I think I gave a pretty good example of a real-world situation of the annoyances of association that by my own experiences has been obnoxiously commonplace over the years. It's hardly been a matter of people with just a mild "fondness" over Apple's products, that's pretty much the entire point of the article above.
Most products I use don't make other consumers feel compelled to cheer me on as if I'm their comrade-in-arms and then turn on me like a pack of wolves if I don't share the same enthusiasm or I happen to also own a competing product. Since I never felt comfortable being accosted so extremely over something I owned, I simply chose not to own those products anymore.
The assumption that I'm easily swayed away from Apple's products inherently assumes that they're worth caring about. But that's just the thing, I don't find them special enough to put up with the hassle of the surrounding cult.
The article did a good job of explaining why people who feel so strongly fail to see the other side, but what it didn't explain is exactly why the Apple vs Everything-Else debate has held such religious fervour.
The term PC wasn't in usage as a term until later years, they were called Microcomputers to any of us that used them. If anyone should be given credit with inventing the microcomputer / personal computer, it should be Texas Instruments, or perhaps Intel depending on what parts you would consider a true microprocessor.
What Apple did was no different than a host of other hobby computer companies, the Apple II just happened to catch on better than others. But this illustrates the frustrations many of us have with Apple fans, because rewriting history = zealotry.
I do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of Apple.
Honestly, it's the biggest reason I no longer buy products from Apple. The astonishing thing is how many years this keeps going on. I had a friend who started hiding his Newton for fear of the cultists that would swarm him and go on about how great it was while he was just trying to look up an address or whatever.
The only sane Apple-nut I ever met was Douglas Adams, but then he was at least reasonable enough to acknowledge other OSes, although you wouldn't believe it from the Apple fans who quote him endlessly.
Why are so many of their consumers complete nutcases?
Seems to me a few of the so-called environmentally friendly technologies are just a temporary stopgap. It's not much different with hybrid cars, which are only a marginal improvement.
Shouldn't we be switching to the best possible solution that we have today, rather than letting the corporations milk the environment issue by giving us the new products in steps? Let's jump to LED solutions now. I'm sure there will be even better light sources in the future, but AFAIK this is a more advanced step that we could be taking right away rather than compromising with florescent.
I live in Vancouver and I can walk down the street and get a much better PC at cheaper prices than Newegg or NCIX, so their ability to ship doesn't concern me much. NCIX themselves have two stores within reasonable distance from me and they get tons of walk-in traffic during the holidays. I don't think Newegg even has brick and mortar stores, so I don't think you're comparing apples and oranges.
No, it IS really simple, you're making it more complicated. "Happy" as opposed to "unhappy". Most folks don't need things handed to them for free to be happy, they'll happily pay for something worthwhile.
DRM != worthwhile. If I'm restricted with my usage of something I've paid for, I'm unhappy with it. Period.
Facing all of the problems together is the better solution IMHO. None of these energy usages are small unless you put them in percentages as you just have. This one is still on the list of significant, it should not be excluded or instead-of, it should be as-well-as.
Don't get me wrong, any amount they can put into this research is a good thing, but on the scale of things compared to funds they put elsewhere, it seems rather low to me. This is an area that needs significant changes soon, but unfortunately it looks like we're going to get incremental adoption of more fluorescents first.
It's astonishing to me that the energy and environmental problems are so obvious, but so little effort is put into the solutions.
Nah, the only people that get excited by Destineer are Macheads who think that anyone who actually makes/ports for the Mac must automatically be worthy.
For the rest of us, if you've heard of Destineer at all, it's generally not from glowing endorsements.
Acid2 Test aside, didn't they claim that IE 7 would match or beat supporting standards of any existing browsers? And didn't they claim that all of IE 7's development would be on bug/security fixes and standard's compliance and not waste time on new features (yet oh look, they added tabbed browser, etc. etc.). I understand that they have a product to sell, but from my perspective Microsoft is more interested in marketing spin than the quality of the actual product, because let's face it, IE 7 only wins when compared with IE 6, which only won compared to Netscape 4. =P
Seems like a whole lot of too little too late. They've got the market for one reason and one reason only: it's bundled and updated with Windows. They don't deserve a single penny for delivering such a sorry product.
Of course, it doesn't matter, because I for one don't bother with IE workarounds anymore. Either their browser works, or it's broken. Up to them to fix it and stop costing web developers extra grief and costs. When they finally fix it, so it works, so what. Many of us are beyond caring about the crap they make.
Telus, Bell and Rogers don't really act that much different than what you've just described, these are companies that have transformed from the traditional local monopolies of phone & cable.
These sort of enforcements to make them "share" have happened before and they've become very clever at finding ways to discourage competition anyway.
