These ads are clearly targeted at people who are not computer geeks who love messing around with every flavor on *nix out there. They were made to reach ordinary people who need to have one(1) computer for day-to-day use.
Whenever I have a relative or non-geek friend who wants to have a computer, for pretty much any reason other than gaming, I always encourage them to buy Macs, for the very selfish reason that I don't want to spend my free time as their personal tech support hot-line. The few times in the past that I had helped a people buy a Windows PC's, they ended up needing constant assistance and complaining of baffling glitches. With those who bought Macs, all I did was spend a couple hours showing them the basics, and told them to "guess" whenever they are unsure of how to do something. In spite of being total newbies, and not very tech-inclined, they get by fine without my help after that, and often derrive enough pleasure from working with their Macs to want to learn more, and become experts.
As for myself, I'm with you. I like having lots of systems running lots of OS's. These ads are not targetting me, either.
Also, most Linux users know what they're doing, and know what they want out of their computers. If Apple gives that to them, they will switch without any TV ads. If Apple does not meet their needs, no ad will persuade them.
So either way, advertizing to the Linux crowd is kind of pointless.
In addition to that, a Linux person is running a free operating system, probably on an old, cheap, home-built computer, so it's not even enough to provide a better OS experience. To sell even one Mac to a Linux guy, you need to provide something that is enough better (in their opinion) to justify a lot of added cost. The fact that even a few Linux people are either switching to Mac, or are using Macs along with their Linux Boxen, says a lot about what Apple must be doing right.
You returned a laptop that you otherwise really liked because you didn't care for the filing system?
That I can see, I guess...
But you returned it (eating the 10% fee) before taking the 30 seconds it would have taken you to find out that the traditional *nix filesystem was an available option?
That's just stupid.
For the record, if you don't like HFS+, you can use UFS. Also if you don't like tcsh, you can install bash (free download from Stallman & co.). If you took a deep breath, calmed down, and did a quick visit to any of thousands of web sites that were chattering about this stuff at the time, you could have found all this out. For that matter, if you had bothered to look into it before buying a $1200 laptop, you would have known all this going in.
You are exactly correct. This is not really an issue of rights. It's only an issue customer service. A company is failing to provide a service that most paying customers are used to getting. A poor choice on their part, yes, but hardly anything worth marching to the capital steps in Washington over.
In addition to the "Your Rights Online" category, Slashdot really needs a "Big Company Not Treating Their Customers Well" category, because that seems to be what a lot of these stories end up being. Save the YRO banner for DMCA court battles and stuff like that.
I'll second that. Apart from the times when I need to use a piece of hardware that still lacks OS X support (a MOTU 828), I never boot into OS 9 anymore.
By your argument, calling the OS composed of gnu tools and a linux kernel 'Linux', would be like calling a Ford a Sony, because they happened to make the stereo.
Actually, it would be more like calling it a "Mitsubishi" (or after whoever made the engine for that particular model... in some cases "Ford").
If you think the kernel is no more important to an OS than the stereo is to a car, then you probably don't understand operating systems very well.
Let's just be totally frank here... a reference to Stallman's group, representing their contribution, would probably be a lot more common if "GNU" was not such an incredibly stupid name. I mean, he even expects you to pronounce it "guh-NEW" for shit's sake. Can I buy a vowel? I know that recursive acronyms seemed like a cute fad back in the 80's and 90's, but really "GNU's Not Unix!?" Was that really the best anybody could do?
If they had called it "Freenix" or "StallmanOS" or something, it might not have occurred to Linus and his buddies to come up with a new name when they were developping the Linux kernel.
As it is, whoever thought "the GNU System" was a cool name simply blew it. Almost nobody says "guh-NOO-LIN-ux" when discussing Linux, and almost nobody ever will. Try to get over it. Life will go on.
As someone who sees this everyday, let me tell you something. Do you know what cancer pain is?
That's actually asking, not telling.
And to answer your question, no. I do not have cancer, but I have endured prostate inflamation (which is pain enough to render a person senseless, or in my father's case, unconsious). I've also had other medical issues, but I'm not going to catalog them here. Suffice it to say, I have experinced prolonged and severe pain a few times in my life.
The main points of my post are:
1. As long as I am physically capable of committing suicide, the duty of killing myself is mine and mine alone. If I need a doctor to do it for me, that's a pretty good indicator that I don't really want to die enough to overcome the survival instinct.
