I think this campaign is not aimed at Mac users and convincing them to switch to Windows, but rather an attempt to stop the herd of Windows users out there from considering Macs. I bet these ads will be loaded with implied falsehoods (i.e., Word and Explorer doesn't run on Macs, can't network on Macs, etc.)
I'm no fan of MS products, but the XBox is the best of the 3 consoles IMHO. I wasn't impressed with GameCube for some reason. Probably the initial selection of games was the main cause, but most of what I played on it seemed stiff and poorly conceived and the controller was right out of some Fisher-Price nightmare. The first round of games were boring. Luigi's Mansion? C'mon! Enough with the damn Mario stuff already. Playstation 2 is much better but for whatever reason, the stuff I played on the XBox blew me away.
Note, before anyone flames me for that, I didn't buy an XBox nor would I simply for the principle of it. I don't like feeding MS's coffers. If anyone other than MS had made the XBox, I probably would have considered buying one. I just think it's fair to point out that it's a decent gaming system.
The government already has the ability to access most of your records with little or no plausible cause.
And that makes it right, how?
We aren't giving consent to the government to access our curriculum vitae's - that's already been done a long time ago. At this point, we are just making it more convenient for them.
And that makes it right, how?
The old "it's already being done in this circumstance so why not this way too" logic reminds me of an old story I heard about how one goes about boiling a frog--that is, one degree at a time so he doesn't realize what's happening to him until it's too late.
vote for a congressman who doesn't support big business and its want to walk over the wants of the citizenry in the name of control. Write your congressman. Inform your neighbors that the officials they elected are rapidly signing away their rights.
Um... yeah, I've done all that. Your point?
The problem is that there are virtually no congressmen left who won't support big business over personal rights. Most congressmen don't actually read your letters. Most people you try to inform don't know how this will hurt them in the long run and it's hard not to come off sounding like some Art Bell-like conspiracy theorist in explaining it.
This reminds me of when the Web first started to become popular and a lot of big corporations ignored it and didn't bother securing their domain names. The most famous example of this was the incident where the guy bought mcdonalds.com and later ended up selling it back to McDonalds for a donation to charity to make a point.
The point is that corporations tend to move at a glacial pace and tend to ignore technology and change, often at their own peril. Those that make this behavior a bad habit, go extinct or end up having to donate to charity just to get their domain name back.
The recording industry has wasted the last 3+ years fighting file sharing when they should have been figuring out how to embrace it and adapt themselves to the changing environment.
My feelings were that they should have tried to one-up the technology (i.e., offer music albums on DVD which would include lots of low-cost filler material that fans love--interviews with the band, live performances, commentary, videos, etc.) That would make the store-bought medium far more desireable to the consumer and the mp3 downloading experience would pale by comparison. In having done that, they could have relegated Napter and all its offspring to the status of free advertising. Instead, the recording industry chose (like McDonalds) to ignore the inevitable.
Even if they choose to change their ways now, I doubt they could make up for the lost time. Good riddance to them. I hope they can't. I'd like to see one good, hard-to-ignore example of technology roadkill for other industries to contemplate. Hopefully the corporate world will pass by the recording industry's dead body and learn a lesson from it.
I deeply dislike when lawmakers feel that have to step in and dictate rules to any industry, but I have watched for the last couple years as this issue has come and gone and I've watched the video game industry as a whole sit firmly and stupidly on their thumbs and do nothing in response. We've decided as a society that this kind of content should be regulated in films and elsewhere and if the video game industry can't step up to the plate and rise to those reasonable expectations, then I guess they need a governmental nanny to do it for them. My response is a great big shrug of indifference.
And yes, anticipating the onslaught of "you don't play games," I've got a drawer full of very violent games next to me right now. I keep them locked up so my kids can't get at them. It's not hard to do. It requires a little maturity and responsibility. If the video game industry needs a bunch of pinheads in Congress to teach them the same, then it's nothing short of a major embarrassment for them.
Funny that this topic has come up when I've recently found myself fascinated with the "theories" about how the moon landing was a hoax. I wonder how that crowd will react to this news, especially given that there is a likely large overlap between the moon hoax people and the face on Mars group. We could be looking at a fairly sizeable group of people who are going to insist on wasting time and resources in having this mission look into the face. Think that couldn't happen? NASA has already done so to a limited degree. Look around on the Web for some believers' sites. Some of them think this "face" on Mars is the single most important discovery mankind has made. I'd hate to see what would happen given 8+ years for them to stir the shit up.
