Old iPods let you do this. I had one that did, I don't miss it at all.

For those who think "oh I wish i had a device i can just browse as a hard drive"... well, how do you make playlist with a filesystem? I have 2 thousand files on my iPod, and I'm not even trying hard. Because some are based on last time i played them, dozens of files come and go based on metadata changes every time I sync. You want me to manage that myself? How can I have a file in two playlists, do I have to have two copies on disk? There's no real good way on filesystem only. You have to have some managing software. And at that point, you need to sync between Filesystem image and Managing software image. At that point, I'm willing to drop the Filesystem access for a decent player. I had the second gen iPod.

You can buy mp3s from Apple now. Did all these other MP3 players suddenly jump up and be popular? Nahhh...

There are two secrets with the iPod popularity, and neither is DRM. One is that it was, relatively to other players, easy to use. Click a button, you have a song. Drop a disc to your computer, you have an album. Yeah, I could have used CDex, and chosen between Gracenote, and opencddb.org and all that, but iTunes was a decent ripper and there you go.

The other thing, and the thing that would keep me from moving much, is all the metadata about songs. Most of my playlists are metadata based, mostly to do with star ratings, Id have to find a way to translate all that to a massive download to another device type. It's too much of a hassle, to change off a device that to be honest works pretty well for me anyway.

Remove the government-granted monopolies and the problem goes away on its own.

I often hear this argument, i feel it's a bit simplistic. There are various places where a free market will fail. Markets aren't magic, they're just a set of rules that are put together. Sometimes these rules result in something magical, sometimes something that doesn't work.

1. An aside snarky comment is, the market doesn't care much about who makes the rules, it just shifts in some way. But we as humans tend to think any shift by one side (Corporations if you're Conservative, Regulators if you're Liberal) are always good, and any shift by the other side (Government if you're Conservative, Corporations if you're Liberal) are inherently evil. The market has no bias you have to see how it plays out.

We all like competition, well most of us. But how you're able to compete is partially determined by market rules. The rules somewhat fail for things that take a lot of scale to be profitable and a lot of costly initial infrastructure to build out. You have a massive chicken and egg problem here. So, we change the rules somewhat, to allow the first companies to be profitable, yet try to balance the fact that the same rules that made it hard for them to get in make it hard for competition. In a way, both Liberals and Conservatives can claim to be on the same side - competition - but go about it in 180 degree different ways. Conservatives think the best way to get competition is to get out of the way. Liberals believe (and I personally agree) that there are special rules for certain industries, and the rules of the marketplace need to be augmented with regulations to get real competition.

can't guarantee a binary API from one compiler to the next due to shitty non-standardized name mangling

There is (or rather i should say there's been a lot of progress towards) a standard C++ ABI. G++ has been following it since 3..0 days, and it really got stable around 3.4.

It's a bit off to be angry at the name mangling Name mangling incompatibility is actually a feature. It's purposely different to make things not link up because the real things (static function initialization, object layout, including virtual table layout, etc) are incompatible. Be angry that those things aren't standardized, or not enough.

Im not sure about MacOS9, i was off macs by then, but in System 7 days, DOS/Windows3.1/Win95 had tens of thousands of viruses, and Mac OS7 had literally about 7. I doubt it jumped that much in a couple years.

Windows (up until XP) still had a DOS core. It was SO easy to write a Windows virus, almost trivial. Macs on the other hand had no command shell, so everything needed to be system calls. Also, it was a new processor, Motorola 68K to Intel `86, so machine code was different. Then, byt the time MacOS 9 came around, im sure it was pretty much all PowerPC. From what i heard, it was almost impossible to write shellcode for it.

So, a huge influx of viruses for a hard to hack processor when the ease and profit was in the Windows arena? I doubt it.

Not saying that OS9 was great. It wasn't. Read the whole mess about Copeland and Taligent if you want to read about how NOT to run a company. But the virus problem wasn't the issue.

Grrr, you're right. I did 8 * 2^10 * 2^10, when i should have done 8 * 2^10 * 2^10 * 2^10. Off by mega => giga.

Thanks, my bad math. But if anything, this makes my point stronger rather than weaker.

