I’ve just encountered the first utterly daft Mac OS X feature. You cannot easily turn off the start-up chime/sound. In Windows it is simple to do but in OS X you have to use shell scripts, 3rd party apps or remember to mute your audio before you shut-down.
I don’t know about you but having your Mac chime in the middle of a quiet room is not pleasant.
It’s not another Mazda advert but instead LSD inspired rabbits for an iPod competitor from Microsoft. Plenty of noise out there about it so I won’t rehash. I just wanted to comment on two aspects.
First is this comment in a Seattle Weekly article:
To create a mass product, Microsoft can’t design products for the “blue badgers,” as Microsofties call themselves
Strange that. Google is successful with GMail, Google Calendar and others because the very people who make them, use them. Jobs of Apple uses an iPod, he is passionate about them and I’ll bet many other Apple employees are too. There is a strong ethos in all good companies to make products that you use and like. Many of the good Web 2.0 sites out there were created by someone with a personal itch to scratch.
Afterall, blue badgers listen to music, right?
The other is the WiFi sharing feature. Basically you can transmit any song on your Zune to another Zune user in physical range. That user can then listen to the song for three days. If they like it enough, they can buy it.
Cool idea and the technology must be fantastic. But just how many people are going to be in a situation where they can use it? It will take some time to get enough Zunes out there to make public-space sharing a real option. In the technology company I work for in Ireland only a handful even have iPods. The one guy I know who will buy a Zune has just started working for Microsoft, in Seattle.
The rest of us share music over the web with people we often have never met but are good friends with. People well out of WiFi range.
It is one of those cool demo features that work in setup situations at tradeshows and product launches. Nice to have it but…
“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he says in his remarkable autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume I” (2004), and you believe him. He was, as usual, thinking only about his sound. It is always the sound that interests Dylan about a song, and one of the reasons that he is only semi-articulate in interviews is that you can’t really describe a sound. It was Guthrie’s sound that attracted him, not Guthrie’s lyrics. When he heard Guthrie for the first time, he explains in the autobiography, “a voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’ ” It was a lonesome sound; he knew he could get it.
Without comparing myself to Bob Dylan I have to say that is exactly my feeling towards music. It is about the sound. The aural landscape if you want to get precious. Lyrics are secondary. If I want meaning, message, philosophy and so on, I read a book. When I listen to music I want to swim.
If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says
from BOB ON BOB
Daily bits...