Re:The road to commoditization
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The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
You say the "iPad is a vision of the future" and "Until the PC is a true appliance, it won't truly be usable by everyone in society." but then go on to talk about how it's your "aging father" that needs this. I don't want to ruin your day or anything but in the future he will not be around so why should the tech industry mold to him and those like him? Nearly all people my age (mid-twenties) are perfectly comfortable using a real computer. Most people that attend my university can handle Linux and Solaris just fine as well. Younger people are even more familiar with computers having grown up with what we now consider a PC.
So my question is why should we be pandering to accommodate the, as you put it, "aging" community? Most of whom don't even want a computing device. The future of the market is people that grew up using Windows 95 or newer.
Real computers do not need "constant care and feeding" at least no more than a device like this would need if it was any kind of popular.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
As long as you paid your 100 dollars this year for that privileged. Let's try not to leave that little tid-bit out.
so eventually most of my hand was covered in blood. And then it hit me...it actually looked rather aestheticly pleasing; however little sense such perception has.
And Apple would never stop production of a Windows product to leverage their own operating system. Logie Audio.
Microsoft really hasn't used their monopoly position in the operating system field to push their office software. If they did not let other office suites on Windows you might have an argument. Your argument is some other company does not support Mac so it must be Microsoft's doing and that's about as flawed as an argument gets.
The problem all of us have with that is, as Slashdot is a perfect example, even self proclaimed intelligent people are complete idiots. Unfriendly tactics like these make metric butt-loads of cash and before long there are no other options because the strategy "Maybe not good, but good enough to warrant [people] spending the money..."
Awh yes, I never had the pleasure of playing the Marathon games. I could see how any extension to a good universe could be a good extension though.
The great assortment of life in the Mass Effect universe I feel allows for many interacting sci-fi elements. there are wholly different forms of life (Hanar), Misunderstandings/bad judgments causing wars and centuries of conflict (Quarian/Geth). Completely incompatible views of morality and honour (Human/Batarian). Throw some pseudo mysticism in there for fantasy fans (Asari). And of course you have scientifically explained magic powers.
I've always wanted to delve farther into it. I have played through many times and gotten every achievement in Mass Effect 1. To me Halo never got into enough depth. I would have loved if they did because the basis for the story was great. But you could never find out more about the Convenant, or its member species.
I found Halo 1 much better. Halo 2 was the only one of the games that I played once and never even thought about touching again. That's pretty subjective though.
I found the story great, perhaps nothing that hasn't been done in sci-fi before. They did take a unique twist and coalesced many different ideas into one large universe that made it seem very alive and real. They would throw seemingly useless bits of information at you making the scope of the universe feel especially large.
You may be bored of the intro sequence but I enjoyed it and found it to be an important part of the game. It was the set up for your quest, the initial research. In fact I missed the Citadel in ME2, but I seem to be pretty alone on that one.
I find it odd that you find the Mass Effect story cliched and predictable but like Halo. Which is unarguably cliched and predictable.
Halo 2? I thought even amoung Halo fans nobody liked that game for more than the multiplayer.
Mass Effect is a deep universe, very fleshed out. The story was extremely immersive. Even with its flaws it is likely my number one game.
I've never played Sands of Time but I've also never heard it acclaimed for any outstanding writing.
Bioshock I've witnessed most of; good but not great.
Halo only had half a story. A good foundation but no depth.
As a sci-fi fan Mass Effect was incredible to me. Something tells me you are not.
I preferred having reused environments to having next to no side missions. How many systems were in ME2 that were only there to scan for resources. Resources you can't use because you've found all the upgrade options and used up all the credits available in the game and can't afford any more purchased upgrade tokens.
If you didn't want to land on those planets and clear out biotics you didn't need to. But for those of us that wanted to do that the option was available. Now there is only a handful of side mission. They were fun but there certainly wasn't enough of them. I hope they didn't do this so they could charge for DLC later. I am hoping the Hammerhead will allow more random exploration.
