" People who are going to be using photoshop professionally have most likely already decided whether or not they're going to buy an Apple. Even if the G5 was undeniably faster by a great margain, I doubt that fact would sell more than a few hundred units. "
As an apple fan you are correct. But hasn't apple's fanbase and even its ads always been about being part of a better community with better hardware (which can be argued) at a comparable price (which needs some fuzzy minds to believe).
Perhaps this campaign isn't to switch people over because Apple is faster but to make their own customers still feel great that their choice is the best and the stupid MS people are getting ripped off with crappy products?
" when I noticed that CNN and MSNBC had their news anchors put the war helmets on, and start the 9/11 rant all over again."
Um no. Mod this guy down. I have been watching it since my city got a power surge (east lansing, MI) and all the reporters keep saying is that they have no reason to suspect it terrorism, are waiting for more news, everything seems to be calm, and that it looks like a normal power outage.
Sure its breaking news when the entire northeast loses power. EVERYONE turns on their TV to see whats going on. I flipped past every channel to see the "breaking news" even though I already know everything they had to say.
My brother last night called me about his computer shutting down in 60 secs or less. I had him do the msconfig/ctrl-alt-del to find any viruses he may have downloaded.
This morning my dad's office has the same problem (then I knew to check/.). However, my computer has been up and running kazaa on a static IP off a cable modem for the past 10 days while I have been on vacation.
Our president gets some blowjobs and its a six month scandal. Another country's dictator kills tens of thousands of people and it doesn't make page 13 (of our paper and of course not the dictator's paper).
How many Americans has President Bush killed with his policies compared to the dictators around the world? His policies, even his wars, kill less than China's policies. I don't care what China does, until it removes all dictator powers, gives power to its people, and renounces all of its past crimes it will be a shitty place to live.
You praise it for being open source. The whole country is full of pirates. They aren't so open source and anti-pay. And chinese people may say life its getting great now. But thats because they don't know better. I'm sure some slaves in America were so happy to be free after the civil war that they were happy to be free, poor, starving, unemployed, and discriminated against. But ONLY because they didn't know better.
Our standards of living are on a whole different level than a lot of the world. Some parts of Europe are above America's standards. And if you don't believe so look at how many third world countries you can beat your wife w/o any recourse. It makes me sick the abuses that still go on today.
My dad has been an architect for all his life too. Seeing buildings built all of my life I know that even you guys screw up. Although the buildings almost never fall down, there are hundreds of tiny problems with houses even once they are done. They rarely show up for a while.
The more complex the project the more errors will show up over time.
The parent may have been arrogent in his "programmers are the best" rant but he was right in his "complexity = errors" part. I could inspect any project of yours and find errors no doubt.
Now take Windows, tens of millions lines of code, took a good 5-10 years to make. Now find something else in life with comparable staff, years, and complexity and see if they have made updates. Also, in computers you don't always see the bugs until its too late. At least in buildings, cars, and other physical objects you can see whats may go wrong (construction company is setting it up wrong, using bad material, communication caused a mixup, etc).
Actually I didn't look at your other posts. But I did the same as you and just looked up the prices on the web so both of our research was valid, its just I provided proof first and requested your own (sorry if I asked for proof)
And I also made invalid your post about the prices of full albums not being the issue. Full album prices aren't the issue for online stores since you can use search engines and find the cd for $6+ at other places.
Buymusic is looking for single song downloads and don't seem to be competiting on full albums. So your entire complaint about full album downloads is invalid. It would be like going to a movie theatre and complaining about the arcade machine prices. Its just an extra service to add revenue but not their lead product.
I was thinking of a future with 20 billion people but with enough automated machines that we only *need* 1 billion people to actually work for the essentials (food, energy, water, etc).
Automation will kill billions of jobs in the next century but we are a species of unlimited wants and needs. So even if farming, fast food, driving, water plants, energy, and computer networks are all run with skeleton staffs I am sure we will create more jobs. Reality tv actors? More salesmen to sell us junk we don't need.
