Museums

I know you're not really hating on Apple, I was being a little tongue-in-cheek. I haven't seen any sort of problems that you reported with iTunes, so I can't comment on those. Maybe things are better now. My wife has a 2nd gen iPod Touch 32MB and I have a 1 GB iPod Shuffle for when I go to the gym (actually, this is my second, the first one was destroyed when I accidentally washed it in my gym pants, something I'd have a hard time ascribing to Apple). I haven't really noticed iTunes trying to sell you stuff in-your-face, excepting when you open it up since it comes up by default in the iTunes Store rather than your library. Click a tab in your library and that's gone pretty quick. The iTunes store has had a lot of DRM-free stuff for a while now, and I can't really say that DRM is an Apple-only concern where it does exist. As for my stuff, all my photos are still plain old jpegs or RAW images, all my music is in drm-less codecs that are freely available on other platforms, my mail can be converted to another database if I so desire... I can still run Firefox if I want to, I can still use Microsoft Office or OpenOffice, I use Quicken, which is also available on Windows. I recently upgraded the hard disk in my MacBook with an off-the-shelf 2.5" SATA drive with no issues (and in fact my Time Machine backup made this the least painful hard drive upgrade ever). I can reasonably run a lot of open software on OS X. Point being, I can easily move out of the OS X realm into Linux or Windows if I wanted to, taking all my toys along with me, but why do it? I'm having fun playing in this sandbox right now. Other people might feel differently, but I don't feel like I'm hindered in any realistic way from doing whatever it is I want, and in fact, Apple's software has made my life with computers less annoying. That said, I do have a couple of quibbles: Cosmetically, I loved my white macbook when I first got it. The slick polycarbonate shell has scratched rather easily though. The keyboard has cracked in a couple places at the edges of the case. Both are cosmetic issues rather than functional issues. Part of me thinks this never should have happened, but on the flipside I'm not one to baby my laptop either. It is well-used believe me, and aside from these two points I'd say overall I'm happy with my purchase. I think they've at least addressed the cracking issue on the latest white cased MacBook. As for the development software, I believe the free versions of Visual Studio are crippled in some ways are they not? And it's nice to have a company-sanctioned IDE to use, regardless of how nice a third parties' IDE might be. ________________________________ From: Keith <keithvz at verizon.net> To: General at olddell.com; On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Mon, January 25, 2010 10:53:21 AM Subject: Re: Museums geoffrey oltmans wrote: So I'm really not trying to "hate" on Apple here. It seems as long as you are willing to stay within the Apple paradigm, then everything is nice. Everything works. I don't doubt that. The problem comes in whenever you'd like to use your hardware/software in a different way. I'd like to just plug my ipod into my Windows PC, and copy my .mp3's to it. It seems absurd to me that you can't do this. Forget the huge bloated management application that is constantly advertising and trying to sell you something. I will say I've had no end to problems w/ the ipod nano I bought my wife a few years ago. And lost songs (aka money) due to DRM issues. Serves me right for actually paying for music, anyways. Or maybe you don't want the new software update for your ipod. Or maybe you don't want to use itunes to restore a broken ipod. There's really no choice. It vaguely reminds me of those Caribbean and Mexican beach resort vacations. As long as you stay on the property in the enclosed fence, everything is fine. Ignore the guys with machine guns outside. Just do as we tell you and no one will get hurt. :) Floomla is a decent free ipod app, btw. BTW: Microsoft offers a number of free versions of Visual Studio. Depending on the language, etc, Eclipse is a good free alternative too. Keith