Why is it that Slashdot always posts the Steam Survey when it gets recycled? The survey was just restarted and has been running for less than a day, you're currently looking at about 3% of what their overall results will be.
Sure, you can form a few opinions and conjecture over a sampling of 30k, but then again, over the course of less than a full day (AFAIK it was recycled at midnight), you're not even looking at the players from prime-time yet.
More appropriate numbers will be known after a month or two.
... Magic Carpet, Black & White, Fable. All of his games are AAA titles as far as I can see.
While I'd agree his earlier games were his best (the 4 in my subject title would all easily make my list of top 50 games, probably top 20), Peter Molyneux gets attention because he makes groundbreaking games. His biggest issue is having eyes bigger than his stomach, he overhypes and overdesigns and all of what he bites off he doesn't chew and much of it never actually makes it into the games... but still, there are few designers that can match him regardless.
Definitely A-list. But then, I think the Slashdot detractors don't actually ~play~ games, unless you count forum trolling a game. =P
Translation 1: New hardware should be more frequet, milk them for all they are worth by making them buy more systems and software.
Translation 2: New hardware should be less frequent - it's coming out too often now, and it's really making the customers turn away from consoles. I think you've got it backwards.
The cynic view while appropriate for Slashdot, doesn't always apply. Yes Nintendo is in the business of making money, but they are also in the business of entertaining people and guess which chicken lays the egg? You're assuming that Iwata's comments are just aimed at a way to take your money, but he's talking about product cycles following the demand of the consumer, so it's the other way around.
Consumers clearly want to spend their money on Nintendo's product and Nintendo in return is trying to fulfil their wishes for product.
And the comment about customers turning away from consoles?!? Haven't you noticed the trend has been a wee bit the other way around lately.
I don't think Levelord has gone anywhere has he? And AFAIK he's the main holdover from the original SiN. Ritual has had plenty of people part in the past, so this current drama is probably just stirring up FUD dust.
As long as Levelord is still at Ritual, I have complete faith in good content for SiN episodes.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I gave a pretty good example of a real-world situation of the annoyances of association that by my own experiences has been obnoxiously commonplace over the years. It's hardly been a matter of people with just a mild "fondness" over Apple's products, that's pretty much the entire point of the article above.
Most products I use don't make other consumers feel compelled to cheer me on as if I'm their comrade-in-arms and then turn on me like a pack of wolves if I don't share the same enthusiasm or I happen to also own a competing product. Since I never felt comfortable being accosted so extremely over something I owned, I simply chose not to own those products anymore.
The assumption that I'm easily swayed away from Apple's products inherently assumes that they're worth caring about. But that's just the thing, I don't find them special enough to put up with the hassle of the surrounding cult.
The article did a good job of explaining why people who feel so strongly fail to see the other side, but what it didn't explain is exactly why the Apple vs Everything-Else debate has held such religious fervour.
The term PC wasn't in usage as a term until later years, they were called Microcomputers to any of us that used them. If anyone should be given credit with inventing the microcomputer / personal computer, it should be Texas Instruments, or perhaps Intel depending on what parts you would consider a true microprocessor.
What Apple did was no different than a host of other hobby computer companies, the Apple II just happened to catch on better than others. But this illustrates the frustrations many of us have with Apple fans, because rewriting history = zealotry.
Scroll up, you didn't read the original post, it clearly mentions "Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners". You could have saved yourself some time. =P
I do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of Apple.
Honestly, it's the biggest reason I no longer buy products from Apple. The astonishing thing is how many years this keeps going on. I had a friend who started hiding his Newton for fear of the cultists that would swarm him and go on about how great it was while he was just trying to look up an address or whatever.
The only sane Apple-nut I ever met was Douglas Adams, but then he was at least reasonable enough to acknowledge other OSes, although you wouldn't believe it from the Apple fans who quote him endlessly.
Why are so many of their consumers complete nutcases?
A good point, although the LED bulbs should last much longer, so less wasteful even if you're using more bulbs and wattage is the same.
Seems to me a few of the so-called environmentally friendly technologies are just a temporary stopgap. It's not much different with hybrid cars, which are only a marginal improvement.
Shouldn't we be switching to the best possible solution that we have today, rather than letting the corporations milk the environment issue by giving us the new products in steps? Let's jump to LED solutions now. I'm sure there will be even better light sources in the future, but AFAIK this is a more advanced step that we could be taking right away rather than compromising with florescent.
I live in Vancouver and I can walk down the street and get a much better PC at cheaper prices than Newegg or NCIX, so their ability to ship doesn't concern me much. NCIX themselves have two stores within reasonable distance from me and they get tons of walk-in traffic during the holidays. I don't think Newegg even has brick and mortar stores, so I don't think you're comparing apples and oranges.