Numbers still don't add up. If you checked the other link the cd was going for $14 about. I also checked out bestbuy and it was $15.
However, mysimon.com says BN has it for $7 but its out of stock right now.
But my point was that he price points weren't factual at all and he just made it up to back up his argument. I am sure with 300,000 songs you could find variations where downloading is cheaper and other times when getting the cd is easier.
Used cd stores may have the cd for cheap and other online stores may do the same. A common retail store may try to sell it for $20.
So I think the whole argument of price in online stores may be invalid. Some cds have 20 tracks, others have 6 or less. Paying per song can be a great buy (6*$0.79 = $4.74 which isn't bad even with restrictions). However, 21*$1 = $21 which would suck on a song by song basis. They do have album prices to offset this but I doubt they refund you if you download one song, like it, and want the cd.
"Hmm, let's see, here's a "best of" Judas Priest album. I can do a one-time download of a crippled non-CD-quality set of copy protected files that only work on a subset of machines for $12.69. Or, on the buy.com music page, I can buy the same album, at a higher quality, on physical media, in a universal format with no copy protection, including inserts with pictures, lyrics, etc., for $10.98. Gee, that's a tough choice... "
I looked it up and they don't even sell the Judas Priest album. They sell 6 individual tracks for $0.99 a piece. Did you do your research or just make up facts to back up your mini-rant? Here are my links.
Hopefully they will learn soon. I know people would like to have a legit collection of music on their computer. But paying $10,000 in cds to get a track here and there isn't feasible. (and even if it is to some people who wants to sit and rip songs all day long. Some people don't mind but I got better stuff to do).
Apple had it right but they need more support. On a side note, it will be fun to watch this crash and burn. I can't wait to laugh at the people who made this business. A group of top execs will be looking at each other asking what went wrong.
"The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them. "
It was bad that this came from msn.com since it is a conflicting interest. But this DOESN'T seem like MSN's attempt to start knocking down goggle's god-like reputation. It seems like a simple article about the downfalls of google (and the current web).
In essence he says that since billions have been spent on commercial web sites that google reports this infrastructure the way google does with all information. But as the web becomes more commercial than so does the web searches. The more commercial means the less informative.
The article makes sense and to anyone who thinks about it for a minute knows this about the search engine. It basically tells people to be very descriptive in their searches since commercial products will have the spotlight on all the one word searches. (apple, speaker, car, house, beer, travel, jar, picture, etc)
I have seen things like the product was reviewed by Leo of techtv and given 5 stars yet it also looks like a worthless product. I am surprised that Leo would give a product like this such a high rating.
Or does the product work well (I mean how hard is it to write a product that erases everything completely?) but their ethics just suck?
"Sorry, I don't associate with greedy lawyer types... not that I'm worried about this case, but send me a few names/numbers in case I have a future need arise!:)"
Not all lawyers are pieces of shit, only about 90%. My dad's best friend is a lawyer who defends doctors in medical malpractice suits (doctors do make accidents during their lifetime that shouldn't cost them $2 billion.) My dad owns a business and every couple of weeks someone threatens to sue. Only about once a year do they go through with it but having a friend as a lawyer to write you up a nice letter can save thousands of dollars. When you run apartment complexes then they are worth their weight in gold.
Yep, and this is all normal because its a business cycle. People don't want the truth that recessions and booms all come and go. Our last boom was the biggest non-war boom EVER. People today think that the economy should never stop going up and when it falls back slightly (because www.loafershoes.com is valued more than small countries) then they want a fall guy (Alan Greenspan and Bush look like the guy for it right now).
Do the reasons matter? At the end of the day its a business and not a charity. If I had my money invested in AOL and I knew they were employing people who weren't making money then I would question why.
I'm not saying its impossible to get enjoyment out of an old game but it sure can be tough when the game is based partyl on graphics. Carmegeddon now looks like a game full of poster board cut out people with red MS paint being splattered everywhere.
I still like warcraft but only when I am forced to be at a P1 computer. I prefer the updated Warcraft 3 because graphics, AI, level size, content, and complexity is all added.
