My point exactly. Why does Microsoft insist that I install a bunch of drivers and system software just to use the mouse? Incidentally, I haven't been able to remove it from my system settings in OSX either, so if anyone knows how, I'm all ears.
I wrote a paper for a curriculum class that explores the idea to eliminate public school bussing. The figures were staggering. I don't have them in front of me at the moment, but something like 90% of all school budgets are spent on transportation and facilities. I think the transportation part was something like half of that 90%. Get rid of the busses, save money, and get parents involved in their kids' education! When I lived in England, I didn't see a single "school bus" the entire time I lived there. I did see lots of teens riding the public busses though (something already being subsidized by taxes, so why pay twice for a separate bus system when one already exists?)
Education is the largest section of every budget at local levels everywhere. It's the main reason we have property taxes. Most people like to bitch about taxes and bad schools, but imagine the giant trailer park we'd all live in if our local government didn't provide free education to all. When framed that way, most of the people I know who are against paying property taxes (to fund schools when they don't even have kids in those schools) change their tone. Hell, my property taxes have been paying for fire and ambulance services for 22 years now, and I've never once needed the services of a fire truck or an ambulance.
Maybe you could look in your copy of your State's Constitution, since Education is a State issue and not a federal one (although I wish we did have a federally standardized curriculum--might eliminate all those bad Southern education jokes).
I love when Libertarian Nut Jobs get called out for their nutty policy beliefs, then get all uptight that somebody called them a nutjob.
I'm a curriculum expert (I know, appeal to authority, but most of you won't read my credentials) and to boil down a huge field of study into a simple statement, here I go: It is the duty of every government everywhere to inject local values and customs and insist on (and supply) mandatory education for all.
So there ya go--a basic rule followed by most every successful civilization in the history of man.
I think this article explains the success formula for the 3D shooter games, when all they are is more-of-the-same. Just look at how many of the top 3D shooters are sequels to previous versions (hint: all of them). I like to play them from time-to-time, but being older than the control group in this study, I play for different reasons. Sure it's fun to shoot stuff up, but how fun can that be after 15 years? Pretty stuff on the screen gets old too, especially when the game play sucks.
I find the cinematics and historical aspects of the WWII shooters to be the most engaging. Otherwise, you are just running around shooting stuff, which is why I really don't like playing them online. I see the younger generation loves this sort of immediate engagement, however, and they are the ones buying the games (presumably).
You know, it is quite OK to be consistently pleased by one company's products and then voice such pleasure in public forums. That hardly qualifies as fanboism (the most over used term on the Internet). I like my BMW. I would recommend it to others. I would go on a discussion board and tell other people about its qualities. What's the problem?
Wow. That was a bit over-the-top in the Snark division. I don't think the guy was WANTING to use the left-mouse button-eject function, since the mouse button was stuck. But yeah, I like the Logitech mice too.
But seriously...posts like yours, as aggrivatingly snarky as they are, are what keep me coming back. It's fun to become agitated AND I learned an OSX function I never new about;-)
I agree, but the majority of anti-iTunes crowd likes to throw out false accusations to bolster their anti-drm arguments. DRM is bad enough--they don't have to make up stuff about it to make it worse. But they do anyways.
They are bottlenecked by the number of systems they can produce. They physically can't get the number of systems out there to get any real marketshare.
As Apple market share increases, don't you think they'd increase their capacity to make and deliver more systems? Do I even need to ask this question?
Macs used to have 15% to 20% marketshare in the early 1990's. Now they have less than 10%, when they had the Mac Clones they really sold a lot of them.
If Apple allowed Mac Clones again, I am sure Macs could easily capture that 20% all over again.
Revisionist history! I hade a couple Apple clones (out of morbid curiousity, and they both sucked). MacOS market share at that time was at an all-time low and the clone market nearly killed the company. Steve Jobs came back, killed the clones, introduced the hockey-puck moused iMac, and that recovery is now legendary, despite the worst mouse ever created.
Excellent post! Makes me question why so many people chose to use Windows at home then. I use Windows at work because that's what my company gives me, not because it's the best tool for the job. You'd be lucky to find a handful of creative professionals in a crowd of 1000 that would argue Adobe Creative Suite runs better on Windows than OSX.
If my work let me buy my own computer there'd be a 17" MacBook Pro sitting on my desk running CS3, and I'd be more productive than my coworkers plodding along with the non-professional design tools companies like mine tend to supply us with.
I think what you meant to say is you have to use iTunes to add songs PURCHASED from iTunes to your iPod (so as to decode the FairPlay DRM). Otherwise it's relatively easy to put music on an iPod without using iTunes. It requires any number of free and readily available freeware downloads. It's even easier with WinXP--(show hidden files, drag and drop to iPod in target disk mode). Other music services "Work with iPod" as well, allowing you to use their music service to add songs to the iPod (Amazon, for example).
Pretty much everyone I know who has purchased an Intel Mac as their first Mac did so for the ability to run Windows. Interestingly enough, I'm the only one of us that actually runs Windows on a Mac, and I've been a Mac user since 1989. They just wanted a safety net before they'd make the leap.
