Goodbye, Clarice.

alternateorg on March 15, 2001

Don’t go see Hannibal. It was horrible. Had I paid for it, I would have wanted my money back. I should have tried, anyway.

Nautilus vs. Mac

alternateorg on March 14, 2001

I found this list of Eazel Nautilus functionality items that they say Mac and Windows don’t have. Here’s my breakdown of it.

* Zooming in every view, from 25% up to 400%
Why? Wouldn’t setting a font size to 16 be enough?

* Icons can be arbitrary sizes and are individually resizable
Again, why? I could see a slight advantage to setting an important file’s icon to bigger than another. less-important file, but that still seems only slightly useful. Also, the Mac can do something similar: You can add ‘Label’ to your list view windows, and then sort by that. So if you label 5 files as ‘Essential,’ they’ll show up at the top, together. No clunky larger icons necessary.

* Icons based on document content, including embedded text for text files
What OS doesn’t do this? When was the last time you saved a Photoshop file and it got an icon that wasn’t Photoshop-related? Even PS JPEGs get a little JPEG marker on the icon. And the ‘text of a text-file inside the icon’ thing is ridiculous. If you don’t know what the file contains by what you named it, you’re an idiot.

* Emblems, which are little satellite images expressing file attributes, including user-assigned attributes
I can’t tell how this would work, so I dunno. Seems overly complicated for an icon, though.


* Sound previewing by hovering over the icon
I can hear the cacophony of mousing over multiple files in a window… no thanks.

* Extensible, componentized viewers (ie, you can read a text or other type of file right in Nautilus without launching a separate app)
Should the OS be what you use to write text? Is it really that hard to open SimpleText?


* Extensible, componentized directory views (a little hard to explain, offering type-specific views that put the functionality at the user’s fingertips – the best current example in Nautilus is the “view as music” feature)
Can’t you just do this in Audion or iTunes? Why does the OS have to do it?

* Annotations, where users can write and retrieve notes about any file or directory
‘Get Info,’ anyone?


* Attribute-based searching – ie, show me all the files I marked important
Sherlock can search by ‘File label is essential.’


* “Text services” where selected text is used to parameterize a web request
Huh?

* Drag and drop customization, including a cute way to specify gradient washes simply by dragging a color near an edge multiple user levels where the software reconfigures itself to support users with different appetites for complexity
Not sure about all of that, but OS X has that drag-n-droppable customization that Jobs showed at MWSF.

Overall, as far as I can tell, nothing groundbreaking.. Things they said no other OS can do are either not worth it or can be done by the Mac OS, and mostly Windows, too.

Followupster

alternateorg on March 14, 2001

Just a follow-up to my last post:

Something I think I didn’t get across clearly enough was that I’m all for musicians making money from their work. It’s just that they don’t. They end up millions of dollars in debt after their first album, and are slaves to their contracts for the next 5 albums, just so they can pay the record company off. And that isn’t right, to me. If musicians ran the music industry, it would be a million times different, I think. And Jen raised another point: we’re paying end-user licenses on art. If I go online to look at a Hopper painting somewhere, I don’t have to pay money just to see it, and if I really wanted to, I could download it and make a nice (little) print-out of it, for pesonal desk-related use. No one in the poster-making industry is crying about that. The only difference between a scan of a peice of art and an MP3 is time. The only difference between music and say, a painting, is that music takes place over time, and it’s aural, not visual.

Something a friend of mine once said about people (in high-school) fighting over which one got to buy a painting of mine, and I didn’t know who to sell it to: He said, ‘It doesn’t matter who buys it. Art is in the creating, not the creation.’ I’ve always felt that was true. So treating songs as if they were sticks of bubble-gum instead of what they are (works of art) is why I think the record industry has screwed us (the music- ‘consuming’ public). I would buy all the CDs I could if they record companies didn’t make such huge profits from every single CD sale, and musicians got like 2 cents. I think the average CD (with liner notes) costs something like $1.50 to actually make and ship. And they turn around and sell it to stores (and you after that) for 15 bucks.