Of course, the best way to satisfy this group is to offer to take them all along. And hey... if we have to leave them there, I'm sure the aliens would take good care of them.
I don't know If I could consider that the authority on Apple market share, but it's better then IDG. If you are going to believe Google then Apple market share has stayed steady at 4%.
I agree that this is probably a better gauge than IDG (or most groups claiming to know any given market share--as far as I've seen, they all have their flaws.) But bear in mind one important thing. A great deal of time spent surfing the web is done at work where the platform of choice is Wintel. Any Linux or Mac user (like me) who goes to work and might work on a Windows machine has a good deal of their web surfing time counted as a "Windows user." I think using Google's stats gives a more realistic picture, but I think the numbers for anything other than Windows is going to be slightly lower than it should be.
Remember that Apple (like most tech companies) often times has to balance the needs of their users against other concerns coming at them from other sectors. Other World Computing was recently asked by Apple to cease distribution of a piece of software that allowed third party DVD burners to operate with iMovie. Everyone cried fowl and accused Apple of behaving like Microsoft, until it was later revealed (by MacCentral, I believe) that Apple would have been liable for enormous fees for potential use of licensed MPEG technology for the use of iMovie with third party hardware (not sure how, but that was the claim.) In that case, Apple had to protect itself from uses that may have cost them dearly. Who knows if such circumstances exist here. I think Apple has done enough to show that they want to empower their users in ways that other companies have long since given up on (compare and contrast to Sony and Microsoft for starters.)
So cut them a break and let's not all trample each other in the mad rush to scream Big Brother at them. Sometimes big companies have agreements and connections that force them into this kind of behavior from time to time.
I don't like seeing it happen either, but there is no cause for calling them "evil" like I've seen here. That's overreaction and says more about the person saying it than it says about Apple.
Remember that in a lot of instances, companies and particularly large corporations use human resource depts. to create the wording of the job listings. Many times, the human resource dept. will consult with management about what sort of programming knowledge is expected in a given job position. It's curious to me that the top five listed here (Java, C++, Visual Basic, Perl and Javascript) also seem to be the most commonly known language amongst people who are peripherally aware of programming or work in an environment where programmers do. I think some of these are ranking high because of buzzword-ish qualities. Consider that Java is going to be well known amongst a lot of management types because of the press it has received during the MS anti-trust trial (and even now, it's making headlines.) And then look at Javascript--the name itself indicates that it's not even a programming language per se. Odd. Something is not quite right. Is Javascript being pushed up higher than it should because it sounds like Java? I've known many people who confuse the two.
I'm also suspicious that C# makes #6. Does anyone know anybody using it? I tend to think it's gotten that position because of its visibility being associated with MS and therefore has become known to people writing and contributing to job listings.
I could be way off-base here, but that's my initial feeling about this.
My wife and I used to buy each other lots of CDs for the holidays, but that has since changed. She bought me one this year (Audioslave) and thankfully it works fine. Given all the publicity these DRM-crippled pseudo-CDs have received, we've decided it's best to avoid that particular gift. We listen to a lot of music on our computer, and who wants to unwrap a gift to discover that it can't be ripped to your player of choice? "Merry Christmas, dear... and yes, I have the receipt so we can take this back." Lame. The RIAA's paranoia and lack of insight are rapidly putting itself out of business.
Here where I live, Spirited Away didn't play (or hasn't yet) at any of the major cinemas, just at a small community-run cinema that plays offbeat, non-mainstream stuff. I don't mind that per se. It was really nice to see Spirited Away in a more intimate, less herd-like setting than Regal Suckemas. I took my very sensitive 6-year-old daughter to it and she loved it, wasn't even phased by the more intense moments. And I went along as guardian, of course, because... you know... I'm an adult... and I don't watch cartoons... of course. I did it for the kid.;^)
It seems a shame to me that such a fantastic film has been relegated to a smaller and less visible venue. It will automatically undercut ticket sales. SA only played there for a week-and-a-half and the theater was only about 1/10 sold out when we went. That's a fucking crime!
Is this the case elsewhere? Where is SA playing in your area? How much promotion is going on?
I see all sorts of borderline conspiracy theories being posted here about why the Wright Bros. are credited with the first flight. I'm seeing some interesting theories about why others who supposedly did it first aren't in the history books. Remember that history is how we got where we are today.