I could care less if OSX is hip. You said it yourself--it's still going to be the nicer platform to work with. If MORE people cared LESS about what OTHER people think about the computer they use, most of these stupid Macs Suck! threads would die a deserving death, we unhip-yet-productive Mac users will reamin the silent majority, and the douchy-hipster Mac zealots will just go away.
Microsoft makes more money selling software to Mac users than Apple makes selling Macs to Mac users. I'm not positive whether that's still true, but it would not surprise me in the least if it was.
I'm pretty sure that has NEVER been true. Mac users might buy Office for $150 once every 5 years or so but they buy $1500 new macs every couple of years. I'm pretty sure there is a bit more profit margin built into a $1500 computer than a $150 box of software. I can't think of anything else that Microsoft charges for that Mac users use.
The Apple section at the local Best Buy is the busiest part of the whole store. It may be completely anecdotal, but I've been using Macs since 1989 and I've NEVER seen so much mainstream interest.
The article takes Apple to task for not thinking enough of its users to bother telling them when Safari sends data off to a third party on their behalf.
I don't really want to be bugged every 5 seconds that my computer is doing something on my behalf. Those sort of "features" are what I dislike about the Windows operating environment. Maybe it is just me, but there is a definite sweet spot for the trade-offs of security versus convenience. To say what you said in a more positive tone would be that Apple seems to lean towards convenience.
And do you think that it's a good thing that people will buy something purely from the brochure?
I'm not saying it is a good or a bad thing. It just is. Pretending differently makes one an elitist (of which I'm guilty from time-to-time). If you think EVERYONE should go out and buy a car in the same fashion YOU do because you think it is for the betterment of society, then I think you are crazy. Stupid people have a right to exist and buy stuff too, to no detriment I can think of. Disdain? Yes. Detriment? No way.
Stewbacca's techniques have produced the best results I've ever seen a college professor get out of a class using computers.
Interestingly enough, the technique is more for middle/high school ages. I'm glad to hear it works for adult learners as well (using the term "adult" rather loosely considering a college freshman is only three months removed from being in high school). It also isn't my idea. I'm just merely regurgitating the information I've learned from my Education studies.
I thought you were supposed to click the links to the stories. That way you can wade through a ten-page article (and see 10 ads instead of one) that could otherwise have been hosted on one page.
Slashdot Mirror
My point exactly. Why does Microsoft insist that I install a bunch of drivers and system software just to use the mouse? Incidentally, I haven't been able to remove it from my system settings in OSX either, so if anyone knows how, I'm all ears.
I wrote a paper for a curriculum class that explores the idea to eliminate public school bussing. The figures were staggering. I don't have them in front of me at the moment, but something like 90% of all school budgets are spent on transportation and facilities. I think the transportation part was something like half of that 90%. Get rid of the busses, save money, and get parents involved in their kids' education! When I lived in England, I didn't see a single "school bus" the entire time I lived there. I did see lots of teens riding the public busses though (something already being subsidized by taxes, so why pay twice for a separate bus system when one already exists?)
Education is the largest section of every budget at local levels everywhere. It's the main reason we have property taxes. Most people like to bitch about taxes and bad schools, but imagine the giant trailer park we'd all live in if our local government didn't provide free education to all. When framed that way, most of the people I know who are against paying property taxes (to fund schools when they don't even have kids in those schools) change their tone. Hell, my property taxes have been paying for fire and ambulance services for 22 years now, and I've never once needed the services of a fire truck or an ambulance.
Maybe you could look in your copy of your State's Constitution, since Education is a State issue and not a federal one (although I wish we did have a federally standardized curriculum--might eliminate all those bad Southern education jokes).
I love when Libertarian Nut Jobs get called out for their nutty policy beliefs, then get all uptight that somebody called them a nutjob.
I'm a curriculum expert (I know, appeal to authority, but most of you won't read my credentials) and to boil down a huge field of study into a simple statement, here I go: It is the duty of every government everywhere to inject local values and customs and insist on (and supply) mandatory education for all.
So there ya go--a basic rule followed by most every successful civilization in the history of man.
It's only in America (of the wealthy democracies) where the public schools are so bad.
As if public schools in, oh say, Central Africa are better? Gimme a break. Envy is a bitch.
I think this article explains the success formula for the 3D shooter games, when all they are is more-of-the-same. Just look at how many of the top 3D shooters are sequels to previous versions (hint: all of them). I like to play them from time-to-time, but being older than the control group in this study, I play for different reasons. Sure it's fun to shoot stuff up, but how fun can that be after 15 years? Pretty stuff on the screen gets old too, especially when the game play sucks.
I find the cinematics and historical aspects of the WWII shooters to be the most engaging. Otherwise, you are just running around shooting stuff, which is why I really don't like playing them online. I see the younger generation loves this sort of immediate engagement, however, and they are the ones buying the games (presumably).
Now get off my lawn.
MS Mice are almost exclusively Logitech OEMs. Why would you replace it with a duplicate?
So as not to have to deal with the horribly invasive drivers provided by Microsoft?
