"if you believe in any one of these religions you are biased and not qualified to compare"
Likewise, if you live in Europe, or America, or any country in the world, you are biased and not qualified to compare Sweden to America.;)
Besided, this idealized "European" who is more open-minded than the Americans is on the same continent as the 3 or more influential countries that have or are in the process of passing laws forbidding the wearing of headscarves in public institutions. Open-minded, indeed.
It took me a couple of days to notice a particular pattern with iTunes' "partial albums". In many cases, I would look up an artist, let's use Lenny Kravitz as an example, and up would come 3 or 4 albums. One of the albums is complete, the rest are partial. After this happened with a few more artists, I realized the truth. They really only had one album from that artist: the "Best Of" collection. For convenience, however, they'd also split the component tracks into their respective original albums to make searching for them easier. That way, even if I don't know that Kravitz's version of "American Woman" is on his "Greatest Hits" album, I can still find it by browsing to the album it was originally on, "5".
Once I figured that out, the whole situation seemed a lot less misleading.
Web users will only take so much abuse. If every website were owned by advertisers, I'd say this was a possible future. However, the first site to try this will get run out of town on a rail because there are alternative sites out there. I doubt that most people care enough about the content on one particular site to sit through a 15 second ad when they can go to another site and get something similar without the ads. Before I started using Firebird, I was already doing that with Pop-Ups. If a site had too many obnoxious pop-ups, I wouldn't go there again because it was too much work to get the information. It got to the point where I wouldn't even click on google results that looked like they might assault me with popups. The rest of the world will get to that point pretty fast if you actually keep them from their content.
1.
1. Robbery committed at sea.
2. A similar act of robbery, as the hijacking of an airplane.
2. The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material: software piracy.
3. The operation of an unlicensed, illegal radio or television station.
[Medieval Latin prtia, from Late Greek peirteia, from Greek peirts, pirate. See pirate.]
Source: The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright (C) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Piracy has had a new meaning ever since people started broadcasting unregistered radio stations back in the day. The term "sofware piracy" derives from that, not from the swashbuckling scourges of the seven seas, and music/movie piracy is a descendent of software piracy.
Like it or not, the english language is dynamic. Just look at the differences between American and British English. People like to debate the semantics of words like "theft" and "piracy," but it just DOESN'T MATTER because, in the end, English words mean whatever a majority of people want them to mean. Unless you are practicing law, you can't appeal to your preferred definition of a word to invalidate someone's argument.
Rule of thumb: if it's made by Apple and its name begins with a lowercase "i", they don't want you to open it up. Examples: iPod, iMac, iBook. All of them are great products - easy to use, slick, small form-factor - but all of them are difficult to customize, or even open for that matter.
The difference between Peter Jackson and George Lucas is that Peter Jackson's trilogy didn't suck.
It took less time to make, looks better, has better acting, and (I believe) cost less to make. That's good directing.
Additionally, Jackson has the advantage of working from source material that has been beloved for generations, and he's done it justice. I predict that the LOTR trilogy of movies will endure at least as long as the original Star Wars trilogy has, and much much longer than ID4 or T3.
Someone modded this up? What are you thinking? Like you say, a computer is a tool, meaning that it is there to accomplish tasks. If you want your computer to be a word processor, it shouldn't be hard to make it a word processor. If you want it to be a gaming station, it shouldn't be hard to set that up either.
I don't spend weeks "getting to know" my car inside and out so that I can drive it. I don't spend hours with my lawn mower "getting it the way I like it" so that I can mow my lawn. Just because you're a computer snob doesn't mean that users ought to be experts on their machines in order to use them.
Does anyone know if this service pack release is related to the Eolas lawsuit? I was under the impression that IE will be required to change the way it handles embedded media. Will this new service pack implement those changes, and if so, is this popup blocking issue just a way to get people to install yet another service pack? I know I wouldn't bother to install a service pack unless it offered me something new or fixed a problem. "Now with popup blocking!" sounds a lot better than "Now more irritating in order to fulfill the terms set in a recent lawsuit!"
