I've heard that some people like it.


 I was avoiding stating my own Metallica opinions, but now that you  
 mention
 it, that's exactly how I feel (and yea, I have heard a lot of other  
 people
 say Load was the start of a downfall). I did kind of like "Until it  
 Sleeps"
 and maybe one other (forget what), but yea, most of Load/Reload I just  
 never
 got into. "Black album" was filed with good stuff, and I never understood
 people that said "St. Anger" was a return to Metallica's former glory.  
 Just
 sounded like noise to me, and I'm a big metal fan!

 Speaking of all this, am I correct in my understanding that Load was  
 right
 after Megadeth split off? (And that "black album" was right before?)


As Daniel wrote, Mustane left before Kill 'em All (their first album), but  
his name is listed as the one of the authors for many of those songs.

If you are looking for "what was the trigger that started making Metallica  
suck", it was that James Hetfield kind of let some of the other band  
members take the creative wheel.  Before that, Hetfield was basically the  
main writer, and was in charge of what made it into songs.

The alright songs from Load: Bleeding me, 2x4, King nothing, Hero of the  
day.

At least IMO :)  I didn't really like Until it Sleeps.

But, they are still my favorite band of all time.

-Steve

Sep 09 2010

domino <effect sitemine.org> writes:

the retarded superretard script kid Wrote:

 Tue, 07 Sep 2010 05:45:55 +0000, BCS wrote:
 
 Hello Nick,
 
 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9958cd1bfa012970d8 news.digitalmars.com...
 
 Hello Nick,
 
 Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already too
 small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now
 MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my blood
 pressure...
 


 (GB) a phone has.
 


 factor at the cost of a 2.5" HDD. Yea, eventually that'll happen, but
 by then I could get a HDD many times bigger than that for the same
 price.
 
 


 on the PC board. Besides, what the heck do you need more than about 32GB
 for on a phone? If you need to shoot that much video, get a real camera!


 I have 32 GB micro-sdhc cards (class 2 or 4) on my phone and 64 GB 
 compactflash (don't know the class, but approximately 90 MB/s) on my 
 camera (Canon 7D). Both could have more space. The camera doesn't compress 
 video very well despite quite high price so the maximum video length is 
 only few minutes.


I doubt that. The only camera you have is in your phone. VGA 640x480 quality

 
 
 Besides:
 http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?N=4294966955+
 42 94953566&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct&
 


 lap-top. OTOH: this is the class of phone I use:
 http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services
 /Mobile-Phones/Motorola-Stature-i9-US-EN
 


 capacity.
 
 


 always be cheaper as an external HDD. Some people will want to use their
 phone as a weapon, should that also be a design criteria?


 I'd like to have 128..512 GB of storage in the phone. Why? My media 
 library (hundreds of CDs & DVDs transcoded -> mp3/ogg or xvid). I think 
 this is even possible with two 64 GB sdxc cards. Podcasts. TV series. 
 Games. Photos converted to JPG   1080p resolution for powerpoint & other 
 purposes.


Yep yep.. piratebay kid. Your first year CS 101 teacher doesn't expect any
powerpoints from a people of your quality.

 
 
 In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a smart
 phone/PDA needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports. You might, just
 maybe, talk me into believing that an HDMI port could be handy. But
 that would really push it.
 


 
 




 The mini-HDMI is pretty decent. There are no better alternatives that I 
 know of at the moment. 1080p video + multichannel audio, quite small.


Firewire. Nuff said

 
 My phone & cam both also have micro-usb 2.0 connectors. Pretty good. 
 Waiting for usb 3.0.


Your _phone_ has usb 1.0 and a proprietary connector.

Sep 07 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Sep 07 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 05:45:55 +0000, BCS wrote:

 Hello Nick,
 
 "BCS" <none anon.com> wrote in message
 news:a6268ff1b9958cd1bfa012970d8 news.digitalmars.com...
 
 Hello Nick,
 
 Ugh, don't even get me started on MicroSD. Ordinary SD is already too
 small if you ask me, although I still put up with it anyway. Now
 MicroSD, well I can't say anything about it without raising my blood
 pressure...
 


 (GB) a phone has.
 


 factor at the cost of a 2.5" HDD. Yea, eventually that'll happen, but
 by then I could get a HDD many times bigger than that for the same
 price.
 
 


 on the PC board. Besides, what the heck do you need more than about 32GB
 for on a phone? If you need to shoot that much video, get a real camera!


I have 32 GB micro-sdhc cards (class 2 or 4) on my phone and 64 GB 
compactflash (don't know the class, but approximately 90 MB/s) on my 
camera (Canon 7D). Both could have more space. The camera doesn't compress 
video very well despite quite high price so the maximum video length is 
only few minutes.

 
 Besides:
 http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?N=4294966955+
 42 94953566&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct&
 


 lap-top. OTOH: this is the class of phone I use:
 http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services
 /Mobile-Phones/Motorola-Stature-i9-US-EN
 


 capacity.
 
 


 always be cheaper as an external HDD. Some people will want to use their
 phone as a weapon, should that also be a design criteria?


I'd like to have 128..512 GB of storage in the phone. Why? My media 
library (hundreds of CDs & DVDs transcoded -> mp3/ogg or xvid). I think 
this is even possible with two 64 GB sdxc cards. Podcasts. TV series. 
Games. Photos converted to JPG   1080p resolution for powerpoint & other 
purposes.

 
 In this day and age, you would be hard pressed to suggest a smart
 phone/PDA needs more than a 1 maybe 2 USB ports. You might, just
 maybe, talk me into believing that an HDMI port could be handy. But
 that would really push it.
 


 
 




The mini-HDMI is pretty decent. There are no better alternatives that I 
know of at the moment. 1080p video + multichannel audio, quite small.

