If you want to be generous in your interpretation, maybe you could say they included it to make the point that, even at two years old, it's still better than most of what's out there. (Reference: see almost every Vista review out there. Their quip: "Name a good Vista feature that goes beyond what's in Tiger. Yeah, we can't either.") Speaking of Vista, it didn't make the list at all. Not 1st, not 99th, nowhere.
Craigslist also made the list, and that's what, 10 years old now? I guess the list means "100 best tech products that you can still get this year"--in which case OS X and CL definitely belong. It's "The 100 Best Products of 2007," not "The 100 Best NEW Products of 2007." (CL just gets better and better, though I wish they'd make the jump from plain text to a database so I could RELIABLY find Macintoshes without having to look for Apple and Mac and Macintosh and IMAC (OMG CAPS!!!!!11) They don't have to go all the way and make people specify VRAM and 10/100 vs. gigabit, but mfg-make-model-speed would be nice. It could all be optional, so retards who don't want to mess with dropdowns can just accept that they'll get fewer views.)
More than anything, any "best of" list that includes Adobe Premier is immediately suspect.:-)
If you want to get really picky, you could point out that 2007 is not over yet. You know what it is? I think it's "We Felt Like Making a List of a Bunch of Things We Like." Thank you, Slashdot, for slavishly supplying them with pageviews.
Exactly. To me, there's nothing worse than being a hypocrite. Disney built their empire largely on the backs of non-copyrighted works, especially their earliest and biggest hits. A very short list*: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, and most of (all?) the music from the Fantasia movies.
You probably won't have to worry about that. (Unless maybe you use IE and MS builds it in.) The reason we have Flash ads is because there is tons and tons of good (yes, really) Flash content out there, so everyone has the plugin. If no developers use Silverlight to make neat content, no one will bother to get the plugin, and with no installed base, no advertiser will release ads in that format. Advertisers are lots of things but they aren't totally dumb--they'd rather go back to text or GIFs than use a format which no one can see.
They should be summarily rejected by the industry, as they simply do not make any sense in the context of storage.
Actually, I think it's all the fault of marketers. You get to 1000 before you get to 1024, so hard drive manufacturers can build sooner, and thus market earlier, "40,000,000,000" byte drives rather than true 40 GB drives, or you get to sell a 40 GB drive instead of a 37 GB drive. I never heard anything like "one gigabyte = 1 billion bytes" until HDs started getting into the muti-gigabyte range a few years ago. And you're right, "gibibyte", etc., are the the stupidest words, ever.
The meanings of words change depending on their context. To most people, "quick" and "fast" mean the same thing, but to a drag racer, they're two very different words. "Speed" and "velocity," "mass" and "weight" are the same to most people, but not in physics class. If you're talking about distance in meters, then yeah, 1k = 1000. But if you're talking about memory in computers, 1k = 1024.
The author says iTunes-like content is a "dead end." None of my examples are dead. They've all gone down, to be sure, but none are dead, or even close. There are PDAs all over the shelves at Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Depot, etc etc etc. I live in a medium-sized city and there are two or three dozen radio stations, and I hear it in every mall, gas station, office, etc. Don't underestimate the amount of time people spend in cars--"drive time" made Howard Stern a millionaire many times over. My reference to plays was a bit of a stretch, but after a century of competition from movies, there are still plenty of plays and musicals on the stage to be seen, so if movies couldn't kill them in three generations, I doubt they'll go away any time soon. (I didn't say they dominate, just that they survived, and are still very much alive.)
The researcher says "Free is going to win." Well, TV is *already* free. (RTFA--he's talking about free, over-the-air stations like Fox and ABC.) By this logic, a non-free option would have never made it out of the gate. How does he explain that?
And, I just noticed, the idiot researcher ends his piece with a contradiction: "McQuivey advises media companies to... pay more attention to those [options] that let users share content within a home network." Which is exactly what iTunes DOES. Which is exactly what ABC.com DOESN'T DO.*
My biggest point, though, was not that his conclusion is dumber than the average piece of crap we see from researchers & journalists (which it was), but that things like this are inherently stupid--there does not have to be one winner and one loser. Anyone who says "A will die because B will thrive" is retarded. Sure, it happens, but as often as not, both exist. The ability to watch movies at home has not killed theatrical movies. Video rentals did not kill video sales. iTunes did not kill CDs. The list goes on and on. It seems like every week we see some dumb story like this and it's just plain STUPID.
