Compare to, e.g., Pages' inspector and side panels - whilst Pages isn't functionality the same as Word, the interface is pretty good for the most part. The tabs at the top of the inspector are kinda the same as the tabs in Office 12 I suppose, it just comes down to implementation. Certainly with a single floating inspector that isn't too wide, it is much easier to mouse around it than if it was the width of the screen!
Knowing Microsoft...
And oh boy, do I. Its resemblance to Pages is more than a little curious. And I don't mean that they wouldn't borrow it (Microsoft? Not steal? Bite your tongue!), but that they'd borrow it for this.
Pages is supposed to be a much lighter, easier-to-use word processor with some nicely-designed templates and an easier interface. It was to be the lithe, agile Mini-Cooper to Microsoft's Dodge Ram pickup truck. You might use Word to haul lumber or mulch, but if you're just driving to the store, Pages will get you there quickly and in style....good ghod that metaphor got mangled. No matter...
As I write this, I think I'm beginning to understand. Word and its misbegotten ilk are the most feature-crammed, bloatiest of Microsoft's primary products. Those hordes of features, rising up like clouds of rabid fruit bats on the horizon, make them hard to use. The Pages interface, on the other hand, is lighter and easier to use. If Microsoft could get a light, easy-to-use interface on Word, maybe people could find the features they need faster.
I think that's it! That's their idea! They're going to borrow from Pages' UI to make Microsoft Word just as easy to use, I'm sure of it! They're going to put the Mini-Cooper's controls on the Dodge Ram pickup! And I want some of whatever they were smoking when they came up with this harebrained scheme!
Actually, every fucking internal webpage in my company doesn't work with firefox. I really can't even explain how they've done it. They're not using ActiveX or other complex technologies, they've just managed to write such terrible code that it flat out doesn't work.
"FrontPage."
And no, I can't get them to change the sites. We're a "major" company, but not large in the sense that IBM or Intel or Microsoft are. Yet the buerocracy on stuff like this is extensive enough that suggesting a change would just go into a black hole.
Yeah! Amazing, ain't it? Steve Krug observed this phenomenon in Don't Make Me Think, that the larger the organization, the more cooks there are working on the stew, what with people trying to get their content as high as possible on the page, and other technicians, designers, and programmers all trying to shape their little God's Phosphorescent Green Acre in their image. What usually results is a site that's overloaded and ugly. And unless the culture of the company changes drastically, any attempt at redesign will have the same problem. It doesn't change because it's an effect of the political attitudes rather than a problem standing on its own.
Where I work, I've noticed a thing vaguely similar but in ways startlingly different. The front-end that the customers see suffers the bloat because everyone wants to lay claim to or get something out of the page. The intranet is, by comparison, a joy. Individuals work on those pages, and they vary greatly by design and weight because individuals use different techniques, and the company maintains standard CSS.
I've actually been given reason to set up a few small contest sitelets on that intranet, and true to my ethic I've tried to make them as small, light, and still somewhat attractive as possible. No Javascript, CSS, graphics where possible... and it works in IE, Safari, Firefox, etc. Folks seem to like it, too, because it's not blindingly slow. It could even lead to...more work. And a hand in the main site redesign, for what good that'll do.
Maybe you don't have to become a vice president before you get more control of how their web is designed...
The whole reason of returning library books/media is so that others may borrow it.
Surely this is not necessary when borrowing an easily reproducible copy.
And that's exactly what I thought when I saw this. Due dates are a way of managing scarcity: the library only has so many copies in stock, so they insist that copies only be out for a certain amount of time. The fine they levy for not bringing it back in time is not so much a revenue stream as an incentive for patrons to bring the media back in time.
Digital copies mean that given a single original, one can create any number of identical duplicates. It should herald an end to information scarcity. The problem is that too many businesses, content producers, etc. are totally incapable of crafting a business model based on abundance. In their defense, it may not be possible to do so.
That's the reason for the DRM in this case: rather than buy all the audio books themselves, the libraries pay a small fee, get a number of licenses, and can lease those out for a limited time. It's not so much the library that's using the DRM to check books back, it's that the company making the audiobooks available to them will only let them offer books for a limited time.
Congratulations to the libraries on finding a way to make audiobooks available cheaply to its patrons and eliminating the need to bring the books back, but deep down I'm still fuming. It won't end until someone finds a way to DRM money and jams it down the industry's throat... and actually, that gives me a wicked idea. But how to pull it off...?