My phone & cam both also have micro-usb 2.0 connectors. Pretty good. 
Waiting for usb 3.0.

Sep 07 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello retard,

 Tue, 07 Sep 2010 05:45:55 +0000, BCS wrote:
 
 I wouldn't. I'd put it in a package about 4-5 times as big and mount
 it on the PC board. Besides, what the heck do you need more than
 about 32GB for on a phone? If you need to shoot that much video, get
 a real camera!
 


 compactflash (don't know the class, but approximately 90 MB/s) on my
 camera (Canon 7D). Both could have more space. The camera doesn't
 compress video very well despite quite high price so the maximum video
 length is only few minutes.
 


Real cameras are another matter. A good lens alone is bigger than a 2.5" HDD.

 You're not everyone. Some people would rather have HDD-level storage
 capacity.
 


 always be cheaper as an external HDD. Some people will want to use
 their phone as a weapon, should that also be a design criteria?
 


 library (hundreds of CDs & DVDs transcoded -> mp3/ogg or xvid). I
 think this is even possible with two 64 GB sdxc cards. Podcasts. TV
 series. Games. Photos converted to JPG   1080p resolution for
 powerpoint & other purposes.


Once you scratch into the I-might-want-it space, you can blow right past 
any reasonable amount of storage for a package you will like putting in your 
pocket.

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 07 2010

Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+spam com.gmail> writes:

On 04/09/2010 08:29, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 "Steven Schveighoffer"<schveiguy yahoo.com>  wrote in message
 news:op.vig8crpreav7ka localhost.localdomain...
  And OMG, you've never bought a cell phone?  Why are you punishing yourself
  ;)  I suppose with the attitude you have towards them it would just raise
  your blood pressure carrying it around...




 I just don't do anywhere near enough yapping (outside of NG text, of course
 ;) ) for it to be worthwhile. Cell companies don't even have a plan that
 would be small enough to be appropriate for me. But the landlines do, and
 with the tiny amount of talking I do, waiting until I get home to use the
 phone is a complete non-issue (especially since I'd be the only cell owner
 in the world to that would refuse to use it while driving). And I don't even
 *want*  to be reachable 24/7. Unlimited minutes? Forget it. Back when pay
 phones still existed, my away-from-home phone usage never totaled more than
 $5/yr. Try finding a cell plan that competes with that.


Are there no pay-as-you-go plans where you live? In Portugal (and the UK 
as well) there are pay-as-you-go plans with no required top-ups, thus 
they would cost you 0/yr if you made no calls. (you just had to receive 
a call every 3 months to ensure you SIM remained active, but still no cost)
There must be something like that in the US.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer

Oct 13 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 As far as free software advertisement though, most of that is negated by 
 google these days :)


Paid advertising worked extremely well in the 80's. Sales definitely correlated 
with it. No longer. Want to waste money? Buy a print ad. You're likely to get 
zero response on it. I know, I've tried.

What does work is writing interesting articles and papers about the product,
etc.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5n8t9$162c$1 digitalmars.com...
 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 As far as free software advertisement though, most of that is negated by 
 google these days :)


 Paid advertising worked extremely well in the 80's. Sales definitely 
 correlated with it. No longer. Want to waste money? Buy a print ad. You're 
 likely to get zero response on it. I know, I've tried.

 What does work is writing interesting articles and papers about the 
 product, etc.


I don't know anything about print ads, or technology ads, but I wouldn't be 
surprised if modern TV ads are ineffective. They never seem to have anything 
to do with the product/service being offered...and those are the *good* 
ones...

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I don't know anything about print ads, or technology ads, but I wouldn't be 
 surprised if modern TV ads are ineffective. They never seem to have anything 
 to do with the product/service being offered...and those are the *good* 
 ones...


I wouldn't know, I ff over all of them.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5ncg8$1bp6$2 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I don't know anything about print ads, or technology ads, but I wouldn't 
 be surprised if modern TV ads are ineffective. They never seem to have 
 anything to do with the product/service being offered...and those are the 
 *good* ones...


 I wouldn't know, I ff over all of them.


I only rarely see them now. I don't have any of that DVR stuff (never 
thought it made sense to buy a device, as opposed to a service, on a 
subscription model), so not only do I get the increasingly irritating and 
patronizing commercials (I don't normally have a problem with commercials, 
just the irritating and patronizing ones, which are most of them these 
days), but I also get those ads that stations have injected *over-top* of 
the shows themselves as a backlash against DVRs (Which I don't even have! 
And I have to be punished anyway!) So I've just said "fuck them, and fuck 
playing fair, since they obviously aren't" and I only watch shows on library 
DVDs now, or if the libraries either don't have it or don't have it 
unscratched then downlaod (but not Hulu - fuck web browsers, fuck flash 
video, and fuck "TV on a PC"). So usually the only times I do see ads is 
when a roomate watches TV.

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I only rarely see them now. I don't have any of that DVR stuff (never 
 thought it made sense to buy a device, as opposed to a service, on a 
 subscription model), so not only do I get the increasingly irritating and 
 patronizing commercials (I don't normally have a problem with commercials, 
 just the irritating and patronizing ones, which are most of them these 
 days), but I also get those ads that stations have injected *over-top* of 
 the shows themselves as a backlash against DVRs (Which I don't even have! 
 And I have to be punished anyway!) So I've just said "fuck them, and fuck 
 playing fair, since they obviously aren't" and I only watch shows on library 
 DVDs now, or if the libraries either don't have it or don't have it 
 unscratched then downlaod (but not Hulu - fuck web browsers, fuck flash 
 video, and fuck "TV on a PC"). So usually the only times I do see ads is 
 when a roomate watches TV. 


Me very satisfied Netflix customer.

