Im interested in the Artist's works - the publisher is a leech.
Not true. Publishers do a whole bunch of jobs that are important, for the individual artists and for all artists and music patrons.
I don't know about you, but I discover new music by listening to it, on the radio or on the few webstreams that have music that I like. The system might be messed up, but the record publishers screening, labeling, and pushing for music is what gets me new songs to listen to.
The internet, as of yet, has hardly touched the predominence of this promotion model.
If I publish a book and sell it to bookstores, nothing obliges me to keep selling Waldenbooks more copies to sell.
Artists aren't publishers. They're authors.
If I sell a novel to a publisher to publish in X markets, I can't hop into those markets without first ending my agreement with the publisher--and if the publisher doesn't pursue a market, I can probably get away with marketing it myself.
If I'm an artist, if I've sold you a non-exclusive right to sell a song, what's my incentive to prevent you from continuing to do so?
If you're granting only "non-exclusive" rights to selling a song, it's not worth investing in promotion, mastering, or even recording--because you can turn around and sell it to my competition, who doesn't have to eat the costs that I, as a label, spend on the artist.
Yes, the system is lopsided and busted and abusive--but it works, and everyone has a real part to play, even if they cheat and charge more than is fair.
A record company is not a store; they're more like a book publisher, that takes the IP and tries to sell it in the marketplace, theoretically making them, the artists, and the artists' agents a fair share of the money.
Your qualifier is exactly the kind of shit that the major labels use to fuck over artists and prevent a free market existing for people who wish to make a living as a musician.
The lack of a qualifier would be exactly the sort of shit that artists would use to fuck over labels, thus preventing anyone from honestly being a professional music publisher.
I think that the qualifier is a LOT better than anything the labels have now. The artist just can't go into a market and undercut their label without a 90-day notice--unless the label doesn't promote to that market, in which case it's fair game.
What's so unsavory about that? If there's going to be any kind of agreement, it should be a real one--not something based wholly on the whim of the artist. Exchanging "label rapes artist" for "artist rapes label" is unnecessary shit, pure and simple.
"You grant us the non-exclusive right to sell your songs over the internet or on CDs at the rate of $X per song, of which you get Y%. This contract may be cancelled by either party at any time by giving 90 days notice."
That gives all of the control to the artist, who could jump record companies at any time, despite the "90 days notice" thing.
A necessary qualifier would be "You agree not to compete with us in any markets that we are actively pursuing."
Plus, it'd be a good idea if albums give a mass-product discount, allowing the artist to make and sell songs that don't have pop appeal, but satisfy their creativity. Locking songs to albums isn't good, but making the album useless isn't either.
Where this gets interesting is if Microsoft goes out of their way to make it easy to port games between Windows and the XBox. It would be up to Nintendo or Sony to make something of it
Not really. The Xbox was designed to be "PC-like" from the get-go.
Sony and Nintendo don't really have much of a cause to raise a stink--if they wanted to make a "PC like" system and then MS sqaushed them, they would, but they don't.
It's like MS only letting Outlook run on Windows; Apple really doesn't have anything to say about that.
All they have to do is claim it is linked in some way to security. They don't have to actually DO any linking of it to security.
Yes, they do. Any claim that they can't back up will (most likely) get tossed out by the compliance committee--or the judge, who has all the room she needs to hold MS to the letter and spirit of this agreement, considering she could have broken up MS if she wanted to.
But... but... the earth is only 10,000 years old! How could this have happened 800,000 years ago??!?!?
It didn't. God made the Earth look like it had suffered pole switches long long ago to let science know that the magnetic field will switch.
When belief in an Allmighty, All-knowing being whom is not bound by time is confronted with scientific data that can "disprove" His existence (or lie), there are two logical conclusions, not one.
1: "He doesn't exist" or "He was wrong."
2: "He made it this way for a reason."
Side note: I know God exists, and I know that either the universe is as old as it seems, or God made it that way. I don't care which one is right, as it's tangential to my faith in Him and my faith in human intelligence.
A firewall that passes telnet and not ssh? That's absolutely moronic! That's like defending against an foreigh threat to the United States by stripping Americans' of all their civil liberties!
You know, really moronic!!!
Side note: When the foreign threat is using the American's civil liberties to get around the defenses that are otherwise in place, some checks on the CL are the only effective defense for them.
This creates a new threat, (corruption), which in turn requires its own check (delayed high-profie accountability.)