This is nothing new. Take your average MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MOO/WHATEVER. Look around it, and you'll find some people playing/involved in plots. Unless it's a really big event, though, you'll find more of them in "bar scenes" or out-of-character areas having conversation.
Although I have to thank the high-end MMORPG operators and gamemasters for creating sparkly, attractive, and perhaps even slightly ADD-inflicting environments. They've attracted enough people that playing online can be considered "a technologically sophisticated social norm" instead of a "creepy internet addiction."
Submitted for your approval: Mr. Andy Clarke, creative director of his own web and media design firm, Stuff and Nonsense. He has designed, among other things, the web portal for Disney UK, the WWF (that's Wildlife, not Wrestling) UK, and the British Heart Foundation.
Mr. Clark is also a member of the Web Standards Project, and as such has a good deal of weight in the evangelism of web standards.
Of particular interest is his own blog site, And All That Malarkey, which takes on a dramatically different appearance depending on whether you use (a) anything else, or (b) Internet Explorer. This summer, if you can only look at one page in two different browsers side-by-side, let this be the one. You won't be disappointed.
Figure: There are plenty of distributed computing projects out there, and it may not be easy to tell from your console's behavior what project you're actually contributing to. Now consider who makes those consoles:
Microsoft, whose vested interest is increasing its market share and busting anyone sharing illegal content (software), and
Sony, whose vested interest is increasing its market share and busting anyone sharing illegal content (music and video).
Now imagine your always-on entertainment console spying on your home network PC and reporting back on anything questionable that it finds.
But that's not all! Given Microsoft's security in the past, how likely is it that the XBox 360 will be properly secured against bad incoming data, malware, etc.? How likely is it that Sony can completely secure theirs? How unlikely is it that a poorly written DC-client wouldn't open up some sort of security hole?
Now imagine your console actually slipping a virus to your computer, behind your home firewall, while it's searching your computer for warez and deleting your MP3s.
Appreciate the FUD! (Okay, I couldn't resist. It's Sunday morning and the past few weeks have made me punchy.
This Michael Dell? ("...the best thing that could be done with Apple would be to shut it down, liquidate its assets, and return the money to its shareholders")
It should be observed that Michael Dell has taken pot-shots at, belittle, and marginalize Apple at every turn, in every market, using every bit of FUD he and the top brass at Dell could muster. The rivalry is legendary. At first I thought he was just trying (bitterly) to tout his machines at the expense of another company.
Then Apple makes a significant hit with OS X, talks about running on Intel hardware, and now he's more than willing to swallow a little of his pride and share in Apple's good fortune. This reversal of his stance has opened my eyes. He's not actually bitterly opposed to Apple, he's just bitterly opposed to poverty and obscurity. He's a techno-whore.
Tetris theme, ska variation... again??!?!
on
Video Game Mixlist
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· Score: 1
I'm also familiar with a version of one of the Tetris themes recorded by a group called the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra (warning: their home page is in, not surprisingly, Japanese). I first became aware of them because they supplied all of the music for Incredible Crisis, a delightfully quirky but poorly localized (and poorly received) game for the PS1 which Gamespot couldn't be bothered to provide a good link to.
It seems worthwhile to note that people who produce music for videogames are themselves musicians, as well as the people who remix and remaster their music. It's just that the former group gets much more limited airplay.
The music industry attitude that I've come across is simple... if you aren't prepared to sell our content with DRM, then you don't get our content.
That's their choice. They have the right to control their product however they want. They have the right to release it DRMed to the gills so that only a single model of player can play it. They have the right to snip it up into 5-second segments that play in random order in the wrong player. They have the right to apply filtering and clipping to turn crystal clarity into thick, clammy mud. They have the right to require whatever crippling mechanisms they can cook up, to make their music as useless and unlistenable as they want.
What they don't have the right to do is kvetch when nobody can listen to or wants to buy data in their format.
I say give them exactly what they want and more: unlistenable music in undecryptable formats, and let the market itself pass their death sentence.
Why does everything computer related now have to be so concerned with 'piracy'? Why is it suddenly everyone's job to patrol everything you do to make sure you haven't commited the heinous crime of copying a cd? It's a sad state for the world to be in.
Because there are people out there who have a legal claim to intangible things that can be copied perfectly hundreds of times without loss. Because they have a zero-tolerance policy against said copying, and would prefer to see otherwise innocent person locked away for life rather than lose a potential sale.