Speaking as a CG major, I have to disagree and say that 3D has the potential to be limitless, but it is far from being so right now. Some things that would be a breeze in 2D are a real PITA in 3D.
Example: In Monsters, Inc., the writers wrote in a throwaway gag in which Mike comes out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to his foot. They didn't think anything of it at the time, but when it came time to animate a strip of toilet paper flopping around naturally, they discovered that it was very difficult.
Basically, in 2-D if you can draw it, you can do it. In 3-D, you may very well have to invent a new computer before you can make the desired effect.
This is just a theory, and I have no idea if it's true, but is it possible that iTunes automatically chooses a lower quality version of the preview for slower internet connections? I know that certain types of streaming video can detect a drop in transfer rate and compensate by switching to a lighter, lower quality stream. Does Apple's audio server do the same thing? If so, different people may experience different quality previews.
I can understand your frustration, but as a graphics guy and a web designer, I would like to defend the "text editor" approach. When I lay out a site, I do it in Photoshop with each element on a layer, then I export the layers as individual graphics. For more complex, chopped up graphics I use ImageReady. Once the graphics are done, however, it's hand coding all the way. Why? I have a few reasons.
1.) WYSIWYG editors do things without telling me what they are doing. This is both the WYSIWYG editor's greatest strength and weakness. If I build a page in Dreamweaver, I find that it's nearly impossible to edit the output by hand because I don't know how Dreamweaver chose to do what I told it to do. Did it align that image by making it float or by using absolute positioning? Is the text in a bold tag, a strong tag, or a span tag with a style on it? I can't find things in the document because I didn't put them there in the first place. This is problematic when I want to edit something quickly and can't figure out how the page is put together.
2.) Everyone has a text editor, and most people have ftp programs. If I'm on my boss's computer showing her a page I designed, she's likeley to say something like "can we move that image about 10 pixels to the left?" If I made the file by hand, it's a simple matter to ftp to the site, edit the file in a text editor, and save it. If it's a Dreamweaver file, I either have to go back to my computer and launch Dreamweaver or edit the file by hand, which is a PITA for the reasons described in reason #1.
3.) WYSIWYG editors give you a false sense of security. The document looks great inside Dreamweaver, so it must be fine, right? Wrong! Sometimes pages that look perfectly fine in your WYSIWYG editor will bomb on you when you display them in a browser. In order to get consistency across all browsers, an editor would have to design its pages to suit the lowest common denominator in browsers. Instead, they aim for the latest and greatest browsers because they can make prettier pages that way. By writing pages by hand, you get a feel for what works and what doesn't across various browsers. You get a "style" of building pages in which you gradually learn how to code for your intended audience's technology and still incorporate the types of design elements that you want.
4.) Filesize is not important in Quark, but it is in HTML. Your Photoshop, Quark, Word, GIMP, OpenOffice, and Kontour files don't need to have streamlined code. They can put whatever they want "behind the scenes" as long as it looks right in the end. With web files, they need to be as small as possible. There are still people using dial-up. No program has yet come up with a way to automatically generate perfectly streamlined HTML. It's possible they never will. If I have to clean the code that comes out of Dreamweaver, I'm not really saving that much time.
5.) WYSIWYG editors make people think that designing for the web is the same as designing for print. This is a big one, and it sounds like the parent poster has become frustrated (and for good reason) with the fact that the two design paradigms are not the same. "Things need to be perfectly aligned"? Tough. They may line up 90% of the time, but somebody is going to get a crappy version of your page unless you design for flexibility instead of perfection. People want to see your text at various sizes, they'll shrink their windows down or blow them up to enormous sizes, and just about anything they do that doesn't match your computer's settings when you designed it will make your page look dumb. Only Flash pages come close to perfectly scalable web pages, and Flash comes with it's own set of problems.
I don't have animosity toward WYSIWYG HTML editors, but I have yet to find one without the problems I named. The only animosity I have comes from frustration with people who have succumbed to reason number 5. Too many people don't understand that by using the "professional" web editor, they make their pages look more amateur unless they really know what they are doing.
Maybe it's one of those clever recursive acronyms that geeky programmers love so much. "Nvu's Very Useful"? I'll bet that would make a whole lot of people laugh until Red Bull came out of their noses.