No, it IS really simple, you're making it more complicated. "Happy" as opposed to "unhappy". Most folks don't need things handed to them for free to be happy, they'll happily pay for something worthwhile.
DRM != worthwhile. If I'm restricted with my usage of something I've paid for, I'm unhappy with it. Period.
I had the exact same thought, they could have picked a better show to support this way.
Even if it turned out cool, they'll rerun it to death ala This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Facing all of the problems together is the better solution IMHO. None of these energy usages are small unless you put them in percentages as you just have. This one is still on the list of significant, it should not be excluded or instead-of, it should be as-well-as.
The more solutions, the better.
Don't get me wrong, any amount they can put into this research is a good thing, but on the scale of things compared to funds they put elsewhere, it seems rather low to me. This is an area that needs significant changes soon, but unfortunately it looks like we're going to get incremental adoption of more fluorescents first.
It's astonishing to me that the energy and environmental problems are so obvious, but so little effort is put into the solutions.
Next up, semantic spam.
Actually, I think it's beaten the rest of the content to the punch. =(
Plus some shovelware for the Wii.
Nah, the only people that get excited by Destineer are Macheads who think that anyone who actually makes/ports for the Mac must automatically be worthy.
For the rest of us, if you've heard of Destineer at all, it's generally not from glowing endorsements.
Yep, Q10 rocks. Just my $0.02.
Acid2 Test aside, didn't they claim that IE 7 would match or beat supporting standards of any existing browsers? And didn't they claim that all of IE 7's development would be on bug/security fixes and standard's compliance and not waste time on new features (yet oh look, they added tabbed browser, etc. etc.). I understand that they have a product to sell, but from my perspective Microsoft is more interested in marketing spin than the quality of the actual product, because let's face it, IE 7 only wins when compared with IE 6, which only won compared to Netscape 4. =P
Seems like a whole lot of too little too late. They've got the market for one reason and one reason only: it's bundled and updated with Windows. They don't deserve a single penny for delivering such a sorry product.
Of course, it doesn't matter, because I for one don't bother with IE workarounds anymore. Either their browser works, or it's broken. Up to them to fix it and stop costing web developers extra grief and costs. When they finally fix it, so it works, so what. Many of us are beyond caring about the crap they make.
Telus, Bell and Rogers don't really act that much different than what you've just described, these are companies that have transformed from the traditional local monopolies of phone & cable.
These sort of enforcements to make them "share" have happened before and they've become very clever at finding ways to discourage competition anyway.
Why is it that Slashdot always posts the Steam Survey when it gets recycled? The survey was just restarted and has been running for less than a day, you're currently looking at about 3% of what their overall results will be.
Sure, you can form a few opinions and conjecture over a sampling of 30k, but then again, over the course of less than a full day (AFAIK it was recycled at midnight), you're not even looking at the players from prime-time yet.
More appropriate numbers will be known after a month or two.
... Magic Carpet, Black & White, Fable. All of his games are AAA titles as far as I can see.
While I'd agree his earlier games were his best (the 4 in my subject title would all easily make my list of top 50 games, probably top 20), Peter Molyneux gets attention because he makes groundbreaking games. His biggest issue is having eyes bigger than his stomach, he overhypes and overdesigns and all of what he bites off he doesn't chew and much of it never actually makes it into the games... but still, there are few designers that can match him regardless.
Definitely A-list. But then, I think the Slashdot detractors don't actually ~play~ games, unless you count forum trolling a game. =P
Translation 2: New hardware should be less frequent - it's coming out too often now, and it's really making the customers turn away from consoles. I think you've got it backwards.
The cynic view while appropriate for Slashdot, doesn't always apply. Yes Nintendo is in the business of making money, but they are also in the business of entertaining people and guess which chicken lays the egg? You're assuming that Iwata's comments are just aimed at a way to take your money, but he's talking about product cycles following the demand of the consumer, so it's the other way around.
Consumers clearly want to spend their money on Nintendo's product and Nintendo in return is trying to fulfil their wishes for product.
And the comment about customers turning away from consoles?!? Haven't you noticed the trend has been a wee bit the other way around lately.
84 Million? That's twice Blizzard's developing budget for World of Warcraft... for a porn filter. Seriously?
WTF?
Seriously, yeah. This is not revealing news for laptops.
Just retire with dignity before you... oh, too late, nevermind.
'nuff said.
I don't think Levelord has gone anywhere has he? And AFAIK he's the main holdover from the original SiN. Ritual has had plenty of people part in the past, so this current drama is probably just stirring up FUD dust.
As long as Levelord is still at Ritual, I have complete faith in good content for SiN episodes.