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iTunes Music Store - 'Coolest Invention of 2003'
Pingsmoth writes "Time Magazine has just named the iTunes Music Store as their Top Coolest Invention of 2003. Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man'."
Ever since Gnome 2.4 was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide to some of their claims, and what they really mean.
/gnu/celeron gnu/packard gnu/bell gnu/box.
Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with your source code.
Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves and forget about being able to have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines.
Gnome is easier to use
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of settings.
Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS.
Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx, netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light!
Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we will tell you to fuck off and go back to Windows or KDE.
Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files
Gnome allows mac like operation.
x86 compatible 1 button mice are almost impossible to find, and it dosen't copy the whole macbar concept. Not to even mention their auto apply implementation is broken and dangerous! Plus if they did actually come anywhere close to copying the Mac the C&D letters would come flying up their asses.
Gnome is GNU software.
gnu/Yay, gnu/gnome gnu/for gnu/my gnu/debian gnu/linux gnu/500mhz
Inspired by the gentoo translate-o-matic.
Since upgrading to panther on 3 machines I've found I can no longer burn iTMS AAC files to disc as audio discs as I could on jaguar. This has happened across my eMac, iBook 800 and my father's iMac. Is this another goddamned restriction by Apple?
An entirely new approach to running a business isn't cool? Did we learn nothing from the dot-bomb experience? Consider this:
1. Alienate potential customers, existing customers and existing resellers of your products.
2. Piss off biggest computer company in the world
3. Piss off regulatory groups in many countries in the world
4. Make unsubstantiated demands for money from complete strangers. Provide no mechanism whereby said strangers can pay the requested money
5. Threaten all and sundry with lawsuits. Specifically refuse to tell anyone the basis for these lawsuits, with the explanation that doing so would allow people to stop "breaking the law" which would be unacceptable
6. Issue verbal indemnities to potential lawsuit recipients, based on constantly changing criteria. Ensure nobody can tell whether they're actually indemnified or not, which actually isn't that big a deal as nobody knows what the basis of the lawsuits is anyway (refer previous point)
7. Continue distributing for free that which you proclaim to be illegal to give away. Distribute it under a licence that specifically says "it's OK to give this away"
8. Sell product in blatant violation of the rights of the owners of the product. Simultaneously complain that others are doing the exact same thing with "your" product
If the Iraqi Information Minister was cool - and who among us thought he wasn't THE man for 2003? - then this is also cool.
I just want some pussy.
I've seen that so-called "invisible" cloak before, and I wish they'd stop calling it that. It is a special effects technique nearly as old as cinematography. Someone wears reflex material while a scene is front-projected onto them. I don't think much of it as a stealth technique. FX man (walking up to armed guard at secure installation): 'scuse me, would you mind looking through this beam splitter while I set up a projector at your feet? Thanks! --Metryq
Compere: Well, you can't get much more interesting than that, or can you? With me now is Mr Thomas Walters of West Hartlepool who is totally invisible. Good evening, Mr Walters. (turns to empty chair)
... Even now you yourself, you do hardly notice me...
Walters: (off-screen) Over here, Hughie.
Compere turns to find a boringly dressed man sitting by him.
Compere: Mr Walters, are you sure you're invisible?
Walters: Oh yes, most certainly.
Compere: Well, Mr Walters, what's it like being invisible?
Walters: (slowly and boringly) Well, for a start, at the office where I work I can be sitting at my desk all day and the others totally ignore me. At home, even though we are in the same room, my wife does not speak to me for hours, people pass me by in the street without a glance in my direction, and I can walk into a room without...
Compere: Well, whilst we've got interesting people, we met Mr Oliver Cavendish who...
Walters: (droning on)
This isn't me attacking the United States; however, you must certainly concede that MANY companies in the states are focused primarily on their domestic interests without seeing that there is a global community forming.
If I wanted to attack the United States, I would bring up things like.. say.. the fact that a movie star is now the govenor of California, that the president is a complete and total moron who has, in a little over a year, managed to destroy much of what the United Nations stood for, the fact that the US government continually lies to it's citizens, the fact that the goverment brainwashed the US populus with the Sept 11-Terrorist / Iraq-Saddam connection. (2/3rds of the citizens of the US think that Iraq was involved in the Sept 11 attacks. The ENTIRE REST OF THE WHOLE WORLD knows that this was false and the country was lied to.) Or the right-wing government. Or privatized health care. I can continue, but this is about iTunes and Apple.
The average Windoze user's IQ is about 70, the average Mac user's is about 120, and the average Linux user's is over 150. Just think of that for a moment....