A billion years ago, in System 7 days before Win 95 even came out, I worked in a Mac lab. Not once, but twice, when I told someone to point the mouse to the hard drive on screen, they picked the mouse up off the desk, and jabbed it towards to the screen. They had no mental model of GUIs, it was "well, this is how you point". I didn't laugh at them, either in front of them or after they left. They just used the normal idea of pointing. Nothing hilarious about it, but it does mean they have a very very shallow view of what computing is. Steve Jobs wrote software for those people.

yes, *you* could do the find . -type f > playlist.m3u. But could the person above do that? what the hell is a shell. What does find mean? what's an m3u file? Maybe that was my error above... i didn't say nobody could do it, just the vast vast majority woudn't do it nor want to. I submit that find > somefile.xml would be a lot harder, you probably need to write a real script for this, further making it harder to deal with your device. Again, not saying nobody could do it, just >99% of people wouldn't have the skill nor want to learn.

That playlist XML script? Yeah, I personally did that. For about two weeks. I had my WinXP machine use Cygwin and a series of perl scripts specifically written to write back and forth to the iPod musicDB and some XML. Then manipulate the XML (not hard, but it took a while to get the quoting right). At first it was "hey, I can control the songs better this way..." Then i realized there wasn't a lot I wanted to do with scripts I couldn't do with iTunes. Yeah, In theory there were more things available, just that iTunes did the things I cared about. Eventually I just dropped it all and just used iTunes. Nothing Apple did to get in my way. I already had the Cygwin setup, I didn't have any startup costs any more. It just wasn't fun and wasn't a good use of my time.

True, but even then, you're (probably) better off not going after the filesystem directly, but dealing with the XML file that iTunes can generate for you. It has a lot of metadata about rating and playcounts and such that won't be accessible from the filesystem view. But if you can use your system to manage 30K objects, it obviously works and I'd never try to convince you against it.

My issue was mostly with the "everyone would want to deal with filesystem view and why does iTunes exist at all" crowd.

A bit meta, but at least it wasn't only me downmodded...

I think slashdot users get a little too technical, and feel others should be exactly the same way as them. But people have different mental models, and different preferences. I do technical things all day. I don't want to have to root my MP3 player to just play a damn file.

I do have one very minor quibble - I don't think they'd necessarily be a Luddite. If anything, their manual manipulation requires a much higher order of mental mapping. To me, it's just why bother. You bought a product that can deal with the tediousness of mapping metadata from two sources (device and user) but for some reason you decide you can do it "better". Meh.

It all depends :)

My folks got married when I was 7 or 8 or so. Yes, I'm a literal bastard, at least technically. But they were "married" long before any ceremony. They fought hard, but there was no question of them separating. My grandma used to tell me a quote from my mom "If I had to live under a tree with him, I would." They nearly did with very little money throughout the relationship. They took it seriously, even with, on the outside, just a City Hall ceremony and never a honeymoon. Contrast that with Kim Kardashian's wedding to Humphries, the wedding in the millions, visible, lots of people at their wedding, very public lives, with them divorcing nearly before the wedding was aired. She didn't take the marriage seriously. The wedding, yeah, great party. But not the marriage.

And even if you do take the wedding seriously, and the marriage, now you're adding 20,000 or so in debt (if you're lucky it's that low) to a relationship. Are you in a space where your relationship can take that hit?

I agree with you on seriousness, but I differ on how much a wedding is an external indicator.

Also, the prenuptual agreement blunted a lot of the monetary deterrent to divorce. I think #3 is less strong than you think. Maybe 30 years ago, but now everyone gets divorced and with the stigma gone, and the monetary pain gone it's less of a problem. Witness Kim K and Humphries above.

One thing missing in the list is communication. My wife and I were raised radically differently. She's somewhat traditional Chinese, me American with lots of foreign influences. Stronger than that, was what we learned on how to fight from our parents. We both had horrible models to follow, but they were 180 degree different models, and in the beginning we blew up hard. We talked it through, and now we're one of the more solid couples I know. But that's hard to quantify. Maybe "how much time do you spend talking to each other a day" or something like that.

I agree to this.

We have millions of dollars riding on perl scripts. Yeah, we want to move to python, but while we're on perl we're on perl. There's a lot you can do with maintenance and upgrading to better perl with better constructs.

A language is not like a cellphone. We don't toss perl because the new iPhone is out next week. Perl doesn't fade. There's not a battery that will slowly begin not charging as deeply as time goes on. Perl remains perl. The problem domain doesn't radically shift month by month where we need a new language every month. What we have works.

I've had routers hang and stay hung overnight. DD-WRT has a configurable heartbeat ping. I have that turned on.

The issue is not so much the pinging, but the fact that it had a heartbeat that was not nuclear-bomb-proof and not re-configurable.

You mean, someone MIGHT then use a turn signal? This modern world is so amazing!

But my joke DB just came down with a SQL injection bug and the best it came up with was "20 bucks, same as in town"

I'll just leave this here

On a side note, I have seen many supermarkets convert their signs to "___ Items Or Fewer" since the song came out. The expensive printed signs still say "Or Less", while some places with Laser Printed signs have "Or Fewer". Or maybe I just notice it more. Baader-Meinhoff perhaps?

See my above comment to lgw, but Apple does do m3u, and a lot of opensource.

yes. i realize there are these things known as files.... :)

But, do you think about the huge mental model difference between a filesystem (and not mentioning specific limitations per filesystem, say what I can do in FAT) vs what I want a playlist to look like. You may revel in "hey I can map these two different models in my head interchangably" I've done that too, hey I"m a programmer (who's actually written one of these so called "files") but most people don't like to play that way. They just want to listen to music.

How does this playlist work? Do you hand generate it? Is there one copy of the music file in a sinular location on disk? that makes sense to me... but then now I have a JOIN. I have the same file in multiple lists,, I need to JOIN with a fileID. How are primary keys generated suquentially? At this point I need a program to manage the stuff on disk. Now, I have this model difference between filesystem (I have to balance my nodes, not everything goes into 90s, 80s, i need a well balanced hash, maybe dirs AA1, AA2, ZZ9, etc). So, now I have to use the app, cause my disk is a mess to satisfy constraints of the device. At this point, do I care to look at the disk? It's a balanced hash of files, and the real info is in the playlist. The playlist has metadata and JOINs, can i do all this in my head? Nahhh, just use the app. At this point, you have an iPod without a visible filesystem, and iTunes.

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.