And telnet lets the employer see what happens, while ssh doesn't. If external telnet queries can't get at anything, then there's no reason to block them; if internal ssh queries CAN hide what the employee does at the company with the company's equipment from the company, and there's no compelling reason to allow ssh, ssh might as well be blocked.
Both are hardly moronic--a bit obscure and harsh, but not "moronic."
They be the newest group of people to suffer horribly under the gentle ministrations of those who don't consider them 'human'.
An AI shouldn't "suffer" at all when it's shut down or deleted. It might not be moral or humane to do so, but the AI doesn't suffer, it simply stops existing.
Sounds like the basis of a good SF story about religious nuts who get their jollies torturing virtual people. Would stand up to be the first in line to stand up to push the buttons to cause these people 'virtual' pain so you could watch them scream? After all, they have no souls, and can't really be in pain. It's just entertainment.
You're talking about sadists, not religious people.
Religous folks only enjoy pain when it's a sign of someone growing. A sinner showing pain at their sins is an improvement upon the sinner who does not, as they're one step closer on the road to not-sinning.
The folk who actually enjoy torture, in my experience, have been very, very non-religious. After all, if it's not a sin and they can't be harmed for it, why not?
The idea that truth can be received from some magic book passed down from a bunch of characters in robes a couple of thousand years ago flies in the face of the whole concept of determining truth through experimentation and observation.
Quoth Indiana Jones:
"it is not the search for Truth, it is the search for Fact."
That's not exactly true. Australia is life+50 years, where as the US is post-1923. Neither one is a subset of the other.
US copyright is either life+50 with a 20-year extension that's coming under the SC right now, or 70 years +20 for copyrights held by an (immortal) corporation.
The most intelligent guess I've heard about the SC is that if they don't toss out the 1998 twenty-year extension, they'll toss out the next one. Althought it's intelligent at the moment to plan as if US copyright is "infinte for anything younger than mickey mouse", only a fool wouldn't have a backup for that supposition being found false.
Re:As any security conscious agency can tell you..
on
Secure PDAs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The only true method of keeping confidential information safe is to keep it under lock and key, or in the possesion of a concerned person all the time.
Secure PDA is an oxymoron.
No person is truly secure. Those in power are always corruptable.
Security, when it comes down to it, is simply the challenge making the price of breaking in greater than the beneift of breaking in.
If a crook has a 1% chance of being caught and sentenced for one year for breaking into my home, and we value his year of freedom at $50,000, he had had better get more than $500 from breaking in or the risk isn't worth the gain.
Most criminals (and hackers) don't think in these terms directly, but there is, AFAIK, an pseudo-concious awareness of it. ('course, the whole bit is thrown when non-cash values, like Thrill or Political Activism are factored in...)
Finally, there aren't any "mystery" menu commands unless you don't actually look at the menu bar when you use hot keys
In Windows & Office, at least, there are plenty of "hidden" commands.
Several uses of the function keys in office, as well as almost all of the "winkey + button" commands for windows itself, are not apparant unless you pull up the customization menu or dig through the help file.
Hmm... a useful app to solve that would be a "what's this key do" program, that shows a virtual keyboard and, when attached to the system or any program, it tells you what any key or key-combination does...
These things might be godsends to verticals like Fedex who use this kind of stuff daily... but it'll be a long, hard sell as they've already deployed an existing solution that seems to work well for them.
UPS (and FedEx, I think) allready uses modified PDAs for signature captures.
If Palm came out with a new device with at least a 8 inch x 9 inch usable area and a resolution of at least 640 x 640, I'd pick that up instead of a tablet PC. It's have the same uses, same effect--and the batteries would last for more than fourty-five minutes.
Unless they develop some killer feature (yes yes, in ADDITION to Linux support, these [mira2go.com] notwithstanding) I've got absolutely no intention of purchasing one.
My boss still writes out half of her messages in longhand... and as often as not, for causal notes we still use paper around the house or the gaming table.
A tablet PC isn't a replacement for a PDA--it's a grown-up PDA, with enough size and processing power to do all of the neat things that Star Trek PADDs "can" do but PDA's are simply too small for.
I'd love to have a tablet PC, but I'd never write with it. I'd leave it out for causal use--like when looking up a recipie for cooking, making a shopping list, checking the TV listings, or any number of things that a PC (or even a laptop) isn't ideal for.