Before going off on some ill-conceived rant about the evils of stolen credit, bear that simple concept in mind. Thousands of people could have flown before the Wright Bros., but if their having done so leads us to where we are today, then they become more important to history, the others become curious footnotes. It happens all the time. You don't have to read much to run across other instances of this. Don't get too bothered by it. There isn't some evil conspiracy at work.
Thanks to a good job done by the tech staff and filtering software, office workers in the US are not bothered by spam mail and the value of email communications has not eroded.
A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not for company provided email accounts.
From your article:
"There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds."
Not at all. I clicked on the link in your article to read what happened as I was shocked to read your summary of it. Ms. Oden, in her own words, indicates that she was willing to be difficult in this situation (intentionally not doing as she was asked by the security people.) Once a person refuses to cooperate with reasonable requests from authority, they pretty much lose me.
No, I don't think AA should have singled her out; I don't think the security people should have acted like pricks (if in fact they really had behaved that way--given that we're only hearing Ms. Oden's side, it's hard to say.) However, there is also a glaringly obvious leap in logic in assuming that she was on AA's security list for what she wrote in the newspaper. This fact is glossed over very quickly. Are we sure she hasn't done other things to make her a security concern? Of course, we don't know. She doesn't lay out her whole life history. She just jumps from the article to the events at the airport. In formal logic, this is called a post-hoc fallacy--the assumption that one event is happening because of another.
So, I'm not reading your entire article. When you start off trying to win me over to your point of view with a story like Oden's that is totally biased, somewhat emotional, and full of logical fallacies, then I become suspicious of the rest of the piece. Oden makes some crazy leaps in logic in her story--you should question those leaps, not follow them.
Christ - the problem of protecting children from offensive or adult content lies with the parents, not one some new-fangled US legislation.
For the most part, I agree with you, but then, most of society doesn't. I have two children and one is old enough to use our computer, and I monitor her Internet usage. In fact, I have raised my daughter in such a way that she self-censors. She knows when she's stumbled across something that may be questionable and asks me if it's okay. However, not everyone is as good a parent as I am (sorry to sound snotty, but it's the truth.) Consider how this will inevitably boomerang back on our asses if we don't provide a safe "sandbox" for the rest of the parents out there who can't get it together. I don't want to see legislation that attempts to outlaw content and punish people for viewing certain things because some inattentive parent out there can't get the first clue on how to raise their child. I'd much rather accept this "lesser evil."
I'm surprised to see any carping about it as any attempts to make the Internet more kid-friendly without legislation would seem to find favor with most readers of Slashdot.
I thought it was sad that they put pictures of Gandalf the White in the trailers
I totally agree. I hate trailers that show too much.
My wife (who hasn't read the books and probably never will but enjoyed the first film quite a lot) saw this in the trailer and asked me about it. I didn't want to lie to her, so I just coyly replied without giving her a real answer: "I really don't want to tell you why he's there. But maybe it's a flashback."
I see a lot of suspiciously high-minded moralizing on this topic, but I can't help but wonder if it's yet another attempt to paint Microsoft as the Enemy of All Mankind (I'm not a fan of MS, but sometimes the scent of anti-MS sentiment can really get a little overwhelming on Slashdot.) The only people I think are responsible for this situation are the Chinese (both the government and the citizens who let their government do this to them.)
It's hypothetical, but what would be your response (you being anyone posting here that MS and other coporations are liable) if China had used Linux and open source software to block Internet access to its citizenry? Would contributors to open source and Linux be morally responsible for how the Chinese government used this software? And don't hide behind discursive comments like "nobody intentionally gave them this to block access" or "Linux isn't a coporation" because that doesn't matter. The question is a moral one, not a matter of whether you make money off it or not. You made the tool that they use to do their "evil." Profit or not, you had a hand in it. Right?
So any of you OSS or Linux coders: would *you* accept blame?
Seriously though, transitioning from OS9 to OSX must be a bit like moving from an automatic to a stick shift.
Not exactly. I've watched non-geeks where I work move from OS 9 to OS X without much problem and without noticing too much difference. Apple did a good job of hiding a lot of the geek stuff so a better analogy would be that going from OS 9 to OS X must be like moving from an automatic to a stick shift that lets you drive like it's an automatic anyway.
Funny to see how the Mac community is slowly but surely becoming UNIXified.
