Yeah, and the PS2 didn't help the penetration of DVD players and lower the price of DVD players either! Oh... wait.
Pretty much everybody I knew had a DVD player before the PS2 arrived, and there have always been a lot more stand-alond DVD players out there than PS2's. In fact, the PS2 and the X-Box combined has always represented a very tiny portion of the DVD player market. The vast majority of people out there don't give a shit about playing Grand Theft Auto or anime dating sims, and just buy cheap DVD players instead of game machines. What was your point again?
Kinda like The Matrix, only it was envisioned 2500 years ago. That, and Plato's _Republic_ doesn't have people floating in midair and doing cool ninja moves.
Jobs doesn't want to dominate. He's a kooky hippie who managed to strike it rich, not an aspiring Bill Gates or Larry Ellison.
He wants his *vision* to dominate.
By that metric, he's already won.
- Windows (the OS which most people use) looks a hell of a lot more like the Mac OS than the OS which was dominating the market (MS-DOS) when the Lisa was first introduced.
- Almost everybody has moved to object-based development, just like he was saying they would back when he founded NeXT.
- CGI dominates the entire animation industry, just like he knew it would when he acquired Pixar from LucasArts for a tiny fraction of what it would ultimately be worth.
- Companies all over are pouring huge resources into finding ways to make computers more appliance-like.
- You can buy one song you like off an album you otherwise don't want.
The guy gets off on advancing Big Ideas and seeing them catch on. He doesn't seem to care how much he personally benefits when it happens, so long as it happens the way he thinks it should.
He may not be after the kind of economic power which Gates enjoys, but he's clearly all about power. How often do most people get to change the whole goddamn world?
The same thing could have been said about the mouse, too.
And the Power Glove.
The introduction of the mouse was driven by the needs of the GUI.
The Revolution's introduction of motion sensors seem to be driven by the need to distinguish their new console in a market crowded by systems which feature better raw performance and lack the (perhaps unfair) "kiddie" stigma of Nintendo's previous consoles.
Someone needs to keep a list of everyone who is whining about our impending doom due fossile fuel emmission induced global warming, so in 25 years they can be ostracized.
College kids still sometimes read Malthus, and Erlich still steals his arguments, so crackpots can survive wrong predictions.
It's like the old joke about the prophet who was so far-seeing that after 400 years none of his predictions have come true yet.
Are you implying you don't "buy into" the Greenhouse climate model? Not "believing" in global warming it one thing, but that's just hilarious. What's next, you don't "buy into" gravity?
I'm implying that I have not bought into some of the specific models of climate change that have been put out there, and with good reason. Many of them have been shown to be deeply flawed by the simple "rewind test" (where you feed the prediction models past data and ask it to predict today's climate.)
I never said I disbelieved in the concept that rising CO2 levels in a closed system will trap more solar heat. That's simple fact. It's also fairly evident that CO2 levels are higher now than they have been in a very long time. There is still a lot of room for debate about what conclusions you can draw from this informaiton, however. In particular, nobody seems to be able to make a accurate guess regarding how quickly CO2 levels will normallize when we decrease our fossil fuel burning. Nobdoy seems to be able to predict how much the likely increase in vegitation is likely to off-set our exess CO2 production or how long it will take for the biosphere to react to it. Nobody seems to be able to say whether it's even possible for us to do anything about the current predicted warming trends.
In other words, we don't know shit about anything, and any "solution" we try to apply might actually do more harm than good.
Besides, you missed my main point, which is that shifting to energy solutions which do not spew crap into the air & water is a Good Idea whether you are alarmed about Global Warming or not.
I'm not saying he's full of it, but before we say that even environmental progressives are re-thinking nuclear, it might be useful to actually get the thoughts of people still in the progressive environmental movement.
"People still in the progressive environmental movement" are, by definition, not re-thinking the axioms of the movement.
It's just like, the minute you say that gay marriages and/or abortion should be legal, you are no longer a part of the Fundamentalist Christian Right in the US, no matter how active you may have been in the movement earlier in your life.
A lot hinges on the question of whether the changes are our doing. If they're not, we should adapt ourselves, not the planet. If they are, we need to start controlling ourselves. Your view of the solution sounds a bit external to humans ("reverse the cycle") for my tastes, though my impression may be wrong.
Mankind is part of nature, therefore any changes we make are natural.