You know, it is quite OK to be consistently pleased by one company's products and then voice such pleasure in public forums. That hardly qualifies as fanboism (the most over used term on the Internet). I like my BMW. I would recommend it to others. I would go on a discussion board and tell other people about its qualities. What's the problem?
Wow. That was a bit over-the-top in the Snark division. I don't think the guy was WANTING to use the left-mouse button-eject function, since the mouse button was stuck. But yeah, I like the Logitech mice too.
But seriously...posts like yours, as aggrivatingly snarky as they are, are what keep me coming back. It's fun to become agitated AND I learned an OSX function I never new about ;-)
I agree, but the majority of anti-iTunes crowd likes to throw out false accusations to bolster their anti-drm arguments. DRM is bad enough--they don't have to make up stuff about it to make it worse. But they do anyways.
They are bottlenecked by the number of systems they can produce. They physically can't get the number of systems out there to get any real marketshare.
As Apple market share increases, don't you think they'd increase their capacity to make and deliver more systems? Do I even need to ask this question?
Macs used to have 15% to 20% marketshare in the early 1990's. Now they have less than 10%, when they had the Mac Clones they really sold a lot of them. If Apple allowed Mac Clones again, I am sure Macs could easily capture that 20% all over again.
Revisionist history! I hade a couple Apple clones (out of morbid curiousity, and they both sucked). MacOS market share at that time was at an all-time low and the clone market nearly killed the company. Steve Jobs came back, killed the clones, introduced the hockey-puck moused iMac, and that recovery is now legendary, despite the worst mouse ever created.
Excellent post! Makes me question why so many people chose to use Windows at home then. I use Windows at work because that's what my company gives me, not because it's the best tool for the job. You'd be lucky to find a handful of creative professionals in a crowd of 1000 that would argue Adobe Creative Suite runs better on Windows than OSX.
If my work let me buy my own computer there'd be a 17" MacBook Pro sitting on my desk running CS3, and I'd be more productive than my coworkers plodding along with the non-professional design tools companies like mine tend to supply us with.
Welcome to slashdot, Brett!
I think what you meant to say is you have to use iTunes to add songs PURCHASED from iTunes to your iPod (so as to decode the FairPlay DRM). Otherwise it's relatively easy to put music on an iPod without using iTunes. It requires any number of free and readily available freeware downloads. It's even easier with WinXP--(show hidden files, drag and drop to iPod in target disk mode). Other music services "Work with iPod" as well, allowing you to use their music service to add songs to the iPod (Amazon, for example).
Pretty much everyone I know who has purchased an Intel Mac as their first Mac did so for the ability to run Windows. Interestingly enough, I'm the only one of us that actually runs Windows on a Mac, and I've been a Mac user since 1989. They just wanted a safety net before they'd make the leap.
I could care less if OSX is hip. You said it yourself--it's still going to be the nicer platform to work with. If MORE people cared LESS about what OTHER people think about the computer they use, most of these stupid Macs Suck! threads would die a deserving death, we unhip-yet-productive Mac users will reamin the silent majority, and the douchy-hipster Mac zealots will just go away.
Microsoft makes more money selling software to Mac users than Apple makes selling Macs to Mac users. I'm not positive whether that's still true, but it would not surprise me in the least if it was.
I'm pretty sure that has NEVER been true. Mac users might buy Office for $150 once every 5 years or so but they buy $1500 new macs every couple of years. I'm pretty sure there is a bit more profit margin built into a $1500 computer than a $150 box of software. I can't think of anything else that Microsoft charges for that Mac users use.
I use "-1 disagree for a reason" but I mask it using "-1 over-rated".
The Apple section at the local Best Buy is the busiest part of the whole store. It may be completely anecdotal, but I've been using Macs since 1989 and I've NEVER seen so much mainstream interest.
The article takes Apple to task for not thinking enough of its users to bother telling them when Safari sends data off to a third party on their behalf.
I don't really want to be bugged every 5 seconds that my computer is doing something on my behalf. Those sort of "features" are what I dislike about the Windows operating environment. Maybe it is just me, but there is a definite sweet spot for the trade-offs of security versus convenience. To say what you said in a more positive tone would be that Apple seems to lean towards convenience.
And do you think that it's a good thing that people will buy something purely from the brochure?
I'm not saying it is a good or a bad thing. It just is. Pretending differently makes one an elitist (of which I'm guilty from time-to-time). If you think EVERYONE should go out and buy a car in the same fashion YOU do because you think it is for the betterment of society, then I think you are crazy. Stupid people have a right to exist and buy stuff too, to no detriment I can think of. Disdain? Yes. Detriment? No way.
Stewbacca's techniques have produced the best results I've ever seen a college professor get out of a class using computers.
Interestingly enough, the technique is more for middle/high school ages. I'm glad to hear it works for adult learners as well (using the term "adult" rather loosely considering a college freshman is only three months removed from being in high school). It also isn't my idea. I'm just merely regurgitating the information I've learned from my Education studies.
I thought you were supposed to click the links to the stories. That way you can wade through a ten-page article (and see 10 ads instead of one) that could otherwise have been hosted on one page.