Because they have lawyers, who earn money based on their ability to bring people, no matter how young or old, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how unable they are to pay (although the poor ones are usually better for quick, easy settlement).
Because they have computers of their own trying to find real copies of their content, and send out false copies of their content, to slow what they consider the rape of their property and their bottom line. And this still isn't enough.
But especially, because they've managed to brainwash enough people into thinking, among other things, that a group which exists as little more than a convenient legal fiction can legitimately lay total claim to an idea while leaving its creator swinging in the wind.
...okay. Maybe that came out a little high on the hyperbole scale, but it gets the point across.
In addition the the reasons cited by other replies to your question, bear in mind that sometimes when you patch one thing you break something else. If it can happen on something as simple as a website, it can happen on something as complex as an operating system.
This way, they should be able to catch exploits that open up because of poorly designed patches. If a later patch-level machine comes down with something and an earlier version doesn't, they'll know it happened, and that's a first step to making sure they don't do it again.
It's just a shame almost everybody else in my year thinks MS can do no wrong, and wouldn't know Tux if he bit them on the nose.
That's sad... but at the same time I know the feeling. My father, who is less computer literate than most farm animals, has mentioned on occasion how he wished all systems ran Windows. That way he wouldn't have to learn any more than the one system (which, by the way, he will never get the hang of at this rate).
It also makes me wonder... what has your year (class? grade?) concentrated their studies in? I'm betting it's not computer science, and they probably regard their beige boxes as little more than odd little curiosities that they're forced to use occasionally.
And what's your reading list like? I'm betting it doesn't include 1984...
You have to understand, I'm trying to get a handle on what and how your class is thinking. That makes it easier (possible, even) to form counterarguments. Which is exactly what's needed here instead of mere anti-Microsoft rhetoric.
...though I admit, the anti-Microsoft rhetoric is fun too.
One word of advice: If you ever have to ask a question that is critical about Apple on Slashdot, post as AC. Things that are considered normal, harmless questions or even humorous in other sections get trolled to death here. The "Cult of Mac", unfortunately, is not a joke.
I could argue the "Cult of Mac" thing. The fact is, every group trolls here. Apple threads get Windows- and Linux-fanatics. BSD threads get "- is dying!" trolls like nobody's business. And SCO threads... well, in that case it's pretty much deserved. But nobody is spared. In a community this large, everybody hates something.
It's just plain old garden-variety groupthink, where a lot of people receive a stimulus and respond similarly. It's not a cult, but it's just two or three steps removed.
Now, as for the success of Apple on Slashdot... you need to go back a ways, but it wasn't always the way. Practically any thread mentioning Apple would attract its share of detractors, anonymous and virtiolic. Then something unforseen happened: Steve Jobs returned.
Apple is doing a certain amount of hand-holding here and provides some documentation and a great programming enviroment -- it got even better with Tiger.
I'm not really fan of Steve Jobs either, but I will admit that a (mostly) benevolent dictator is the best thing Apple could have gotten at the time. He challenged -- and changed -- computer culture, to the point that those silly looking triangular bubble-shaped iMacs that every "expert" at the time pooh-poohed still pop up in some clip-art collections.
Over time, Apple apparently started doing some things right. Not everything, but enough to continue their survival. "Apple is dying!" went from troll's battle cry to last bastion of the hold-outs, and now where it's used, it's sarcastic. Even you admit in your post that they're doing some things correctly.
In this case, the customizeability isn't quite programming, nor should it be. The fading of Hypercard from the public eye was enough warning that most people don't want to deal with programming. There's enough control under the hood on OS X that those people who want to can play with perl, python, ruby, c, c++, obj-c, java, emacs, vi, pico, php, etc. For the rest of them, there's this neat thing that does what they tell it -- programming in essence, but not in name. And that might make it easier for people to swallow.
When it comes down to it, all humor is codified ridicule. The reason the commercial is funny is not because they had a proto-Hooters girl gyrating around (though it was fun to laugh at the apparent airhead too), but you got to laugh at the reactions of the old men on the "committee," not one of whom looked to be under 100, and one of whom was so shocked -- Shocked! -- that he needed an oxygen mask.
The commercial was not simply a jab at the "wardrobe malfunction as art," but also a not-so-subtle poke at the people who made it such a big deal of them.