New, good technology might largely kill an old, similar one--CDs vs. tapes, DVDs vs. VCRs, etc.--but when it comes to ideas--sales vs. rentals, ad-free-but-expensive, ad-supported-but-free--there's almost always room for both. Different people like different stuff and have different priorities. Period. Any prediction that starts with "Everyone who does A or B will both wind up doing C" usually winds up being proved wrong.
* well, technically, you could watch a show from ABC.com on any computer on your network. But that's not really "sharing", is it? And iTunes shows can be shared not only among computers but among DEVICES that people will actually WATCH, like Apple TVs and iPods. When he says "share", he makes it sound like a FILE that you HAVE and can move around as you wish--which iTunes IS, and content-streamed-inside-a-Flash-player ISN'T. After a decade of ATI All-In-Wonder cards and 5 years of MythTV, how many people have computers hooked up to their TVs? (Hell, I'll even be generous and include XBMC, Windows Media Center PCs, etc.) Outside of Slashdot, not very many. Whatever the number is, I'll bet that the number of AppleTVs hooked up to TVs will be higher after just 12 months on the market.
First of all, how many fucking idiots in the world are there that write studies and articles like this? EVERYTHING IS NOT BINARY! THERE DOES NOT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE ONE WINNER AND ONE LOSER! FUCK!!!!!
The Internet has not replaced TV. TV did not replace radio or the movies. Movies and radio did not replace stage shows. Smartphones have not replaced PDAs. Etc etc etc. Can't ONE FUCKING JOURNALIST accept the fact that some things will just stay around?!? Sheesh.
Now, on to the actual premise of TFA: I love that ABC and others are making their content available online. HOWEVER, I do NOT like that I've got to fire up a browser and watch shows streaming. I *want* to be able to download shows and watch them with no de[[[buffering]]]lays, and watch them over and over, and skip around with no delay, and be able to watch it some day in the future when ABC quits hosting the file, etc etc etc. I don't like buying video from iTunes--the fact that it can NEVER be watched without a) a computer, b) an AppleTV, or c) an iPod pretty much kills it for me--but I like watching shows in a browser on my so-so Internet connection even less.
Long story short: this will NOT be the end of iTunes. Hint to fucktard "journalist"/"researcher" #42571: TiVos and videotapes ALSO render iTunes obsolete--but it's still around. Get a fucking clue. Douchebag.
Lucas. If he would release the original trilogy, nicely restored... - get rid of the grabage mattes around spaceships, the slugs on the emperor's face, and all the other OBVIOUS stuff they missed in the last X "restoration" attempts - in the highest currently possible definition (1080) - not the most recent "well, we had this old LaserDic master" bullshit - and NO (1997+) special features on EITHER format, I'd go buy one... maybe not tomorrow, but as soon as the players were halfway reasonable (like $200-300 or so.) Or maybe I'd get a PS-3 or some other cool device that included [HD|BR] playability.
If I were in charge of either format, I'd drive a dumptruck full of money to Lucas' ranch. The original trilogy is one of a very small handful of things that I really do want to own in the best possible quality.
I really want to see Apple* make what I call the MacBook Elite:** ~10" screen, ~10 GB flash-based "HD", no optical drive, light, thin, great (10 hours?) battery life. Not your primary "center of your digital life" kind of machine, but a small, light, great-for-traveling secondary one. Maybe some software that would let it sync with your desktop, just like an iPod: Sync MacBook Elite? [x] Desktop [x] Documents [_] Movies [x] Music (just part of your collection, like how you manage a Shuffle or Nano) [_] Pictures I just bought a 2 GB Sony flash drive for $20--I *know* this could be done economically.
Lots of people value lots of different things about laptops. It'd be great to see one focused solely on those who value portability*** and battery life above all else but who want the power of a laptop with a real OS and a nice big screen and don't want to step all the way down to a PDA.
* Why Apple? 'Cause I like Macs, and there are already tiny Windows laptops. ** MSRP: $1337:-) Seriously, I'm thinking of the original meaning of "elite." *** Portable in the backpack/purse/suitcase sense, not the shirt-pocket sense.