This isn't any more necessary than a GUI, a mouse, speakers, a DVD drive, a modem, an ethernet card, or a 3D accellerator were when they were debuted. This is a change to the system, and I hope it propogates, as it will make the whole computhing thing get a heck of a lot more common.
The PC has allready replaced the typewriter and the fax machine. A tablet PC can take a pot-shot at the coffee table TV guide or pad of paper.
I don't think nationalism will help us much, and the knee-jerk xenophobic crap I'm seeing now is a big step backwards to an age of immigrant/foreigner-bashing.
While I hope we don't go that far, some reaction away from the "how dare you group me at all" mentality we picked up somewhere is a good thing.
If a population of sexual partners has an STD that no one else does, treat them as a distinct contagious population and quarantine them. If a large group of immigrants from a certain ethnic background is committing attacks on us via immigration, treat everyone from that background who comes in with suspicion--just monitor those dispensing the suspicion.
And, as our posts have pointed out, plenty of our terrorists and criminals have been home-grown. The sniper, the Unabomber, McVeigh/Nichols, the list goes on.
I can't speak for the snipers or other serial killers, but both McVeigh and the Unabomber had agendas marked with the USA gov'ts broken promises.
If I could change just one thing about my country, I'd make the federal government keep its promises for longer than an election. Forever sounds long enough...
It says something about how the rest of the world is mostly OK, and much of our world sadly is not.
You mean you were able to LEAVE those places?
You don't know how good you've got it if you think even the worst parts of the USA have got the worldwide crown for "crappy living sitation." No, we're not perfect--but there are some FAR worse places in the world to live.
Question: Is Transformers considered Anime? If not, why not? What exactly qualifies a cartoon as Anime?
I think it depends on who you ask.
Transformers, as we know it, is in the same catagory as Robotech, Pokemon, and (to a much lesser extent) Dragonball--Americanized Anime. As i have no idea what the original was like, I have no way to tell if it's closer to Pokemon (almost no edits) or Robotech (highly revised).
And in a side note, you can get a better TF fix by reading the new comic books, or (if you don't mind some animation holes) watching TF:Armada weekdays on the Cartoon Network.
This kinda sets the tone for your bizare post. You don't like a version of an OS that you have no experience in and little exposure to. . . . . and?
And if I--a rather brave and intelligent computer user--aren't impressed by the latest and greatest that Red Hat has to offer (supposedly the "best OSS can do" user-friendly wise), MS isn't about to "panic" from it. Which was what I was replying to.
You seem to not have even the basic understanding of microsoft. Are you aware that they were found to be a monopoly in a fairly recent court case?
Are you aware that MS has, historically, been at its best when forced to adapt-or-die? Look at how quickly they embraced the internet, and how slow advancement in anything MS gets once their compettion dies up.
A monopoly does not do well against competition, it functions by squezing out any and all competition, and has absolutely nothing to do with inovation.(sp)
Microsoft was not always a monopoly; they are a very adaptable company with some rather driven managers and employees.
MS does not inovate anything except their monolopolistic marketing practices. They take existing concepts and products and provide polished (sometimes broken) implementations that fit in with their other products and strengthen their monopoly.
Wait--they take other people's ideas, and make them "better?" By golly, that's the textbook definition of innovation!
Yes, MS has shady marketing practicies. But they're also innovative--look at what they did with MS Bob, how they extended HTML to enable round-tripping of documents, and all the uproar they caused when they debuted a (gasp!) wholly new feature called Smart Tags last year.
Microsoft products are not inherently easy to use. This ease of use factor is a myth, stemming from the fact that the microsoft way is ubiquitous , on account of their monopoly position. MS interfaces are often substandard, illogical and even sometimes just plain broken.
MS's products are easy to use simply because they are (1) ubiquitous, (2) standardized (moreso than OSS), and (3) easy to setup.
It's a moot question if someone else's current UI would be as easy if it was suddenly in MS's position.
I have recently introduced linux webservers into my company and the feedback I am getting from IT people with pure MS backgrounds is that (for example) apache is way easier to set up than IIS, on account of there is one config file where everything is explained in detail, rather than a confusing series of options in a weird tree format with not much explanation as to what everything does.
Since we're taking random examples, let's take on the command line.
Assuming that you can get a windows box, open up "command.com" and type "/?" A list of commands, with short descriptions in an easy-to-read format shows up. In Bash, a "help" command spits out two columns of jargon-filled commands. The commands are often named for obscure thought processes ("more" to read something?) or inside jokes, to boot.