Doom, Duke Nukem, and War2 were all impressive for ther time. But loading up Duke Nukem today is a little less because every FPS game can do 100 more things than Duke Nukem did (except supply attitude).
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention to put in starting points and ending points. Perhaps the data is on a backup that is hooked up to a computer and the backup is a huge supercomputer that you don't want to move across the distance needed.
If you are trying to figure out the best way to transfer data you have to look at a few things.
The first is if you are moving data that just needs to be stored or if you are going to use it. Shipping 10,000 DVDs of data in a car across the state would be easier than the Internet of course. But if you need to put a few hundred gigs of data on another computer across the state then you have to factor in the time of putting in the disc and moving it to a hard drive.
It would be very interesting to see a study of how best to transfer 10gigs, 1000 gigs, and 10,000 gigs of data from computer to computer, across the state, and across the world.
With human factors (installing of hd drive, hd to hd transfer, hd to dvd recorder transfer, etc) being factored in. It may actually be useful for businesses to research this instead of just using normal business protocals. It could save days of employee time when moving data.
You lost me (and my gaming respect) at Carmageddon II.
If all you do is surf, listen to music, email, and watch movies then of course you could use any system. Windows, mac, and linux all can play mp3s just fine.
But when you use words like "Bill and his Evil Empire" you don't really drag the gamer crowd over to your side. And you lose us when you mention that all you play is an outdated game.
I am a hardcore computer user but I still haven't had the desire to switch over to linux. All my machines come with Windows, they can watch movies, listen to music, surf, do email, and play just about every game. So why should I spend an hour(s) to switch over and learn all the new stuff?
Also, I use opera becuase its better, meaning it was worth the time to switch over. So I am not pro-microsoft. I just need to see the time benefit of switching over. And PLEASE no exploit/privacy speeches. I keep my windows up to date and am not a secret agent. If someone wants to know me my name is Patrick Irish. Woopiety doo. In the past decade no one has tried to hack my computer and I don't forsee someone wasting their time in the future. Windows may be more unsecure than linux but with so many easy targets out there it can be like locking your mailbox. Sure it makes you more secure but how afraid were you in the first place if all you get is junk mail?
And this has at LEAST 3 months before its worth the $15 a month. $12 a month for a full year though which is pointless because its a casual gamer version of EQ with blasters. Instead of spending 30 hours killing rats and butterflies you instead spend 10 hours killing rats and butterflies. That enables the casual gamer to make a decent character faster.
The engine/world is the best part. Wait for 3-6 months though for them to fix the thousands of bugs, put in the features they cut out to ship it early, and perhaps wait until the space expansion which will make it a full game instead of this hacked down overpriced one.
Also, like I said this game isn't like EQ where you could play it for a year and not see everything. I imagine that in 2-3 months you will see just about everything and have a complete character. So when you decide to buy try to think of how complete of a game do you want.
A purchase right now will get you a game that doesn't have a space, vehicles, player cities, some cut professions, less worlds, no space expansion, and THOUSANDS of bugs that you will be reporting left and right.
A purchase at Christmas should get you everything above.
Its so ironic that the country that we dropped the A-bombs on is our best friend (person to person) today. I loved Japan when I visited it and the people there were SO nice to me. I visited Europe and while the French were cordial, pre-Iraq war, we all know how they can feel when push comes to shove.
Then answer me. You complain that XP has broken down 6 times in five months. Lay off the.exe files on Kazaa man! Some people haven't rebooted XP in 5 months and I have had only a few crashes when doing extreme operations (close down quake3 when I want to photoshop and edit movies).
Slashdot Mirror
" People who are going to be using photoshop professionally have most likely already decided whether or not they're going to buy an Apple. Even if the G5 was undeniably faster by a great margain, I doubt that fact would sell more than a few hundred units. "
As an apple fan you are correct. But hasn't apple's fanbase and even its ads always been about being part of a better community with better hardware (which can be argued) at a comparable price (which needs some fuzzy minds to believe).