Today Linux has much better hardware support than Intel MacOSX
Well, of course it does--you're not SUPPOSED to install OS X on anything that didn't come from Apple, period.
Tiny laptops are neat, and they might be popular outside the US, and I think they're great, but you're right, Apple probably won't make them. I could see them bringing back a 12" model, or maybe even making a 10" one*, but they'll probably never get really tiny. (Then again, with the iPhone, maybe they won't have to.)
* I dream of the "MacBook Elite": 10" screen, solid state/CF storage (only 8-10 GB or so), no optical drive; light, thin, and great battery life.
I've seen for a decade in my LUG what people go through when they try to use Linux as a 1:1 replacement for Windows. It's miserable. Linux should not be positioned as "like Windows but cheaper." (Especially since Dell's OEM deal with MS and crapware vendors means that a Linux system from Dell will probably cost exactly as much as a Windows system.) Mark S. is doing exactly the right thing here.
That said, I have the feeling that these things won't sell well at all. (Not that adding Wine would make much of a difference.) Be honest: what does Linux offer the average user that Windows doesn't? The main one is "won't get infected with crap."* That's great, but that's not enough. People have put up with crappy Windows systems for so long that they think it's normal to reinstall Windows periodically, or pay a neighborhood kid or local shop $50-150 to clean off the spyware every few months (if they even bother at all), and to buy a new computer every couple years when the one the old one gets slow. People are used to Windows. They fear change. "The devil you know is better than the devil you don't." We love Linux, but we know what's involved, and we understand what the million little differences are and why they're there. The rest of the world just thinks "this isn't working right." The result of all this is, Joe User will NOT be buying Ubuntu machines from Dell. Dell will sell a few, but not many, and there's a very good chance this program will be axed within 6-12 months.
* OS X offers this same benefit, plus it has the great iLife suite, gorgeous hardware, and unbeatable hardware/software integration. Not perfect, but miles ahead of anything else. That is a compelling reason to change, and I've seen a few people go from Windows to Mac, but even so, Windows has 90%+ share and will continue to dominate for quite a while.
And #4 will be from the team that wrote that piece of shit #3. I think I'd rather watch a shot-by-shot remake of the original from Gus Van Sant with Anne Heche as Sarah Conner, Vince Vaughn as Kyle Reese, and William H. Macy as the terminator.
Fake ID's typically have fake names and addresses, idiot. Also, they didn't "appear" to be 21, they *were* under 21, which is why they had *fake* ID's. Get it? Thanks for playing.
Let me clarify the evidently too-subtle point of my post: If you break the law, it's a bad idea to call attention to yourself. For example, if someone steals your cocaine (which is illegal to possess) it's a bad idea to complain to the police that your cocaine was stolen. Similarly, if you have a fake ID, it's a bad idea to say "Hey! That's my fake ID!" when someone posts a picture of it on their site.
A custom ad-blocking hosts file (/etc/hosts in Linux and OS X; locations vary in Windows) will block most ads and spyware-hosting sites. And it's system-wide, making all browsers largely ad-free.
For those who haven never seen Monad in action and are quick to bash (ha! get it?) Microsoft's new shell, take a look at these twovideos. You'll see that it's much more than just bash on Win32. In fact, if it ever catches on, it'll be Unix's turn to play catch-up, because some parts of it are pretty damn amazing. (Note that those are from 2005, but AFAIK, there haven't been substantial changes.)
The whole point of Monad is that it's not just text, it's objects. So, unlike Unix, where you work with a command and then filter its output (which is just text), the output of Monad, while looking like text, is actually kind of like pointers back to the real thing, so instead of just doing a Unix-style command | filter | filter, you can say "OK, run this command, now of the things it output, go back and tell me this and this about them." Like, "Of these things that are running, tell me which five are using the most CPU time, then tell me the version of each, and how much memory they're using."
PS: "...even if it does have a dorky name"--which name were you referring to: the one that sounds like 'testicle' or the one that makes me think of the Lottery?:-)
No, I want a butt-load of DVD jewel boxes occupying cabinet after cabinet in my living-room so they'll be convenient in the event I might want to watch one... I have literally avoided buying DVDs in the past because I didn't want to increase the clutter of storage.