Spiders and beavers also change their environments to suit their needs, often at the expense of other species. We just happen to be the animal which is most effective at doing so.
Environmentalism has merit to the extent which the ways we impact our environment damage us. Smog in LA, acid rain in Canada, Kenny G in restaurant sound systems... We can all agree that these are Bad Things. As for global warming, the debate has not been completely settled.
Even among those who agree that there's a desease, not everybody agrees that the cure would be better.
The funny thing is, the guy who was in charge in the 70s, President Carter, urged a ramp-up of coal burning as a solution to the oil crisis.
(The "crisis" being that the Arabs actually wanted to sell oil for what it was worth, and nuclear power plants still scared the bejeezus out of everybody.)
But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.
I was with you up until that point.
We don't know whether another three degrees of warming over the next century (which is what the most pessimistic of Global Warming predictors are saying will happen regardless of what changes we make) will, on balance, be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.
Historically, periods of warm climates have been more prosperous for mankind than cool eras, because most of the land in the world lies outside the tropics.
All the Ice melting off Greenland might suck if you live in Venice, New Orleans, or some other port town that is mostly below sea level, but it's the best news ever if you've invested in any arctic real estate.
I'm a big fan of going to nuclear as an incrimental step towards Solar, fusion, or some other, better power source... not because I buy in to "greenhouse" climate models, but rather because I like the idea of cleaner air in our cities. It just plain makes sense, no matter which side of the Global Warming debate you are on.
Have you seen an HD broadcast of your favorite TV show (Lost, Battlestar Gallactica, etc?). It's definately better than a DVD. Maybe you can't tell if your TV isn't very good, but I use a 100" front projector (AE700), and there's a significant difference.
I have the exact same projector as you. You spelled "slight difference" incorrectly.
Both look terrific. You do know that 1080i broadcasts (such as those from PBS) are actually being adapted to your 720p system by downgrading them to 540 lines of resolution (which is only a tiny bit better than the 480p of DVD) and then upscaling to 720, right?
Sure, badly-mastered DVD's (like the original release of "Highlander") look like total crap, but a good Super-bit or otherwise not over-compressed disk looks fantastic on the Panny projector, even at 119".
Granted, ABC and FOX are 720p (the native res of the AE700), so "House" and "Lost" both look beautiful (and also happen to be the best two shows on broadcast TV right now), but 9 guests out of 10 who visit my house will not be able to notice how they are any better than a DVD of "House of Flying Daggers" on the same system, even in an immediate back-to-back comparisons.
Nice. Stand up for your favorite game, then take a shot at a popular web trend.
Some people enjoy pretending to play the guitar in a video game using a plastic toy.
Some people enjoy making and talking to friends via MySpace.
Neither group of people are doing anything wrong.
There is also nothing wrong with LARPers, anime otaku, Trekkies, furries, Promise Keepers, podcasters, crossdressers, luthiers, jazzercizers, kickball league players, potters, painters, fantasy football commissioners, para-para dancers, "fan fiction" erotica writers, or Seventh Day Adventists.
Within the bounds of legality, how you choose spend your free time is your own goddamn business and nobody else's.
If customer demand and screwing a competitor happen to coincide, as it does here, they are most likely to select the option which makes them the most money.
In other words, just because they are evil doesn't mean they are randomly mean. They are perfectly happy to be nice if it serves their evil purposes.
The reason they are selling that album is because it is one which Apple Corps has nothing whatsoever to do with.
I remember owning that record when I was a kid. It's been floating around for decades on a lot of re-issue labels. Basically, it's mostly a Tony Sheridan album on which the Beatles are backing him up. I don't know if the Beatles ever owned a piece of that album, but if they did they let go of it long before they recorded their big hit albums.
(By the way, the album is completely awful. Don't bother it unless you're one of those people who wants it for campy humor.)
The 5th ammendment to the US Constitution has a clause about double jeopardy, or the right of a citizen to not have to stand trial twice for the same crime (I.E. if you are procaimed innocent the first time, there can be no second trial). I guess the UK doesn't have this, or that it only applies to individuals.
It would not apply anyway. The 5th Ammendment applies to criminal justice. This is a civil lawsuit.
The lawsuit, such as it is, claims that Apple is violating the terms of their previous settlement.
They are not, but they are skating close enough to the line that the weasel lawyers might manage to force a slightly bigger settlement.
