Also, given their size and portability, I'd expect netbooks to have harsher treatment than a laptop. Laptops are big enough you think 'expensive computer' when you are handling one, where netbooks are (intentionally) designed to feel like they are more of a 'mid-sized electronic device'.
It's not much, but it could well account for a 1% difference, IMHO.
Don't forget the "Apple Effect". You pay about as much for an iPod Touch as you would for a netbook, but anyone who has an iPod treats it like their little savior of humanity, so incredibly important yet oh, so fragile...
Yeah, it's not a bad idea at all but I know when I really get into a game I get pretty oblivious to reality.
"This is really a real alert. This will really effect you. You may die if you do not stop playing this game and pay attention to the tornado outside your house."
People love to talk about which OS/dist is more "usable", which one people unfamiliar with the more visceral workings of computers and software can deal with.
The painful fact is, and it still seems much overlooked... Computers are a bitch to use. They are extremely complicated things. They take more practice to become affluently capable with than anything.
Cars? Sure, you have to know a thing or two to fix them (which is still generally less convoluted than computers), but if you want to drive a car you just have to turn the key until the damn thing starts. It's easy to tell when it's not working, and there's not much of a gradient between "Working Fine" and "Fucked".
Cooking... there's a lot of science to cooking, there's a lot of talent involved in making things look or taste good, but if you want to make that meat tender and nutritious you just got to heat it up.
Politics? It's all art.
Music? It's not hard to make a sound and only takes a bit of practice to make something sound alright.
Writing? Reading? Just an extension of something already inherent to us.
Files and directories and GUIs and upgrades and inputs and outputs and interrupts and standards and buses and and and... it's all a big fucking mess and it's hard to keep up with.
Regardless of the arguments, it's the truth that all the big contenders have made incredible strides and thanks to those proprietary bastards, open source pragmatists and free software zealots there's still much progress that, collectively, we will be able to make.
And GIMP sucks. I use it all the time and it still drives me batshit.
If you don't like it, seek out politicians that are taking MPAA money and get them out of office. Then it's less likely lawmakers will turn a blind eye toward them when they go nuts.
Good thinking, except it will be the candidates who have the most financial backing who will likely be elected to replace them.
You have convinced me, AC. I am a dumb muthafucka and I shall get a MAC to be GAY. Thank you for your savvy and influential argument. You have changed my life.
That's not a solution to the current problem, that's a intelligent change in thinking. For now I'll offer the patchwork suggestion of dropping Microsoft and use something decent until enough people are enlightened enough that maybe a paradigm shift can actually take place.
I'm afraid you've confused the meaning of "ethical" with "legal".
And just because someone wouldn't have a "legal leg to stand on" gives you no right (ethics, mind you) to tell them to not even try to take it to court and set a precedent on it. Unless you hate the American legal system, and thereby hate America.
It's provably artificial because it worked before. Someone consciously made a change in such a way it specifically supports one manufacturer and not another. This has nothing to do with supporting standards, it's a retaliative attack on a vendor.
I don't buy that shit. If you're a douchebag, you're a douchebag even if you're in a pack of douchebags.
It might still be more productive to instead take away the method of douchebagginess than it would be to defend against everyone that comes along to terrorize the system.
Just because a company can make a product that works with another companies device, the device manufacturer is under no obligation to support it.
Not supporting it is fine and dandy, but using artificial means to restrict perfectly legal devices that have always worked before to make more money is abusive and consumers should be nothing less than insulted.
n. 1. Failure to deliver securities to a purchaser within a specified time. 2. Failure to receive the proceeds of a transaction, as in the sale of stock or securities, by a specified date.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, given their size and portability, I'd expect netbooks to have harsher treatment than a laptop. Laptops are big enough you think 'expensive computer' when you are handling one, where netbooks are (intentionally) designed to feel like they are more of a 'mid-sized electronic device'.
It's not much, but it could well account for a 1% difference, IMHO.
Don't forget the "Apple Effect". You pay about as much for an iPod Touch as you would for a netbook, but anyone who has an iPod treats it like their little savior of humanity, so incredibly important yet oh, so fragile...
Sometimes insightful looks into popular things really makes me sit back and think...
This just makes me say, "So what?"
Yeah, it's not a bad idea at all but I know when I really get into a game I get pretty oblivious to reality.