Magnatune is a great idea. However, one of the biggest reasons that their current model is effective is because nobody wants to steal their music. People go to their site specifically to find artists that they've never heard of, or to "stick it to the man" by buying from a system they approve of. The problem is, it can't replace the big labels because the big labels carry the music that all the teenie-boppers want. The big labels won't adopt the Magnatunes model because they have too much to lose, and their customers don't care about "the cause" like Magnatunes' customers do. The 13 year olds that fill the RIAA's coffers are not scrupulous. They will download a track for free, say "thanks, suckers!" and be on their merry way. Don't expect them to embrace the "pay if you liked it" model.
It seems to me that this is not a violation of the DMCA, or at least it could be argued such. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the DMCA forbids circumventing encryption. Once you have burned the file to a CD, a completely legal and contractually guaranteed right, the file is no longer encrypted. In fact, it's no longer the same file or even the same kind of file. Now it is a CD, subject to the same laws that govern the copying of CDs.
Of course, as I write this it occurs to me that I may be wrong. Court precedent allows you to legally make a certain number of backups (I forget how many) of your media, including CDs, videos, cassette tapes, and even DVDs (except that you can't really copy a DVD without violating the DMCA). In the case of iTunes or the other stores, what you are paying for is the downloaded files. In that case, burning to a CD is already making a backup. Apple generously allows you to make 10 backups of a playlist while the others allow 5, but copying the backup might go beyond the scope of your agreement.
In conclusion, I've made no point whatsoever. Goodnight.
That's not always the truth. I realize that they're an exception rather than a rule, but the Beatles broke the most boundaries in modern music when they were no longer contrained to the stage. Their first non-performed recordings were incredible and groundbreaking because they were doing things that simply couldn't (at the time) be done live.
A more common example is an artist who uses full orchestration on their albums but can't afford to take a full orchestra on the road with them. Or how about musicians that perform multiple instruments on their albums? These recordings aren't imitations of live performances, they are permanent records of an art form specifically designed to be recorded. You wouldn't say that Salvador Dali's paintings are shallow imitations of dreams, would you? Or that the Mona Lisa is a shallow imitation of a live model? Why apply that generalization to music, then?
Um...I think it's just you. Are we even talking about the same Orson Scott Card here? Most of his books don't even have monsters in them, so I'm not sure what you mean. Exceptions I can think of are Wyrms and the Ender's Game series. In the former, there is indeed some rape/interbreeding between human and monster (although it's not explicit, and I hardly recall any references to "oozing, multipenised beasts"). In the latter, the alien races keep to themselves.
The thing is, this article isn't about facts. It is about generating effective propaganda. The author says repeatedly that the party line for general users should be "Microsoft heartlessly killed IE on the Mac" while the line for Mac users should be that Safari killed it.
Sez you! Just quoting the article back at us does not invalidate the parent poster's argument. In fact, he was specifically proposing a counter-theory to what you just parroted back.
I refuse to believe that Microsoft releasing a signed version of Linux for the X-Box would prevent someone else from discovering the mod-chip-less piracy trick. These guys may have been the first, but having them sign an NDA is not going to keep the system safe from pirates.
What we need is a combination. Part of the problem is that people are lazy and like to plead ignorance as an excuse. "Ooh, these tech words are just so intimidating. Why don't you do all the work explaining them to me so little-ol-me doesn't have to actually learn them?"
On the other hand, the words are confusing. Really. Does my modem operate at 2.1 MegaBYTES per second or MegaBITS? Or was it MegaHERTZ? And what about these "flops"? And don't even get me started on Giga-this and Giga-that. The difference between memory and storage takes a long time to understand when you first learn it, and the distinction is becoming fuzzier as flash storage becomes more popular.
That's why someone (I think it's Microsoft?) wants to start "rating" computers with a simple number that takes into account processor speed, RAM, video processor, etc. I certainly don't trust them to rate systems in a consistent and fair manner, but the somewhat shaky solution is a response to a very real problem. Sure, we could teach people that more meghertz means a faster computer, but as Apple or AMD will tell you, that's not always true. Try explaining that to someone after you've just spent a month getting them to understand that more megahertz is better.
