This Is Your Solution Apple?

Really apple this is what you came up with when asked to write an app for media streaming from iTunes. i am so irritated by the craptastic state of this app it is hard for me to form sentences.

so i have an iPad and i have a mac with iTunes that has all my media in it. i can not fit all of that media on my iPad so the obvious solution is to stream it from my mac to my iPad so i can view it in comfort at my leisure. i use Airvideo because it is easy and a very well written app. when iOS 4.3 was released i was super excited because they had said there would be iTunes library sharing for all iOS devices. i was hoping it would be a sleeker version of what Airvideo does built into the video app on the iPad. however i have never been more disappointed in an apple written product in my life.

first of all when you open it the library looks like this.

Please explain to me the organizational paradigm where season 3 of Seinfeld goes next to freaks and geeks and also season 5 of scrubs? i have never seen anything like this. it is quite possibly the biggest clusterfuck of nonsense i have ever seen. how does this code exist. this is how i assume the code is written:

<(are you sure, that seems kind of silly)>

i honestly have no idea who wrote this code but they need to get slapped in the face......really hard.

so it gets worse...much much worse. once you finally find the season of the show you want to watch it opens up to let you view the episodes. logical except this is what you get.

I do not know if anyone knows that much about the office, but Branch Wars most certainly does not come before Fun Run. who the fuck is in charge of this seriously. so not only are the seasons and shows out of order but the episodes are a clusterfuck as well. moving on, one would just think they could muster through and just find the episode they want, knowing of course exactly what order the season goes in. but no.......it seriously gets worse. not only are the episodes jumbled but the app does not even load all the episodes you have in your library. from my experience it shows a maximum of 16 episodes from a show. also it does not pick the first 16 episodes, it just picks 16 random episodes and displays them in a random order. 

this is what you get at the bottom.

so given no choice because the episode i want is for some stupid reason not being displayed i touch get more episodes, maybe that will just load the rest of them. maybe it is a cache issue and it only loads a certain amount. so lets touch that and see what happens. you are seriously not going to believe where it takes you.

Yep, thats right, it takes you out of the app and into the iTunes store to view episodes one can buy. this is such a pathetically designed app am having trouble finding adjectives severe enough to accurately portray how i feel about it. honestly it makes me want to find the human who programmed this and shove something pointy into his left eyeball. i do not understand how this can exist. i honestly can not understand how it has not been patched yet. i really do not understand how there is not a larger uproar over this steaming pile of feces that is this application.

in conclusion all i want to say is FUCKING FIX THIS SHIT. i am tired of this existing in the state it is. 

ok i feel moderately better. :D

Replicator?

Imagine a future where energy is limitless and free. A world where because of the advances in science we control fusion to get our energy. No one fights about energy resources anymore because we have key power plants placed in places that power the entire globe evenly and thoroughly.

Now that we have the setting, in this world goods would no longer be manufactured or produced. They would be designed and tested. Then they would be replicated. Each building would have a replicator and each building would have a store of matter. No one would actually purchase products any more, they would pay for the rights to replicate products. They would be paying for the architecture of the products. Once the architecture is purchased by the consumer they have the rights to replicate it as many times as that purchase contract allows. if science advances far enough ways of taking raw energy and transforming it straight into forms of matter would prove more efficient. However that does not seem likely to happen for a while.

Imagine a hospital equipped with this kind of technology. Instant vaccines, medicines, and supplies. Would save millions of lives. Imagine a replicator placed in a small town in Africa, now able to replicate food and water. It would change how we live. No longer would the population be dependent on the earth for it's survival. No longer would people be forced to die because their region experienced a drought, disease or disaster.

Where would we get all the material for this from? Well if we are powering the world by fusion then there is the answer. We use the leftover matter from the fusion reactions to be used in the replication processes.

Is this technology even close to being possible? We have the technology For 3 dimensional printers right now. People use them to test a multitude of things in the real world. All we would need to do is modify this process to account for density and different types of materials. When it comes to fusion, even though they always say it is 50 years away, eventually we will possess the technology to control a reaction and obtain the energy from those reactions.

The world would be saved from overproduction, and the carbon foot print for moving products around the world reduced to almost nothing. The resources spent in packaging products would also be reduced to almost nothing and the garbage produced from those packaging would be reduced to almost nothing. Overnight the worlds waste would decrease substantially and we would finally be able to feed the billions that go hungry everyday.

(picture source)

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Sleep?

I can not even begin to count the amount of nights I have laid awake at night wondering why sleep is such a hard thing to come by, or better yet why It is even necessary. The reasons for it are obvious though. The brain needs some downtime to repair and maintain itself. The thing that gets me all interested in it is why it was evolutionarily weaves into every animal on the planet.

The cause is probably as simple as the fact that since it gets dark at night the body might as well have a resting period due to the fact that there is no way of seeing the world around them. Not until very recently when homo sapiens discovered they could harness energy and illuminate the nighttime for their own wills, no other creature was able to fully take advantage of all 24 hours of the day. Which begs the question, could we systematically reduce our sleeping periods to a fraction of what they once were?

