I have a hard time taking your opinion seriously when you have drivel like this posted at your site:
Maybe Apple's AAC sounds fine if you listen to hip-hop "music" with nothing but "thump thump" and "sss sss" (not to mention disgusting lyrics about drugs, prostitutes, and violence).
Nothing personal, but it just sounds like you set out to hate the iPod from the start and you're going to throw every lump of shit you can find at it regardless of relevance. I looked at lots of mp3 players and the iPod had lots of advantages--the design (how it works not necessarily how it looks), how it sounded (great to my ears), its seamless integration with iTunes and the amazing number of accessories available for it (the iTrip makes it worth the price alone.) I decided in the end that all this made the iPod a great value, regardless of the situation with the battery (which I agree is a flaw and hopefully Apple will rectify it in the future.)
Besides, if the battery lasts a few years (which it reasonably should) it will have outlived its life with most consumers anyway so I don't think it's something most people really care about.
But I know you won't hear most of this out. You can write most people off with this kind of thing (also from your site):
If you're some kid that listens to noise instead of music, and you think that overpriced overhyped products are "cool", get an iPod.
I'm not a kid. I listen to music not noise. I don't think the iPod is overpriced or overhyped. I don't buy things for the "cool" factor. I also bought an iPod. I know others who are the same.
Your opinion should be expressed with a more adult tone. As it is, you sound exactly like the bonehead "kid" you try to decry.
Please don't make another Indy movie. You see, no matter how well executed it is, no matter how well-conceived it is, no matter how grandiose your overall plans are, the fans will inevitably nitpick it to death and ruin it for the young generation (and the young at heart) your films are generally meant for. I'm afraid my generation, despite growing up with your magical films, has become whiny and pathetic and we bitch and moan when you don't do thing 100% exactly like we expect. We want you to be just like the McDonalds we also grew up with. Make the next Indy film the most perfect Big Mac with Large Fries or we'll scream and shout that you've raped our childhood and that you suck beyond all comprehension.
Quite frankly, I love your films, but I don't know if I can handle another heaping, steaming pile of "fan" reaction yet again.
Are you joking? That film was the most over-hyped, predictable, inconsistent pile of dung I've ever seen. It was one of those films where I caught myself thinkin "please be over in the next fifteen minutes" after the first hour. What a boring piece of crap. I still can't believe people compare that to Star Wars.
I sincerely hope that Lucas won't royally fsck up Indiana Jones part 4 like he did with the Star Wars prequel(s). (I only watched the first one in the theater. It sucked so much that I skipped the second one entirely. My friends say the third is ok, so I'll wait until it gets to the cheap theater and then check it out.)
Oh, so you have formed an opinion on the prequels without actually having seen them all. Suddenly, the incessant whining around here makes a little more sense.
[S]ome of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.'
Too bad MS isn't a massive software corporation with loads of resources and cash to throw at such a thing, but since they're young and struggling and don't have the staffing to port things back to widely used versions of their OS, I think we should all cut 'em some slack.
Yes, I couldn't get that "There were heroes on both sides. Evil was everywhere" line out of my head for the next few minutes when I was watching it either. What does that mean? We're never shown any "heroes" on the Seperatist "side".
Yes, you were shown heroes on that side, but you decided not to view Grievous, Dooku and others as the heroes that the separatists saw them as. That's what the line meant. To those of us with enough literary agility to understand that it wasn't meant literally, it was a very effective scene setting kind of phrase, the very subtle storytelling style that whiners have been accusing Lucas of failing them on since The Phantom Menace. What do you want? Do you want it spelled out like a history lesson with a quiz afterward or do you want to be entertained by some kind of artistry?
"There were heroes on both sides. Evil was everywhere".
WTF!!?! Sounds like something Lucas thumbtyped on his Blackberry when some assisstant reminded him that they needed some yellow pseudo 3D words for the start.
Good god! There is nothing Lucas can do to satisfy the nitpickers. If you insist on reading things so literally, perhaps you should stick to historical documentaries. That line means exactly what it means--that there are people doing heroic actions from the point of view of both sides. The separatists have their heroes. The Republic has its heroes. The war is producing "heroic" acts from both sides. It's just a flowery way of saying that the war is really raging and that it's producing "heroes" on both sides.
Don't be so goddamn literal.