It would be great if some independent source would start rating computer processors based upon benchmarks rather than megahertz. I'm not talking about the little decimal point quibbles that show up between any two processors, but someone could establish that a Pentium 3 800Mhz is in the same class as a G4 500Mhz and a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz is comparable to a G5 2.0Ghz. It would be nice for my mom to go into a store and say "what kind of computer should I get?" and have the clerk say "Well, the number 4's are our top of the line, but if all you need is web browsing, word processing, and a bit of desktop publishing, a number 2 would probably be just fine for you."
Terms such as MP3 and Bluetooth are only understood by a small number of people, a report by a consumer research group found.
But when it describes the process used to determine that, it says
Just 3% of those surveyed got a perfect score on a quiz, which included terms such as MP3 - a digital audio file - and Bluetooth - a short-range technology which uses radio waves instead of wires.
The article implies that only 3% of the people surveyed understand MP3 or Bluetooth. What really happened is that only 3% got a perfect score. It never says what percentage got the MP3 question right. Depending on the complexity of the question, I'd expect a majority of people to have at least some idea of what an MP3 is. I hypothesize that most people would be able to tell you that an MP3 is a popular type of music file and possibly even that it is the most popular type of file on programs like Napster and KaZaA.
On the other hand, if the people surveyed were required to know that MP3 is a "codec" that stands for "MPEG Level-3", and it works by compressing the ranges of frequencies that are difficult for the human ear to hear...
Well, it's not exactly news that most people don't know that.
Actually, it seems to me more like: "Spend money developing a solution that only a handful of 1337 h4x0r5 care about, or we'll release it ourselves at no cost to you. In fact, we'll make sure to put ourselves in a position that leaves us vulnerable to a lawsuit in the process so that you can collect money from us. All right now, we're waiting!"
Okay, so it wasn't blackmail, but only because the threat was really lame.
Slashdot Mirror
"if you believe in any one of these religions you are biased and not qualified to compare"
;)
Likewise, if you live in Europe, or America, or any country in the world, you are biased and not qualified to compare Sweden to America.
Besided, this idealized "European" who is more open-minded than the Americans is on the same continent as the 3 or more influential countries that have or are in the process of passing laws forbidding the wearing of headscarves in public institutions. Open-minded, indeed.
It took me a couple of days to notice a particular pattern with iTunes' "partial albums". In many cases, I would look up an artist, let's use Lenny Kravitz as an example, and up would come 3 or 4 albums. One of the albums is complete, the rest are partial. After this happened with a few more artists, I realized the truth. They really only had one album from that artist: the "Best Of" collection. For convenience, however, they'd also split the component tracks into their respective original albums to make searching for them easier. That way, even if I don't know that Kravitz's version of "American Woman" is on his "Greatest Hits" album, I can still find it by browsing to the album it was originally on, "5".
Once I figured that out, the whole situation seemed a lot less misleading.
Web users will only take so much abuse. If every website were owned by advertisers, I'd say this was a possible future. However, the first site to try this will get run out of town on a rail because there are alternative sites out there. I doubt that most people care enough about the content on one particular site to sit through a 15 second ad when they can go to another site and get something similar without the ads. Before I started using Firebird, I was already doing that with Pop-Ups. If a site had too many obnoxious pop-ups, I wouldn't go there again because it was too much work to get the information. It got to the point where I wouldn't even click on google results that looked like they might assault me with popups. The rest of the world will get to that point pretty fast if you actually keep them from their content.
piracy
n. pl. piracies
1.
1. Robbery committed at sea.
2. A similar act of robbery, as the hijacking of an airplane.
2. The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material: software piracy.
3. The operation of an unlicensed, illegal radio or television station.
[Medieval Latin prtia, from Late Greek peirteia, from Greek peirts, pirate. See pirate.]
Source: The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright (C) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Piracy has had a new meaning ever since people started broadcasting unregistered radio stations back in the day. The term "sofware piracy" derives from that, not from the swashbuckling scourges of the seven seas, and music/movie piracy is a descendent of software piracy.