The thing that bugs me about the whole sleep thing is that it does not seem evolutionarily prudent. I would think that any animal that decides to lay down for 8 hours un-moving and un-aware of its surroundings would have died out a long time ago. A sleeping animal would be easy pickings to any fortunate predator that may stumble upon them. Even that did not stop sleep from continuing to be a huge part of an animals cycles.

Probably the most irritating thing about sleep is that it is not an instant thing. One must almost chase it down and overtake it, or at least that is what it feels like sometimes. The brain has to wait until the heart rate and breathing are a certain reduced speed before the process can begin. It is almost painful having to wait for the body to decide it is ready for sleep when the person had decided on that fact hours beforehand.

I wonder if on planets in other systems where they are gravitationally locked into their rotation, one side of the planet always in darkness and one in light. That if those twilight zone animals require sleep or if it has even come to exist in their ecosystem. If sleep originated due to the dark nights here on earth, what would happen if on that planet it was always daytime? Would animals that were never unable to sense their surroundings have come to a point where sleep is required?

I think one of the goals of future bioengineers should be to either find a way for the brain to do the processes it does while sleeping on the fly, or at the very least reduce the required time for sleep. A world without sleep would be a much more efficient place.


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Onstar?

I recently took a family vacation to Washington DC. The trip was a result of the need to go to the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity. On the way there I got to thinking about the integrated on star function in most cars nowadays. I soon came to the realization that on star does not actually give a damn about the safety of it's customers and I will explain why.

The service as it is setup currently is that the customer pay a fee every month after they initialized the service. Now this is clearly a type of insurance plan for the passengers and driver of the vehicle of which only works if the fee is paid every month. So if one is not a customer of this service then they will not have immediate emergency response if something were to go wrong.

The way it should be is this. The service is paid for when purchasing the vehicle. The feature should be a premium feature paid in full upon acquiring the vehicle for the first time. Once the car is started for the very first time the on star function should initiate on it's own. So the second the car is driven off the lot by the owner they are "insured" with the functionality of on the spot response to whatever may happen. No monthly payments and no subscription. If that is not entirely viable as a product then the most it should ever be is a pay to use service. Where upon using the service for an emergency response the customer is charged a fee, but that should be a last resort.

The reason I got to thinking about this is if we were to have gotten in an accident on our trip, even though our vehicle was equipped with the hardware required for then onstar service it would have been useless since we do not pay for the service. So my question is, why do they automatically put it in vehicles if it will go unused? And why make a clearly innovative safety feature just another money ploy.

It should be an automatically initiated response service meant to keep people safe. Instead it is just another way in order for GM to make some quick cash. They should Stop making it a product to make money off of and make it a standard safety feature across the board.

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Stopping Time?

Whenever someone on a tv show or in a movie stop time they always seem to be able to do it very easily. I am not going to dispute the impossibility of achieving this with our current level of technology or that a biological being would somehow be able to achieve it on their own via a gamma burst or an eclipse. The thing that really concerns me about the whole concept is, if that person is really actually stopping time they could possibly produce a grave situation for anyone they decide to take with them. Let's say if that person were to bring someone with them on the time travel adventure and somehow leave that person behind. The consequences for that person would he atrocious. Once the time traveller resumes his position in time, the passenger would now become stuck at that one point forever. An infinity would pass for that person and the matter that they are composed of. Some possible situations that could arise would be that person would consume their lifetimes worth of oxygen, food and water in what would seem like an instance for everyone else. Proving to be possibly disastrous for the rest of the planet. The percentage of oxygen would reduce drastically because no oxygen would be being produced while that person is consuming it. The person and all of the waste they produced would last for an infinity within a point of normal time.

The only way it would be less disatserous for everyone would be if instead of the time traveler stopping time, they merely slow it down. This would be more reasonable. Depending on the rate in which the traveller slows time down would depend on how long an abandoned passenger would have to wait until the time traveller realized what happened and slows time down again. it is much easier to comprehend that all of the waste that the passenger produced would not be confined to a single point within time, it would still be visible to the people at the normal rate of time, it would just decay at an increased rate.

Moral of the story is simple, if you can stop time, make sure you don't bring anyone with you and if you can slow time down make sure you decrease the rate of time so that you have enough time to re-slow time down in case you leave them behind.

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Recycling Facilities?

When it comes to recycling I have never understood why it is always put into the hands of the consumer alone. For instance it is up to everybody to have to recycle on their own at their own will. This has not proven to work. The waste management system itself should have some kind of recycling built in.

The way it should work:
the consumer puts their garbage out for the company to pick it up. After it gets picked up by the management company it is taken to the facility where it is sorted preferably by robot controlled systems into the various recyclable materials. Thereby leaving only biodegradable waste behind to rot in the giant compost pile that is the dump. The facility could also turn a profit on this venture simply by selling the recycled material to companies who can use it. Not only does this solve the issue of non-disposable waste being left to decompose at the dump It also makes it so companies in the area are using cheaper recycled materials instead of having to buy newly created or mined materials that only go further in exhausting non-renewable materials.

