by Christopher Paul on June 19, 2012 Jim Dalrymple seems to think that Emily White, an NPR intern, should be horrified she’s only bought 15 CDs in her life while having a 11,000 song library on her computer. But why?
She says:
What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?
No, it’s not.
She rightly admits she’d pay for convenience. How come no one will make a more convenient option than ripping CDs one by one?
by Christopher Paul on June 18, 2012 Computers are moving away from complex tools of calculation and precision to appliances that let people do what they need to do. With the advances in mobile computing, well, the iPhone, and sister devices like the iPad, tablets and other smartphones, people just want to turn the device on and have it work.
Gone are the days were jumpers had to be set, IRQs had to be allocated properly, or ports had to run at the same speed. Now, computers need to just do what people tell them to do from the start – no thinking by humans to make it happen other than to recall one’s password.
For good or for ill, people are moving towards disposable, replaceable computing. They don’t care what it takes to make it work nor do they care what anyone (in this case, Apple) must do to fix something that’s not working. They know that’s Apple’s problem and as long as Apple can deliver a working appliance with all their data in tact (iCloud), they don’t care that the memory is fixed; they’ll just replace the computer with another disposable device when ready or necessary.
by Christopher Paul on June 9, 2012 I always like watching graduation speeches from talented comedians like Steve Carrell. The opening minute into his speech just sets the tone. Although disjointed, I found it funny.
by Christopher Paul on June 4, 2012 OS X (Lion, anyway) doesn’t have a GUI based way to tell how long it’s been running. The server version does but my attempts to look up this information using Activity Monitor and System Information didn’t net anything.
But after searching, I found this link to a terminal tip that gave me what I was looking for. Launch Terminal.app and type in the following:
uptime
And the return will be the length of time the computer has been up. Not sure if that’s total CPU time or of that’s since the last reboot, though.
