Well, to me "lazy" means not doign real, productive work, such as well, work, spending time building real realtionships, helping other people, etc. I won't call games work because they're just that: games. Entertainment. Fun. I don't think that you an call a professional game player a person with very much of a work ethic. I'd love to do nothing but sit home all day and play GTA: Vice City, but the fact is that I've got bills to pay, a family, etc. So, I put off playing until I have real free time. So yes, I'd categorize a compulsive game player as being "lazy". Hell, who wouldn't want to be able to spend their life playing games? I know that I would, at least until I got sick on 'em.
I help people all the time. I make donations, etc. My business contributes a good bit to charity. But I only help people who are in trouble A. due to no fault of their own or B. are making an effort. I find little sympathy for people "addicted" to video games. They're already better off than I am: they can afford high speed Net connections, and I can't. They completely did it to themselves, and now they whine about their horrible "addiction". Please. The world is a fucked up place. There are many people in very, very bad situations. "Addicted" to video games isn't exactly the same as say, starving to death, dying of AIDS, having a heroin addiction, being homeless, struggling to pay your bills, etc. And it's very simple to "cure" a video game "addiction". Pull the damned plug and get a real life.
So you're right. No sympathy whatsoever. Not from me, at least.
These "people" are pathetic. They are simply people with zero self-esteem, zero drive, and who are intrinsically lazy. They have the willpower of a doorknob. I know this is gonna be modded "flamebait", but it's very simple. It's not a physical "addition" and it's insulting to people with real additions. These are just lazy fucking slobs who use "addiction" as a crutch so as they don't have to get their fat asses off of the sofa. Any serious problems that strike these people and their families are brought on by themselves. It's that simple.
Get rid of corporate conglomerates, and you'll see your precious standard of living plummet faster than the stock market in 2000. No more cheap computers. Hell, no more computers. Forget about cars. Major appliances? No way. Call me nuts, but I've never met a "mom and pop" company that manufactured computers and their components (and I'm not talking about a screwdriver shop). Good kneejerk, but you may want to think a bit past that.
It's not about shaping beliefs, it's about the impact on the country. MS's earnings, the taxes they pay, the salaries they pay, and all of the industries they effect make a *signifcant* impact on the economy. This cannot be ignored. Companies *do* have greater importance than individual people when it comes to politics, and like the original poster said, they should. If politicians didn't give MS access (no pun intended), and MS say, got pissed off and moved overseas, the US economy would be up shit creek without a paddle. On the other hand, another Joe Blow or two that's pissed off ain't gonna make that big of a difference.
Whether or not their impact is negative is your opinion, and you know what people say about opinions and assholes...
And then what do you do after their 30 second attention spans demand another game? Talk about something else for a minute then say, "Hey, did I show you guys Quake 3"?
And I also like the pre-setup thing. Hook 'em with showing them the one decent game, but only after you spend the hour previously trying to install the graphics drivers, sound drivers, etc. The only problem is a kid is gonna go home, try to install *nix, and after about 5 minutes, they're gonna say, "fuck this. this is too much work. I'm just gonna run it in W2K".
Jesus, what school did you go to in which they didn't teach that advertising is crucial and often *the* deciding factor in business? Wow. Advertising is useful in telling people that you make or sell this particular product or service. It also explains the benefit of your particular product. Hypnotism has nothing to do with it. People still use their free will to make decisions.
You're assuming that the *ony* factor in where people shop & what they buy is price. That isn't true. In fact anyone in business will tell you that competing on price alone is a surefire way to fail. Why? Price is easy. Someone bigger can always take a loss on price to force you out. That's business. I own a retail establishment and I can tell you that not all people are brain dead zombies that shop at superstores for the best prices on the shittiest products. Not everyone is speeding down towards the lowest common denominator of Wal-Mart. In my shop, I offer high quality products at reasonable prices, and I'm doing just fine. There are plenty of people in my area that, like myself, are willing to shop elsewhere if they can have a decent shopping experience, and find better quality merchandise. Not everybody is willing to go into a loud, filthy, obnoxious, crowded Wal-Mart just to be able to pick up merchandise off of the floor or out of a pile, and then stand in line for hours to be "waited on" by drones who really don't give a shit about what they're doing.
And yes, I do happen to compete directly against a mega big-box superstore and yes, I am winning.
play back through a Hoontech card with digital output and use an offboard MSB Link DAC III (the computer is acoustically isolated from the listening room) which feeds into a Creek 5350 integrated amp driving Vandersteen 2ce Signature loudspeakers.