2. I won't tell you what to put in your living will if you don't tell me what to put in mine. If I am suffering chronic pain, even if the chance of my suffering ever ending in anything other than death is a million to one, I prefer to commit to staying alive and take that chance.
btw arthritis at age 30 IS abnormal
Don't I know it... but I said I was "in my 30's", not 30. My mother started with the arthritic pain at about the same age, so I have a family history for it. No biggie, it's just a little ache.
I'm right there with you, charon. I've seen too many cases of unions making things more difficult for both the employer and for the employee. I openly support any effort by a company to union-bust. I haven't seen it happen since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in the 80's, but I continue to have high hopes. I was really pulling for UPS a couple years ago, but they finally had to cave in. The unions are simply too powerful for anybody to bust anymore.
Many companies take the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach, by creating their own internal unions... guaranteeing that employees get screwed from both ends. It's a joke. That's why almost every time I read about a strike, I root for the strikers to lose.
What if killing someone ment them having less pain? Certianly that falls under 'do no harm'? No?
No. Thanks for asking.
I have artritis in my joints. Killing me now, while I am in my 30's, could save me years, perhaps even decades of pain. Doing me that favor is not up to you, or any doctor. If I really can't stand living, it's up to me to kill myself.
My current "living will" says simply this: "Never pull the plug. Use any and all extreme means to keep me alive, no matter how severe my suffering. I can take it. I fully intend to stay hooked up to radical life support systems until either I die anyway, or future scientists invent a new robot body I can live in, even if it takes hundreds of years. If anybody pulls the plug on me, I request that my surviving friends and relatives avenge my death with immediate and violent action. Thank you in advance for respecting my wishes."
Your points are the reason I enjoyed The Matrix. It's a good, exciting popcorn flick. It's chock full of great wire-fu action and keen special effects. The best thing about having the DVD is that it allows you to cue up the lobby gunfight or the helecoptor crash without bothering with the ultra-stupid plot exposition scene.
My point, which you seem to support, is that it is not brilliantly-written science fiction, in spite of what thousands of drooling fanboys insist on claiming. The story is lame and poorly thought-out, and is only present to prop up the action sequences.
I doubt Tsui Hark "got sick of Hollywood BS". He didn't have time.
Unlike the many Chinese film-makers who picked up and moved to the US, he was barely here long enough to do the stunt work for The Matrix, doesn't speak a damn word of English, and has always said that making Chinese movies will remain his priority.
I think you are probably giving the writers too much credit. It seems to me that they just fell in love with the idea of machines that feed off us, and didn't think it through enough.
I see two hobbits here. One is an upstanding member of the Shire known as Frodo Baggins, who looks after his uncle's home, employs a gardener named Samwise Gamgee, and participates in community life. The other is a fugitive from justice running through the woods calling himself Underhill.
One of the Hobbits has a future. The other... does not. It's time for you to choose, Mister Baggins.
Re:The Matrix: An Example of Bad Software Engineer
on
The Matrix is Reloading
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Anyway, reading any more into the movie is getting a bit philosophical, need less to say you did a better post then all those arseholes who say shit like why didn't they use horses instead of people.
The best answer, ofcourse, is "we simply don't know".
No, the best answer is: Because the writers didn't really think it through very well.
Which brings me to what I thought was one of the biggest weaknesses to the show... Why do the agents bother to broadcast their presence to the rebels by morphing into "Men In Black" whenever they take a body over. Wouldn't it be fare more efficient for The Girl In The Red Dress to just stay looking the way she does, and blow Neo's head off?
It all makes sense if you imagine this as the result of a Microsoft MMORPG
No, it doesn't. Perpetual motion still doesn't work. You cant have a crop of people, being fed by nothing but each other, as a power source. The math just doesn't work.
I agree with the parent post to your comment. The whole story would have worked much better if the Matrix was created by well-intentioned yet misguided robots who believed they were doing it all for our benifit, rather than as a means to harness our energy.
After all, if humans can not survive in this captive state without The Matrix keeping their minds occupied, why not just use fish or cows as batteries, and forget about humans entirely?
By the story, there should not have been a Matrix 1.
If you are just using people as crops, you really don't need their brains to be aware. The robots could just as easilly strap people in to those force-feeding pods and not give them any mental stimulation at all. They would be miserable and want to die, but they would still be alive which seems to be the whole point.
The Matrix seems to just be their as a courtesy, so all the livestock is happy in their belief that they are living in a world before the robots took over. Once Morpheus and Neo started making trouble, just switch the damn thing off, and the problem is solved.