Consumer side of things:
the only thing the consumer would be aware of would be that they put out the trash. Some would say that this would lead to less care on what people throw away. That may be true however that should be the issue anyway. We should be able to throw anything away that we want and have it all sorted out at the facility we pay to manage our waste. Also when it comes to consumers recycling things on their own, their are a lot of financial reasons the consumer would choose to recycle what they can on their own.

Overall I think that if this kind of plan was implemented I would guess that not only would our world start to become a lot cleaner, but companies that should be "managing" our waste would not just be burying it in a hole somewhere but actually doing the management that they currently propose they do.


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Modern Warfare 2 is an Epic Failure?

For as long as there have been video games there have been LAN parties. For As long as there have been video games there have been nerds, who even though socially inept, have had there fellow nerds to enjoy the art form that they are. Whether it be in an arcade, a chat room, or even moms basement. Nerds have always gravitated together to be awake into the wee hours enjoying that new interactive masterpiece together.



Infinity Ward has decided however that this is no longer acceptable. They in one fell swoop made all LAN parties impossible with their newest addition to the Call of Duty franchise. Modern warfare 2 with all it's glamor and beauty lacks one of the most important features for any video game.

These are the things that make this game an enormous failure, even if it is the most popular game.

1. No LAN(Local Area Network) support whatsoever.
They decided to tell their customers that either connect to xbox live, play split screen, or you are playing on your own.

2. System connect only allows for 1v1.
If I can play split screen up to 4 players, why not allow me to port that experience to a system connect. There won't be any lag because there is no network to rely on.

3. DLC maps only playable when connected to xbox live.
This is absolute bullshit. I paid money for these maps. They are on my xbox. Why am I forced to be connected to the Internet to access files stored locally on my hard drive. This is a crime against video games.



There seriously should be some list of rules, a video game charter if you will. That has the rules that all games should be developed by. For instance, if I download a DLC, it is now my property. Don't restrict me to having to be connected to the Internet or only certain users allowed to use it. If it is on the hard drive the account is saved to, then I can use that DLC. Halo 3 for all the problems i have with the game has done this part right. Recently my roommate downloaded the new map pack under his gamer tag on my hard drive. On my gamer tag I had not downloaded them. But halo 3 allowed me to play those maps simply because they were on my hard drive. Allow for all possible multiplayer possibilities. System link, LAN, and split screen.

Update:
people have said to me, why do i reserve such hostility to MW2 and not Starcraft 2 a game that should have LAN support but does not. my answer is simple. Blizzard announced a long time before Starcraft 2's release that it was not going to have LAN support. full disclosure. with MW2 however they just failed to put it in the game and never told us about it.

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Car Years?

Why don't car makers put the year of the car on the outside of the vehicle? Instead of just putting the name challenger, why not have it say the year before or after the name. It would make things a lot easier. For instance mechanics, or police officers would find it helpful. No more having to either remember it off hand or tearing apart the glove box.b

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No Network Play?

The story goes like this. My buddy brought over his xbox so we could play 2 on 2 MW2. Not thinking anything of it we Plug his xbox into the living room tv and mine into my monitor in my room. We both get signed into the network and then into xbox live. I said to everyone, "hey let's do a local network match, it will have almost no ping and no lag". So the connections would make for a very even match. The options for multiplayer are either split screen, xbox live, or system link. Up until this point I was under the assumption that I could just set up a match via the network we were on, but no this is apparently impossible for this game to do. For fucks sake, star craft was capable of this and halo 3. Why is this not a feature that is standard on all multiplayer games now. It is really ridiculous. We ended up having to play across xbox live, which led to ping between systems. Why do some features always seem to get left behind?


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WWDC?

Some words on WWDC 2010. As I sit back and reflect on the keynote this past Monday, I begin to realize just how disappointed I am. Granted the new iPhone 4 looks fantastic, and the technology they added to this new phone is really quite impressive. However there are a few things I have on my mind that I think should have happened but did not.



10.7?
Apples next big cat should have made at least a Preview or a mention. This is the developers conference after all. In the past it has almost always been the event that apple uses to show a sneak peek of the new Mac os. I was a little disappointment their wasn't even a slide hinting at them working on it.

MobileMe?
I have recently posted about my opinions of the current MobileMe set of functions. So really all I have to say is that it is still way over priced for the limited functionality it gives it's prescribers. I really had hoped for any kind of iTunes streaming, cheaper price....really anything would have been nice.



AppleTV?
Apparently it is still a hobby, how unfortunate. Apple concedes victory to google.



Mac Pro?
From what I understand the new i7 chips would seriously upgrade the performance in those machines. I may be wrong, but they have not made a very big deal about their top of the line Mac in a while.


MacBook Air?
Still a joke of a product in my opinion, but it would have been nice to see something about it this year. It was quietly updated earlier this year, but it doesn't seem like that was enough. Even though I have had countless conversations with my cousin about how they should just remove that laptop all together, it is over priced and under powered.

Overall this years WWDC was all about the iOS and the new iPhone. I had just hoped for a lot more. However I always want a 4 hour keynote anyway, and they always keep it under 2. I just hope they quietly release some stuff over the next few months, or even have a special keynote for some of the stuff I mentioned. Either way this years WWDC was just meh. There is always next year.

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