All good points. My bad. I still wouldn't pay money for any product that says, "You can't bitch about it publically". Of course, there's no way that they could legally enforce this.
I'm CONSTANTLY reading about how MS's EULA are so terrible, yet this one prohibits what you can and cannot say about the product and *this* is acceptable? Talk about truly restricting free speech (I don't even know if this is legal). Anyone who buys this has got to be out of their fucking minds. I buy MS stuff (licenses and all), but I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.
I can see it now... X-10 popups that instead of having pictures of a scantily dressed woman, now have pictures of a model train set. "NOW! Get your X-10 camera to...uhhh... well, get a live feed from the point of view of your toy trains... AND spy on naked women!!"
Well, except that you forget... IE is evil, and Mozilla should be worshipped. This is completely arbitrary, and isn't at all based on quality of the programs, bloat, features, bugs, rendering capability, or usage statistics. Damn, man! Remember where you are! This is Slashdot, where facts and objectivity are meaningless!
You should *never* have to re-install W2K. I know it's a bold statement, but it's true. If you're re-installing W2K, then you really, really screwed something up pretty badly, and you should probably get some help.
Hmmm.. retail (any big box store), denim (Cone Mills), soft drinks (Coke & Pepsi), and many other products that you've never even heard of, and also the components of many of the products that you use every day. There are plenty of 'em. You just don't know about any outside of your little geek sphere of influence. Pick up a business magazine or two. You may actually learn something.
Again, you're asuming that A. MS has a monopoly, which they don't, and B. that a monopoly is a bad thing, which I don't think that it necesarily is and C. that they're "predatory", which happens to describe every other for-profit company on the planet.
Let's just say that I was "inspired" by your remarks.
Fair enough. I just don't understand the activism part. There aren't too many other industries where activism is what it is in the software industry. In the ever popular car analogy, I hate american cars. Hate 'em with a passion. Ugly designs, piss-poor quality, hard to maintain, expensive to maintain, etc. Can't stand 'em. Yet, I don't have a website entitled "americancarssuck.com". I just don't buy 'em, and proceed along with my life as if they didn't exist. It's really quite simple.
If you want to call it a "valid news source", then you should also call The National Enquirer a "valid news source" because the quality is about the same.
By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment? That means that two years down the road, it's time to pay for a new version. ..
From everything I've read, companies are sticking with W2K for the forseeable future. It's stable, it's fast, and there's no great reason to go to XP or.Net. They used to have to upgrade the DOS based desktops, but now with W2K, what's the point?
You get meta-karma, for actually using the word "balance" in the same sentence with a link to the register. I was impressed. If course, it's unbelievably funny, but I was pretty damn impressed at the effort.
On another front, you can get well-balanced news stories here.
Just buy a Linux box, then. You can buy one from any of the major manufacturers. How they conduct their business shouldn't effect you at all. Buy a linux box and get on with life. If more people just did that, then you'd have the effect you're looking for. And I can tell you that it'd have a much greater effect than whining and bitching on the Web.
What I'm vehemently against is their ability and willingness to stifle and/or steal the fruit of other people's ideas and hard work. If I were still a customer, I'd also be very upset at the way my data was being held hostage.
I've never heard of them stealing anything. That's news to me if they did. What I do read about them is that they trounce the competition in several different areas. That's how business works. If small businesses lose out to MS, that's because they didn't offer a product that was a good value that people wanted, or something as simple as they didn't market themselves well enough. That's business. That's not stealing.
As far as data being held hostage, I have no idea what you're talking about. I can get to all of my data any time I want.
You think that because you have a business your opinion is somehow more valid?
Absolutely it does. I know what it takes to make a real business work. Not some namby-pamby.com bullshit, either. A real business that buys and sells things, that provides services, and that employs people. As I continue to bust my ass to build my business, I'd die rather than let some asshole take anything away from me. That includes the government. Gates earned it. He deserves to be left the hell alone. His company is one of the few keeping this shithole economy afloat.
As far as the public's trust, I couldn't care less. The public couldn't care less about MS. That's the truth. Nobody outside of geekworld really gives a flying shit. What they DO care about are things like Enron because their precious wallets were hurt when they bought into the ponzi scheme. The public's trust in unfettered capitalism is fine. Hell, you wanna ask any of the thousands of immigrants streaming into the US every day what they think of capitalism?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to me "lazy" means not doign real, productive work, such as well, work, spending time building real realtionships, helping other people, etc. I won't call games work because they're just that: games. Entertainment. Fun. I don't think that you an call a professional game player a person with very much of a work ethic. I'd love to do nothing but sit home all day and play GTA: Vice City, but the fact is that I've got bills to pay, a family, etc. So, I put off playing until I have real free time. So yes, I'd categorize a compulsive game player as being "lazy". Hell, who wouldn't want to be able to spend their life playing games? I know that I would, at least until I got sick on 'em.