I thought it was the other way around. Seriously, I'm not trying to start arguments, but with all the talk I've heard about how OS X is the first Unix with a nice interface, I would think that Unix users have become somewhat Mac-ified. I don't hear nearly as much talk from old-time Mac users about how wonderful it is to have a CLI or Perl. I hear more chatter and excitement from the other site about how it's nice to have an interface that works so well.:^)
Too egocentric either way. Both statements are probably true--Mac users and Unix users have probably moved toward each other.
I wonder if it would be possible to turn the telescope to point it at the doubters' backsides to confirm the existence of their heads in their rectums.
I'm wondering if it's possible in The Sims to create a character who protests McDonalds without the mandatory stick shoved sideways up the sim's ass. I like playing these characters because they seem to have lots of time on their hands and they never seem to need jobs. On top of that, they seem to have no problem with the hygiene rating being persistently low. That's great, but the stick thing poses quite a problem. Does anyone have any hacks or mods to The Sims that would allow this or is this simply too unrealistic for me to expect?
I wish only the best luck to any business that wants to exclude me (and others on the same platform I have) from its pool of potential customers. They will need all the luck they can get if that's their approach.
And if being excluded from surrogate couch-potato activities like this is the price I pay for owning a machine and OS that isn't tainted by shortsighted DRM concepts, then so be it. It's more than worth it to me. Besides, when I sit down at my computer, I do so to work or to absorb information or to communicate. On the rare occasion that I want to veg, I do it in from the TV anyway. I think these business ventures of delivering entertainment via the Internet are bizarre. Do people really want to use their computers and the Internet as a TV/cinema substitute?
Slashdot Mirror
I think this campaign is not aimed at Mac users and convincing them to switch to Windows, but rather an attempt to stop the herd of Windows users out there from considering Macs. I bet these ads will be loaded with implied falsehoods (i.e., Word and Explorer doesn't run on Macs, can't network on Macs, etc.)
Note, before anyone flames me for that, I didn't buy an XBox nor would I simply for the principle of it. I don't like feeding MS's coffers. If anyone other than MS had made the XBox, I probably would have considered buying one. I just think it's fair to point out that it's a decent gaming system.
And that makes it right, how?
We aren't giving consent to the government to access our curriculum vitae's - that's already been done a long time ago. At this point, we are just making it more convenient for them.
And that makes it right, how?
The old "it's already being done in this circumstance so why not this way too" logic reminds me of an old story I heard about how one goes about boiling a frog--that is, one degree at a time so he doesn't realize what's happening to him until it's too late.
Um... yeah, I've done all that. Your point?
The problem is that there are virtually no congressmen left who won't support big business over personal rights. Most congressmen don't actually read your letters. Most people you try to inform don't know how this will hurt them in the long run and it's hard not to come off sounding like some Art Bell-like conspiracy theorist in explaining it.
The point is that corporations tend to move at a glacial pace and tend to ignore technology and change, often at their own peril. Those that make this behavior a bad habit, go extinct or end up having to donate to charity just to get their domain name back.
The recording industry has wasted the last 3+ years fighting file sharing when they should have been figuring out how to embrace it and adapt themselves to the changing environment.
My feelings were that they should have tried to one-up the technology (i.e., offer music albums on DVD which would include lots of low-cost filler material that fans love--interviews with the band, live performances, commentary, videos, etc.) That would make the store-bought medium far more desireable to the consumer and the mp3 downloading experience would pale by comparison. In having done that, they could have relegated Napter and all its offspring to the status of free advertising. Instead, the recording industry chose (like McDonalds) to ignore the inevitable.
Even if they choose to change their ways now, I doubt they could make up for the lost time. Good riddance to them. I hope they can't. I'd like to see one good, hard-to-ignore example of technology roadkill for other industries to contemplate. Hopefully the corporate world will pass by the recording industry's dead body and learn a lesson from it.
Probably not, but I'm an optimist.
I deeply dislike when lawmakers feel that have to step in and dictate rules to any industry, but I have watched for the last couple years as this issue has come and gone and I've watched the video game industry as a whole sit firmly and stupidly on their thumbs and do nothing in response. We've decided as a society that this kind of content should be regulated in films and elsewhere and if the video game industry can't step up to the plate and rise to those reasonable expectations, then I guess they need a governmental nanny to do it for them. My response is a great big shrug of indifference.