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5ndre$1e09$2 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I only rarely see them now. I don't have any of that DVR stuff (never 
 thought it made sense to buy a device, as opposed to a service, on a 
 subscription model), so not only do I get the increasingly irritating and 
 patronizing commercials (I don't normally have a problem with 
 commercials, just the irritating and patronizing ones, which are most of 
 them these days), but I also get those ads that stations have injected 
 *over-top* of the shows themselves as a backlash against DVRs (Which I 
 don't even have! And I have to be punished anyway!) So I've just said 
 "fuck them, and fuck playing fair, since they obviously aren't" and I 
 only watch shows on library DVDs now, or if the libraries either don't 
 have it or don't have it unscratched then downlaod (but not Hulu - fuck 
 web browsers, fuck flash video, and fuck "TV on a PC"). So usually the 
 only times I do see ads is when a roomate watches TV.


 Me very satisfied Netflix customer.


For videos and music, north-eastern Ohio's library systems are absolutely 
phenomenal. And unless you're *ridiculously* irresponsible, the late fees 
are an order of magnitude cheaper than any netflix subscription. If I lived 
anywhere else, I would probably be a Netflix user.

(But unfortunately, these libraries are horrible for non-fiction books, 
unless all you ever want is "For Dummies"-level stuff, or if you just happen 
to be paying thousands of dollars to a college, or work for a college - 
*then* they give you the *cough* "privilege" of using the OhioLINK library 
system which is great for non-fiction books. But frankly, an 
enterprise-level MSDN subscription would probably be cheaper (literally))

Sep 01 2010

Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisprog gmail.com> writes:

On Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:15:24 Walter Bright wrote:
 Someone once told me that "capitalism doesn't support the arts". I asked
 him how the Beatles got rich. Oops!


Capitalism is going to tend to support what is generally popular or what is 
popular with the affluent crowd. Anything that doesn't fall in either of those 
categories isn't necessarily going to do well. So, the artsy stuff that appeals 
primarily to artsy people isn't necessarily going to do well. The Beatles 
managed general popularity, so capitalism supported them just fine.

Music and movies are huge industries. Capitalism definitely supports them. 
However, if you're dealing with less well-known, less generally-liked stuff,
then 
capitalism isnt't really going to support it. Of course, arguably, that's for 
the better, since if it doesn't do well that means that it's not something that 
the majority supports, but there is good stuff out there that never becomes 
particularly popular or successful. However, since art is generally in the eye 
of the beholder, there will always be people unhappy with how it gets handled 
regardless of the economic system in use.

 There's a subgroup of the theater crowd around here who regard producers as
 "sellouts" if their plays actually attract an audience.


I hear that this sort of thing tends to happen with Indie artists as well.
There 
are fans who like them until they get popular. I guess that there are people
who 
_like_ it when the stuff that they like is niche.

- Jonathan M Davis

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisprog gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.35.1283369617.858.digitalmars-d puremagic.com...
 On Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:15:24 Walter Bright wrote:
 There's a subgroup of the theater crowd around here who regard producers 
 as
 "sellouts" if their plays actually attract an audience.


 I hear that this sort of thing tends to happen with Indie artists as well. 
 There
 are fans who like them until they get popular. I guess that there are 
 people who
 _like_ it when the stuff that they like is niche.


From some interview I read awhile ago, that's what happened to the band 
Green Day (Not that I'm a big fan or anything, but they're not bad). Their 
first couple albums were very indie, got moderate sales, and gained a strong 
cult following. Then they put out the "Dookie" album, and got better 
promotion from their label, and it was a big mainstream hit. The old fans 
actually got pissed at them for that and labeled them "sellouts". Apparently 
that was a big part of the motivation behind the songs on their following 
album, "Insomniac" (but most rock lyrics never make any sence to me anyway, 
so it's not like I can actually tell).

(Moral of the story: People is stoopid.)

Sep 01 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Jonathan,

 Capitalism definitely supports
 them. However, if you're dealing with less well-known, less
 generally-liked stuff, then capitalism isnt't really going to support
 it. 


Amazon.com enters, stage right.

 There's a subgroup of the theater crowd around here who regard
 producers as "sellouts" if their plays actually attract an audience.
 


 well. There are fans who like them until they get popular. I guess
 that there are people who _like_ it when the stuff that they like is
 niche.
 


And there are people who will buy $5 a cup coffee when they really do like 
the $.50 stuff better. They are called snobs.

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

BCS wrote:
 And there are people who will buy $5 a cup coffee when they really do 
 like the $.50 stuff better. They are called snobs.


I had fun at a wine tasting when I picked the cheapest wine of the lot as my 
favorite. Hilarity ensued.

Sep 01 2010

BCS <none anon.com> writes:

Hello Walter,

 BCS wrote:
 
 And there are people who will buy $5 a cup coffee when they really do
 like the $.50 stuff better. They are called snobs.
 


 as my favorite. Hilarity ensued.
 


Think of all the money you can save!

-- 
... <IXOYE><

Sep 01 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i5n8b6$14uo$2 digitalmars.com...
 BCS wrote:
 And there are people who will buy $5 a cup coffee when they really do 
 like the $.50 stuff better. They are called snobs.


 I had fun at a wine tasting when I picked the cheapest wine of the lot as 
 my favorite. Hilarity ensued.


Wish I could have seen that :)

My favorite type of grape wine is ordinary White Zinfandel. And I *still* 
like grape juice 10x better.

Sep 01 2010

Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:

retard wrote:
 In more expensive countries the same quality costs 5..20 times as much.


Import duties and liquor taxes may play a role in that.

Sep 02 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:14:20 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

 BCS wrote:
 And there are people who will buy $5 a cup coffee when they really do
 like the $.50 stuff better. They are called snobs.