(IIS is something I, thankfully, have no experience in. I've heard that it's both a pain to figure out and very powerful once you do figure it out... but it's also a server thing, which is not where MS shines.)
come on, seriously, this is supposedly a paper detailing the results of some market research on linux use by MS customers. Now I would buy that this was an executive sumary passed around to give a heads up on things. But there is no way that this is a serious analysis on the results. What experience do you have with market research to be able to make these claims?
Hey, I didn't post the article. I simply counter-pointed a post.
ESR seemed to think that it was valid, viable, and worth writing an article on. If you don't think it's what it is, then flame him, not me.
Word is also expensive, to the tune of $250 per seat ($150 for Windows XP Professional in OEM packaging, and $100 for Works Suite, which includes Word). What makes Word worth the extra $7500 for a K-12 computer lab?
A school--especially one where money is tight--can almost certainly get Word for far, far less than $250, $150, or even $100. They could get a site license if they have enough PCs, or they could get an educational price in the neighborhood of $25 a copy.
Does it really take that much longer to teach kids how to do basic TeX than to teach kids how to do Word?
Unless high schools have gotten a lot more advanced, they're both wasted on K-12 students. Wordpad does all that the faculty can reasonably expect, and is relatively portable.
If they're going to be teaching real word processing, any commerical package would do. I don't believe that there's an easy solution for TeX that does mail-merges and styles, which Word does and most real-world word processors do as well.
Realistically, the lab should take whomever gives them the best offer, and that the teacher knows. Better to teach the children about word processors and how to learn them than to teach them any single word processor.
Word is the current king, but that doesn't mean that it always will be that way--or that the version used in six years will still be the one used today.
Slashdot Mirror
Im interested in the Artist's works - the publisher is a leech.
Not true. Publishers do a whole bunch of jobs that are important, for the individual artists and for all artists and music patrons.
I don't know about you, but I discover new music by listening to it, on the radio or on the few webstreams that have music that I like. The system might be messed up, but the record publishers screening, labeling, and pushing for music is what gets me new songs to listen to.
The internet, as of yet, has hardly touched the predominence of this promotion model.
If I publish a book and sell it to bookstores, nothing obliges me to keep selling Waldenbooks more copies to sell.
Artists aren't publishers. They're authors.
If I sell a novel to a publisher to publish in X markets, I can't hop into those markets without first ending my agreement with the publisher--and if the publisher doesn't pursue a market, I can probably get away with marketing it myself.
If I'm an artist, if I've sold you a non-exclusive right to sell a song, what's my incentive to prevent you from continuing to do so?
If you're granting only "non-exclusive" rights to selling a song, it's not worth investing in promotion, mastering, or even recording--because you can turn around and sell it to my competition, who doesn't have to eat the costs that I, as a label, spend on the artist.
Yes, the system is lopsided and busted and abusive--but it works, and everyone has a real part to play, even if they cheat and charge more than is fair.
A record company is not a store; they're more like a book publisher, that takes the IP and tries to sell it in the marketplace, theoretically making them, the artists, and the artists' agents a fair share of the money.
Your qualifier is exactly the kind of shit that the major labels use to fuck over artists and prevent a free market existing for people who wish to make a living as a musician.
The lack of a qualifier would be exactly the sort of shit that artists would use to fuck over labels, thus preventing anyone from honestly being a professional music publisher.
I think that the qualifier is a LOT better than anything the labels have now. The artist just can't go into a market and undercut their label without a 90-day notice--unless the label doesn't promote to that market, in which case it's fair game.
What's so unsavory about that? If there's going to be any kind of agreement, it should be a real one--not something based wholly on the whim of the artist. Exchanging "label rapes artist" for "artist rapes label" is unnecessary shit, pure and simple.
"You grant us the non-exclusive right to sell your songs over the internet or on CDs at the rate of $X per song, of which you get Y%. This contract may be cancelled by either party at any time by giving 90 days notice."
That gives all of the control to the artist, who could jump record companies at any time, despite the "90 days notice" thing.
A necessary qualifier would be "You agree not to compete with us in any markets that we are actively pursuing."
Plus, it'd be a good idea if albums give a mass-product discount, allowing the artist to make and sell songs that don't have pop appeal, but satisfy their creativity. Locking songs to albums isn't good, but making the album useless isn't either.