And yes, anticipating the onslaught of "you don't play games," I've got a drawer full of very violent games next to me right now. I keep them locked up so my kids can't get at them. It's not hard to do. It requires a little maturity and responsibility. If the video game industry needs a bunch of pinheads in Congress to teach them the same, then it's nothing short of a major embarrassment for them.
Of course, the best way to satisfy this group is to offer to take them all along. And hey... if we have to leave them there, I'm sure the aliens would take good care of them.
I agree that this is probably a better gauge than IDG (or most groups claiming to know any given market share--as far as I've seen, they all have their flaws.) But bear in mind one important thing. A great deal of time spent surfing the web is done at work where the platform of choice is Wintel. Any Linux or Mac user (like me) who goes to work and might work on a Windows machine has a good deal of their web surfing time counted as a "Windows user." I think using Google's stats gives a more realistic picture, but I think the numbers for anything other than Windows is going to be slightly lower than it should be.
Remember that Apple (like most tech companies) often times has to balance the needs of their users against other concerns coming at them from other sectors. Other World Computing was recently asked by Apple to cease distribution of a piece of software that allowed third party DVD burners to operate with iMovie. Everyone cried fowl and accused Apple of behaving like Microsoft, until it was later revealed (by MacCentral, I believe) that Apple would have been liable for enormous fees for potential use of licensed MPEG technology for the use of iMovie with third party hardware (not sure how, but that was the claim.) In that case, Apple had to protect itself from uses that may have cost them dearly. Who knows if such circumstances exist here. I think Apple has done enough to show that they want to empower their users in ways that other companies have long since given up on (compare and contrast to Sony and Microsoft for starters.)
So cut them a break and let's not all trample each other in the mad rush to scream Big Brother at them. Sometimes big companies have agreements and connections that force them into this kind of behavior from time to time.
I don't like seeing it happen either, but there is no cause for calling them "evil" like I've seen here. That's overreaction and says more about the person saying it than it says about Apple.
I'm also suspicious that C# makes #6. Does anyone know anybody using it? I tend to think it's gotten that position because of its visibility being associated with MS and therefore has become known to people writing and contributing to job listings.
I could be way off-base here, but that's my initial feeling about this.
Not likely.
My wife and I used to buy each other lots of CDs for the holidays, but that has since changed. She bought me one this year (Audioslave) and thankfully it works fine. Given all the publicity these DRM-crippled pseudo-CDs have received, we've decided it's best to avoid that particular gift. We listen to a lot of music on our computer, and who wants to unwrap a gift to discover that it can't be ripped to your player of choice? "Merry Christmas, dear... and yes, I have the receipt so we can take this back." Lame. The RIAA's paranoia and lack of insight are rapidly putting itself out of business.
It seems a shame to me that such a fantastic film has been relegated to a smaller and less visible venue. It will automatically undercut ticket sales. SA only played there for a week-and-a-half and the theater was only about 1/10 sold out when we went. That's a fucking crime!
Is this the case elsewhere? Where is SA playing in your area? How much promotion is going on?
Before going off on some ill-conceived rant about the evils of stolen credit, bear that simple concept in mind. Thousands of people could have flown before the Wright Bros., but if their having done so leads us to where we are today, then they become more important to history, the others become curious footnotes. It happens all the time. You don't have to read much to run across other instances of this. Don't get too bothered by it. There isn't some evil conspiracy at work.
What better way to undermine faith in a platform than to release Microsoft products for it?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... *gasp*... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
A survey conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project, whose findings are reported in this article by MSNBC.com, found that spam is certainly a problem for personal email accounts but not for company provided email accounts.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA...
Thank you Slashdot for posting this hilarious article. It's almost as good as The Onion. It's nice to end the day with such a great laugh!
Not at all. I clicked on the link in your article to read what happened as I was shocked to read your summary of it. Ms. Oden, in her own words, indicates that she was willing to be difficult in this situation (intentionally not doing as she was asked by the security people.) Once a person refuses to cooperate with reasonable requests from authority, they pretty much lose me.
No, I don't think AA should have singled her out; I don't think the security people should have acted like pricks (if in fact they really had behaved that way--given that we're only hearing Ms. Oden's side, it's hard to say.) However, there is also a glaringly obvious leap in logic in assuming that she was on AA's security list for what she wrote in the newspaper. This fact is glossed over very quickly. Are we sure she hasn't done other things to make her a security concern? Of course, we don't know. She doesn't lay out her whole life history. She just jumps from the article to the events at the airport. In formal logic, this is called a post-hoc fallacy--the assumption that one event is happening because of another.