Knowing Apple's track record since Jobs retured, I bet they end up not only settling this lawsuit, but doing so in such a way that Apple Computer will be "forced" to use iTMS to sell all those Apple Corps recordings which they previously have not been allowed to sell.
but Apple Corp was nice enough to let them keep using that name on one condition - that Apple computers never enter into the sale of music.
Oh, it was because the were NICE!
And here I thought it was because they had no case at all, and chose a settlement that barely covered their lawyer fees and didn't revoke the naming rights because it was they best they could have hoped for at the time.
But your explanation, that they are really nice people, makes way more sense.
Last time I used a wireless card on a Linux box, it wasn't so bad, but it was an extremely common model 802.11b card. Since 802.11g made wireless more popular, there seems to be a lot more card manufacturers out there, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux driver-writing community was having trouble keeping up with them all.
To be fair, it's not like your choices of supported hardware don't have gaps in the Mac OS X world, it's just that what will and will not work is usually far more obvious.
For example: Video cards, if not built specifically to work with Macs, won't work with Macs. Cameras, on the other hand, pretty much always work with Macs, probably because so many photographers and video producers are Mac junkies.
I've owned many, many PC systems over the years. I've recently abandoned all but my company-owned work systems in favor of 4 Macs.
1. A G5 tower drives my media room. 2. A first-gen Mac mini is the swiss-army knife solution of my music studio. 3. I use an iBook for almost everything else I do. 4. An eMac... is collecting dust in my basement, other than serving up a web site that I no longer really care about. I should probably sell it along with my old Windows game PC.
(I used to be a major FPS junkie, but I've become bored with them and now do most of my gaming, apart from WoW, on an X-Box, so my Windows system hasn't been turned on in about a year. Come to think of it, I swiped all the memory out of it to jack up my G5, so it's not even operational at the moment.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and the PS2 didn't help the penetration of DVD players and lower the price of DVD players either! Oh... wait.
Pretty much everybody I knew had a DVD player before the PS2 arrived, and there have always been a lot more stand-alond DVD players out there than PS2's. In fact, the PS2 and the X-Box combined has always represented a very tiny portion of the DVD player market. The vast majority of people out there don't give a shit about playing Grand Theft Auto or anime dating sims, and just buy cheap DVD players instead of game machines. What was your point again?
Kinda like The Matrix, only it was envisioned 2500 years ago. That, and Plato's _Republic_ doesn't have people floating in midair and doing cool ninja moves.
Winner: The Matrix.
Jobs doesn't want to dominate. He's a kooky hippie who managed to strike it rich, not an aspiring Bill Gates or Larry Ellison.
He wants his *vision* to dominate.
By that metric, he's already won.
- Windows (the OS which most people use) looks a hell of a lot more like the Mac OS than the OS which was dominating the market (MS-DOS) when the Lisa was first introduced.
- Almost everybody has moved to object-based development, just like he was saying they would back when he founded NeXT.
- CGI dominates the entire animation industry, just like he knew it would when he acquired Pixar from LucasArts for a tiny fraction of what it would ultimately be worth.
- Companies all over are pouring huge resources into finding ways to make computers more appliance-like.
- You can buy one song you like off an album you otherwise don't want.
The guy gets off on advancing Big Ideas and seeing them catch on. He doesn't seem to care how much he personally benefits when it happens, so long as it happens the way he thinks it should.
He may not be after the kind of economic power which Gates enjoys, but he's clearly all about power. How often do most people get to change the whole goddamn world?
The same thing could have been said about the mouse, too.
And the Power Glove.
The introduction of the mouse was driven by the needs of the GUI.
The Revolution's introduction of motion sensors seem to be driven by the need to distinguish their new console in a market crowded by systems which feature better raw performance and lack the (perhaps unfair) "kiddie" stigma of Nintendo's previous consoles.
Someone needs to keep a list of everyone who is whining about our impending doom due fossile fuel emmission induced global warming, so in 25 years they can be ostracized.
College kids still sometimes read Malthus, and Erlich still steals his arguments, so crackpots can survive wrong predictions.
It's like the old joke about the prophet who was so far-seeing that after 400 years none of his predictions have come true yet.
Are you implying you don't "buy into" the Greenhouse climate model? Not "believing" in global warming it one thing, but that's just hilarious. What's next, you don't "buy into" gravity?