 I had fun at a wine tasting when I picked the cheapest wine of the lot
 as my favorite. Hilarity ensued.


The price of wine often doesn't correlate with its quality, at least very 
linearly. When I was in Spain, a local wine "expert" could easily find 
good wine and the price was 4..10 euros per bottle. It's the same thing 
in Greece or Bulgaria or other cheaper wine-producing countries. The 
cheapest wine is actually cheaper than bottled water.

In more expensive countries the same quality costs 5..20 times as much.

Sep 02 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:34:00 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message
 news:op.victz4b5eav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 The only measurable factor for "good" art is how many  people use it/buy
 it.


 That's not a bad point - I can't think of many other metrics for art.
 Quality certainly can positively influence popularity. But I think we  
 have
 to be careful not to conflate "popularity" with "quality" too much.  
 Similar
 to the old saying: "What's popular is not always right. What's right is  
 not
 always popular." PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar
 with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we
 have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and  
 quality.


Imagine if you had to pay for it ;)

 For-sale software, books, movies do rather well, so  I'm inclined to
 believe they are pretty good.  There are also some open  source/free
 materials that do rather well, but they are not nearly as  common as  
 free
 materials that are crappy.  My point was that for-sale art  by far
 outperforms freely available art in popularity and usage.  When you  get
 paid to make something, you can do it more often, you get better at  it,
 and your quality of work goes up.


 I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenon you describe, but I think there  
 are
 other contrary factors in play as well:

 - For-sale anything tends to have more marketing behind it than free
 (because if you're trying to get money for it, you're more motivated to  
 get
 it out in front of people), so that can be a factor in the  
 popularity/usage
 of for-sale things. If you're trying to sell your paintings, you're more
 likely to try to go as as many art fairs as you can, get business cards  
 made
 out to hand out, get a spot and display that people will really notice,  
 push
 your website, etc. If your work is free, you have less reason to do all
 that, which in turn, works against popularity and usage.


There is that part of it.  Some companies can sell whatever they want  
because of marketing, i.e. Microsoft.  But one thing that for-sale art  
does is weed out the unpopular artists.  Make a crappy product, and many  
people won't buy your next one.  Look how hard Vista hit Microsoft despite  
their huge marketing machine.

As far as free software advertisement though, most of that is negated by  
google these days :)  Just yesterday I wanted to find a tool that diff'd  
mysql database schemas so I could sync one to the other.  In about 10  
minutes I found 2-3 candidates that were free and I didn't use any of  
them, because they seemed unfinished, or required installing other stuff  
just to get it to work.  What I ended up using is advise on a forum that  
said to just diff the results of the mysqldump.

But I think you would agree the truly great free products/software don't  
have a problem with marketing because growth today is viral when someone  
finds something that is awesome, free or not.

 - Free stuff is more likely to be a labor of love (because if you're not
 getting paid for it, why else bother if not because you truly care?),  
 while
 for-sale tends to involve people who just don't give a crap about  
 anything
 but the paycheck. They know something will sell as-is, so why waste the
 resources making it as good as they can make it, like the "labor of love"
 people would do?


I think most good products are labors of love, even ones that are not  
free.  There are many cases that are not, and are "just there for the  
money," but those usually aren't as successful.  As you say, not as much  
effort is put into those.  But if something is good, and people will pay  
for it, why wouldn't you want to charge for it so you can continue doing  
it?  I don't understand the thought process that necessarily links love  
for a job or quality of art to working for free.  I love programming, but  
love or not, it would just be a toy hobby if I had to spend the majority  
of my day doing something else in order to support myself and my family.

 Businessmen have long ago learned that, contrary to the old saying, "If  
 you
 build a better mousetrap, the world will NOT beat a path to your door".
 Especially if the world doesn't even know you've done so. They'll just  
 keep
 using their inferior, but popular, mousetraps. But if you can *convince*
 them you've built a better one, regardless of whether or not it's actualy
 true, then they *will*, metaphorically, beat a path to your door.


Yes, there are plenty examples of that.

-Steve

Sep 01 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:53:41 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Walter Bright" <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote in message
 news:i5nco0$1bp6$3 digitalmars.com...
 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 That's all I can think of. Certainly nothing from Apple since Woz left,
 and that's the company most people try to point to as a shining example
 of alleged "polish".


 All I can say is you need to look at the product before it was polished  
 to
 see if progress was made during the polishing process. Looking at just  
 the
 end result doesn't tell much.


 The pre-release iterations are completely irrelevant. If the end result  
 is
 something with nearly-zero tactile feedback, super-ultra-hyperly-modal
 interface, and can't be turned off with the "power" button, but only by
 holding "Up" for five seconds, or has tiny ui elements that can't be
 accessed with a stylus or fingernail but is far too small to do reliably
 with a finger, or is a closed-locked-down-platform, or is branded as  
 being a
 PDA-like device but still doesn't support something as basic as  
 copy-paste
 that PalmOS devices already had nearly ten years prior even in smartphone
 form (Handspring Treo), then yes, the polish is crap no matter how much
 crappier the early iterations were. Apple's "polish" exists as nothing  
 more
 than aesthetic-oriented graphic design, and it fools most people.


Love my iPhone.  Love it.  My last two phones were a Palm Treo and a  
Samsung touch-screen (w/stylus) smartphone with Windows mobile 6.  They  
are absolute garbage compared to this.  Granted, I started with the 3gs,  
and upgraded to iOS4 about a month after I got it, so my phone is the  
result of 3 years of polish, but I feel apple has the right focus for it.

iPhone is hands down the best phone I've ever used.  I thought when I got  
it, I would have a hard time accessing small things like the on-screen  
keyboard keys, but I'm surprised at how accurate I am with it, even after  
only having it for a few months.  I regularly go to webnews on digitalmars  
and can click the minuscule links pretty accurately.