Why bother seeing a film if it's this obvious that you're ready to nitpick it? I mean, what is that, 20 seconds into the fucking movie and you're already having a hard time with it? Gees, dude, go for broke. Why not nitpick the opening logos while you're at it. Isn't that Lucasfilm Ltd. lettering just a tad skewed? I mean, what is Lucas smoking, crack?
Sorry... as someone who enjoyed the prequels, I'm just a tad fed up with 5+ years of fanboy whining. Nothing personal.
BRAVO! I couldn't agree more. Not only are you accurate about this "anti-popular" subculture, but there is also an anti-Star Wars subculture wherein participants try to prove how hip they are by hating Star Wars and looking down on the fans. Want to see it in action, check out Fark's discussions the next time they post a Star Wars-related topic.
But that's a perpetuating the problem, and Windows isn't that hard to learn. If you know computers, you can deal with Windows. I have always been a die-hard Mac user and I got a job four years ago that was in an all-Windows office. (And it's wasn't just all-Windows, my colleagues were all anti-Mac types.) I picked up all the ins-and-outs of Windows in a few days, no big deal, but I also saw how many tasks we struggled with that the Mac does better so I suggested that we switch one machine to see how it goes. It went so well that we are now a 50-50 Mac and Windows dept. (with one Linux box thrown in for good measure.) It's shortly about to tilt in favor of the Macs as one of the Windows machines is about to become obsolete.
You can change things to suit your preferences if you're smart about it, can demonstrate the value of the alternatives to Windows. So this attitude that we must stick by Windows because it's a Windows-dominated world is sort of circular.
Yet another example of the way feature bloat infects everything in technology.
<sarcasm>Gosh, too bad there wasn't some search engine out there where you could type a line of lyrics and find info about the song that way.</sarcasm>
You might be saying that, but the AOL-Time-Warner merger certainly doesn't support it. There has been no "nonstop mindless growth;" AOL is a brick.
Yeah, but what I meant was that companies run out of ideas about what they can do and turn to mergers just to get bigger and more powerful. That's mindless growth and I maintain that it's destructive to the companies involved and potentially harmful to consumers and our economy in the long-run.
I didn't say a company had to die to prove what I'm saying. I was talking about mindless growth, growth that takes place for no apparent reason other than making some company bigger and more powerful. Look at today's headlines about WalMart since that's the example you brought up.
You mean, merging already massive and powerful corporations into mammoth mega-corporations might not be such a good idea after all? You mean, nonstop, mindless growth in business might not be inherently good? You mean consolidating more and more power into fewer and fewer hands might not make the world a better place?
Gees, I must be some kind of genius because I've been saying that for years.
The amount of compiler warnings in Mozilla code is astounding. Quite clearly it was written by result-oriented professional engineers, rather than the process-enjoying hobbyists.
And the end-user, for whom the software was ostensibly created in the first place, cares about this for what reason?
Don't get me wrong. I understand what you're saying (and agree with the spirit of it) but should the focus on software written for widespread usage really be what turns on the engineers or what turns on the user?
"You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface--like the iPod today--and then lost its position," Gates said.
You can draw those parallels but only if you keep it extremely simple can you draw the same conclusions from those situations. There are tons of differences between how the old Apple Computer handled the Macs and how the new Apple Computer is handling the iPod. The primary ones:
* Apple never had an analogous lead in the computer market the way they do in the mp3 player market. They were popular computers, but they did not dominate like the iPod does.
* Apple was extremely arrogant about its computers when the Mac first came out and assumed that cheesy-ass evangelizing and a killer new concept (as opposed to building relationships with retailers and doing heavy advertising) would carry the day for them. Wrong. Are they doing that with the iPod? No.
* Macs never attempted to be inexpensive or compete with low-end machines for market share when prices started to fall in home computing. The iPod is going after the low-end part of the market aggressively.
* The GUI on the Mac was a great concept but the machines themselves were not technologically more impressive than what other companies offered. iPods generally are better machines overall than the competition.
* Macs were at a disadvantage early on because of a proprietary system and hardware. The iPod doesn't suffer from that problem. The "software" equivalent for the iPod in this situation is music, and the iPod is compatible with most major formats. The "hardware" equivalent is the fact that iPods work on both Macs and Windows (the predominant platform.)
* Macs were never "cool" in the same way that the iPod is. There was never a real cultural buzz about Macs that the iPod enjoys.