Another huge plot hole: the part about how man blotted out all the sunlight to stop the robots because it was the source of their power. Excuse me, the sun in the only source for OUR power, and robots, unlike us, can run on pretty much anything that makes electricity. How stupid were these people!?
Worst of all: these human crops are being raised, without sunlight to grow external food sources, by feeding the biomass of the dead to the living. Since a healthy human body has only enough nutrients to feed one adult for about one week or so, you would rapidly run out of humans under this system.
Besides, the power required to run the Matrix itself, let alone the life-support systems, would be more than you could get by using "people as batteries".
Stupid on all levels.
That said, 2 and 3 will both be cool. Neo is now a super-hero, which is what they intended all along: to create a new, modern super-hero franchise. Matrix 1 was the origin story. Now the sequils will be the kind of stories they wanted to do in the first place, but had to get through the last film to do it.
Anybody who goes to these films to see anything other than Kung Fu fighting and neat camera effects is wasting their time anyway.
Hey, don't be messing with Jet Li. I was surprised they offered him that little.
I'm surprised they offered him that much. So much fuss is made over the fact that he is an actual martial arts master, yet 95% of his films look fake as hell.
The wire work in his films are usually obvious to the point of being distracting; it doesn't look like really high jumping or flight, but rather it looks like somebody dangling on a wire.
There are so many "fight" scenes he has done where he gently caresses a bad guy with his foot and the bad guy goes flying across the room like he was shot from a cannon.
There was one movie where he and a little kid beat a man senseless using the middle of a stretch of rope, held on to on both ends. It looked about as violent as three unskilled girls playing jump-rope, but with loud, slapstick special effects.
Screw Jet Li. Give me Yuen Baiu or Jackie Chan any day. They may not have the actual skills to beat somebody up, but they know how to look like they are doing so.
People like to blame The Matrix for the sudden rise of "Wire Fu" in Hollywood movies, but it's a trend that was beginning long before The Matrix hit the screen.
When Communist China took control of Hong Kong from England, a shitload of leading chinese actors, directors, and stunt coordinators reacted by heading to Hollywood (a place where many of them previously had zero interest in).
So far, Chinese control of Hong Kong has not been quite as restrictive as some people feared at the time (we will see over the long haul), but during the initial transition America gained the benifit of a lot of Hong Kong talent.
The Matrix proved to Hollywood that "chop-socky" film making could cross over to other genres in big-budget American films, so we get spinning kicks and Tai Chi Quan moves even in non-kung-fu flicks like X-Men, Charlie's Angels, and The Musketeer... but films like Kiss of The Dragon, The Replacement Killers, Broken Arrow, and Rush Hour probably would have happened anyway, because so many of Hong Kongs best film-makers are now working here, mostly creating films that are meant to appeal to both US and Chinese audiences.
Actually the reason for the film's success, and why it will continue to succeed all summer, is that it is far from "just another action film".
It's really a coming-of-age drama disguised as an action flick.
Spider-Man is, and really always has been, the story of Peter Parker becoming a man. The fact that Parker becomes a super-hero serves to raise his private struggles to mythic proportions, but that's essentially all it is. The turning point of the story is not where he gets bitten by the spider, but when he is confronted by the consequences of his failure to rise to his responsibility to his fellow man.
If you never go see it, too bad. You are missing the best "summer event" movie to come along in decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I have a relative or non-geek friend who wants to have a computer, for pretty much any reason other than gaming, I always encourage them to buy Macs, for the very selfish reason that I don't want to spend my free time as their personal tech support hot-line. The few times in the past that I had helped a people buy a Windows PC's, they ended up needing constant assistance and complaining of baffling glitches. With those who bought Macs, all I did was spend a couple hours showing them the basics, and told them to "guess" whenever they are unsure of how to do something. In spite of being total newbies, and not very tech-inclined, they get by fine without my help after that, and often derrive enough pleasure from working with their Macs to want to learn more, and become experts.
As for myself, I'm with you. I like having lots of systems running lots of OS's. These ads are not targetting me, either.
So either way, advertizing to the Linux crowd is kind of pointless.
In addition to that, a Linux person is running a free operating system, probably on an old, cheap, home-built computer, so it's not even enough to provide a better OS experience. To sell even one Mac to a Linux guy, you need to provide something that is enough better (in their opinion) to justify a lot of added cost. The fact that even a few Linux people are either switching to Mac, or are using Macs along with their Linux Boxen, says a lot about what Apple must be doing right.