You can not like them if you want, you are entitled to your opinion, but  
it seems like you have a very negative view of almost everything :)  I bet  
your glass is half empty, huh...

-Steve

Sep 02 2010

retard <re tard.com.invalid> writes:

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


You buy a new one, of course. Why this will never happen is that once a 
new model of the iShit comes out, as a die hard Apple fan you simply MUST 
buy it and get rid of the old one. I heard they don't even replace the 
batteries in Apple's repair services. They just hand you a new phone.

Sep 02 2010

"Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> writes:

"retard" <re tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:i5pc2e$2lm$1 digitalmars.com...
 Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


 You buy a new one, of course. Why this will never happen is that once a
 new model of the iShit comes out, as a die hard Apple fan you simply MUST
 buy it and get rid of the old one. I heard they don't even replace the
 batteries in Apple's repair services. They just hand you a new phone.


Yup. Exactly my point.

-------------------------------
Not sent from an iPhone.

Sep 02 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:03:59 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

 "Nick Sabalausky" <a a.a> wrote in message
 news:i5ov60$2c5c$1 digitalmars.com...
 "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message
 news:op.vieozxaleav7ka localhost.localdomain...
 Love my iPhone.  Love it.  My last two phones were a Palm Treo and a
 Samsung touch-screen (w/stylus) smartphone with Windows mobile 6.  They
 are absolute garbage compared to this.  Granted, I started with the  
 3gs,
 and upgraded to iOS4 about a month after I got it, so my phone is the
 result of 3 years of polish, but I feel apple has the right focus for  
 it.

 iPhone is hands down the best phone I've ever used.  I thought when I  
 got
 it, I would have a hard time accessing small things like the on-screen
 keyboard keys, but I'm surprised at how accurate I am with it, even  
 after
 only having it for a few months.  I regularly go to webnews on
 digitalmars and can click the minuscule links pretty accurately.

 You can not like them if you want, you are entitled to your opinion,  
 but
 it seems like you have a very negative view of almost everything :)  I
 bet your glass is half empty, huh...


 I'm a "technical-ist": The glass is half-empty and half-full at the same
 time. Problem is, most glasses I've seen are only a quarter full and  
 with
 overly-sweetened content (or three-quarters empty if you prefer ;) ).

 I just have standards.

 A. Search "you're holding it wrong".




Not a problem on my 3gs, and no longer a problem on 4 (free case).  Though  
I understand the issue people have with the statement, Jobs is as arrogant  
as they come...

 B. Closed platforms are evil (not to be confused with closed source).




s/evil/stable.  It's one of the reasons my previous company was in  
business.  They built server appliances.  When you control everything on  
the platform, there's less things to test, less things that can go wrong,  
and any bugs you fix for one customer automatically translate to all other  
customers.

 C. Gatekeeping is evil. See also http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html




This I agree with.  It should be enough that the developers follow the  
technical requirements.  Still, the apps that are available are pretty  
cool.  My new favorite is netflix.  When I'm waiting for something  
somewhere and I can continue watching a movie I was streaming at home,  
that's just awesome...

 D. Service provider lock-in is evil. My phone works with *any* service
 provider (and didn't become uselessly obsolete after a year or two):
 http://www.uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=EXAI398  And I
 really do like this phone a lot.




Then I guess 99% of phones are evil?  I also have co-workers and friends  
who use jailbroken iphones on other GSM networks.  I could never do that  
with most of my verizon phones.  Besides, who switches phone service  
providers within the life of a phone?  Not to mention that the two biggest  
service providers are incompatible with eachother, so you couldn't switch  
between them even if you wanted to.

 E. A die-hard Apple fan I know recently showed me his beloved iPad.
 Accurately setting the text-cursor was nearly impossible. But that would
 have been an incredibly simple fix: Use a screen that worked with a  
 stylus
 or fingernail. There's millions of them out there. Even if that would  
 have
 prevented multi-touch (and I don't know that it would or would not  
 have),
 after using the multi-touch, I felt it added no real value other than a
 "gee-whiz" gimmick factor. Stylus/fingernail support would have added at
 least some real value.




Your friend is doing it wrong.  I can accurately set the cursor whenever I  
want using the magnifying glass.

See an example here:  
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781430231295/typing_numbers_and_symbols

 F. Like all Apple software, the software on the iPad/iPhone are
 appallingly slim on settings/options.




*shrug*  Most of the settings suit me well.  What options do you miss?

 G. A *phone* without tactile dial buttons is just plain wrong. What is  
 it
 with Apple's long-standing war against tactile feedback? It detracts  
 from
 usability and the only thing it adds is high-tech-gee-whiz-gimmick.




What do you need tactile feedback for?  You get audible feedback, and the  
phone number buttons are extremely responsive.  Plus, if you want to dial  
without looking at the phone, you can use voice-activation.

Blackberry tried a touch-screen with tactile feedback, it sucked.

 H. What's there to protect the highly-prominent screen?




The screen is made of pretty durable glass.  Like all touch-screen phones,  
it's highly advisable to get a screen protector for it.  I don't get what  
your problem is here, do you want a screen or not?  If you do, then what  
possible way could a manufacturer design a destruction-proof screen?  Put  
little airbags around it in case you drop it?

 I. I don't give a crap how thin they can make it. But Apple seems to  
 think
 I should care. Heck, I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on
 something that I'll constantly feel I'm about to accidentally snap in
 half. But that's exactly how I felt with the iPad.




This is petty :)  I can't speak for the ipad, but the iphone feels more  
durable than any phone I've had.  Maybe you'd prefer this phone:  
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20100829/BIZ/708299922/1005/biz

Note that the ipad directly competes with e-Reader devices, so they need  
to appeal to those people too.