I help people all the time. I make donations, etc. My business contributes a good bit to charity. But I only help people who are in trouble A. due to no fault of their own or B. are making an effort. I find little sympathy for people "addicted" to video games. They're already better off than I am: they can afford high speed Net connections, and I can't. They completely did it to themselves, and now they whine about their horrible "addiction". Please. The world is a fucked up place. There are many people in very, very bad situations. "Addicted" to video games isn't exactly the same as say, starving to death, dying of AIDS, having a heroin addiction, being homeless, struggling to pay your bills, etc.
And it's very simple to "cure" a video game "addiction". Pull the damned plug and get a real life.
So you're right. No sympathy whatsoever. Not from me, at least.
These "people" are pathetic. They are simply people with zero self-esteem, zero drive, and who are intrinsically lazy. They have the willpower of a doorknob. I know this is gonna be modded "flamebait", but it's very simple. It's not a physical "addition" and it's insulting to people with real additions. These are just lazy fucking slobs who use "addiction" as a crutch so as they don't have to get their fat asses off of the sofa. Any serious problems that strike these people and their families are brought on by themselves. It's that simple.
Get rid of corporate conglomerates, and you'll see your precious standard of living plummet faster than the stock market in 2000. No more cheap computers. Hell, no more computers. Forget about cars. Major appliances? No way. Call me nuts, but I've never met a "mom and pop" company that manufactured computers and their components (and I'm not talking about a screwdriver shop). Good kneejerk, but you may want to think a bit past that.
Well, you may want to consider that a good % of Slashdotters aren't even of legal voting age in the US.
It's not about shaping beliefs, it's about the impact on the country. MS's earnings, the taxes they pay, the salaries they pay, and all of the industries they effect make a *signifcant* impact on the economy. This cannot be ignored. Companies *do* have greater importance than individual people when it comes to politics, and like the original poster said, they should. If politicians didn't give MS access (no pun intended), and MS say, got pissed off and moved overseas, the US economy would be up shit creek without a paddle. On the other hand, another Joe Blow or two that's pissed off ain't gonna make that big of a difference.
Whether or not their impact is negative is your opinion, and you know what people say about opinions and assholes...
And then what do you do after their 30 second attention spans demand another game? Talk about something else for a minute then say, "Hey, did I show you guys Quake 3"?
And I also like the pre-setup thing. Hook 'em with showing them the one decent game, but only after you spend the hour previously trying to install the graphics drivers, sound drivers, etc. The only problem is a kid is gonna go home, try to install *nix, and after about 5 minutes, they're gonna say, "fuck this. this is too much work. I'm just gonna run it in W2K".
Jesus, what school did you go to in which they didn't teach that advertising is crucial and often *the* deciding factor in business? Wow. Advertising is useful in telling people that you make or sell this particular product or service. It also explains the benefit of your particular product. Hypnotism has nothing to do with it. People still use their free will to make decisions.
You're assuming that the *ony* factor in where people shop & what they buy is price. That isn't true. In fact anyone in business will tell you that competing on price alone is a surefire way to fail. Why? Price is easy. Someone bigger can always take a loss on price to force you out. That's business. I own a retail establishment and I can tell you that not all people are brain dead zombies that shop at superstores for the best prices on the shittiest products. Not everyone is speeding down towards the lowest common denominator of Wal-Mart. In my shop, I offer high quality products at reasonable prices, and I'm doing just fine. There are plenty of people in my area that, like myself, are willing to shop elsewhere if they can have a decent shopping experience, and find better quality merchandise. Not everybody is willing to go into a loud, filthy, obnoxious, crowded Wal-Mart just to be able to pick up merchandise off of the floor or out of a pile, and then stand in line for hours to be "waited on" by drones who really don't give a shit about what they're doing.
And yes, I do happen to compete directly against a mega big-box superstore and yes, I am winning.
play back through a Hoontech card with digital output and use an offboard MSB Link DAC III (the computer is acoustically isolated from the listening room) which feeds into a Creek 5350 integrated amp driving Vandersteen 2ce Signature loudspeakers.
And we should care about this, why?
No, but copyrights do protect the creators. If not for copyright, who's to say that Tolkein's books would ever have been written?