For that reason alone, I'm thinking GoDaddy should get more of my business. The commercial stood well on its own, not necessarily for the product but as an attention-getter. The viral marketing campaign around it was just gilding.
In the past, it could be argued, John Dvorak tried to drive viewers to his column by lambasting Apple up one side and down the other for things which people who knew what they were talking about called minor, niggling, or debatable.
So who reads John Dvorak's column any more?
Here's another journalist, also squarely in the Windows camp, posting a review of Apple stuff in almost glowing terms, and even admitting that he is a "fan."
We've seen John Dvorak's stick lose its effectiveness. Obviously the carrot is working, for now...
Now these same industries, who tried their damndest to ban the technology completely, are embracing it. That is news, and as you say, protects the technology, not those using the technology to violate copyright.
Your optimism is refreshing, but misplaced. They will continue to try to ban the technology, but they'll change tack slightly: they'll instead try to ban the technology for any but **AA-approved uses.
They'd get to use the technology to reduce their distribution costs (and I betcha the content still goes up significantly in price), and nobody else can do anything with it unless it's been blessed first by the corporate overlords. They win! Consumers lose! Everybody's happy!
It's the reason (i.e. need a court decision that P2P is legal) for not permitting P2P that is very odd, even by US standards. A policy based upon that P2P is not permitted due to excessive bandwidth usage is at least understandable.
That's because it still sounds better than the truth: they don't want to deal with the litigious bastards in the **AA. The courts make a convenient scapegoat, i.e. "when they say it's all right" (and they never will), "we'll support this wholeheartedly."
Or to put it more simply, the excuse is chickenshit wrapped in legalese and it's hard to tell which stinks worse.
Shouldn't these issues have been caught during the design aspect of the game. Some of these things are so stupid, it shouldn't have taken a year and a half after launch to fix.
Maybe, but I've worked around software quality control people. I've seen plenty of times when a bug has been found, they guess its likelihood or its impact wrong ("Even if someone does find it, it won't do much damage."), and then mere days after the release scramble to come up with a rational plan to correct or patch what is now a gaping breach in their business plan gushing money.
These things especially happen when working with complex software (increasing the likelihood of trouble), software which a lot of people come into contact with quickly (increasing the likelihood of discovery/occurrence), and concepts belonging to young, "immature" industries (increasing the likelihood of management guessing wrong about how bad they're gonna screw the pooch and how little the pooch is gonna enjoy it).
Way to go Disney! Being pro-active and teaching our children to repect the RIAA.
You must be new to this "Disney Channel" thing.
Not very coincidentally at all, an episode of "The Proud Family" a while back which actually made the downloading of music a plot point. The upshot of it was, "Downloading music is bad, mmmmmkay?"
Slashdotters and Slashdotettes, they're engaging in meme warfare. First they got the laws of questionable morality made by buying the legislators, and now they're trying to get around the immorality by changing childrens' morals (spokescharacters, showing inflated consequences of breaking their manufactured mores, etc.).
I've heard about propaganda that "kids smell bullshit," but how many geniuses did you know from grade school? Expect some of them to fall for it. And if enough of them do, the rules changes come that much closer to wide acceptance.
Slashdot Mirror
Pages is supposed to be a much lighter, easier-to-use word processor with some nicely-designed templates and an easier interface. It was to be the lithe, agile Mini-Cooper to Microsoft's Dodge Ram pickup truck. You might use Word to haul lumber or mulch, but if you're just driving to the store, Pages will get you there quickly and in style. ...good ghod that metaphor got mangled. No matter...
As I write this, I think I'm beginning to understand. Word and its misbegotten ilk are the most feature-crammed, bloatiest of Microsoft's primary products. Those hordes of features, rising up like clouds of rabid fruit bats on the horizon, make them hard to use. The Pages interface, on the other hand, is lighter and easier to use. If Microsoft could get a light, easy-to-use interface on Word, maybe people could find the features they need faster.
I think that's it! That's their idea! They're going to borrow from Pages' UI to make Microsoft Word just as easy to use, I'm sure of it! They're going to put the Mini-Cooper's controls on the Dodge Ram pickup! And I want some of whatever they were smoking when they came up with this harebrained scheme!
"FrontPage."