Which is why it's nice to rip them. Here's my system: - buy DVDs - rip them, store them on server (which is actually just my regular G5 with two 500 GB drives) - watch them using my Mac Mini, which shows them in a nice list, just like my TiVo's "now playing" list - put DVDs into a DVD holder (a thing the size of a binder which holds a couple dozen, with liner notes, not that I ever look at them) - give away jewel cases Ripping them to MP4s also means I don't have to sit through a bunch of crap (warnings, menus, previews, etc.) every time I want to watch a movie. I pick the movie off the list and it starts right up. This is also good for 24 marathons--as soon as the closing credits start, it's just escape, down arrow, enter to start the next episode.
I really want to see Apple* make what I call the MacBook Elite:** ~10" screen, ~10 GB flash-based "HD", no optical drive, light, thin, great (10 hours?) battery life. Not your primary "center of your digital life" kind of machine, but a small, light, great-for-traveling secondary one. Maybe some software that would let it sync with your desktop, just like an iPod: Sync MacBook Elite? [x] Desktop [x] Documents [_] Movies [x] Music (just part of your collection, like how you manage a Shuffle or Nano) [_] Pictures I just bought a 2 GB Sony flash drive for $20--I *know* this could be done economically.
Lots of people value lots of different things about laptops. It'd be great to see one focused solely on those who value portability*** and battery life above all else but who want the power of a laptop with a real OS and a nice big screen and don't want to step all the way down to a PDA.
* Why Apple? 'Cause I like Macs, and there are already tiny Windows laptops. ** MSRP: $1337:-) Seriously, I'm thinking of the original meaning of "elite." *** Portable in the backpack/purse/suitcase sense, not the shirt-pocket sense.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to be generous in your interpretation, maybe you could say they included it to make the point that, even at two years old, it's still better than most of what's out there. (Reference: see almost every Vista review out there. Their quip: "Name a good Vista feature that goes beyond what's in Tiger. Yeah, we can't either.") Speaking of Vista, it didn't make the list at all. Not 1st, not 99th, nowhere.
:-)
Craigslist also made the list, and that's what, 10 years old now? I guess the list means "100 best tech products that you can still get this year"--in which case OS X and CL definitely belong. It's "The 100 Best Products of 2007," not "The 100 Best NEW Products of 2007." (CL just gets better and better, though I wish they'd make the jump from plain text to a database so I could RELIABLY find Macintoshes without having to look for Apple and Mac and Macintosh and IMAC (OMG CAPS!!!!!11) They don't have to go all the way and make people specify VRAM and 10/100 vs. gigabit, but mfg-make-model-speed would be nice. It could all be optional, so retards who don't want to mess with dropdowns can just accept that they'll get fewer views.)
More than anything, any "best of" list that includes Adobe Premier is immediately suspect.
If you want to get really picky, you could point out that 2007 is not over yet. You know what it is? I think it's "We Felt Like Making a List of a Bunch of Things We Like." Thank you, Slashdot, for slavishly supplying them with pageviews.
Suggested tag: slownewsday
Exactly. To me, there's nothing worse than being a hypocrite. Disney built their empire largely on the backs of non-copyrighted works, especially their earliest and biggest hits. A very short list*: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, and most of (all?) the music from the Fantasia movies.
i n_characterst ed_features
For fun, compare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_doma
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_anima
Woah, woah, wait--so you're saying someone besides Apple is using WebObjects?!?!?
You probably won't have to worry about that. (Unless maybe you use IE and MS builds it in.) The reason we have Flash ads is because there is tons and tons of good (yes, really) Flash content out there, so everyone has the plugin. If no developers use Silverlight to make neat content, no one will bother to get the plugin, and with no installed base, no advertiser will release ads in that format. Advertisers are lots of things but they aren't totally dumb--they'd rather go back to text or GIFs than use a format which no one can see.
They should be summarily rejected by the industry, as they simply do not make any sense in the context of storage.
Actually, I think it's all the fault of marketers. You get to 1000 before you get to 1024, so hard drive manufacturers can build sooner, and thus market earlier, "40,000,000,000" byte drives rather than true 40 GB drives, or you get to sell a 40 GB drive instead of a 37 GB drive. I never heard anything like "one gigabyte = 1 billion bytes" until HDs started getting into the muti-gigabyte range a few years ago. And you're right, "gibibyte", etc., are the the stupidest words, ever.