When I went there a few years ago there was an entry English examination for all international students and Ontario students that achieved less than 80% in 12U/OAC English in high school. Failing the exam meant you had to take a remedial English class and then retake the examination. I don't believe you can graduate without passing. Being an Ontario student with less than 80% in 12U English I had to take it. I feared the worst at the time and was very stressed about writing it but it was mind numbingly easy. It was really there just to prove that you could, indeed, speak English (UW has a huge international population and there are definitely a few that cannot speak English). A native English speaker that fails this test either has a learning disability or is idiotic beyond belief (or drunk while writing it; it is written early in the semester).
That's exactly it. When you need to completely focus on a hard problem you want silence. But there is no way you could maintain that focus indefinitely; the brain simply isn't made for that. When doing non intensive programming background music is a relaxant. It allows you to context switch the problem and the music between conscious and unconscious thought. For me that allows me to work longer without feeling too fatigued right away. It's especially helpful when the particular problem isn't very engaging.
I grew up in the country so it has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with silence to me. Sometimes it's just more productive to have a slight distraction from work.
There is another number that I notice most people ignore: how many album sales were generated by that same piracy. I know that I wouldn't even know the genres of music I enjoy existed if it wasn't for "stealing" it in the first place. For the most part it's not sold in record stores either. So how would I buy this music not even knowing it exists? At least now I can find and order stuff that I like.
To answer your other question, I feel "obligated" to get them because I enjoy them. I assume you meant "entitled" though so I will answer that as well. I feel entitled to listen to music because it exists. Why can I not listen to music in my house when I could just as easily hear it blaring from a car, from another's house or from a danceclub? At least in my house I can appreciate it how I like to. This music was created, recorded and then released publicly. Once that happens there is nothing that can be done with what people choose to do with that publicly released, effortlessly duplicated, recording.
I do like to reward artists I enjoy to encourage them to continue. However I do not think any one is entitled to tell me what I can and cannot hear because I have not met their criteria for hearing it. Just like I do not think the people who invented all the gadgets that allow artists to record their music should be able to stop them from recording music if the inventors' arbitrary criteria is not met.
The current "problem" with piracy in the music industry is not because people do not appreciate the value of music. It is because they have realized that music is monetarily worthless. There is no way to equate money and music as music is neither a good nor a service. A physical album is a good, and a concert is a service but music is neither. Music is our culture, it is a part of humanity and it will never go away. If some artist decides to stop producing because they have concluded that there is not enough money involved then someone else will gladly fill in any void they might have, but probably haven't, left. Album sales are down because the worth of these albums is much lower. This is more due to a cultural shift than any specific cause, piracy and streaming are a result of this shift and not the other way around. History shows that there is really no way to combat a cultural shift so sales will continue to decline until the shift is accepted and accounted for.
Without the free distribution of music over the internet I wonder how many works of art would have been lost forever. The wording of your post makes it sound as if your idea of "music" is what your local record stores stock. What of the music that is not stocked? That is not streamed? That was recorded years ago and is no longer produced? Or was only released to radio? How much art, how much culture must we lose because of a few men's quest to redefine our monetary system to include governance over freely transmittable ideas? Never equate CD with music, or MP3 with music; they are simply a medium to transmit information.
I would tend to disagree. There are many places a human could go that a dog-shape could not. Our strength is climbing, something that our vertical stance gives us a bit of an advantage in. Especially in our environment or the ruins of our environment. Some kind of hybrid could likely be designed that would be vastly superior though.
Also, it could be that being the learning computer it is took a look at human history and found that nothing has been as successful at killing humans than other, often stronger and more numerous humans. So it made a stronger and more numerous human.
If I get all I need from Windows and some Linux distro then buying a Apple PC for OS X is simply rewarding a company for having an extremely customer unfriendly end user agreement. I understand their reasons for doing this, some of them I might even almost see as reasonable but I don't see that as a reason to buy a product.