Yeah! Amazing, ain't it? Steve Krug observed this phenomenon in Don't Make Me Think , that the larger the organization, the more cooks there are working on the stew, what with people trying to get their content as high as possible on the page, and other technicians, designers, and programmers all trying to shape their little God's Phosphorescent Green Acre in their image. What usually results is a site that's overloaded and ugly. And unless the culture of the company changes drastically, any attempt at redesign will have the same problem. It doesn't change because it's an effect of the political attitudes rather than a problem standing on its own.
Where I work, I've noticed a thing vaguely similar but in ways startlingly different. The front-end that the customers see suffers the bloat because everyone wants to lay claim to or get something out of the page. The intranet is, by comparison, a joy. Individuals work on those pages, and they vary greatly by design and weight because individuals use different techniques, and the company maintains standard CSS.
I've actually been given reason to set up a few small contest sitelets on that intranet, and true to my ethic I've tried to make them as small, light, and still somewhat attractive as possible. No Javascript, CSS, graphics where possible... and it works in IE, Safari, Firefox, etc. Folks seem to like it, too, because it's not blindingly slow. It could even lead to ...more work. And a hand in the main site redesign, for what good that'll do.
Maybe you don't have to become a vice president before you get more control of how their web is designed...
And that's exactly what I thought when I saw this. Due dates are a way of managing scarcity: the library only has so many copies in stock, so they insist that copies only be out for a certain amount of time. The fine they levy for not bringing it back in time is not so much a revenue stream as an incentive for patrons to bring the media back in time.
Digital copies mean that given a single original, one can create any number of identical duplicates. It should herald an end to information scarcity. The problem is that too many businesses, content producers, etc. are totally incapable of crafting a business model based on abundance. In their defense, it may not be possible to do so.
That's the reason for the DRM in this case: rather than buy all the audio books themselves, the libraries pay a small fee, get a number of licenses, and can lease those out for a limited time. It's not so much the library that's using the DRM to check books back, it's that the company making the audiobooks available to them will only let them offer books for a limited time.
Congratulations to the libraries on finding a way to make audiobooks available cheaply to its patrons and eliminating the need to bring the books back, but deep down I'm still fuming. It won't end until someone finds a way to DRM money and jams it down the industry's throat... and actually, that gives me a wicked idea. But how to pull it off...?
This is nothing new. Take your average MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MOO/WHATEVER. Look around it, and you'll find some people playing/involved in plots. Unless it's a really big event, though, you'll find more of them in "bar scenes" or out-of-character areas having conversation.
Although I have to thank the high-end MMORPG operators and gamemasters for creating sparkly, attractive, and perhaps even slightly ADD-inflicting environments. They've attracted enough people that playing online can be considered "a technologically sophisticated social norm" instead of a "creepy internet addiction."
A Slashdotter agreeing with John C. Dvorak, who is saying nice things about Apple?
Quick, can someone post a current weather report for Hell, please?
Submitted for your approval: Mr. Andy Clarke, creative director of his own web and media design firm, Stuff and Nonsense. He has designed, among other things, the web portal for Disney UK, the WWF (that's Wildlife, not Wrestling) UK, and the British Heart Foundation.
Mr. Clark is also a member of the Web Standards Project, and as such has a good deal of weight in the evangelism of web standards.
Of particular interest is his own blog site, And All That Malarkey, which takes on a dramatically different appearance depending on whether you use (a) anything else, or (b) Internet Explorer. This summer, if you can only look at one page in two different browsers side-by-side, let this be the one. You won't be disappointed.
3. ???
4. Profit!!
I really should have gone to bed earlier last night. I still can't believe I'm resorting to that hoary cliche'.
Want to get paranoid? You do? Cool!
Figure: There are plenty of distributed computing projects out there, and it may not be easy to tell from your console's behavior what project you're actually contributing to. Now consider who makes those consoles:
Now imagine your always-on entertainment console spying on your home network PC and reporting back on anything questionable that it finds.
But that's not all! Given Microsoft's security in the past, how likely is it that the XBox 360 will be properly secured against bad incoming data, malware, etc.? How likely is it that Sony can completely secure theirs? How unlikely is it that a poorly written DC-client wouldn't open up some sort of security hole?
Now imagine your console actually slipping a virus to your computer, behind your home firewall, while it's searching your computer for warez and deleting your MP3s.
Appreciate the FUD ! (Okay, I couldn't resist. It's Sunday morning and the past few weeks have made me punchy.