"This is really a real alert. This will really effect you. You may die if you do not stop playing this game and pay attention to the tornado outside your house."
People love to talk about which OS/dist is more "usable", which one people unfamiliar with the more visceral workings of computers and software can deal with.
The painful fact is, and it still seems much overlooked... Computers are a bitch to use. They are extremely complicated things. They take more practice to become affluently capable with than anything.
Cars? Sure, you have to know a thing or two to fix them (which is still generally less convoluted than computers), but if you want to drive a car you just have to turn the key until the damn thing starts. It's easy to tell when it's not working, and there's not much of a gradient between "Working Fine" and "Fucked".
Cooking... there's a lot of science to cooking, there's a lot of talent involved in making things look or taste good, but if you want to make that meat tender and nutritious you just got to heat it up.
Politics? It's all art.
Music? It's not hard to make a sound and only takes a bit of practice to make something sound alright.
Writing? Reading? Just an extension of something already inherent to us.
Files and directories and GUIs and upgrades and inputs and outputs and interrupts and standards and buses and and and... it's all a big fucking mess and it's hard to keep up with.
Regardless of the arguments, it's the truth that all the big contenders have made incredible strides and thanks to those proprietary bastards, open source pragmatists and free software zealots there's still much progress that, collectively, we will be able to make.
And GIMP sucks. I use it all the time and it still drives me batshit.
If you don't like it, seek out politicians that are taking MPAA money and get them out of office. Then it's less likely lawmakers will turn a blind eye toward them when they go nuts.
Good thinking, except it will be the candidates who have the most financial backing who will likely be elected to replace them.
Citation needed. I use Windows 7 and it's certainly not one of those.
I think they meant in relation to OS X and every distribution of GNU/Linux
Would you still think it was funny if it was Linus Torvalds?
Only if he didn't think it was funny.
I think this meme should evolve into "I don't get the idea"...
This was clearly a conspiracy. Let's see if anyone denies it before I finish my post. ...
Well, no one denied it!
You have convinced me, AC. I am a dumb muthafucka and I shall get a MAC to be GAY. Thank you for your savvy and influential argument. You have changed my life.
That's not a solution to the current problem, that's a intelligent change in thinking. For now I'll offer the patchwork suggestion of dropping Microsoft and use something decent until enough people are enlightened enough that maybe a paradigm shift can actually take place.
The One And Only Solution, kids, is to only run executable code you can trust.
I don't have the time to discuss what this entails, but I can start you off with one source of software you definitely can not trust...
Terribly.
A shame I can't comment on the subject, I just install Ubuntu...
I'm afraid you've confused the meaning of "ethical" with "legal".
And just because someone wouldn't have a "legal leg to stand on" gives you no right (ethics, mind you) to tell them to not even try to take it to court and set a precedent on it. Unless you hate the American legal system, and thereby hate America.
So tell me, 172656, Why do you hate America?
"Generally" is synonymous with "conventionally", and conventionally "fail" has come to be used as a noun.
Fuck the definition you read in your book, if we were judged by the English of our precursors we would all be laughably awful.
It's provably artificial because it worked before. Someone consciously made a change in such a way it specifically supports one manufacturer and not another. This has nothing to do with supporting standards, it's a retaliative attack on a vendor.
I don't buy that shit. If you're a douchebag, you're a douchebag even if you're in a pack of douchebags.
It might still be more productive to instead take away the method of douchebagginess than it would be to defend against everyone that comes along to terrorize the system.
Bless you, fellow bastard.
Microsoft threw down the gauntlet and pretty much have had their way with the hackers.
You dare imply real hackers play Xbox?
Just because a company can make a product that works with another companies device, the device manufacturer is under no obligation to support it.
Not supporting it is fine and dandy, but using artificial means to restrict perfectly legal devices that have always worked before to make more money is abusive and consumers should be nothing less than insulted.
"fail" is not a noun...
Au contraire...
n.
1. Failure to deliver securities to a purchaser within a specified time.
2. Failure to receive the proceeds of a transaction, as in the sale of stock or securities, by a specified date.
Why do you hate America? Why are you trying to fuck America?
La la la!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/
Not exactly what you asked for but it's good stuff and it predates Wikipedia.