As much as some people don't seem to be able to understand is some of us genuinely do not like OS X. I do not find it intuitive at all, I find it quite obtuse and a pain to use. So when I hear that I should buy Apple hardware, which for a computer that I would want, is way more than I would want to spend because "OS X is just so much better" I just think you're full of bologna. You like it, that's fine, but don't try to tell me it's a better system by listing a few pluses, especially ones that some people might not find pluses at all.
"No more human babies were being made? So you ditch technology and also give up sex? I just can't buy that."
Easy, after giving up all their technology they subsequently all died of starvation, infection, disease, territory battle with the stronger, faster more adapted natives within two weeks. Meaning Kara actually was the harbinger of death because she brought everyone to Earth 2.0 where they all got themselves killed. And god didn't just keep calling her that to mess with her.
Although Hera being mitochondrial Eve doesn't actually mean no one else mated, just that her bloodline eventually mated with everyone.
I have this game for PS3 and it is definitely the buggiest game I have ever played. NPCs dying. The character often gets stuck on obstacles, behind a tree and a rock in Oasis, in rocks while trying to climb to hard to reach areas and many times on stair railings. The game will lock up all the time, you don't have to be doing anything. Just walking around will cause it to completely lock up requiring you to hold down the power button (power sensor?) until the machine shuts off. The locking up gets worse and worse the more you use a plasma weapon it seems. Keeping track of goo piles seems to make the game very unstable. The save from my first play through is mostly unplayable now, usually locks up every 20 or so minutes when it's in the mood to be annoying. I've also gotten crash to desktops from it. I have never experienced those in anything but an EA PC game before.
Those are problems I would consider major. If they happened once in a while I would understand. It is a huge and complicated game after all. But these happen all the time, I can't sit down and play for a while without being annoyed by many glitches.
I still think they should be able to sell it. Although I imagine that there are some legal issues involved with that. Getting bulk amounts of the software if this got enough demand might be difficult without signing a contract with Apple that specifically stated they couldn't resell it bundled with a computer (I'm not exactly sold on the legality of such a clause though). But if this company can obtain the copies of OSX that they are bundling legally and without signing a contract I don't think there should be anything Apple could do.
I never mentioned anything about the RIAA. I didn't even hint at it. The only way I can even guess you pulled the RIAA out here is if you believe "business model" only applies to RIAA. And I said "shakey"(I guess what I meant was "shaky" which really doesn't look right to me from a phonetic stand point which is where the spelling error came from) as in "not quite solid", not "shady". And I think that given the size of the argument over it here it is in fact "not quite solid".
I also never said Apple could not say "We only want our software running on our boxes". I merely said they can't really enforce it. That may seem pedantic to you, but they have distinct meaning to me. "That's what this economy is supposed to be about." You mean like buying something from company A and something else from company B, putting it together and selling it for cheaper than company A sells the same basic product for? I know you're opinion is that a software license is different from actually purchasing something. But I've seen many "not lawyers" and probably even some real lawyers make some pretty compelling arguments about why they are the same. Or at least that their EULA is non-enforceable.
You say "Apple is not violating anyone's Constitutional rights by distributing their OS in this manner." and I say no one is violating Apple's rights by installing their software on a non Apple branded machine even if they do want to sell it afterwards. If Apple wants to build quality machines cheaply by using standard parts then they're going to have to deal with the consequences of that.
I am not vilifying Apple here(this time). I'm simply saying that they're probably just spewing out a lot of hot air. This is the market telling Apple that it's not doing something right. That people want a cheaper solution and they're willing to buy it form a competitor if Apple won't produce. If no one wants a cheaper solution or only wants to buy from Apple then this will go away. Free market in motion.
Slashdot Mirror
You say the "iPad is a vision of the future" and "Until the PC is a true appliance, it won't truly be usable by everyone in society." but then go on to talk about how it's your "aging father" that needs this. I don't want to ruin your day or anything but in the future he will not be around so why should the tech industry mold to him and those like him? Nearly all people my age (mid-twenties) are perfectly comfortable using a real computer. Most people that attend my university can handle Linux and Solaris just fine as well. Younger people are even more familiar with computers having grown up with what we now consider a PC.