Anyway, there are more problems with the parallel that Gates is drawing, but those are the primary ones. He's just plain wrong and I can only conclude that he's smarter than that and knows damn-well that he's wrong. His comments are clearly yet another attempt for Microsoft to spread FUD in a market they don't dominate.
No, not required, but definitely advantageous. How you can look at the Mac and the iPod/iTunes combo and not come to that conclusion is beyond me, but if you don't see it, it's not worth my time to argue it. For a long time, the conventional wisdom in technology was that Apple was trapped by their own "closed" system, but Steve Jobs has demonstrated that it's actually an advantage to control (in his own words) "the whole widget." It has allowed them to make strides in the last few years that other companies, who are largely dependent on the cooperation of others, can only dream of.
Actually, they're in a better position than Apple.
We'll see. That was also the general consensus about Apple's competitors with the introduction of the iTunes Music Store and the iPod. They have proven the naysayers spectacularly wrong in that assumption. I don't doubt they can do it again.
I would like to see your source for that Bill Gates quote also.
Heh, so would I! I've looked around, but I can't find it. It wasn't online, but in a print source I have somewhere so it makes it a little hard for me to find, but it was from about a year ago. There was an article in Wired or MacWorld or somewhere where the writer described being present as Gates paid a visit to the team working on Windows Media Player and its technology. Someone was demonstrating for the group what Apple was doing, and Gates made a comment to the effect that they were way behind and told the team directly that they have a lot of hard work ahead of them to catch up. The writer made it clear that Gates wasn't happy with what he was seeing.
I don't blame you if you think I'm making that up, but I'm really not. I was fairly surprised by it too.
Those of you who spend a significant amount of your spare time bashing the prequels, you all need to read this.
Don't feel bad if you get uncomfortable while reading it. It's called logic. You're not used to seeing so much of it in one place concerning this film. He uses it throughout. You'll get used to it.
All of those examples either lack the control over the hardware, the user base, the operating system or the infrastructure to do what Apple is in the position to do. And as one other poster points out, they also lack Steve Jobs who happens to have a connection and stature in Hollywood via Pixar that the others don't. That's worth a lot if we're talking about negotiating an iTunes-like movie service. Apple's CEO can speak their language, understands what they want, their expectations, will be partly on their side and more immediately trustworthy because he's also the CEO of Pixar. The others can't relate in that way and in business, that means a lot.
They are all in just as good of a spot to start delivering HDTV video as Apple. Perhaps better.
I'll concede that any one of them has a good start, but none of them are in as good a position as Apple... not even close really. Even the best of the bunch (MS) has huge problems. Their video technology is (as Gates himself has admitted) lagging behind Apple's Quicktime significantly.
The only thing I'm "soffing" at is the parent's statment that the Mac Mini is designed to be an HDTV box. It's clearly not up to the job, and not designed to be.
Fine, you're right about that, but don't you get some sense that Apple's latest changes to its hardware seems to be moving rapidly toward more compact, less intrusive, and that it looks suspiciously like the design work is heading for some kind of non-computing component? That, coupled with all the other stuff that's been mentioned here, makes people think of a home entertainment box. I don't see much to scoff at. It's the observation of someone paying attention to all of those things.
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Nothing personal, but it just sounds like you set out to hate the iPod from the start and you're going to throw every lump of shit you can find at it regardless of relevance. I looked at lots of mp3 players and the iPod had lots of advantages--the design (how it works not necessarily how it looks), how it sounded (great to my ears), its seamless integration with iTunes and the amazing number of accessories available for it (the iTrip makes it worth the price alone.) I decided in the end that all this made the iPod a great value, regardless of the situation with the battery (which I agree is a flaw and hopefully Apple will rectify it in the future.)
Besides, if the battery lasts a few years (which it reasonably should) it will have outlived its life with most consumers anyway so I don't think it's something most people really care about.
But I know you won't hear most of this out. You can write most people off with this kind of thing (also from your site):
I'm not a kid. I listen to music not noise. I don't think the iPod is overpriced or overhyped. I don't buy things for the "cool" factor. I also bought an iPod. I know others who are the same.
Your opinion should be expressed with a more adult tone. As it is, you sound exactly like the bonehead "kid" you try to decry.