Like it or not, the english language is dynamic. Just look at the differences between American and British English. People like to debate the semantics of words like "theft" and "piracy," but it just DOESN'T MATTER because, in the end, English words mean whatever a majority of people want them to mean. Unless you are practicing law, you can't appeal to your preferred definition of a word to invalidate someone's argument.
Rule of thumb: if it's made by Apple and its name begins with a lowercase "i", they don't want you to open it up. Examples: iPod, iMac, iBook. All of them are great products - easy to use, slick, small form-factor - but all of them are difficult to customize, or even open for that matter.
The difference between Peter Jackson and George Lucas is that Peter Jackson's trilogy didn't suck.
It took less time to make, looks better, has better acting, and (I believe) cost less to make. That's good directing.
Additionally, Jackson has the advantage of working from source material that has been beloved for generations, and he's done it justice. I predict that the LOTR trilogy of movies will endure at least as long as the original Star Wars trilogy has, and much much longer than ID4 or T3.
Someone modded this up? What are you thinking? Like you say, a computer is a tool, meaning that it is there to accomplish tasks. If you want your computer to be a word processor, it shouldn't be hard to make it a word processor. If you want it to be a gaming station, it shouldn't be hard to set that up either.
I don't spend weeks "getting to know" my car inside and out so that I can drive it. I don't spend hours with my lawn mower "getting it the way I like it" so that I can mow my lawn. Just because you're a computer snob doesn't mean that users ought to be experts on their machines in order to use them.
Does anyone know if this service pack release is related to the Eolas
lawsuit? I was under the impression that IE will be required to change the way it handles embedded media. Will this new service pack implement those changes, and if so, is this popup blocking issue just a way to get people to install yet another service pack? I know I wouldn't bother to install a service pack unless it offered me something new or fixed a problem. "Now with popup blocking!" sounds a lot better than "Now more irritating in order to fulfill the terms set in a recent lawsuit!"
Speaking as a CG major, I have to disagree and say that 3D has the potential to be limitless, but it is far from being so right now. Some things that would be a breeze in 2D are a real PITA in 3D.
Example: In Monsters, Inc., the writers wrote in a throwaway gag in which Mike comes out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to his foot. They didn't think anything of it at the time, but when it came time to animate a strip of toilet paper flopping around naturally, they discovered that it was very difficult.
Basically, in 2-D if you can draw it, you can do it. In 3-D, you may very well have to invent a new computer before you can make the desired effect.
This is just a theory, and I have no idea if it's true, but is it possible that iTunes automatically chooses a lower quality version of the preview for slower internet connections? I know that certain types of streaming video can detect a drop in transfer rate and compensate by switching to a lighter, lower quality stream. Does Apple's audio server do the same thing? If so, different people may experience different quality previews.
I can understand your frustration, but as a graphics guy and a web designer, I would like to defend the "text editor" approach. When I lay out a site, I do it in Photoshop with each element on a layer, then I export the layers as individual graphics. For more complex, chopped up graphics I use ImageReady. Once the graphics are done, however, it's hand coding all the way. Why? I have a few reasons.
1.) WYSIWYG editors do things without telling me what they are doing. This is both the WYSIWYG editor's greatest strength and weakness. If I build a page in Dreamweaver, I find that it's nearly impossible to edit the output by hand because I don't know how Dreamweaver chose to do what I told it to do. Did it align that image by making it float or by using absolute positioning? Is the text in a bold tag, a strong tag, or a span tag with a style on it? I can't find things in the document because I didn't put them there in the first place. This is problematic when I want to edit something quickly and can't figure out how the page is put together.
2.) Everyone has a text editor, and most people have ftp programs. If I'm on my boss's computer showing her a page I designed, she's likeley to say something like "can we move that image about 10 pixels to the left?" If I made the file by hand, it's a simple matter to ftp to the site, edit the file in a text editor, and save it. If it's a Dreamweaver file, I either have to go back to my computer and launch Dreamweaver or edit the file by hand, which is a PITA for the reasons described in reason #1.