So my question is why should we be pandering to accommodate the, as you put it, "aging" community? Most of whom don't even want a computing device. The future of the market is people that grew up using Windows 95 or newer.
Real computers do not need "constant care and feeding" at least no more than a device like this would need if it was any kind of popular.
As long as you paid your 100 dollars this year for that privileged. Let's try not to leave that little tid-bit out.
so eventually most of my hand was covered in blood. And then it hit me...it actually looked rather aestheticly pleasing; however little sense such perception has.
That was the blood loss speaking.
And Apple would never stop production of a Windows product to leverage their own operating system. Logie Audio.
Microsoft really hasn't used their monopoly position in the operating system field to push their office software. If they did not let other office suites on Windows you might have an argument. Your argument is some other company does not support Mac so it must be Microsoft's doing and that's about as flawed as an argument gets.
I'm trying very hard to understand what turning in papers has to do with email fonts. Have you confused your email client as a word processor?
And I suppose you still have your black and white TV too. After all why buy a new LCD now when newer models will be out in 8 months!
The problem all of us have with that is, as Slashdot is a perfect example, even self proclaimed intelligent people are complete idiots. Unfriendly tactics like these make metric butt-loads of cash and before long there are no other options because the strategy "Maybe not good, but good enough to warrant [people] spending the money..."
Trent Reznor is famous and has lots of hipster cred? Even Apple won't punch a lion in the mouth if it will affect their image.
Awh yes, I never had the pleasure of playing the Marathon games. I could see how any extension to a good universe could be a good extension though.
The great assortment of life in the Mass Effect universe I feel allows for many interacting sci-fi elements. there are wholly different forms of life (Hanar), Misunderstandings/bad judgments causing wars and centuries of conflict (Quarian/Geth). Completely incompatible views of morality and honour (Human/Batarian). Throw some pseudo mysticism in there for fantasy fans (Asari). And of course you have scientifically explained magic powers.
I've always wanted to delve farther into it. I have played through many times and gotten every achievement in Mass Effect 1. To me Halo never got into enough depth. I would have loved if they did because the basis for the story was great. But you could never find out more about the Convenant, or its member species.
I found Halo 1 much better. Halo 2 was the only one of the games that I played once and never even thought about touching again. That's pretty subjective though.
I found the story great, perhaps nothing that hasn't been done in sci-fi before. They did take a unique twist and coalesced many different ideas into one large universe that made it seem very alive and real. They would throw seemingly useless bits of information at you making the scope of the universe feel especially large.
You may be bored of the intro sequence but I enjoyed it and found it to be an important part of the game. It was the set up for your quest, the initial research. In fact I missed the Citadel in ME2, but I seem to be pretty alone on that one.
I find it odd that you find the Mass Effect story cliched and predictable but like Halo. Which is unarguably cliched and predictable.
They run Linux, but they certainly don't run Ubuntu.
Halo 2? I thought even amoung Halo fans nobody liked that game for more than the multiplayer.
Mass Effect is a deep universe, very fleshed out. The story was extremely immersive. Even with its flaws it is likely my number one game.
I've never played Sands of Time but I've also never heard it acclaimed for any outstanding writing.
Bioshock I've witnessed most of; good but not great.
Halo only had half a story. A good foundation but no depth.
As a sci-fi fan Mass Effect was incredible to me. Something tells me you are not.
I preferred having reused environments to having next to no side missions. How many systems were in ME2 that were only there to scan for resources. Resources you can't use because you've found all the upgrade options and used up all the credits available in the game and can't afford any more purchased upgrade tokens.
If you didn't want to land on those planets and clear out biotics you didn't need to. But for those of us that wanted to do that the option was available. Now there is only a handful of side mission. They were fun but there certainly wasn't enough of them. I hope they didn't do this so they could charge for DLC later. I am hoping the Hammerhead will allow more random exploration.