 J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?


When I was looking at getting a palm pre as a verizon customer, and I  
discovered that palm pre doesn't support voice dialing, I mentioned I'd  
just be switching to AT&T for the iPhone.  The Verizon guy identified the  
battery issue as a reason not to get one.  So I looked up the details.  I  
think apple provides a $100 service to change your battery.  I don't know  
the details, but I think they just swap out your entire phone.  If they  
don't swap out your phone, that's crappy, but I can't complain yet because  
it hasn't happened to me ;)

$100 is pretty steep, but most phone batteries cost $40-60, so it's not  
unreasonable.  I think by making the battery internal they can make it  
more powerful and make the device smaller (sorry, some of us like the  
small size ;).

I also have read if you don't care about your warranty or your warranty is  
expired, you can buy an actual iphone battery online for about $20 and a  
kit for $10 more so you can change it yourself.

 That's a lot of issues for something that's supposedly well-polished.




Wait, most of these aren't actual problems, but just design decisions you  
disagree with.  In fact, only one is a bug (the iphone 4 antenna problem),  
which has already been addressed.  "I hate how they think they're so cool  
because their devices are thin" isn't even a problem, its just a form of  
name calling.

Note that for all these "problems" you mentioned, the iphone's good  
features are *really* good.  Even the tiny details have thought put into  
them.  One example: I listen to music at work with the enclosed headphones  
(w/ mic and volume control inline on the wire), and I listen to it low, so  
I can hear when other people want to talk to me.  When I get in the car, I  
have to turn the volume on the iphone all the way up to normalize the  
input to the stereo.

I noticed that once I set the respective volumes, I didn't have to change  
them -- the iphone knows the difference between the two headphone types  
and auto-adjusts the volume to the last setting.  It's one of those  
features that is trivial, but just make the iphone a pleasant experience.

I'll tell you a few things that I've found annoying:

1. I disabled downloading graphics in emails (as everyone should), but in  
emails I know are not spam, I want to download the images.  There is no  
button for that...
2. A couple times, the phone had a hard time connecting to a wireless  
network that it previously had no problem with.  It mistakes a bad signal  
with a bad password, so it asks you for the password.  If you don't hit  
"cancel" and just hit "ok", it forgets the password that it used to have.   
I then have to go look up the password as it's some hex string.
3. The calendar app doesn't allow you to jump ahead quickly by months or  
years.  This is annoying when setting a future appointment.  You can  
quickly scroll via the day, they should give you wheels to do the month  
and year also.

-Steve

Sep 03 2010

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:

On Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:36:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a a.a> wrote:

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote in message
Then I guess 99% of phones are evil?

99% of phones? Certainly not.

99% of *cell* phones? Absolutely, yes. Service provider lock-in is one of
the primary reasons I've never bought one.

Yes, that's what I meant :) I thought we were talking cell phones here...

And OMG, you've never bought a cell phone? Why are you punishing yourself
;) I suppose with the attitude you have towards them it would just raise
your blood pressure carrying it around...

Your lack of experience with cell phones does not give any boost to your
position...

I also have co-workers and friends who use jailbroken iphones on other
GSM networks.

In an allegedly capitalist society (or "mixed-economy with capitalist
leanings" as the case may be), no one should ever have any reason to
devise
or use such hacks for such a basic freedom as consumer choice.

Huh? Why should verizon go out of its way to allow you to use its phones
with other services? Maybe you don't understand capitalism...

I could never do that with most of my verizon phones.

Verizon is one of the worst cell companies out there anyway.

[purposely ignoring]

Besides, who switches phone service providers within the life of a
phone?

No one, but you're overlooking the *reasons* that doesn't happen:
contract
lock-in and hardware that's not built to last.

Contract lock-in only happens if you want to buy a phone cheap. If you
absolutely don't want a 2-yr contract, you can pay full price for the
phone.

These days, hardware is not built to last no matter what it is. And it's
because people don't *want* old hardware. As a manufacturer, you have a
choice:

1. build something that's more expensive, but outlasts its usefulness or
2. build something that's cheaper, may not last as long, but lasts at
least until the next gen version is available.

And I like to buy things once and keep them as long as possible (my stereo
has an input for laser disc to give you an idea). But cell phones and
computers change so fast that the hardware is obsolete before it's broken.

Not to mention that the two biggest service providers are incompatible
with eachother, so you couldn't switch between them even if you wanted
to.

If there's a fundamental difference in protocols (as opposed to the
artificially-created incompatibilities), then yes, of course that's fine.

Yes, Verizon uses CDMA and AT&T uses GSM. Different protocols, different
chips required.

However, outside the cell phone world, such situations are likely to
result
in dual-use devices

There were some phones like that. Nobody cared ;)

E. A die-hard Apple fan I know recently showed me his beloved iPad.
Accurately setting the text-cursor was nearly impossible. But that
would
have been an incredibly simple fix: Use a screen that worked with a
stylus
or fingernail. There's millions of them out there. Even if that would
have
prevented multi-touch (and I don't know that it would or would not
have),
after using the multi-touch, I felt it added no real value other than
a
"gee-whiz" gimmick factor. Stylus/fingernail support would have added
at
least some real value.

Your friend is doing it wrong.

Well, I was the one using it and noticing that.

I can accurately set the cursor whenever I want using the magnifying
glass.

See an example here:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781430231295/typing_numbers_and_symbols

That's nothing more than a workaround. How is that *not* worse than being
able to just use the tip of your fingernail?

Be....cause... it's better? At least I think it is :) What if you don't
have a long fingernail? Even if you do have a fingernail, and are using
an old-style screen that could detect the fingernail, it's probably going
to be more inaccurate, and without a way to tune into the right position.