I'm implying that I have not bought into some of the specific models of climate change that have been put out there, and with good reason. Many of them have been shown to be deeply flawed by the simple "rewind test" (where you feed the prediction models past data and ask it to predict today's climate.)
I never said I disbelieved in the concept that rising CO2 levels in a closed system will trap more solar heat. That's simple fact. It's also fairly evident that CO2 levels are higher now than they have been in a very long time. There is still a lot of room for debate about what conclusions you can draw from this informaiton, however. In particular, nobody seems to be able to make a accurate guess regarding how quickly CO2 levels will normallize when we decrease our fossil fuel burning. Nobdoy seems to be able to predict how much the likely increase in vegitation is likely to off-set our exess CO2 production or how long it will take for the biosphere to react to it. Nobody seems to be able to say whether it's even possible for us to do anything about the current predicted warming trends.
In other words, we don't know shit about anything, and any "solution" we try to apply might actually do more harm than good.
Besides, you missed my main point, which is that shifting to energy solutions which do not spew crap into the air & water is a Good Idea whether you are alarmed about Global Warming or not.
I'm not saying he's full of it, but before we say that even environmental progressives are re-thinking nuclear, it might be useful to actually get the thoughts of people still in the progressive environmental movement.
"People still in the progressive environmental movement" are, by definition, not re-thinking the axioms of the movement.
It's just like, the minute you say that gay marriages and/or abortion should be legal, you are no longer a part of the Fundamentalist Christian Right in the US, no matter how active you may have been in the movement earlier in your life.
A lot hinges on the question of whether the changes are our doing. If they're not, we should adapt ourselves, not the planet. If they are, we need to start controlling ourselves. Your view of the solution sounds a bit external to humans ("reverse the cycle") for my tastes, though my impression may be wrong.
Mankind is part of nature, therefore any changes we make are natural.
Spiders and beavers also change their environments to suit their needs, often at the expense of other species. We just happen to be the animal which is most effective at doing so.
Environmentalism has merit to the extent which the ways we impact our environment damage us. Smog in LA, acid rain in Canada, Kenny G in restaurant sound systems... We can all agree that these are Bad Things. As for global warming, the debate has not been completely settled.
Even among those who agree that there's a desease, not everybody agrees that the cure would be better.
The funny thing is, the guy who was in charge in the 70s, President Carter, urged a ramp-up of coal burning as a solution to the oil crisis.
(The "crisis" being that the Arabs actually wanted to sell oil for what it was worth, and nuclear power plants still scared the bejeezus out of everybody.)
But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.
I was with you up until that point.
We don't know whether another three degrees of warming over the next century (which is what the most pessimistic of Global Warming predictors are saying will happen regardless of what changes we make) will, on balance, be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.
Historically, periods of warm climates have been more prosperous for mankind than cool eras, because most of the land in the world lies outside the tropics.
All the Ice melting off Greenland might suck if you live in Venice, New Orleans, or some other port town that is mostly below sea level, but it's the best news ever if you've invested in any arctic real estate.
I'm a big fan of going to nuclear as an incrimental step towards Solar, fusion, or some other, better power source... not because I buy in to "greenhouse" climate models, but rather because I like the idea of cleaner air in our cities. It just plain makes sense, no matter which side of the Global Warming debate you are on.
And a furry Seventh Day Adventist LARPer, no less, so you can just imagine what sort of images I paint.
Have you seen an HD broadcast of your favorite TV show (Lost, Battlestar Gallactica, etc?). It's definately better than a DVD. Maybe you can't tell if your TV isn't very good, but I use a 100" front projector (AE700), and there's a significant difference.
I have the exact same projector as you. You spelled "slight difference" incorrectly.
Both look terrific. You do know that 1080i broadcasts (such as those from PBS) are actually being adapted to your 720p system by downgrading them to 540 lines of resolution (which is only a tiny bit better than the 480p of DVD) and then upscaling to 720, right?
Sure, badly-mastered DVD's (like the original release of "Highlander") look like total crap, but a good Super-bit or otherwise not over-compressed disk looks fantastic on the Panny projector, even at 119".
Granted, ABC and FOX are 720p (the native res of the AE700), so "House" and "Lost" both look beautiful (and also happen to be the best two shows on broadcast TV right now), but 9 guests out of 10 who visit my house will not be able to notice how they are any better than a DVD of "House of Flying Daggers" on the same system, even in an immediate back-to-back comparisons.