Where this gets interesting is if Microsoft goes out of their way to make it easy to port games between Windows and the XBox. It would be up to Nintendo or Sony to make something of it
Not really. The Xbox was designed to be "PC-like" from the get-go.
Sony and Nintendo don't really have much of a cause to raise a stink--if they wanted to make a "PC like" system and then MS sqaushed them, they would, but they don't.
It's like MS only letting Outlook run on Windows; Apple really doesn't have anything to say about that.
All they have to do is claim it is linked in some way to security. They don't have to actually DO any linking of it to security.
Yes, they do. Any claim that they can't back up will (most likely) get tossed out by the compliance committee--or the judge, who has all the room she needs to hold MS to the letter and spirit of this agreement, considering she could have broken up MS if she wanted to.
The term "proprietary", when used in the context of copyrighted works such as software, refers to licensing that restricts your users.
Or, depending on where your ideology lies, "proprietary" is simply the antonym of "open."
To wit: Winamp is freeware and doesn't come with any real restrictions, but is still "proprietary."
But... but... the earth is only 10,000 years old! How could this have happened 800,000 years ago??!?!?
It didn't. God made the Earth look like it had suffered pole switches long long ago to let science know that the magnetic field will switch.
When belief in an Allmighty, All-knowing being whom is not bound by time is confronted with scientific data that can "disprove" His existence (or lie), there are two logical conclusions, not one.
1: "He doesn't exist" or "He was wrong."
2: "He made it this way for a reason."
Side note: I know God exists, and I know that either the universe is as old as it seems, or God made it that way. I don't care which one is right, as it's tangential to my faith in Him and my faith in human intelligence.
It's not based on who holds the copyright, it's based on the creator's life span.
How about "who created it?"
Saying "it's not based on who holds the copyright" implies a misunderstanding that you (obviously) don't have.
So there's no big loophole for immortal corporations in there.
Not unles the corporation manages to get one real; person to be immortal...
A firewall that passes telnet and not ssh? That's absolutely moronic! That's like defending against an foreigh threat to the United States by stripping Americans' of all their civil liberties!
You know, really moronic!!!
Side note: When the foreign threat is using the American's civil liberties to get around the defenses that are otherwise in place, some checks on the CL are the only effective defense for them.
This creates a new threat, (corruption), which in turn requires its own check (delayed high-profie accountability.)
And telnet lets the employer see what happens, while ssh doesn't. If external telnet queries can't get at anything, then there's no reason to block them; if internal ssh queries CAN hide what the employee does at the company with the company's equipment from the company, and there's no compelling reason to allow ssh, ssh might as well be blocked.
Both are hardly moronic--a bit obscure and harsh, but not "moronic."
They be the newest group of people to suffer horribly under the gentle ministrations of those who don't consider them 'human'.
An AI shouldn't "suffer" at all when it's shut down or deleted. It might not be moral or humane to do so, but the AI doesn't suffer, it simply stops existing.
Sounds like the basis of a good SF story about religious nuts who get their jollies torturing virtual people. Would stand up to be the first in line to stand up to push the buttons to cause these people 'virtual' pain so you could watch them scream? After all, they have no souls, and can't really be in pain. It's just entertainment.
You're talking about sadists, not religious people.
Religous folks only enjoy pain when it's a sign of someone growing. A sinner showing pain at their sins is an improvement upon the sinner who does not, as they're one step closer on the road to not-sinning.
The folk who actually enjoy torture, in my experience, have been very, very non-religious. After all, if it's not a sin and they can't be harmed for it, why not?
The idea that truth can be received from some magic book passed down from a bunch of characters in robes a couple of thousand years ago flies in the face of the whole concept of determining truth through experimentation and observation.
Quoth Indiana Jones:
"it is not the search for Truth, it is the search for Fact."
That's not exactly true. Australia is life+50 years, where as the US is post-1923. Neither one is a subset of the other.
US copyright is either life+50 with a 20-year extension that's coming under the SC right now, or 70 years +20 for copyrights held by an (immortal) corporation.
The most intelligent guess I've heard about the SC is that if they don't toss out the 1998 twenty-year extension, they'll toss out the next one. Althought it's intelligent at the moment to plan as if US copyright is "infinte for anything younger than mickey mouse", only a fool wouldn't have a backup for that supposition being found false.
The only true method of keeping confidential information safe is to keep it under lock and key, or in the possesion of a concerned person all the time.
Secure PDA is an oxymoron.