This Michael Dell? ("...the best thing that could be done with Apple would be to shut it down, liquidate its assets, and return the money to its shareholders")
It should be observed that Michael Dell has taken pot-shots at, belittle, and marginalize Apple at every turn, in every market, using every bit of FUD he and the top brass at Dell could muster. The rivalry is legendary. At first I thought he was just trying (bitterly) to tout his machines at the expense of another company.
Then Apple makes a significant hit with OS X, talks about running on Intel hardware, and now he's more than willing to swallow a little of his pride and share in Apple's good fortune. This reversal of his stance has opened my eyes. He's not actually bitterly opposed to Apple, he's just bitterly opposed to poverty and obscurity. He's a techno-whore.
I'm also familiar with a version of one of the Tetris themes recorded by a group called the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra (warning: their home page is in, not surprisingly, Japanese). I first became aware of them because they supplied all of the music for Incredible Crisis, a delightfully quirky but poorly localized (and poorly received) game for the PS1 which Gamespot couldn't be bothered to provide a good link to.
It seems worthwhile to note that people who produce music for videogames are themselves musicians, as well as the people who remix and remaster their music. It's just that the former group gets much more limited airplay.
That's their choice. They have the right to control their product however they want. They have the right to release it DRMed to the gills so that only a single model of player can play it. They have the right to snip it up into 5-second segments that play in random order in the wrong player. They have the right to apply filtering and clipping to turn crystal clarity into thick, clammy mud. They have the right to require whatever crippling mechanisms they can cook up, to make their music as useless and unlistenable as they want.
What they don't have the right to do is kvetch when nobody can listen to or wants to buy data in their format.
I say give them exactly what they want and more: unlistenable music in undecryptable formats, and let the market itself pass their death sentence.
Because there are people out there who have a legal claim to intangible things that can be copied perfectly hundreds of times without loss. Because they have a zero-tolerance policy against said copying, and would prefer to see otherwise innocent person locked away for life rather than lose a potential sale.
Because they have lawyers, who earn money based on their ability to bring people, no matter how young or old, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how unable they are to pay (although the poor ones are usually better for quick, easy settlement).
Because they have computers of their own trying to find real copies of their content, and send out false copies of their content, to slow what they consider the rape of their property and their bottom line. And this still isn't enough.
But especially, because they've managed to brainwash enough people into thinking, among other things, that a group which exists as little more than a convenient legal fiction can legitimately lay total claim to an idea while leaving its creator swinging in the wind.
...okay. Maybe that came out a little high on the hyperbole scale, but it gets the point across.
...has an equal and opposite government program. Or at least that's what it feels like.
Any day now, I look forward to hearing how the music and software industries are trying to discourage P2P piracy by giving away candy.
In addition the the reasons cited by other replies to your question, bear in mind that sometimes when you patch one thing you break something else. If it can happen on something as simple as a website, it can happen on something as complex as an operating system.
This way, they should be able to catch exploits that open up because of poorly designed patches. If a later patch-level machine comes down with something and an earlier version doesn't, they'll know it happened, and that's a first step to making sure they don't do it again.
That's sad... but at the same time I know the feeling. My father, who is less computer literate than most farm animals, has mentioned on occasion how he wished all systems ran Windows. That way he wouldn't have to learn any more than the one system (which, by the way, he will never get the hang of at this rate).
It also makes me wonder... what has your year (class? grade?) concentrated their studies in? I'm betting it's not computer science, and they probably regard their beige boxes as little more than odd little curiosities that they're forced to use occasionally.
And what's your reading list like? I'm betting it doesn't include 1984...
You have to understand, I'm trying to get a handle on what and how your class is thinking. That makes it easier (possible, even) to form counterarguments. Which is exactly what's needed here instead of mere anti-Microsoft rhetoric.
...though I admit, the anti-Microsoft rhetoric is fun too.
Far be it from me to bash Microsoft (yes, even here), but in this case I can't resist...
What was running through the minds of Microsoft's Top Brass:
Yeah, that should have a good following, but personally I'm holding out for "Apostle Rancher."
I could argue the "Cult of Mac" thing. The fact is, every group trolls here. Apple threads get Windows- and Linux-fanatics. BSD threads get "- is dying!" trolls like nobody's business. And SCO threads... well, in that case it's pretty much deserved. But nobody is spared. In a community this large, everybody hates something.
It's just plain old garden-variety groupthink, where a lot of people receive a stimulus and respond similarly. It's not a cult, but it's just two or three steps removed.