Well, there's risk involved in posting anything new. Dupes pay the bills.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly why an ethernet adapter is needed on a guitar.
;)
So you can imagine a Beowolf Cluster of them. Duh!
Nice. Stand up for your favorite game, then take a shot at a popular web trend.
Some people enjoy pretending to play the guitar in a video game using a plastic toy.
Some people enjoy making and talking to friends via MySpace.
Neither group of people are doing anything wrong.
There is also nothing wrong with LARPers, anime otaku, Trekkies, furries, Promise Keepers, podcasters, crossdressers, luthiers, jazzercizers, kickball league players, potters, painters, fantasy football commissioners, para-para dancers, "fan fiction" erotica writers, or Seventh Day Adventists.
Within the bounds of legality, how you choose spend your free time is your own goddamn business and nobody else's.
My goal is to be the next SRV but I won't live that long.
You won't live long enough to die in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin?
I think you people are being too hard on the guy.
He's just talking about believing in his product enough to feed his kids his own dog food.
Wait. That came out wrong...
Uh. Actually, I was saying Apple Computer would probably find a way to game the system in their favor. I didn't say it was a Good Thing.
Why would MS do that?
They only screw their customers if it either:
1. Helps them
2. Screws their competitors.
If customer demand and screwing a competitor happen to coincide, as it does here, they are most likely to select the option which makes them the most money.
In other words, just because they are evil doesn't mean they are randomly mean. They are perfectly happy to be nice if it serves their evil purposes.
The reason they are selling that album is because it is one which Apple Corps has nothing whatsoever to do with.
I remember owning that record when I was a kid. It's been floating around for decades on a lot of re-issue labels. Basically, it's mostly a Tony Sheridan album on which the Beatles are backing him up. I don't know if the Beatles ever owned a piece of that album, but if they did they let go of it long before they recorded their big hit albums.
(By the way, the album is completely awful. Don't bother it unless you're one of those people who wants it for campy humor.)
The 5th ammendment to the US Constitution has a clause about double jeopardy, or the right of a citizen to not have to stand trial twice for the same crime (I.E. if you are procaimed innocent the first time, there can be no second trial). I guess the UK doesn't have this, or that it only applies to individuals.
It would not apply anyway. The 5th Ammendment applies to criminal justice. This is a civil lawsuit.
The lawsuit, such as it is, claims that Apple is violating the terms of their previous settlement.
They are not, but they are skating close enough to the line that the weasel lawyers might manage to force a slightly bigger settlement.
Knowing Apple's track record since Jobs retured, I bet they end up not only settling this lawsuit, but doing so in such a way that Apple Computer will be "forced" to use iTMS to sell all those Apple Corps recordings which they previously have not been allowed to sell.
but Apple Corp was nice enough to let them keep using that name on one condition - that Apple computers never enter into the sale of music.
Oh, it was because the were NICE!
And here I thought it was because they had no case at all, and chose a settlement that barely covered their lawyer fees and didn't revoke the naming rights because it was they best they could have hoped for at the time.
But your explanation, that they are really nice people, makes way more sense.
Ah. I see now.
IHBT.
Last time I used a wireless card on a Linux box, it wasn't so bad, but it was an extremely common model 802.11b card. Since 802.11g made wireless more popular, there seems to be a lot more card manufacturers out there, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux driver-writing community was having trouble keeping up with them all.
To be fair, it's not like your choices of supported hardware don't have gaps in the Mac OS X world, it's just that what will and will not work is usually far more obvious.
For example: Video cards, if not built specifically to work with Macs, won't work with Macs. Cameras, on the other hand, pretty much always work with Macs, probably because so many photographers and video producers are Mac junkies.
I'm not a Mac "fan", I'm a Mac "user."
I've owned many, many PC systems over the years. I've recently abandoned all but my company-owned work systems in favor of 4 Macs.
1. A G5 tower drives my media room.
2. A first-gen Mac mini is the swiss-army knife solution of my music studio.
3. I use an iBook for almost everything else I do.
4. An eMac... is collecting dust in my basement, other than serving up a web site that I no longer really care about. I should probably sell it along with my old Windows game PC.
(I used to be a major FPS junkie, but I've become bored with them and now do most of my gaming, apart from WoW, on an X-Box, so my Windows system hasn't been turned on in about a year. Come to think of it, I swiped all the memory out of it to jack up my G5, so it's not even operational at the moment.)