Which brings up another point. My Napster rage here is just another arm of my hating corporatization of everything. Corporations control what you listen to and buy. Sometimes I just hate feeling like a target market. Napster is my way of proving that I’m not.

YA Napster Essay

alternateorg on March 13, 2001

Things have been kinda slow around here lately, and I’ve had this on my mind, now seemed like the right time to get it online.

I am so sick of reading weblogs and articles about people going around saying. “Yeah, well, I used Napster, sure, but I only downloaded things I couldn’t find anywhere else, and I always buy my favorite bands CDs the second they come out, and I’m a good little music consumer, so I don’t really care all that much that Napster is going down the tubes…” Napster is starting to be like some sort of wrist slap-bracelet fad kinda thing. If you mention now that you actually like it and actually use it INSTEAD OF BUYING MUSIC then you’re looked at now as some sort of sick fuck who is being totally and morally wrong. Fuck that shit. I used Napster to pirate music. There. I fucking said it.

So fucking sue me (I’m sure Metallica will try) that I don’t ENJOY putting gobs and gobs of money into record executives’ pockets. Fuck those guys. As far as I’m concerned, they’re like the people that make porn: They completely and utterly live off of the fact that someone else (the musician or pornstar) has had a shitty childhood or something else bad happen in their lives. What do I mean? Let me explain. Musicians write music because they’re sad. At least all the good ones anyway. Bad Religion is infinitely better than The Backstreet Boys because the music is real and felt and written because of emotion, not marketing. I just can’t bring myself to like the idea that record execs do absolutely nothing for society. The peddle other people’s ideas and emotions and feelings. Fuck that.

So back to the point. Napster is so wildly successful on such a massive scale for a couple reasons. The average Napster user is 18-24 (I’m assuming)… The people within that age range have some things to say by using Napster. The foremost statement is that music on the radio FUCKING SUCKS. All the music coming out in the past year has been worthless. At least the stuff in mainstream channels: MTV, the radio etc. So if mainstream channels are letting us down, we go to less-accepted ‘gray’ channels. Like any peer-to-peer filesharing network. FTP sites when I was in high school, Hotline when I was in college, and Napster when I joined the workforce and had a T1 at my disposable for 8 hours a day. If the channels are there, then I’m going to use them.

I do not feel guilty at all about illegally using Napser to get music that I want to enjoy. So I liked ONE Limp Bizkit song, and wanted to put on a compilation CD. So I downloaded it from Napster, and Fred fucking Durst or the guy that decided the album was going to be recorded didn’t get one dime from me. People enjoy music. They don’t enjoy paying for it. Add to that the fact that if I wanted to listen to a specific Cure song because I thought it would help me get a design to where I want it to be, and voila. Napster is the perfect solution.

Let me reiterate the most important sentence in this post: I do not feel guilty at all about illegally using Napser to get music that I want to enjoy. Not one bit, and you shouldn’t either. If the music industry gave a flying fuck about us as people who feel the same emotions as the music we buy instead of a way to get a title to #1 on the Billboard charts, then maybe, just maybe, this wouldn’t be such a problem for them. But they’ve been fucking us since the 50’s and now with digital technology we have the power to fight back. And we can. And we will.

Partition black magic

alternateorg on March 12, 2001

By the way, if you’ve picked up a new PowerBook G4 I would highly suggest NOT PARTITIONING the happy drive. As it turns unhappy if you do. So don’t do it.

And on an unrelated note, how did I ever exist without knowing about this site? It’s a site dedicated to Apple/Macintosh history. Link via Splorp

OS X Goes GM

alternateorg on March 7, 2001

Apple .announced today that MacOS X has gone Gold Master… which basically means that it’s being produced in mass quantities now, instead of disc images for internal builds. If you’re new to the Mac platform or are a Windows user, you have no idea how momentus this is; that it’s finally happening. A lot of us have been waiting for this ‘next-generation OS’ since it was called Rhapsody, like 5 years ago.