Now, as for the success of Apple on Slashdot... you need to go back a ways, but it wasn't always the way. Practically any thread mentioning Apple would attract its share of detractors, anonymous and virtiolic. Then something unforseen happened: Steve Jobs returned.
I'm not really fan of Steve Jobs either, but I will admit that a (mostly) benevolent dictator is the best thing Apple could have gotten at the time. He challenged -- and changed -- computer culture, to the point that those silly looking triangular bubble-shaped iMacs that every "expert" at the time pooh-poohed still pop up in some clip-art collections.
Over time, Apple apparently started doing some things right. Not everything, but enough to continue their survival. "Apple is dying!" went from troll's battle cry to last bastion of the hold-outs, and now where it's used, it's sarcastic. Even you admit in your post that they're doing some things correctly.
In this case, the customizeability isn't quite programming, nor should it be. The fading of Hypercard from the public eye was enough warning that most people don't want to deal with programming. There's enough control under the hood on OS X that those people who want to can play with perl, python, ruby, c, c++, obj-c, java, emacs, vi, pico, php, etc. For the rest of them, there's this neat thing that does what they tell it -- programming in essence, but not in name. And that might make it easier for people to swallow.
When it comes down to it, all humor is codified ridicule. The reason the commercial is funny is not because they had a proto-Hooters girl gyrating around (though it was fun to laugh at the apparent airhead too), but you got to laugh at the reactions of the old men on the "committee," not one of whom looked to be under 100, and one of whom was so shocked -- Shocked! -- that he needed an oxygen mask.
The commercial was not simply a jab at the "wardrobe malfunction as art," but also a not-so-subtle poke at the people who made it such a big deal of them.
For that reason alone, I'm thinking GoDaddy should get more of my business. The commercial stood well on its own, not necessarily for the product but as an attention-getter. The viral marketing campaign around it was just gilding.
In the past, it could be argued, John Dvorak tried to drive viewers to his column by lambasting Apple up one side and down the other for things which people who knew what they were talking about called minor, niggling, or debatable. So who reads John Dvorak's column any more? Here's another journalist, also squarely in the Windows camp, posting a review of Apple stuff in almost glowing terms, and even admitting that he is a "fan." We've seen John Dvorak's stick lose its effectiveness. Obviously the carrot is working, for now...
Your optimism is refreshing, but misplaced. They will continue to try to ban the technology, but they'll change tack slightly: they'll instead try to ban the technology for any but **AA-approved uses.
They'd get to use the technology to reduce their distribution costs (and I betcha the content still goes up significantly in price), and nobody else can do anything with it unless it's been blessed first by the corporate overlords. They win! Consumers lose! Everybody's happy!
That's because it still sounds better than the truth: they don't want to deal with the litigious bastards in the **AA. The courts make a convenient scapegoat, i.e. "when they say it's all right" (and they never will), "we'll support this wholeheartedly."
Or to put it more simply, the excuse is chickenshit wrapped in legalese and it's hard to tell which stinks worse.
That's a pity... I could see great things coming from the implementation of the hand-wash only flag...
Maybe, but I've worked around software quality control people. I've seen plenty of times when a bug has been found, they guess its likelihood or its impact wrong ("Even if someone does find it, it won't do much damage."), and then mere days after the release scramble to come up with a rational plan to correct or patch what is now a gaping breach in their business plan gushing money.
These things especially happen when working with complex software (increasing the likelihood of trouble), software which a lot of people come into contact with quickly (increasing the likelihood of discovery/occurrence), and concepts belonging to young, "immature" industries (increasing the likelihood of management guessing wrong about how bad they're gonna screw the pooch and how little the pooch is gonna enjoy it).
The MMORPG industry is the trifecta, man.
You must be new to this "Disney Channel" thing.
Not very coincidentally at all, an episode of "The Proud Family" a while back which actually made the downloading of music a plot point. The upshot of it was, "Downloading music is bad, mmmmmkay?"
Slashdotters and Slashdotettes, they're engaging in meme warfare. First they got the laws of questionable morality made by buying the legislators, and now they're trying to get around the immorality by changing childrens' morals (spokescharacters, showing inflated consequences of breaking their manufactured mores, etc.).
I've heard about propaganda that "kids smell bullshit," but how many geniuses did you know from grade school? Expect some of them to fall for it. And if enough of them do, the rules changes come that much closer to wide acceptance.