All good points. My bad. I still wouldn't pay money for any product that says, "You can't bitch about it publically". Of course, there's no way that they could legally enforce this.
At least there's nobody telling me that I can't say, "This product sucks" on a website if I choose to.
I'm CONSTANTLY reading about how MS's EULA are so terrible, yet this one prohibits what you can and cannot say about the product and *this* is acceptable? Talk about truly restricting free speech (I don't even know if this is legal). Anyone who buys this has got to be out of their fucking minds. I buy MS stuff (licenses and all), but I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.
I can see it now... X-10 popups that instead of having pictures of a scantily dressed woman, now have pictures of a model train set. "NOW! Get your X-10 camera to ...uhhh... well, get a live feed from the point of view of your toy trains... AND spy on naked women!!"
Well, except that you forget... IE is evil, and Mozilla should be worshipped. This is completely arbitrary, and isn't at all based on quality of the programs, bloat, features, bugs, rendering capability, or usage statistics. Damn, man! Remember where you are! This is Slashdot, where facts and objectivity are meaningless!
You should *never* have to re-install W2K. I know it's a bold statement, but it's true. If you're re-installing W2K, then you really, really screwed something up pretty badly, and you should probably get some help.
Hmmm.. retail (any big box store), denim (Cone Mills), soft drinks (Coke & Pepsi), and many other products that you've never even heard of, and also the components of many of the products that you use every day. There are plenty of 'em. You just don't know about any outside of your little geek sphere of influence. Pick up a business magazine or two. You may actually learn something.
Again, you're asuming that A. MS has a monopoly, which they don't, and B. that a monopoly is a bad thing, which I don't think that it necesarily is and C. that they're "predatory", which happens to describe every other for-profit company on the planet.
Let's just say that I was "inspired" by your remarks.
Fair enough. I just don't understand the activism part. There aren't too many other industries where activism is what it is in the software industry. In the ever popular car analogy, I hate american cars. Hate 'em with a passion. Ugly designs, piss-poor quality, hard to maintain, expensive to maintain, etc. Can't stand 'em. Yet, I don't have a website entitled "americancarssuck.com". I just don't buy 'em, and proceed along with my life as if they didn't exist. It's really quite simple.
If you want to call it a "valid news source", then you should also call The National Enquirer a "valid news source" because the quality is about the same.
By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment? That means that two years down the road, it's time to pay for a new version. . .
.Net. They used to have to upgrade the DOS based desktops, but now with W2K, what's the point?
From everything I've read, companies are sticking with W2K for the forseeable future. It's stable, it's fast, and there's no great reason to go to XP or
You get meta-karma, for actually using the word "balance" in the same sentence with a link to the register. I was impressed. If course, it's unbelievably funny, but I was pretty damn impressed at the effort.
On another front, you can get well-balanced news stories here.
Good troll! It was pretty damn funny, too.
Just buy a Linux box, then. You can buy one from any of the major manufacturers. How they conduct their business shouldn't effect you at all. Buy a linux box and get on with life. If more people just did that, then you'd have the effect you're looking for. And I can tell you that it'd have a much greater effect than whining and bitching on the Web.
What I'm vehemently against is their ability and willingness to stifle and/or steal the fruit of other people's ideas and hard work. If I were still a customer, I'd also be very upset at the way my data was being held hostage.
I've never heard of them stealing anything. That's news to me if they did. What I do read about them is that they trounce the competition in several different areas. That's how business works. If small businesses lose out to MS, that's because they didn't offer a product that was a good value that people wanted, or something as simple as they didn't market themselves well enough. That's business. That's not stealing.
As far as data being held hostage, I have no idea what you're talking about. I can get to all of my data any time I want.
You think that because you have a business your opinion is somehow more valid?
.com bullshit, either. A real business that buys and sells things, that provides services, and that employs people. As I continue to bust my ass to build my business, I'd die rather than let some asshole take anything away from me. That includes the government. Gates earned it. He deserves to be left the hell alone. His company is one of the few keeping this shithole economy afloat.
Absolutely it does. I know what it takes to make a real business work. Not some namby-pamby
As far as the public's trust, I couldn't care less. The public couldn't care less about MS. That's the truth. Nobody outside of geekworld really gives a flying shit. What they DO care about are things like Enron because their precious wallets were hurt when they bought into the ponzi scheme. The public's trust in unfettered capitalism is fine. Hell, you wanna ask any of the thousands of immigrants streaming into the US every day what they think of capitalism?