The meanings of words change depending on their context. To most people, "quick" and "fast" mean the same thing, but to a drag racer, they're two very different words. "Speed" and "velocity," "mass" and "weight" are the same to most people, but not in physics class. If you're talking about distance in meters, then yeah, 1k = 1000. But if you're talking about memory in computers, 1k = 1024.
transactions are going to cost half as much on Unix and Linux as they did on the mainframe
:-)
And I'm sure they'll pass those savings along to the consumer.
The author says iTunes-like content is a "dead end." None of my examples are dead. They've all gone down, to be sure, but none are dead, or even close. There are PDAs all over the shelves at Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Depot, etc etc etc. I live in a medium-sized city and there are two or three dozen radio stations, and I hear it in every mall, gas station, office, etc. Don't underestimate the amount of time people spend in cars--"drive time" made Howard Stern a millionaire many times over. My reference to plays was a bit of a stretch, but after a century of competition from movies, there are still plenty of plays and musicals on the stage to be seen, so if movies couldn't kill them in three generations, I doubt they'll go away any time soon. (I didn't say they dominate, just that they survived, and are still very much alive.)
The researcher says "Free is going to win." Well, TV is *already* free. (RTFA--he's talking about free, over-the-air stations like Fox and ABC.) By this logic, a non-free option would have never made it out of the gate. How does he explain that?
And, I just noticed, the idiot researcher ends his piece with a contradiction: "McQuivey advises media companies to... pay more attention to those [options] that let users share content within a home network." Which is exactly what iTunes DOES. Which is exactly what ABC.com DOESN'T DO.*
My biggest point, though, was not that his conclusion is dumber than the average piece of crap we see from researchers & journalists (which it was), but that things like this are inherently stupid--there does not have to be one winner and one loser. Anyone who says "A will die because B will thrive" is retarded. Sure, it happens, but as often as not, both exist. The ability to watch movies at home has not killed theatrical movies. Video rentals did not kill video sales. iTunes did not kill CDs. The list goes on and on. It seems like every week we see some dumb story like this and it's just plain STUPID.
New, good technology might largely kill an old, similar one--CDs vs. tapes, DVDs vs. VCRs, etc.--but when it comes to ideas--sales vs. rentals, ad-free-but-expensive, ad-supported-but-free--there's almost always room for both. Different people like different stuff and have different priorities. Period. Any prediction that starts with "Everyone who does A or B will both wind up doing C" usually winds up being proved wrong.
* well, technically, you could watch a show from ABC.com on any computer on your network. But that's not really "sharing", is it? And iTunes shows can be shared not only among computers but among DEVICES that people will actually WATCH, like Apple TVs and iPods. When he says "share", he makes it sound like a FILE that you HAVE and can move around as you wish--which iTunes IS, and content-streamed-inside-a-Flash-player ISN'T. After a decade of ATI All-In-Wonder cards and 5 years of MythTV, how many people have computers hooked up to their TVs? (Hell, I'll even be generous and include XBMC, Windows Media Center PCs, etc.) Outside of Slashdot, not very many. Whatever the number is, I'll bet that the number of AppleTVs hooked up to TVs will be higher after just 12 months on the market.
First of all, how many fucking idiots in the world are there that write studies and articles like this? EVERYTHING IS NOT BINARY! THERE DOES NOT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE ONE WINNER AND ONE LOSER! FUCK!!!!!
The Internet has not replaced TV. TV did not replace radio or the movies. Movies and radio did not replace stage shows. Smartphones have not replaced PDAs. Etc etc etc. Can't ONE FUCKING JOURNALIST accept the fact that some things will just stay around?!? Sheesh.
Now, on to the actual premise of TFA: I love that ABC and others are making their content available online. HOWEVER, I do NOT like that I've got to fire up a browser and watch shows streaming. I *want* to be able to download shows and watch them with no de[[[buffering]]]lays, and watch them over and over, and skip around with no delay, and be able to watch it some day in the future when ABC quits hosting the file, etc etc etc. I don't like buying video from iTunes--the fact that it can NEVER be watched without a) a computer, b) an AppleTV, or c) an iPod pretty much kills it for me--but I like watching shows in a browser on my so-so Internet connection even less.
