Just another reason why I tell people not to give any money to the so-called "Humane Society of the United States".
If you support animal welfare, donate to the American Humane Society or even better, to a local animal shelter. They have a greater need for the money and they will spend it on helping animals instead of on political activism.
xkcd
This unit is even smaller than before, if you can believe it. 1.8" x 0.7" x 0.3".
So how'd they get it this small? Simple, they removed all the controls.
So how do you actually control the thing? It uses a special set of headphones, with three buttons on the cord. This is the same kinds of headphones introduced for the iPhone, for "hands free" operation. On the cord, the "+" and "-" buttons control the volume. Between the two is a big flat button, whose behavior will depend on how you push it:
And, of course, there's the problem of what to do if you don't want to use Apple's headphones. Maybe you've got better-sounding ones, or you want to plug your shuffle into your car stereo or something. Without the proprietary earphones, the shuffle starts playing when you turn it on and stops when you turn it off, and that's all you can do. Not at all acceptable unless someone starts selling a set of controls you can attach in-line with a generic headphone/line cord.
My prediction is that this iPod is going to be quickly replaced with something more like the second-gen model, that has actual controls. Or there will be a new accessory to provide a more proper set of controls for those people who don't like the Apple headphone buttons and/or want to use a different set of headphones.
The guild thinks that this infringes on their right to license audiobooks separately from the text.
Neil Gaiman thinks this is BS. I concur.
And since I'm not a guild member that might have future retribution to consider, I'll go so far as to say that if the Author's guild thinks it's a good idea to follow in the footsteps of the RIAA and MPAA, screwing over content creators in favor of the lawyers, then their organization no longer has a reason to exist at all.
Nothing conclusive yet, but some very interesting data and conjecture.
Detroit doesn't need wads of cash to prop up a system that has failed and will continue failing if it doesn't change. It needs to radically restructure itself, taking advantage of things like the bankruptcy laws to make the process less painful. Mitt Romney spells it out in the article.
For those who don't know, EFI is a new boot environment for PCs that is intended to replace the old BIOS environment that PCs have used in various forms since the first IBM PC shipped in 1981. EFI is much more advanced than BIOS, but only the most recent operating systems can boot on EFI-equipped PCs.
So why is this interesting? Apple Intel-based Macintosh computers (which is everything sold since mid-2006) use EFI and Mac OS X requires EFI in order to boot. (There have been some hacking efforts to make Mac OS X run on BIOS-based PCs, but they are of questionable reliability.) With the EFI-X Boot Module, you can get that same EFI software on a generic PC. It would appear that this alone is sufficient to allow Mac OS X to install on non-Apple hardware. (Assuming you have hardware for which Apple provides drivers, of course.)
Of course, installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware is a violation of Apple's software license terms, so actually doing this might be illegal, depending on where you live and what the courts decide. And it is likely that Apple will update Mac OS X in some way to make it incompatible with an EFI-X-equipped PC. Nevertheless, it is a very interesting piece of news and an even more interesting product for PC hackers to play with. (And there's absolutely nothing illegal about using EFI-X to run Linux or the 64-bit version of Windows Vista - both of which have EFI support.)
Read the essay for the whole story.
Read the article for the full story.