I've had two old-style touch screen phones before this. They suck. They
break, require calibration, and require a stylus. My samsung phone got to
be so inaccurate that I pretty much avoided using the touch screen as much
as possible. I'll pay the price of lost accuracy when positioning a
cursor in order to avoid having to pop out a stylus to press on-screen
buttons.

And once you get used to it (the cursor positioning), it's fast.

What do you need tactile feedback for?

See, now I just can't even fathom that kind of stance, so it's difficult
for
me to argue against it. For me it's just a fundamental thing: With
tactile
feedback > without tactile feedback, by a large degree.

ok then :)

You get audible feedback, and the phone number buttons are extremely
responsive.
Plus, if you want to dial without looking at the phone, you can use
voice-activation.

That hardly makes it better to not have tactile feedback.

I guess. It doesn't really bother me to not have tactile feedback.

One thing I can say for the iphone, it's *very* reliable that when you
push a button it registers. So the assurance that "yes you are pushing
the button" isn't usually necessary. The sounds also help.

Blackberry tried a touch-screen with tactile feedback, it sucked.

Which is exactly why it's idiotic for Apple to make the entire interface
touchscreen. You do that and you lose tactile feedback and you can't
just
hack it back in. If you took my Palm Pilot, replaced the
up/down/left/right
and app buttons with touchscreen input, that would be a step *backwards*.
You'd gain nothing but a questionable "cool factor", and the UI would
just
simply be worse.

But PalmOS is not iOS. I've had about 5 palms, starting with the palm
III, and I like the apple interface significantly more.

H. What's there to protect the highly-prominent screen?

The screen is made of pretty durable glass. Like all touch-screen
phones,
it's highly advisable to get a screen protector for it. I don't get
what
your problem is here, do you want a screen or not? If you do, then what
possible way could a manufacturer design a destruction-proof screen?
Put
little airbags around it in case you drop it?

So you mean, it should fold? You can just say that you know :)

Palm III also had a plastic cover. I eventually left it off, it was kind
of annoying.

Just a different style I guess. Most smart phones have a outward facing
screen these days, even the touch-screen ones.

Note that with a folding device, it's probably *less* durable because the
folding part can break, and wires can more easily come loose. Less moving
parts == more reliable.

Or a different approach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_PC#Convertibles

And other things can no doubt be thought up, especially if Apple is as
clever as people claim they are.

Or hell, a built-in or even just pre-packaged protector.

This is *far* from an insurmountable obstacle.

No, but its *far* from a failed design also :) Protecting the screen from
breakage by having a hard cover detracts from the usability. Besides, I
think the phone is pretty darned durable, it's not a cheap feeling thing.
I'm not going to throw it against the wall, but I wouldn't do that with a
folding phone either. I also have a rubber protective case on it too (but
the screen is exposed).

This is petty :)

In and of itself, maybe. But thinness typically necessitates other design
compromises, all for a "benefit" that is, as you say, petty.

What compromises? What is it missing that could be there if it were
thicker?

I can't speak for the ipad, but the iphone feels more durable than any
phone I've had. Maybe you'd prefer this phone:
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20100829/BIZ/708299922/1005/biz

I don't understand what you mean. According to that it's even thinner
than
Apple's stuff.

It's a larger phone, I thought that meant it was thicker. I guess I
didn't read it well enough. Nevermind.

But it does make me think of another thing: a perfectly flat rectangle
(with
a touchscreen on the side against your head) is a rather awkward form
factor
for a phone (and I have tried such phones, like my sister's Palm...umm,
the
other WebOS one that isn't a Pre).

Pixi

My phone is far more comfortable:
http://www.uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=EXAI398

again, *shrug*. It's pretty comfortable to me.

Note that the ipad directly competes with e-Reader devices, so they need
to appeal to those people too.

That still doesn't necessitate "as thin as conceivably possible".

It doesn't necessitate it, but it does score points with that crowd.
People want a thin book-sized device to read all their books.

Now if only iBooks had some decent material...

J. What happens when the battery gets old and won't hold a charge?

When I was looking at getting a palm pre as a verizon customer, and I
discovered that palm pre doesn't support voice dialing, I mentioned I'd
just be switching to AT&T for the iPhone. The Verizon guy identified
the
battery issue as a reason not to get one. So I looked up the details.
I
think apple provides a $100 service to change your battery. I don't
know
the details, but I think they just swap out your entire phone. If they
don't swap out your phone, that's crappy, but I can't complain yet
because
it hasn't happened to me ;)

I honestly find the vast majority of cell phones to be *too* small.
Problematically so. (And yes, I *have* used a number of cell phones,
even
though I've never owned one) Small is obviously good to a certain
point...but...well, only to a certain point. Sorry, but some of us don't
like super-small ;)

You might like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Cm8MFqxWw&feature=fvst

I agree, smaller isn't always better. But I mean smaller as in, if it was
an external battery, then it would have to be larger than you would like.
The iPhone size isn't too small.

I also have read if you don't care about your warranty or your warranty
is
expired, you can buy an actual iphone battery online for about $20 and a
kit for $10 more so you can change it yourself.

Which only goes to prove that the typical $40-100 you mentioned above
*is*
exorbitant.

Yes, I feel it is too. They got you by the balls also, since if your
battery is dead, you have one option.

Furthermore, there is absolutely *no* excuse for a company pushing a
device
that you actually have to *hack* just to change the damn battery.

Well, I think the excuse is the size. Which doesn't fly with you, so I
guess you're right.

That's a lot of issues for something that's supposedly well-polished.

Wait, most of these aren't actual problems, but just design decisions
you
disagree with. In fact, only one is a bug (the iphone 4 antenna
problem),
which has already been addressed.