3.) WYSIWYG editors give you a false sense of security. The document looks great inside Dreamweaver, so it must be fine, right? Wrong! Sometimes pages that look perfectly fine in your WYSIWYG editor will bomb on you when you display them in a browser. In order to get consistency across all browsers, an editor would have to design its pages to suit the lowest common denominator in browsers. Instead, they aim for the latest and greatest browsers because they can make prettier pages that way. By writing pages by hand, you get a feel for what works and what doesn't across various browsers. You get a "style" of building pages in which you gradually learn how to code for your intended audience's technology and still incorporate the types of design elements that you want.
4.) Filesize is not important in Quark, but it is in HTML. Your Photoshop, Quark, Word, GIMP, OpenOffice, and Kontour files don't need to have streamlined code. They can put whatever they want "behind the scenes" as long as it looks right in the end. With web files, they need to be as small as possible. There are still people using dial-up. No program has yet come up with a way to automatically generate perfectly streamlined HTML. It's possible they never will. If I have to clean the code that comes out of Dreamweaver, I'm not really saving that much time.
5.) WYSIWYG editors make people think that designing for the web is the same as designing for print. This is a big one, and it sounds like the parent poster has become frustrated (and for good reason) with the fact that the two design paradigms are not the same. "Things need to be perfectly aligned"? Tough. They may line up 90% of the time, but somebody is going to get a crappy version of your page unless you design for flexibility instead of perfection. People want to see your text at various sizes, they'll shrink their windows down or blow them up to enormous sizes, and just about anything they do that doesn't match your computer's settings when you designed it will make your page look dumb. Only Flash pages come close to perfectly scalable web pages, and Flash comes with it's own set of problems.
I don't have animosity toward WYSIWYG HTML editors, but I have yet to find one without the problems I named. The only animosity I have comes from frustration with people who have succumbed to reason number 5. Too many people don't understand that by using the "professional" web editor, they make their pages look more amateur unless they really know what they are doing.
Maybe it's one of those clever recursive acronyms that geeky programmers love so much. "Nvu's Very Useful"? I'll bet that would make a whole lot of people laugh until Red Bull came out of their noses.
Magnatune is a great idea. However, one of the biggest reasons that their current model is effective is because nobody wants to steal their music. People go to their site specifically to find artists that they've never heard of, or to "stick it to the man" by buying from a system they approve of. The problem is, it can't replace the big labels because the big labels carry the music that all the teenie-boppers want. The big labels won't adopt the Magnatunes model because they have too much to lose, and their customers don't care about "the cause" like Magnatunes' customers do. The 13 year olds that fill the RIAA's coffers are not scrupulous. They will download a track for free, say "thanks, suckers!" and be on their merry way. Don't expect them to embrace the "pay if you liked it" model.
It seems to me that this is not a violation of the DMCA, or at least it could be argued such. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the DMCA forbids circumventing encryption. Once you have burned the file to a CD, a completely legal and contractually guaranteed right, the file is no longer encrypted. In fact, it's no longer the same file or even the same kind of file. Now it is a CD, subject to the same laws that govern the copying of CDs.
Of course, as I write this it occurs to me that I may be wrong. Court precedent allows you to legally make a certain number of backups (I forget how many) of your media, including CDs, videos, cassette tapes, and even DVDs (except that you can't really copy a DVD without violating the DMCA). In the case of iTunes or the other stores, what you are paying for is the downloaded files. In that case, burning to a CD is already making a backup. Apple generously allows you to make 10 backups of a playlist while the others allow 5, but copying the backup might go beyond the scope of your agreement.
In conclusion, I've made no point whatsoever. Goodnight.
"...the benchmarks should speak for themselves."
I think 5 pages of comments in under four hours say otherwise. Honestly, when have benchmarks ever spoken for themselves?
*Sigh*
That's a popular myth, but it simply doesn't wash. Check out the article that snopes.com did on why New Coke wasn't a marketing ploy to sell classic Coke.
That's not always the truth. I realize that they're an exception rather than a rule, but the Beatles broke the most boundaries in modern music when they were no longer contrained to the stage. Their first non-performed recordings were incredible and groundbreaking because they were doing things that simply couldn't (at the time) be done live.