Gawd, you are just as bad as those trolls that post the "I thought we hate the MPAA" messages every time /. reviews a movie.
That I can see, I guess...
But you returned it (eating the 10% fee) before taking the 30 seconds it would have taken you to find out that the traditional *nix filesystem was an available option?
That's just stupid.
For the record, if you don't like HFS+, you can use UFS. Also if you don't like tcsh, you can install bash (free download from Stallman & co.). If you took a deep breath, calmed down, and did a quick visit to any of thousands of web sites that were chattering about this stuff at the time, you could have found all this out. For that matter, if you had bothered to look into it before buying a $1200 laptop, you would have known all this going in.
You are exactly correct. This is not really an issue of rights. It's only an issue customer service. A company is failing to provide a service that most paying customers are used to getting. A poor choice on their part, yes, but hardly anything worth marching to the capital steps in Washington over.
In addition to the "Your Rights Online" category, Slashdot really needs a "Big Company Not Treating Their Customers Well" category, because that seems to be what a lot of these stories end up being. Save the YRO banner for DMCA court battles and stuff like that.
I'll second that. Apart from the times when I need to use a piece of hardware that still lacks OS X support (a MOTU 828), I never boot into OS 9 anymore.
Then your car is obsolete. The logic system on new cars is a lot more sophisticated than a simple MP3/CD/Radio.
Actually, it would be more like calling it a "Mitsubishi" (or after whoever made the engine for that particular model... in some cases "Ford").
If you think the kernel is no more important to an OS than the stereo is to a car, then you probably don't understand operating systems very well.
If they had called it "Freenix" or "StallmanOS" or something, it might not have occurred to Linus and his buddies to come up with a new name when they were developping the Linux kernel.
As it is, whoever thought "the GNU System" was a cool name simply blew it. Almost nobody says "guh-NOO-LIN-ux" when discussing Linux, and almost nobody ever will. Try to get over it. Life will go on.
That's actually asking, not telling.
And to answer your question, no. I do not have cancer, but I have endured prostate inflamation (which is pain enough to render a person senseless, or in my father's case, unconsious). I've also had other medical issues, but I'm not going to catalog them here. Suffice it to say, I have experinced prolonged and severe pain a few times in my life.
The main points of my post are:
1. As long as I am physically capable of committing suicide, the duty of killing myself is mine and mine alone. If I need a doctor to do it for me, that's a pretty good indicator that I don't really want to die enough to overcome the survival instinct.
2. I won't tell you what to put in your living will if you don't tell me what to put in mine. If I am suffering chronic pain, even if the chance of my suffering ever ending in anything other than death is a million to one, I prefer to commit to staying alive and take that chance.
btw arthritis at age 30 IS abnormal
Don't I know it... but I said I was "in my 30's", not 30. My mother started with the arthritic pain at about the same age, so I have a family history for it. No biggie, it's just a little ache.
Many companies take the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach, by creating their own internal unions... guaranteeing that employees get screwed from both ends. It's a joke. That's why almost every time I read about a strike, I root for the strikers to lose.
Go scabs!
No. Thanks for asking.
I have artritis in my joints. Killing me now, while I am in my 30's, could save me years, perhaps even decades of pain. Doing me that favor is not up to you, or any doctor. If I really can't stand living, it's up to me to kill myself.
My current "living will" says simply this: "Never pull the plug. Use any and all extreme means to keep me alive, no matter how severe my suffering. I can take it. I fully intend to stay hooked up to radical life support systems until either I die anyway, or future scientists invent a new robot body I can live in, even if it takes hundreds of years. If anybody pulls the plug on me, I request that my surviving friends and relatives avenge my death with immediate and violent action. Thank you in advance for respecting my wishes."
You bet it is! Just ask Jimmy Hoffa (once you figure out which end zone he's burried under).
My point, which you seem to support, is that it is not brilliantly-written science fiction, in spite of what thousands of drooling fanboys insist on claiming. The story is lame and poorly thought-out, and is only present to prop up the action sequences.
Unlike the many Chinese film-makers who picked up and moved to the US, he was barely here long enough to do the stunt work for The Matrix, doesn't speak a damn word of English, and has always said that making Chinese movies will remain his priority.
I think you are probably giving the writers too much credit. It seems to me that they just fell in love with the idea of machines that feed off us, and didn't think it through enough.
One of the Hobbits has a future. The other... does not. It's time for you to choose, Mister Baggins.