No person is truly secure. Those in power are always corruptable.
Security, when it comes down to it, is simply the challenge making the price of breaking in greater than the beneift of breaking in.
If a crook has a 1% chance of being caught and sentenced for one year for breaking into my home, and we value his year of freedom at $50,000, he had had better get more than $500 from breaking in or the risk isn't worth the gain.
Most criminals (and hackers) don't think in these terms directly, but there is, AFAIK, an pseudo-concious awareness of it. ('course, the whole bit is thrown when non-cash values, like Thrill or Political Activism are factored in...)
Finally, there aren't any "mystery" menu commands unless you don't actually look at the menu bar when you use hot keys
In Windows & Office, at least, there are plenty of "hidden" commands.
Several uses of the function keys in office, as well as almost all of the "winkey + button" commands for windows itself, are not apparant unless you pull up the customization menu or dig through the help file.
Hmm... a useful app to solve that would be a "what's this key do" program, that shows a virtual keyboard and, when attached to the system or any program, it tells you what any key or key-combination does...
These things might be godsends to verticals like Fedex who use this kind of stuff daily... but it'll be a long, hard sell as they've already deployed an existing solution that seems to work well for them.
UPS (and FedEx, I think) allready uses modified PDAs for signature captures.
(yeah, I know I'm replying to myself)
Having said all of the above...
If Palm came out with a new device with at least a 8 inch x 9 inch usable area and a resolution of at least 640 x 640, I'd pick that up instead of a tablet PC. It's have the same uses, same effect--and the batteries would last for more than fourty-five minutes.
Unless they develop some killer feature (yes yes, in ADDITION to Linux support, these [mira2go.com] notwithstanding) I've got absolutely no intention of purchasing one.
My boss still writes out half of her messages in longhand... and as often as not, for causal notes we still use paper around the house or the gaming table.
A tablet PC isn't a replacement for a PDA--it's a grown-up PDA, with enough size and processing power to do all of the neat things that Star Trek PADDs "can" do but PDA's are simply too small for.
I'd love to have a tablet PC, but I'd never write with it. I'd leave it out for causal use--like when looking up a recipie for cooking, making a shopping list, checking the TV listings, or any number of things that a PC (or even a laptop) isn't ideal for.
This isn't any more necessary than a GUI, a mouse, speakers, a DVD drive, a modem, an ethernet card, or a 3D accellerator were when they were debuted. This is a change to the system, and I hope it propogates, as it will make the whole computhing thing get a heck of a lot more common.
The PC has allready replaced the typewriter and the fax machine. A tablet PC can take a pot-shot at the coffee table TV guide or pad of paper.
I don't think nationalism will help us much, and the knee-jerk xenophobic crap I'm seeing now is a big step backwards to an age of immigrant/foreigner-bashing.
While I hope we don't go that far, some reaction away from the "how dare you group me at all" mentality we picked up somewhere is a good thing.
If a population of sexual partners has an STD that no one else does, treat them as a distinct contagious population and quarantine them. If a large group of immigrants from a certain ethnic background is committing attacks on us via immigration, treat everyone from that background who comes in with suspicion--just monitor those dispensing the suspicion.
And, as our posts have pointed out, plenty of our terrorists and criminals have been home-grown. The sniper, the Unabomber, McVeigh/Nichols, the list goes on.
I can't speak for the snipers or other serial killers, but both McVeigh and the Unabomber had agendas marked with the USA gov'ts broken promises.
If I could change just one thing about my country, I'd make the federal government keep its promises for longer than an election. Forever sounds long enough...
So I think the comparison between the Transformers and Pokemon cartoons isn't really all that applicable.
;)
What, you don't think that the TF cartoon was created to market a toy in its inital marketplace?
It says something about how the rest of the world is mostly OK, and much of our world sadly is not.
You mean you were able to LEAVE those places?
You don't know how good you've got it if you think even the worst parts of the USA have got the worldwide crown for "crappy living sitation." No, we're not perfect--but there are some FAR worse places in the world to live.
Also, the show came after the toys, didn't it? No matter how much we liked it, it was basically a commercial.
Same thing for Pokemon--but far more people know the show than know the Game Boy game.
The best of all was, IMNSHO, the comic book.
Question: Is Transformers considered Anime? If not, why not? What exactly qualifies a cartoon as Anime?
I think it depends on who you ask.