Please don't make another Indy movie. You see, no matter how well executed it is, no matter how well-conceived it is, no matter how grandiose your overall plans are, the fans will inevitably nitpick it to death and ruin it for the young generation (and the young at heart) your films are generally meant for. I'm afraid my generation, despite growing up with your magical films, has become whiny and pathetic and we bitch and moan when you don't do thing 100% exactly like we expect. We want you to be just like the McDonalds we also grew up with. Make the next Indy film the most perfect Big Mac with Large Fries or we'll scream and shout that you've raped our childhood and that you suck beyond all comprehension.
Quite frankly, I love your films, but I don't know if I can handle another heaping, steaming pile of "fan" reaction yet again.
Thanks for hearing me out.
Are you joking? That film was the most over-hyped, predictable, inconsistent pile of dung I've ever seen. It was one of those films where I caught myself thinkin "please be over in the next fifteen minutes" after the first hour. What a boring piece of crap. I still can't believe people compare that to Star Wars.
Oh, so you have formed an opinion on the prequels without actually having seen them all. Suddenly, the incessant whining around here makes a little more sense.
Too bad MS isn't a massive software corporation with loads of resources and cash to throw at such a thing, but since they're young and struggling and don't have the staffing to port things back to widely used versions of their OS, I think we should all cut 'em some slack.
Yes, you were shown heroes on that side, but you decided not to view Grievous, Dooku and others as the heroes that the separatists saw them as. That's what the line meant. To those of us with enough literary agility to understand that it wasn't meant literally, it was a very effective scene setting kind of phrase, the very subtle storytelling style that whiners have been accusing Lucas of failing them on since The Phantom Menace. What do you want? Do you want it spelled out like a history lesson with a quiz afterward or do you want to be entertained by some kind of artistry?
WTF!!?! Sounds like something Lucas thumbtyped on his Blackberry when some assisstant reminded him that they needed some yellow pseudo 3D words for the start.
Good god! There is nothing Lucas can do to satisfy the nitpickers. If you insist on reading things so literally, perhaps you should stick to historical documentaries. That line means exactly what it means--that there are people doing heroic actions from the point of view of both sides. The separatists have their heroes. The Republic has its heroes. The war is producing "heroic" acts from both sides. It's just a flowery way of saying that the war is really raging and that it's producing "heroes" on both sides.
Don't be so goddamn literal.
Why bother seeing a film if it's this obvious that you're ready to nitpick it? I mean, what is that, 20 seconds into the fucking movie and you're already having a hard time with it? Gees, dude, go for broke. Why not nitpick the opening logos while you're at it. Isn't that Lucasfilm Ltd. lettering just a tad skewed? I mean, what is Lucas smoking, crack?
Sorry... as someone who enjoyed the prequels, I'm just a tad fed up with 5+ years of fanboy whining. Nothing personal.
You can change things to suit your preferences if you're smart about it, can demonstrate the value of the alternatives to Windows. So this attitude that we must stick by Windows because it's a Windows-dominated world is sort of circular.
<sarcasm>Gosh, too bad there wasn't some search engine out there where you could type a line of lyrics and find info about the song that way.</sarcasm>
Yeah, but what I meant was that companies run out of ideas about what they can do and turn to mergers just to get bigger and more powerful. That's mindless growth and I maintain that it's destructive to the companies involved and potentially harmful to consumers and our economy in the long-run.
I assure you, you're not a genius.
I never doubted it. ;^)
"Target thrives; Wal-Mart wobbles"
"Wal-Mart Quits Online DVD Biz"
So I reiterate: gees, maybe mindless growth... yadda yadda....
Perhaps instead of spending time online slinging around insults, you should try reading the news some time.
Gees, I must be some kind of genius because I've been saying that for years.
I know what happens when we get attacked by one of our allies. We wipe out small, defenseless countries that had nothing to do with it.
Look it up if you don't believe me.
=>jd
And the end-user, for whom the software was ostensibly created in the first place, cares about this for what reason?
Don't get me wrong. I understand what you're saying (and agree with the spirit of it) but should the focus on software written for widespread usage really be what turns on the engineers or what turns on the user?
You can draw those parallels but only if you keep it extremely simple can you draw the same conclusions from those situations. There are tons of differences between how the old Apple Computer handled the Macs and how the new Apple Computer is handling the iPod. The primary ones:
* Apple never had an analogous lead in the computer market the way they do in the mp3 player market. They were popular computers, but they did not dominate like the iPod does.