Perhaps this campaign isn't to switch people over because Apple is faster but to make their own customers still feel great that their choice is the best and the stupid MS people are getting ripped off with crappy products?
" when I noticed that CNN and MSNBC had their news anchors put the war helmets on, and start the 9/11 rant all over again."
Um no. Mod this guy down. I have been watching it since my city got a power surge (east lansing, MI) and all the reporters keep saying is that they have no reason to suspect it terrorism, are waiting for more news, everything seems to be calm, and that it looks like a normal power outage.
Sure its breaking news when the entire northeast loses power. EVERYONE turns on their TV to see whats going on. I flipped past every channel to see the "breaking news" even though I already know everything they had to say.
My brother last night called me about his computer shutting down in 60 secs or less. I had him do the msconfig/ctrl-alt-del to find any viruses he may have downloaded.
/.). However, my computer has been up and running kazaa on a static IP off a cable modem for the past 10 days while I have been on vacation.
This morning my dad's office has the same problem (then I knew to check
Silly me, I patch my computer to avoid headaches.
Our president gets some blowjobs and its a six month scandal. Another country's dictator kills tens of thousands of people and it doesn't make page 13 (of our paper and of course not the dictator's paper).
How many Americans has President Bush killed with his policies compared to the dictators around the world? His policies, even his wars, kill less than China's policies. I don't care what China does, until it removes all dictator powers, gives power to its people, and renounces all of its past crimes it will be a shitty place to live.
You praise it for being open source. The whole country is full of pirates. They aren't so open source and anti-pay. And chinese people may say life its getting great now. But thats because they don't know better. I'm sure some slaves in America were so happy to be free after the civil war that they were happy to be free, poor, starving, unemployed, and discriminated against. But ONLY because they didn't know better.
Our standards of living are on a whole different level than a lot of the world. Some parts of Europe are above America's standards. And if you don't believe so look at how many third world countries you can beat your wife w/o any recourse. It makes me sick the abuses that still go on today.
My dad has been an architect for all his life too. Seeing buildings built all of my life I know that even you guys screw up. Although the buildings almost never fall down, there are hundreds of tiny problems with houses even once they are done. They rarely show up for a while.
The more complex the project the more errors will show up over time.
The parent may have been arrogent in his "programmers are the best" rant but he was right in his "complexity = errors" part. I could inspect any project of yours and find errors no doubt.
Now take Windows, tens of millions lines of code, took a good 5-10 years to make. Now find something else in life with comparable staff, years, and complexity and see if they have made updates. Also, in computers you don't always see the bugs until its too late. At least in buildings, cars, and other physical objects you can see whats may go wrong (construction company is setting it up wrong, using bad material, communication caused a mixup, etc).
Actually I didn't look at your other posts. But I did the same as you and just looked up the prices on the web so both of our research was valid, its just I provided proof first and requested your own (sorry if I asked for proof)
And I also made invalid your post about the prices of full albums not being the issue. Full album prices aren't the issue for online stores since you can use search engines and find the cd for $6+ at other places.
Buymusic is looking for single song downloads and don't seem to be competiting on full albums. So your entire complaint about full album downloads is invalid. It would be like going to a movie theatre and complaining about the arcade machine prices. Its just an extra service to add revenue but not their lead product.
I was thinking of a future with 20 billion people but with enough automated machines that we only *need* 1 billion people to actually work for the essentials (food, energy, water, etc).
Automation will kill billions of jobs in the next century but we are a species of unlimited wants and needs. So even if farming, fast food, driving, water plants, energy, and computer networks are all run with skeleton staffs I am sure we will create more jobs. Reality tv actors?
More salesmen to sell us junk we don't need.
Numbers still don't add up. If you checked the other link the cd was going for $14 about. I also checked out bestbuy and it was $15.
However, mysimon.com says BN has it for $7 but its out of stock right now.
But my point was that he price points weren't factual at all and he just made it up to back up his argument. I am sure with 300,000 songs you could find variations where downloading is cheaper and other times when getting the cd is easier.