Long story short: this will NOT be the end of iTunes. Hint to fucktard "journalist"/"researcher" #42571: TiVos and videotapes ALSO render iTunes obsolete--but it's still around. Get a fucking clue. Douchebag.
Lucas. If he would release the original trilogy, nicely restored...
- get rid of the grabage mattes around spaceships, the slugs on the emperor's face, and all the other OBVIOUS stuff they missed in the last X "restoration" attempts
- in the highest currently possible definition (1080)
- not the most recent "well, we had this old LaserDic master" bullshit
- and NO (1997+) special features
on EITHER format, I'd go buy one... maybe not tomorrow, but as soon as the players were halfway reasonable (like $200-300 or so.) Or maybe I'd get a PS-3 or some other cool device that included [HD|BR] playability.
If I were in charge of either format, I'd drive a dumptruck full of money to Lucas' ranch. The original trilogy is one of a very small handful of things that I really do want to own in the best possible quality.
From an earlier post of mine:
:-) Seriously, I'm thinking of the original meaning of "elite."
I really want to see Apple* make what I call the MacBook Elite:** ~10" screen, ~10 GB flash-based "HD", no optical drive, light, thin, great (10 hours?) battery life. Not your primary "center of your digital life" kind of machine, but a small, light, great-for-traveling secondary one. Maybe some software that would let it sync with your desktop, just like an iPod:
Sync MacBook Elite?
[x] Desktop
[x] Documents
[_] Movies
[x] Music (just part of your collection, like how you manage a Shuffle or Nano)
[_] Pictures
I just bought a 2 GB Sony flash drive for $20--I *know* this could be done economically.
Lots of people value lots of different things about laptops. It'd be great to see one focused solely on those who value portability*** and battery life above all else but who want the power of a laptop with a real OS and a nice big screen and don't want to step all the way down to a PDA.
* Why Apple? 'Cause I like Macs, and there are already tiny Windows laptops.
** MSRP: $1337
*** Portable in the backpack/purse/suitcase sense, not the shirt-pocket sense.
Mine is seven digits but that's not why it's easy to remember--I'm 2020x0x.
Never mind that, have you heard about their anti-child abuse program?!?!?
I don't know about yours, but my past is sorted too--chronologically. :-)
Today Linux has much better hardware support than Intel MacOSX
Well, of course it does--you're not SUPPOSED to install OS X on anything that didn't come from Apple, period.
Tiny laptops are neat, and they might be popular outside the US, and I think they're great, but you're right, Apple probably won't make them. I could see them bringing back a 12" model, or maybe even making a 10" one*, but they'll probably never get really tiny. (Then again, with the iPhone, maybe they won't have to.)
* I dream of the "MacBook Elite": 10" screen, solid state/CF storage (only 8-10 GB or so), no optical drive; light, thin, and great battery life.
I've seen for a decade in my LUG what people go through when they try to use Linux as a 1:1 replacement for Windows. It's miserable. Linux should not be positioned as "like Windows but cheaper." (Especially since Dell's OEM deal with MS and crapware vendors means that a Linux system from Dell will probably cost exactly as much as a Windows system.) Mark S. is doing exactly the right thing here.
That said, I have the feeling that these things won't sell well at all. (Not that adding Wine would make much of a difference.) Be honest: what does Linux offer the average user that Windows doesn't? The main one is "won't get infected with crap."* That's great, but that's not enough. People have put up with crappy Windows systems for so long that they think it's normal to reinstall Windows periodically, or pay a neighborhood kid or local shop $50-150 to clean off the spyware every few months (if they even bother at all), and to buy a new computer every couple years when the one the old one gets slow. People are used to Windows. They fear change. "The devil you know is better than the devil you don't." We love Linux, but we know what's involved, and we understand what the million little differences are and why they're there. The rest of the world just thinks "this isn't working right." The result of all this is, Joe User will NOT be buying Ubuntu machines from Dell. Dell will sell a few, but not many, and there's a very good chance this program will be axed within 6-12 months.
* OS X offers this same benefit, plus it has the great iLife suite, gorgeous hardware, and unbeatable hardware/software integration. Not perfect, but miles ahead of anything else. That is a compelling reason to change, and I've seen a few people go from Windows to Mac, but even so, Windows has 90%+ share and will continue to dominate for quite a while.