So, I'm not reading your entire article. When you start off trying to win me over to your point of view with a story like Oden's that is totally biased, somewhat emotional, and full of logical fallacies, then I become suspicious of the rest of the piece. Oden makes some crazy leaps in logic in her story--you should question those leaps, not follow them.
For the most part, I agree with you, but then, most of society doesn't. I have two children and one is old enough to use our computer, and I monitor her Internet usage. In fact, I have raised my daughter in such a way that she self-censors. She knows when she's stumbled across something that may be questionable and asks me if it's okay. However, not everyone is as good a parent as I am (sorry to sound snotty, but it's the truth.) Consider how this will inevitably boomerang back on our asses if we don't provide a safe "sandbox" for the rest of the parents out there who can't get it together. I don't want to see legislation that attempts to outlaw content and punish people for viewing certain things because some inattentive parent out there can't get the first clue on how to raise their child. I'd much rather accept this "lesser evil."
I'm surprised to see any carping about it as any attempts to make the Internet more kid-friendly without legislation would seem to find favor with most readers of Slashdot.
I thought it was sad that they put pictures of Gandalf the White in the trailers
I totally agree. I hate trailers that show too much.
My wife (who hasn't read the books and probably never will but enjoyed the first film quite a lot) saw this in the trailer and asked me about it. I didn't want to lie to her, so I just coyly replied without giving her a real answer: "I really don't want to tell you why he's there. But maybe it's a flashback."
I see a lot of suspiciously high-minded moralizing on this topic, but I can't help but wonder if it's yet another attempt to paint Microsoft as the Enemy of All Mankind (I'm not a fan of MS, but sometimes the scent of anti-MS sentiment can really get a little overwhelming on Slashdot.) The only people I think are responsible for this situation are the Chinese (both the government and the citizens who let their government do this to them.)
It's hypothetical, but what would be your response (you being anyone posting here that MS and other coporations are liable) if China had used Linux and open source software to block Internet access to its citizenry? Would contributors to open source and Linux be morally responsible for how the Chinese government used this software? And don't hide behind discursive comments like "nobody intentionally gave them this to block access" or "Linux isn't a coporation" because that doesn't matter. The question is a moral one, not a matter of whether you make money off it or not. You made the tool that they use to do their "evil." Profit or not, you had a hand in it. Right?
So any of you OSS or Linux coders: would *you* accept blame?
Not exactly. I've watched non-geeks where I work move from OS 9 to OS X without much problem and without noticing too much difference. Apple did a good job of hiding a lot of the geek stuff so a better analogy would be that going from OS 9 to OS X must be like moving from an automatic to a stick shift that lets you drive like it's an automatic anyway.
I thought it was the other way around. Seriously, I'm not trying to start arguments, but with all the talk I've heard about how OS X is the first Unix with a nice interface, I would think that Unix users have become somewhat Mac-ified. I don't hear nearly as much talk from old-time Mac users about how wonderful it is to have a CLI or Perl. I hear more chatter and excitement from the other site about how it's nice to have an interface that works so well. :^)
Too egocentric either way. Both statements are probably true--Mac users and Unix users have probably moved toward each other.
Just curious.
I'm wondering if it's possible in The Sims to create a character who protests McDonalds without the mandatory stick shoved sideways up the sim's ass. I like playing these characters because they seem to have lots of time on their hands and they never seem to need jobs. On top of that, they seem to have no problem with the hygiene rating being persistently low. That's great, but the stick thing poses quite a problem. Does anyone have any hacks or mods to The Sims that would allow this or is this simply too unrealistic for me to expect?
I wish only the best luck to any business that wants to exclude me (and others on the same platform I have) from its pool of potential customers. They will need all the luck they can get if that's their approach.
And if being excluded from surrogate couch-potato activities like this is the price I pay for owning a machine and OS that isn't tainted by shortsighted DRM concepts, then so be it. It's more than worth it to me. Besides, when I sit down at my computer, I do so to work or to absorb information or to communicate. On the rare occasion that I want to veg, I do it in from the TV anyway. I think these business ventures of delivering entertainment via the Internet are bizarre. Do people really want to use their computers and the Internet as a TV/cinema substitute?