Transformers, as we know it, is in the same catagory as Robotech, Pokemon, and (to a much lesser extent) Dragonball--Americanized Anime. As i have no idea what the original was like, I have no way to tell if it's closer to Pokemon (almost no edits) or Robotech (highly revised).
And in a side note, you can get a better TF fix by reading the new comic books, or (if you don't mind some animation holes) watching TF:Armada weekdays on the Cartoon Network.
This kinda sets the tone for your bizare post. You don't like a version of an OS that you have no experience in and little exposure to. . . . . and?
And if I--a rather brave and intelligent computer user--aren't impressed by the latest and greatest that Red Hat has to offer (supposedly the "best OSS can do" user-friendly wise), MS isn't about to "panic" from it. Which was what I was replying to.
You seem to not have even the basic understanding of microsoft. Are you aware that they were found to be a monopoly in a fairly recent court case?
Are you aware that MS has, historically, been at its best when forced to adapt-or-die? Look at how quickly they embraced the internet, and how slow advancement in anything MS gets once their compettion dies up.
A monopoly does not do well against competition, it functions by squezing out any and all competition, and has absolutely nothing to do with inovation.(sp)
Microsoft was not always a monopoly; they are a very adaptable company with some rather driven managers and employees.
MS does not inovate anything except their monolopolistic marketing practices. They take existing concepts and products and provide polished (sometimes broken) implementations that fit in with their other products and strengthen their monopoly.
Wait--they take other people's ideas, and make them "better?" By golly, that's the textbook definition of innovation!
Yes, MS has shady marketing practicies. But they're also innovative--look at what they did with MS Bob, how they extended HTML to enable round-tripping of documents, and all the uproar they caused when they debuted a (gasp!) wholly new feature called Smart Tags last year.
Microsoft products are not inherently easy to use. This ease of use factor is a myth, stemming from the fact that the microsoft way is ubiquitous , on account of their monopoly position. MS interfaces are often substandard, illogical and even sometimes just plain broken.
MS's products are easy to use simply because they are (1) ubiquitous, (2) standardized (moreso than OSS), and (3) easy to setup.
It's a moot question if someone else's current UI would be as easy if it was suddenly in MS's position.
I have recently introduced linux webservers into my company and the feedback I am getting from IT people with pure MS backgrounds is that (for example) apache is way easier to set up than IIS, on account of there is one config file where everything is explained in detail, rather than a confusing series of options in a weird tree format with not much explanation as to what everything does.
Since we're taking random examples, let's take on the command line.
Assuming that you can get a windows box, open up "command.com" and type "/?" A list of commands, with short descriptions in an easy-to-read format shows up. In Bash, a "help" command spits out two columns of jargon-filled commands. The commands are often named for obscure thought processes ("more" to read something?) or inside jokes, to boot.
(IIS is something I, thankfully, have no experience in. I've heard that it's both a pain to figure out and very powerful once you do figure it out... but it's also a server thing, which is not where MS shines.)
come on, seriously, this is supposedly a paper detailing the results of some market research on linux use by MS customers. Now I would buy that this was an executive sumary passed around to give a heads up on things. But there is no way that this is a serious analysis on the results. What experience do you have with market research to be able to make these claims?
Hey, I didn't post the article. I simply counter-pointed a post.
ESR seemed to think that it was valid, viable, and worth writing an article on. If you don't think it's what it is, then flame him, not me.
Word is also expensive, to the tune of $250 per seat ($150 for Windows XP Professional in OEM packaging, and $100 for Works Suite, which includes Word). What makes Word worth the extra $7500 for a K-12 computer lab?
A school--especially one where money is tight--can almost certainly get Word for far, far less than $250, $150, or even $100. They could get a site license if they have enough PCs, or they could get an educational price in the neighborhood of $25 a copy.
Does it really take that much longer to teach kids how to do basic TeX than to teach kids how to do Word?
Unless high schools have gotten a lot more advanced, they're both wasted on K-12 students. Wordpad does all that the faculty can reasonably expect, and is relatively portable.
If they're going to be teaching real word processing, any commerical package would do. I don't believe that there's an easy solution for TeX that does mail-merges and styles, which Word does and most real-world word processors do as well.
Realistically, the lab should take whomever gives them the best offer, and that the teacher knows. Better to teach the children about word processors and how to learn them than to teach them any single word processor.
Word is the current king, but that doesn't mean that it always will be that way--or that the version used in six years will still be the one used today.