* Apple was extremely arrogant about its computers when the Mac first came out and assumed that cheesy-ass evangelizing and a killer new concept (as opposed to building relationships with retailers and doing heavy advertising) would carry the day for them. Wrong. Are they doing that with the iPod? No.
* Macs never attempted to be inexpensive or compete with low-end machines for market share when prices started to fall in home computing. The iPod is going after the low-end part of the market aggressively.
* The GUI on the Mac was a great concept but the machines themselves were not technologically more impressive than what other companies offered. iPods generally are better machines overall than the competition.
* Macs were at a disadvantage early on because of a proprietary system and hardware. The iPod doesn't suffer from that problem. The "software" equivalent for the iPod in this situation is music, and the iPod is compatible with most major formats. The "hardware" equivalent is the fact that iPods work on both Macs and Windows (the predominant platform.)
* Macs were never "cool" in the same way that the iPod is. There was never a real cultural buzz about Macs that the iPod enjoys.
Anyway, there are more problems with the parallel that Gates is drawing, but those are the primary ones. He's just plain wrong and I can only conclude that he's smarter than that and knows damn-well that he's wrong. His comments are clearly yet another attempt for Microsoft to spread FUD in a market they don't dominate.
No, not required, but definitely advantageous. How you can look at the Mac and the iPod/iTunes combo and not come to that conclusion is beyond me, but if you don't see it, it's not worth my time to argue it. For a long time, the conventional wisdom in technology was that Apple was trapped by their own "closed" system, but Steve Jobs has demonstrated that it's actually an advantage to control (in his own words) "the whole widget." It has allowed them to make strides in the last few years that other companies, who are largely dependent on the cooperation of others, can only dream of.
Actually, they're in a better position than Apple.
We'll see. That was also the general consensus about Apple's competitors with the introduction of the iTunes Music Store and the iPod. They have proven the naysayers spectacularly wrong in that assumption. I don't doubt they can do it again.
I would like to see your source for that Bill Gates quote also.
Heh, so would I! I've looked around, but I can't find it. It wasn't online, but in a print source I have somewhere so it makes it a little hard for me to find, but it was from about a year ago. There was an article in Wired or MacWorld or somewhere where the writer described being present as Gates paid a visit to the team working on Windows Media Player and its technology. Someone was demonstrating for the group what Apple was doing, and Gates made a comment to the effect that they were way behind and told the team directly that they have a lot of hard work ahead of them to catch up. The writer made it clear that Gates wasn't happy with what he was seeing.
I don't blame you if you think I'm making that up, but I'm really not. I was fairly surprised by it too.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll pass.
Don't feel bad if you get uncomfortable while reading it. It's called logic. You're not used to seeing so much of it in one place concerning this film. He uses it throughout. You'll get used to it.
"Commander, tear this ship apart until you've found those plans, and bring me the prisoners. I want them alive, eh?"
All of those examples either lack the control over the hardware, the user base, the operating system or the infrastructure to do what Apple is in the position to do. And as one other poster points out, they also lack Steve Jobs who happens to have a connection and stature in Hollywood via Pixar that the others don't. That's worth a lot if we're talking about negotiating an iTunes-like movie service. Apple's CEO can speak their language, understands what they want, their expectations, will be partly on their side and more immediately trustworthy because he's also the CEO of Pixar. The others can't relate in that way and in business, that means a lot.
They are all in just as good of a spot to start delivering HDTV video as Apple. Perhaps better.
I'll concede that any one of them has a good start, but none of them are in as good a position as Apple... not even close really. Even the best of the bunch (MS) has huge problems. Their video technology is (as Gates himself has admitted) lagging behind Apple's Quicktime significantly.
The only thing I'm "soffing" at is the parent's statment that the Mac Mini is designed to be an HDTV box. It's clearly not up to the job, and not designed to be.
Fine, you're right about that, but don't you get some sense that Apple's latest changes to its hardware seems to be moving rapidly toward more compact, less intrusive, and that it looks suspiciously like the design work is heading for some kind of non-computing component? That, coupled with all the other stuff that's been mentioned here, makes people think of a home entertainment box. I don't see much to scoff at. It's the observation of someone paying attention to all of those things.