The best answer, ofcourse, is "we simply don't know".
No, the best answer is: Because the writers didn't really think it through very well.
Which brings me to what I thought was one of the biggest weaknesses to the show... Why do the agents bother to broadcast their presence to the rebels by morphing into "Men In Black" whenever they take a body over. Wouldn't it be fare more efficient for The Girl In The Red Dress to just stay looking the way she does, and blow Neo's head off?
No, it doesn't. Perpetual motion still doesn't work. You cant have a crop of people, being fed by nothing but each other, as a power source. The math just doesn't work.
I agree with the parent post to your comment. The whole story would have worked much better if the Matrix was created by well-intentioned yet misguided robots who believed they were doing it all for our benifit, rather than as a means to harness our energy.
After all, if humans can not survive in this captive state without The Matrix keeping their minds occupied, why not just use fish or cows as batteries, and forget about humans entirely?
I really gotta start hitting "preview" once in a while.
If you are just using people as crops, you really don't need their brains to be aware. The robots could just as easilly strap people in to those force-feeding pods and not give them any mental stimulation at all. They would be miserable and want to die, but they would still be alive which seems to be the whole point.
The Matrix seems to just be their as a courtesy, so all the livestock is happy in their belief that they are living in a world before the robots took over. Once Morpheus and Neo started making trouble, just switch the damn thing off, and the problem is solved.
Another huge plot hole: the part about how man blotted out all the sunlight to stop the robots because it was the source of their power. Excuse me, the sun in the only source for OUR power, and robots, unlike us, can run on pretty much anything that makes electricity. How stupid were these people!?
Worst of all: these human crops are being raised, without sunlight to grow external food sources, by feeding the biomass of the dead to the living. Since a healthy human body has only enough nutrients to feed one adult for about one week or so, you would rapidly run out of humans under this system.
Besides, the power required to run the Matrix itself, let alone the life-support systems, would be more than you could get by using "people as batteries".
Stupid on all levels.
That said, 2 and 3 will both be cool. Neo is now a super-hero, which is what they intended all along: to create a new, modern super-hero franchise. Matrix 1 was the origin story. Now the sequils will be the kind of stories they wanted to do in the first place, but had to get through the last film to do it.
Anybody who goes to these films to see anything other than Kung Fu fighting and neat camera effects is wasting their time anyway.
I'm surprised they offered him that much. So much fuss is made over the fact that he is an actual martial arts master, yet 95% of his films look fake as hell.
The wire work in his films are usually obvious to the point of being distracting; it doesn't look like really high jumping or flight, but rather it looks like somebody dangling on a wire.
There are so many "fight" scenes he has done where he gently caresses a bad guy with his foot and the bad guy goes flying across the room like he was shot from a cannon.
There was one movie where he and a little kid beat a man senseless using the middle of a stretch of rope, held on to on both ends. It looked about as violent as three unskilled girls playing jump-rope, but with loud, slapstick special effects.
Screw Jet Li. Give me Yuen Baiu or Jackie Chan any day. They may not have the actual skills to beat somebody up, but they know how to look like they are doing so.
When Communist China took control of Hong Kong from England, a shitload of leading chinese actors, directors, and stunt coordinators reacted by heading to Hollywood (a place where many of them previously had zero interest in).
So far, Chinese control of Hong Kong has not been quite as restrictive as some people feared at the time (we will see over the long haul), but during the initial transition America gained the benifit of a lot of Hong Kong talent.
The Matrix proved to Hollywood that "chop-socky" film making could cross over to other genres in big-budget American films, so we get spinning kicks and Tai Chi Quan moves even in non-kung-fu flicks like X-Men, Charlie's Angels, and The Musketeer... but films like Kiss of The Dragon, The Replacement Killers, Broken Arrow, and Rush Hour probably would have happened anyway, because so many of Hong Kongs best film-makers are now working here, mostly creating films that are meant to appeal to both US and Chinese audiences.
Heh. If you watched it often enough to start hunting for continuity errors in the editing before the first weekend is over, that's praise enough!
It's really a coming-of-age drama disguised as an action flick.
Spider-Man is, and really always has been, the story of Peter Parker becoming a man. The fact that Parker becomes a super-hero serves to raise his private struggles to mythic proportions, but that's essentially all it is. The turning point of the story is not where he gets bitten by the spider, but when he is confronted by the consequences of his failure to rise to his responsibility to his fellow man.
If you never go see it, too bad. You are missing the best "summer event" movie to come along in decades.