Hmm, I've been on UNIX since SunOS days and Solaris was the new kid on the block. I've written a device driver that shipped in a commercial UNIX kernel. That said, I chose as my desktop a hybrid BSD/Microkernel architecture with POSIX compliance and a modern GUI. Or in other words, a Mac.

Macs are not stupid, they are made to be simple to use. That external simplicity hides a deep complexity underneath. I think people who don't understand that making something complex to be simple to use is one of the hardest things in Computer Science. A good size for desktop computers now is about 8GB of RAM or more. At any given time, 8GB will give you 2^(8*(2^23)) states, which of course will change in a nanosecond. Mac OS tries to, as much as possible, hide the states that don't mean anything to you. It's not that the MacOS guys don't know they exist. They just feel YOU don't need to know they exist. Maybe they're wrong, but it's a conscious decision where they know the states that exist and they feel that showing the states is less helpful than the confusion it would engender.. Not stupidity.

The main issue (and where you have a point though you exaggerate it way past its validity) is sometimes things are complex, and if you hide that complexity, you actually cause a disservice. Apple hides a lot of its security notices. As Macs become more and more of a target, they really need to not hide the complexity as much so that people can make valid choices on how to prevent malware infections.

The truth is that the Chevrolet Nova's name didn't significantly affect its sales: it sold well in both its primary Spanish-language markets, Mexico and Venezuela. (Its Venezuelan sales figures actually surpassed GM's expectations.)

The Nova didn't sell well, because it wasn't a particularly good car. There were many times it DID'T run, didn't need a name to attach that condition to the car.

I wish i could attribute properly, but someone explained the Nova somewhat as "a person hearing a furniture set had notable workmanship, but ignoring it because it had no table" It puts spanish speakers in a bad light, claiming they can't tell the difference between languages.

That said, I think Alfa Romeo DID rename the 144 to the 148, for bad sounds in Cantonese. But they didn't do a Before and After rename sales comparison, so we'll never know if it can affect sales.

I'd prefer the Huxtable system, with Jello Pudding!

So was Honda...

Hell, at one point even GM was "fringe"...

Im not saying that Tesla will grow that size. Suzuki was, and IS a fringe brand. But saying "hey they're small now" is what screwed GM back in the 80s with the Japanese and Volkswagen invasion.

Other bad (for GM) echos are the possible paradigm shift. What allowed the Japanese invasion in the 70's? They had better small car/low gas consumption cars. Here, Tesla has a huge tech advantage in electric right now. Could this be a tipping point? Dunno... But silly for GM to dismiss

As a side point, it makes me a bit sad. GM had the all-electric Impact. But like Microsoft, Nokia et al., they squandered a huge lead in tech and now are trailers.

I hope this is a "Steve Jobs says a competitor's feature sucks because he doesn't have it, but really sees it useful and feverishly puts it in his next release" Sadly, this probably really is "we don't even see them on our radar" and GM is toast. A lot of people work for GM, and whatever you think about the company (generally poorly run for years) if it goes under it's gonna hurt us all.

Probably really the case. Remember that his crew very nearly mutinied because he underestimated ration needs for the first trip.

They tried that but they had to add a a one time pad and people got random drinks

Same. I remember when I got my resume listed there back in the mid nineties. You had to post it, and because it had to be accepted, there was just a tiny bit of "you're in the club". It was a bit of geek cred (that and posting it to Dice back when they still had you use telnet).

Cool Yahoo, a phrase not much heard now, a term of days long gone.

I shudder when i think about all the way these things will be hacked and pwned... I remember a Samsung fridge with a touchscreen to run Twitter, and someone put on the fridge "I'm a fridge, why the fuck am I on twitter."

That and the world scrambling to fix the Shellshock bug that was 20+ years in the making...

I find the Michelin Recommends more my style. There's a restaurant in Chicago Area that feels like you were just dropped into Tokyo (Renga Tei in Lincolnwood, IL). Nothing super special, just very very solid Japanese food with very attentive servers in an inviting space, as inviting as a spot in a strip mall with drop ceilings can be.

It has no stars, but it's good stuff, and it's both our comfort food place, and our "lets take people from out of town there place." Michelin has changed their website a bit and I can't find it, but you can probably spelunk the site a bit and find the list.