Used cd stores may have the cd for cheap and other online stores may do the same. A common retail store may try to sell it for $20.
So I think the whole argument of price in online stores may be invalid. Some cds have 20 tracks, others have 6 or less. Paying per song can be a great buy (6*$0.79 = $4.74 which isn't bad even with restrictions). However, 21*$1 = $21 which would suck on a song by song basis. They do have album prices to offset this but I doubt they refund you if you download one song, like it, and want the cd.
"Hmm, let's see, here's a "best of" Judas Priest album. I can do a one-time download of a crippled non-CD-quality set of copy protected files that only work on a subset of machines for $12.69. Or, on the buy.com music page, I can buy the same album, at a higher quality, on physical media, in a universal format with no copy protection, including inserts with pictures, lyrics, etc., for $10.98. Gee, that's a tough choice... "
4 66
3 11 &loc=109
I looked it up and they don't even sell the Judas Priest album. They sell 6 individual tracks for $0.99 a piece. Did you do your research or just make up facts to back up your mini-rant? Here are my links.
http://www.buymusic.com/product.aspx?sku=200629
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=60461
They still just don't get it do they?
Hopefully they will learn soon. I know people would like to have a legit collection of music on their computer. But paying $10,000 in cds to get a track here and there isn't feasible. (and even if it is to some people who wants to sit and rip songs all day long. Some people don't mind but I got better stuff to do).
Apple had it right but they need more support. On a side note, it will be fun to watch this crash and burn. I can't wait to laugh at the people who made this business. A group of top execs will be looking at each other asking what went wrong.
On a side note, look up the name steven and the 2nd result is the guy's homepage. Google is mysterious, all bow your heads :)
His commends on his own article:
"The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them. "
It was bad that this came from msn.com since it is a conflicting interest. But this DOESN'T seem like MSN's attempt to start knocking down goggle's god-like reputation. It seems like a simple article about the downfalls of google (and the current web).
In essence he says that since billions have been spent on commercial web sites that google reports this infrastructure the way google does with all information. But as the web becomes more commercial than so does the web searches. The more commercial means the less informative.
The article makes sense and to anyone who thinks about it for a minute knows this about the search engine. It basically tells people to be very descriptive in their searches since commercial products will have the spotlight on all the one word searches. (apple, speaker, car, house, beer, travel, jar, picture, etc)
This is a crazy ongoing story.
I have seen things like the product was reviewed by Leo of techtv and given 5 stars yet it also looks like a worthless product. I am surprised that Leo would give a product like this such a high rating.
Or does the product work well (I mean how hard is it to write a product that erases everything completely?) but their ethics just suck?
"Sorry, I don't associate with greedy lawyer types... not that I'm worried about this case, but send me a few names/numbers in case I have a future need arise! :)"
Not all lawyers are pieces of shit, only about 90%. My dad's best friend is a lawyer who defends doctors in medical malpractice suits (doctors do make accidents during their lifetime that shouldn't cost them $2 billion.) My dad owns a business and every couple of weeks someone threatens to sue. Only about once a year do they go through with it but having a friend as a lawyer to write you up a nice letter can save thousands of dollars. When you run apartment complexes then they are worth their weight in gold.
Yep, and this is all normal because its a business cycle. People don't want the truth that recessions and booms all come and go. Our last boom was the biggest non-war boom EVER. People today think that the economy should never stop going up and when it falls back slightly (because www.loafershoes.com is valued more than small countries) then they want a fall guy (Alan Greenspan and Bush look like the guy for it right now).
Do the reasons matter? At the end of the day its a business and not a charity. If I had my money invested in AOL and I knew they were employing people who weren't making money then I would question why.
"you'rerightovercrowdingcanbegood. justlookatallthespaceiamsavingwiththispost!"
:(
Sadly that is more readable than my perl code
I'm not saying its impossible to get enjoyment out of an old game but it sure can be tough when the game is based partyl on graphics. Carmegeddon now looks like a game full of poster board cut out people with red MS paint being splattered everywhere.