When I went there a few years ago there was an entry English examination for all international students and Ontario students that achieved less than 80% in 12U/OAC English in high school. Failing the exam meant you had to take a remedial English class and then retake the examination. I don't believe you can graduate without passing. Being an Ontario student with less than 80% in 12U English I had to take it. I feared the worst at the time and was very stressed about writing it but it was mind numbingly easy. It was really there just to prove that you could, indeed, speak English (UW has a huge international population and there are definitely a few that cannot speak English). A native English speaker that fails this test either has a learning disability or is idiotic beyond belief (or drunk while writing it; it is written early in the semester).
That's exactly it. When you need to completely focus on a hard problem you want silence. But there is no way you could maintain that focus indefinitely; the brain simply isn't made for that. When doing non intensive programming background music is a relaxant. It allows you to context switch the problem and the music between conscious and unconscious thought. For me that allows me to work longer without feeling too fatigued right away. It's especially helpful when the particular problem isn't very engaging.
I grew up in the country so it has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with silence to me. Sometimes it's just more productive to have a slight distraction from work.
Did you honestly just make the argument "But it's free to develop software for the Xbox! *cough*youjusthavetopaytorunit"?
Why should I pay an annual fee to run my own code on my own Xbox? What happens now when Microsoft decides that service costs more than its worth?
There is another number that I notice most people ignore: how many album sales were generated by that same piracy. I know that I wouldn't even know the genres of music I enjoy existed if it wasn't for "stealing" it in the first place. For the most part it's not sold in record stores either. So how would I buy this music not even knowing it exists? At least now I can find and order stuff that I like.
To answer your other question, I feel "obligated" to get them because I enjoy them. I assume you meant "entitled" though so I will answer that as well. I feel entitled to listen to music because it exists. Why can I not listen to music in my house when I could just as easily hear it blaring from a car, from another's house or from a danceclub? At least in my house I can appreciate it how I like to. This music was created, recorded and then released publicly. Once that happens there is nothing that can be done with what people choose to do with that publicly released, effortlessly duplicated, recording.
I do like to reward artists I enjoy to encourage them to continue. However I do not think any one is entitled to tell me what I can and cannot hear because I have not met their criteria for hearing it. Just like I do not think the people who invented all the gadgets that allow artists to record their music should be able to stop them from recording music if the inventors' arbitrary criteria is not met.
The current "problem" with piracy in the music industry is not because people do not appreciate the value of music. It is because they have realized that music is monetarily worthless. There is no way to equate money and music as music is neither a good nor a service. A physical album is a good, and a concert is a service but music is neither. Music is our culture, it is a part of humanity and it will never go away. If some artist decides to stop producing because they have concluded that there is not enough money involved then someone else will gladly fill in any void they might have, but probably haven't, left. Album sales are down because the worth of these albums is much lower. This is more due to a cultural shift than any specific cause, piracy and streaming are a result of this shift and not the other way around. History shows that there is really no way to combat a cultural shift so sales will continue to decline until the shift is accepted and accounted for.
Without the free distribution of music over the internet I wonder how many works of art would have been lost forever. The wording of your post makes it sound as if your idea of "music" is what your local record stores stock. What of the music that is not stocked? That is not streamed? That was recorded years ago and is no longer produced? Or was only released to radio? How much art, how much culture must we lose because of a few men's quest to redefine our monetary system to include governance over freely transmittable ideas? Never equate CD with music, or MP3 with music; they are simply a medium to transmit information.
I would tend to disagree. There are many places a human could go that a dog-shape could not. Our strength is climbing, something that our vertical stance gives us a bit of an advantage in. Especially in our environment or the ruins of our environment. Some kind of hybrid could likely be designed that would be vastly superior though.
Also, it could be that being the learning computer it is took a look at human history and found that nothing has been as successful at killing humans than other, often stronger and more numerous humans. So it made a stronger and more numerous human.
If I get all I need from Windows and some Linux distro then buying a Apple PC for OS X is simply rewarding a company for having an extremely customer unfriendly end user agreement. I understand their reasons for doing this, some of them I might even almost see as reasonable but I don't see that as a reason to buy a product.