I didn't say it was buggy, I said it wasn't polished. A big part of
polish
*is* having solid *design decisions*. Many people seem to think polish is
just gloss, glitz and gimmick.

No, polish is making something behave the way it should behave. This
includes fixing bugs and usability issues, but not "designs you don't
like." For example, the cursor positioning is a usability issue that was
solved by polish (I don't think it was in the original iphone). Because
you don't like the solution doesn't mean it's not finished in 99% of users
minds. I don't think anyone complains about that.

"I hate how they think they're so cool because their devices are thin"
isn't even a problem, its just a form of name calling.

My stance did *not* amount to that, and I've added another reason above.

Well, I did misunderstand your stance, but my point is that "thin is
better" *is* a major selling point for most people. Apple is trying to
sell as many phones as possible, not as many phones as possible to Nick
S. It also diminishes the substance of your other arguments. It appears
that apple could make a perfect phone and you'd still not want it, which
means the rest of your points could just be overblown gripes.

Note that for all these "problems" you mentioned, the iphone's good
features are *really* good. Even the tiny details have thought put into
them. One example: I listen to music at work with the enclosed
headphones
(w/ mic and volume control inline on the wire), and I listen to it low,
so
I can hear when other people want to talk to me. When I get in the
car, I
have to turn the volume on the iphone all the way up to normalize the
input to the stereo.

I noticed that once I set the respective volumes, I didn't have to
change
them -- the iphone knows the difference between the two headphone types
and auto-adjusts the volume to the last setting. It's one of those
features that is trivial, but just make the iphone a pleasant
experience.

Yea, I never said there wasn't anything good about it. Hell, I'll even
admit
the iPad was a lot better than I expected. I'd still never buy one
though.

Oh, I completely forgot, there's another iPad issue:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/ipad-fails-networking-101-how-to-earn-it-a-passing-grade.ars

I think they've fixed the network issues, but I'm not sure. I remember
reading articles about how some colleges banned ipads because they would
take down the network :) Definitely not a problem you want to have out of
the gate, but this is a bug, it gets fixed.

I'll tell you a few things that I've found annoying:

1. I disabled downloading graphics in emails (as everyone should), but
in
emails I know are not spam, I want to download the images. There is no
button for that...

Lack of basic settings, features or any sort of customizability.

I wouldn't go that far :)

Oh, one other thing that's annoying, but I think it's because of pressure
from the phone companies who want to charge you an extra $15/month for
"enterprise access", it doesn't read ics calendar appointments unless you
use microsoft exchange. That is *extremely* crappy and pointless.

2. A couple times, the phone had a hard time connecting to a wireless
network that it previously had no problem with. It mistakes a bad
signal
with a bad password, so it asks you for the password. If you don't hit
"cancel" and just hit "ok", it forgets the password that it used to
have.
I then have to go look up the password as it's some hex string.

Lack of polish, and frankly, sounds downright rushed.

Yes, it needs polish here.

Very *blatant* lack of polish. Jumping by month/year is just plain
obvious
for any calender app.

I know, right?

It's exactly these sorts of appallingly *obvious* things that Apple
constantly gets wrong anyway, and in fairly large quantities, that make
me
say "Apple's sense of 'polish' is little more than gimmicks and graphic
design." Showing attention to detail on one or two things here and there,
but then utterly failing on the basics (consistently) - that's not
polish.

Well, it's just that they haven't got to it yet, or maybe they don't feel
it's as important as other issues. If something is 99% perfect and you
want to point out the 1%, I guess you're entitled to it. But if
everything else out there is only 90% perfect, then it's just pointless
griping. It's a phone, it calls just fine (best in-call interface by far
I've seen), it surfs the internet very well (best web browser experience
on a phone I've had by far), and has lots of attention to detail. The
frilly petty stuff isn't what makes the phone bad or good. My opinion is
that the obvious stuff *does* work well, it's the niche stuff that has
issues, and they are issues I'm willing to live with.

Compare this to my list of issues with Windows mobile 6, you will find
they haven't even opened the polish can yet :)

BTW, I'm done with this, because I think it's getting way way too long :)

Good debate, see you on the next one.

-Steve

Sep 03 2010

Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich gmail.com> writes:

I'm pretty sure that's only for albums which are stored as a single
flac file. They usually come with a .cue file which stores track
lengths so you can split up the huge flac file into each track as a
flac. Then you can have per-track info stored in the flac files
themselves. As for splitting a .flac file that has a .cue file,
Medieval cue splitter is probably the best free tool for the job.

On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 3:36 AM, Walter Bright
<newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:
Like how FLAC format does not allow for track info - you have to
 have a separate "cue" file for that.

Sep 03 2010

Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich gmail.com> writes:

But, you can't embed multiple track info in mp3's either..?

On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 4:50 AM, Walter Bright
<newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:
 It still makes no sense to have it as a separate file.

 Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
 I'm pretty sure that's only for albums which are stored as a single
 flac file. They usually come with a .cue file which stores track
 lengths so you can split up the huge flac file into each track as a
 flac. Then you can have per-track info stored in the flac files
 themselves. As for splitting a .flac file that has a .cue file,
 Medieval cue splitter is probably the best free tool for the job.

 On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 3:36 AM, Walter Bright
 <newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:
 Like how FLAC format does not allow for track info - you have to
 have a separate "cue" file for that.

Sep 04 2010

"Yao G." <yao.gomez spam.gmail.com> writes:

On Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:55:58 -0500, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 digitalmars.com> wrote:

 Isn't it interesting that people keep inventing new audio formats and  
 fail to solve obvious fundamental problems with them, like providing  
 fields for things like artwork, lyrics, etc.?


http://www.id3.org/

-- 
Yao G.

Sep 04 2010

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