I still like warcraft but only when I am forced to be at a P1 computer. I prefer the updated Warcraft 3 because graphics, AI, level size, content, and complexity is all added.
Doom, Duke Nukem, and War2 were all impressive for ther time. But loading up Duke Nukem today is a little less because every FPS game can do 100 more things than Duke Nukem did (except supply attitude).
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention to put in starting points and ending points. Perhaps the data is on a backup that is hooked up to a computer and the backup is a huge supercomputer that you don't want to move across the distance needed.
If you are trying to figure out the best way to transfer data you have to look at a few things.
The first is if you are moving data that just needs to be stored or if you are going to use it. Shipping 10,000 DVDs of data in a car across the state would be easier than the Internet of course. But if you need to put a few hundred gigs of data on another computer across the state then you have to factor in the time of putting in the disc and moving it to a hard drive.
It would be very interesting to see a study of how best to transfer 10gigs, 1000 gigs, and 10,000 gigs of data from computer to computer, across the state, and across the world.
With human factors (installing of hd drive, hd to hd transfer, hd to dvd recorder transfer, etc) being factored in. It may actually be useful for businesses to research this instead of just using normal business protocals. It could save days of employee time when moving data.
You lost me (and my gaming respect) at Carmageddon II.
If all you do is surf, listen to music, email, and watch movies then of course you could use any system. Windows, mac, and linux all can play mp3s just fine.
But when you use words like "Bill and his Evil Empire" you don't really drag the gamer crowd over to your side. And you lose us when you mention that all you play is an outdated game.
I am a hardcore computer user but I still haven't had the desire to switch over to linux. All my machines come with Windows, they can watch movies, listen to music, surf, do email, and play just about every game. So why should I spend an hour(s) to switch over and learn all the new stuff?
Also, I use opera becuase its better, meaning it was worth the time to switch over. So I am not pro-microsoft. I just need to see the time benefit of switching over. And PLEASE no exploit/privacy speeches. I keep my windows up to date and am not a secret agent. If someone wants to know me my name is Patrick Irish. Woopiety doo. In the past decade no one has tried to hack my computer and I don't forsee someone wasting their time in the future. Windows may be more unsecure than linux but with so many easy targets out there it can be like locking your mailbox. Sure it makes you more secure but how afraid were you in the first place if all you get is junk mail?
And this has at LEAST 3 months before its worth the $15 a month. $12 a month for a full year though which is pointless because its a casual gamer version of EQ with blasters. Instead of spending 30 hours killing rats and butterflies you instead spend 10 hours killing rats and butterflies. That enables the casual gamer to make a decent character faster.
The engine/world is the best part. Wait for 3-6 months though for them to fix the thousands of bugs, put in the features they cut out to ship it early, and perhaps wait until the space expansion which will make it a full game instead of this hacked down overpriced one.
Also, like I said this game isn't like EQ where you could play it for a year and not see everything. I imagine that in 2-3 months you will see just about everything and have a complete character. So when you decide to buy try to think of how complete of a game do you want.
A purchase right now will get you a game that doesn't have a space, vehicles, player cities, some cut professions, less worlds, no space expansion, and THOUSANDS of bugs that you will be reporting left and right.
A purchase at Christmas should get you everything above.
Think about it.
Its so ironic that the country that we dropped the A-bombs on is our best friend (person to person) today. I loved Japan when I visited it and the people there were SO nice to me. I visited Europe and while the French were cordial, pre-Iraq war, we all know how they can feel when push comes to shove.
If we were a country sitting on billion and billions of barrels of oil we wouldn't be having this nuclear discussion.
Why does Iran, a country that can produce oil so cheaply, need to bring in special Russian contracters to build a power plant for their population?
Its a question that I hope someone can answer because I am confused on that point.
Then answer me. You complain that XP has broken down 6 times in five months. Lay off the .exe files on Kazaa man! Some people haven't rebooted XP in 5 months and I have had only a few crashes when doing extreme operations (close down quake3 when I want to photoshop and edit movies).
So what do you do?