A more common example is an artist who uses full orchestration on their albums but can't afford to take a full orchestra on the road with them. Or how about musicians that perform multiple instruments on their albums? These recordings aren't imitations of live performances, they are permanent records of an art form specifically designed to be recorded. You wouldn't say that Salvador Dali's paintings are shallow imitations of dreams, would you? Or that the Mona Lisa is a shallow imitation of a live model? Why apply that generalization to music, then?
Um...I think it's just you. Are we even talking about the same Orson Scott Card here? Most of his books don't even have monsters in them, so I'm not sure what you mean. Exceptions I can think of are Wyrms and the Ender's Game series. In the former, there is indeed some rape/interbreeding between human and monster (although it's not explicit, and I hardly recall any references to "oozing, multipenised beasts"). In the latter, the alien races keep to themselves.
The thing is, this article isn't about facts. It is about generating effective propaganda. The author says repeatedly that the party line for general users should be "Microsoft heartlessly killed IE on the Mac" while the line for Mac users should be that Safari killed it.
That's not the reason...
Sez you! Just quoting the article back at us does not invalidate the parent poster's argument. In fact, he was specifically proposing a counter-theory to what you just parroted back.
I refuse to believe that Microsoft releasing a signed version of Linux for the X-Box would prevent someone else from discovering the mod-chip-less piracy trick. These guys may have been the first, but having them sign an NDA is not going to keep the system safe from pirates.
What we need is a combination. Part of the problem is that people are lazy and like to plead ignorance as an excuse. "Ooh, these tech words are just so intimidating. Why don't you do all the work explaining them to me so little-ol-me doesn't have to actually learn them?"
On the other hand, the words are confusing. Really. Does my modem operate at 2.1 MegaBYTES per second or MegaBITS? Or was it MegaHERTZ? And what about these "flops"? And don't even get me started on Giga-this and Giga-that. The difference between memory and storage takes a long time to understand when you first learn it, and the distinction is becoming fuzzier as flash storage becomes more popular.
That's why someone (I think it's Microsoft?) wants to start "rating" computers with a simple number that takes into account processor speed, RAM, video processor, etc. I certainly don't trust them to rate systems in a consistent and fair manner, but the somewhat shaky solution is a response to a very real problem. Sure, we could teach people that more meghertz means a faster computer, but as Apple or AMD will tell you, that's not always true. Try explaining that to someone after you've just spent a month getting them to understand that more megahertz is better.
It would be great if some independent source would start rating computer processors based upon benchmarks rather than megahertz. I'm not talking about the little decimal point quibbles that show up between any two processors, but someone could establish that a Pentium 3 800Mhz is in the same class as a G4 500Mhz and a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz is comparable to a G5 2.0Ghz. It would be nice for my mom to go into a store and say "what kind of computer should I get?" and have the clerk say "Well, the number 4's are our top of the line, but if all you need is web browsing, word processing, and a bit of desktop publishing, a number 2 would probably be just fine for you."
But when it describes the process used to determine that, it says
The article implies that only 3% of the people surveyed understand MP3 or Bluetooth. What really happened is that only 3% got a perfect score. It never says what percentage got the MP3 question right. Depending on the complexity of the question, I'd expect a majority of people to have at least some idea of what an MP3 is. I hypothesize that most people would be able to tell you that an MP3 is a popular type of music file and possibly even that it is the most popular type of file on programs like Napster and KaZaA.
On the other hand, if the people surveyed were required to know that MP3 is a "codec" that stands for "MPEG Level-3", and it works by compressing the ranges of frequencies that are difficult for the human ear to hear...
Well, it's not exactly news that most people don't know that.
Score: -1 (no sense of humor)
Actually, it seems to me more like:
"Spend money developing a solution that only a handful of 1337 h4x0r5 care about, or we'll release it ourselves at no cost to you. In fact, we'll make sure to put ourselves in a position that leaves us vulnerable to a lawsuit in the process so that you can collect money from us. All right now, we're waiting!"
Okay, so it wasn't blackmail, but only because the threat was really lame.