As much as some people don't seem to be able to understand is some of us genuinely do not like OS X. I do not find it intuitive at all, I find it quite obtuse and a pain to use. So when I hear that I should buy Apple hardware, which for a computer that I would want, is way more than I would want to spend because "OS X is just so much better" I just think you're full of bologna. You like it, that's fine, but don't try to tell me it's a better system by listing a few pluses, especially ones that some people might not find pluses at all.
I find the scroll wheel to be the best volume control mechanism. I don't think VLC uses it though, or at least it didn't in the past.
Except they made a choice to exclude a part of the DVD drive that protects the discs to save a penny causing the system to destroy discs.
"No more human babies were being made? So you ditch technology and also give up sex? I just can't buy that."
Easy, after giving up all their technology they subsequently all died of starvation, infection, disease, territory battle with the stronger, faster more adapted natives within two weeks. Meaning Kara actually was the harbinger of death because she brought everyone to Earth 2.0 where they all got themselves killed. And god didn't just keep calling her that to mess with her.
Although Hera being mitochondrial Eve doesn't actually mean no one else mated, just that her bloodline eventually mated with everyone.
I have this game for PS3 and it is definitely the buggiest game I have ever played. NPCs dying. The character often gets stuck on obstacles, behind a tree and a rock in Oasis, in rocks while trying to climb to hard to reach areas and many times on stair railings. The game will lock up all the time, you don't have to be doing anything. Just walking around will cause it to completely lock up requiring you to hold down the power button (power sensor?) until the machine shuts off. The locking up gets worse and worse the more you use a plasma weapon it seems. Keeping track of goo piles seems to make the game very unstable. The save from my first play through is mostly unplayable now, usually locks up every 20 or so minutes when it's in the mood to be annoying. I've also gotten crash to desktops from it. I have never experienced those in anything but an EA PC game before.
Those are problems I would consider major. If they happened once in a while I would understand. It is a huge and complicated game after all. But these happen all the time, I can't sit down and play for a while without being annoyed by many glitches.
I still think they should be able to sell it. Although I imagine that there are some legal issues involved with that. Getting bulk amounts of the software if this got enough demand might be difficult without signing a contract with Apple that specifically stated they couldn't resell it bundled with a computer (I'm not exactly sold on the legality of such a clause though). But if this company can obtain the copies of OSX that they are bundling legally and without signing a contract I don't think there should be anything Apple could do.
I never mentioned anything about the RIAA. I didn't even hint at it. The only way I can even guess you pulled the RIAA out here is if you believe "business model" only applies to RIAA. And I said "shakey"(I guess what I meant was "shaky" which really doesn't look right to me from a phonetic stand point which is where the spelling error came from) as in "not quite solid", not "shady". And I think that given the size of the argument over it here it is in fact "not quite solid".
I also never said Apple could not say "We only want our software running on our boxes". I merely said they can't really enforce it. That may seem pedantic to you, but they have distinct meaning to me. "That's what this economy is supposed to be about." You mean like buying something from company A and something else from company B, putting it together and selling it for cheaper than company A sells the same basic product for? I know you're opinion is that a software license is different from actually purchasing something. But I've seen many "not lawyers" and probably even some real lawyers make some pretty compelling arguments about why they are the same. Or at least that their EULA is non-enforceable.
You say "Apple is not violating anyone's Constitutional rights by distributing their OS in this manner." and I say no one is violating Apple's rights by installing their software on a non Apple branded machine even if they do want to sell it afterwards. If Apple wants to build quality machines cheaply by using standard parts then they're going to have to deal with the consequences of that.
I am not vilifying Apple here(this time). I'm simply saying that they're probably just spewing out a lot of hot air. This is the market telling Apple that it's not doing something right. That people want a cheaper solution and they're willing to buy it form a competitor if Apple won't produce. If no one wants a cheaper solution or only wants to buy from Apple then this will go away. Free market in motion.