And #4 will be from the team that wrote that piece of shit #3. I think I'd rather watch a shot-by-shot remake of the original from Gus Van Sant with Anne Heche as Sarah Conner, Vince Vaughn as Kyle Reese, and William H. Macy as the terminator.
Fake ID's typically have fake names and addresses, idiot. Also, they didn't "appear" to be 21, they *were* under 21, which is why they had *fake* ID's. Get it? Thanks for playing.
Let me clarify the evidently too-subtle point of my post: If you break the law, it's a bad idea to call attention to yourself. For example, if someone steals your cocaine (which is illegal to possess) it's a bad idea to complain to the police that your cocaine was stolen. Similarly, if you have a fake ID, it's a bad idea to say "Hey! That's my fake ID!" when someone posts a picture of it on their site.
Officer! Officer! That man stole my cocaine!
someone tell them about Canadian Tire Money, quick!
I don't want an international incident to come up because some unknowing spook bought something from some Canuck on eBay.
A custom ad-blocking hosts file (/etc/hosts in Linux and OS X; locations vary in Windows) will block most ads and spyware-hosting sites. And it's system-wide, making all browsers largely ad-free.
For those who haven never seen Monad in action and are quick to bash (ha! get it?) Microsoft's new shell, take a look at these two videos. You'll see that it's much more than just bash on Win32. In fact, if it ever catches on, it'll be Unix's turn to play catch-up, because some parts of it are pretty damn amazing. (Note that those are from 2005, but AFAIK, there haven't been substantial changes.)
:-)
The whole point of Monad is that it's not just text, it's objects. So, unlike Unix, where you work with a command and then filter its output (which is just text), the output of Monad, while looking like text, is actually kind of like pointers back to the real thing, so instead of just doing a Unix-style command | filter | filter, you can say "OK, run this command, now of the things it output, go back and tell me this and this about them." Like, "Of these things that are running, tell me which five are using the most CPU time, then tell me the version of each, and how much memory they're using."
PS: "...even if it does have a dorky name"--which name were you referring to: the one that sounds like 'testicle' or the one that makes me think of the Lottery?
No, I want a butt-load of DVD jewel boxes occupying cabinet after cabinet in my living-room so they'll be convenient in the event I might want to watch one... I have literally avoided buying DVDs in the past because I didn't want to increase the clutter of storage.
Which is why it's nice to rip them. Here's my system:
- buy DVDs
- rip them, store them on server (which is actually just my regular G5 with two 500 GB drives)
- watch them using my Mac Mini, which shows them in a nice list, just like my TiVo's "now playing" list
- put DVDs into a DVD holder (a thing the size of a binder which holds a couple dozen, with liner notes, not that I ever look at them)
- give away jewel cases
Ripping them to MP4s also means I don't have to sit through a bunch of crap (warnings, menus, previews, etc.) every time I want to watch a movie. I pick the movie off the list and it starts right up. This is also good for 24 marathons--as soon as the closing credits start, it's just escape, down arrow, enter to start the next episode.
Now we can finally settle this which-OS-is-better debate once and for all!
I really want to see Apple* make what I call the MacBook Elite:** ~10" screen, ~10 GB flash-based "HD", no optical drive, light, thin, great (10 hours?) battery life. Not your primary "center of your digital life" kind of machine, but a small, light, great-for-traveling secondary one. Maybe some software that would let it sync with your desktop, just like an iPod:
:-) Seriously, I'm thinking of the original meaning of "elite."
Sync MacBook Elite?
[x] Desktop
[x] Documents
[_] Movies
[x] Music (just part of your collection, like how you manage a Shuffle or Nano)
[_] Pictures
I just bought a 2 GB Sony flash drive for $20--I *know* this could be done economically.
Lots of people value lots of different things about laptops. It'd be great to see one focused solely on those who value portability*** and battery life above all else but who want the power of a laptop with a real OS and a nice big screen and don't want to step all the way down to a PDA.
* Why Apple? 'Cause I like Macs, and there are already tiny Windows laptops.
** MSRP: $1337
*** Portable in the backpack/purse/suitcase sense, not the shirt-pocket sense.