Ultimately it's the same type of religious hatred you are demonstrating that changes the world, not religion itself.
I don't follow an organised religion but I'm still an honest, law-abiding citizen that has respect for those around me. If some of those around me need organised religion to get themselves to the same point, I don't see a problem with that, whatever works.
The problem I have with 4X games is that the best games are those with human opponents, and the number of people prepared to sit and patiently play turn-based strategy games seems to get fewer and fewer by the day...
I always find that playing against the AI, I tend to fall into the same strategy of play that always lets me win in the end - in my case, it tends to be a strategy of getting as technologically advanced as possible whilst not expanding too much and keeping all my opponents friendly until I can roll out my tank divisions and bombers against their archers and catapults...
I can never play the evil conquering warmonger in 4X games, just as I've never been able to play the evil murderous bastard in either Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas...
Yeah, thanks, you're right and I should have read the article more carefully.
But even so, isn't this just indicative of 4X computer strategy games in general anyway?
When you play games of this type that start with 8 or so players, then you usually end up with about half of them being wiped out in the early to mid-stages of the game because the successful players have been the quickest and fastest to follow a specific strategy - whether it's fast expansion and strength through numbers or being the most technologically advanced.
If you are at a situation where there are only 3 players left in a game then it's because there's a stalemate situation happening whereby no one player is big enough or bad enough to take out one of the other players. By the year 3991 AD, presumably every surviving player will have got to the end of the tech tree, so there's no advantage there; and by virtue of there being three surviving players, they must each occupy considerable land mass each.
You can play a game of chess in 30 minutes or it could take you 6 months to play the game if you made one move a day and played someone via email. But that doesn't mean that the moves are any different in either game.
Therefore I don't see the relevance of playing Civilization II over 10 years here, apart from it being a notable but geeky thing to do.
I've not played Civ in a long time but from what I recall the number of physical game turns are fixed and apart from a couple of the variants ("Test Of Time" springs to mind), the game starts in 4000BC and ends at around 2000AD - so how long it takes you to play that fixed number of turns seems largely irrelevant.
Sure, if the guy had reported that he'd replayed the same game over and over again using different strategies and it *ALWAYS* finished up with the three civilizations at constant war in a nuclear wasteland, then that might be worthy of mention.
But otherwise I must be missing something here or it's just a slow Slashdot news day...
Linux might have more freedom, but for most people they won't have much of a use for it, and so it doesn't provide enough of a compelling argument to use instead of something established, well-known and with a wealth of support like Windows or OS X.
I think the most compelling argument you can give is that using free software downloaded from a trusted source does a helluva lot to stop the threat of viruses.
I use both XP and Linux, go back 5 years or so and I used to run all manner of hooky software on XP with the associated virus problems that result. Now I just run free software or, in the case of some Windows killer apps I use, just buy and register them properly.
Yes, that meant running OpenOffice/LibreOffice on my home machines (because I didn't want to fork out for several MS Office licenses) and not having full compatibility with MS Office, but I've not seen a virus on XP in over 5 years now.
No, I'm not moralising for or against software piracy, I can only confirm what I myself have experienced since not using pirated software.
If it's any consolation, I have been having all sorts of similar graphics problems recently with NVIDIA GT440 cards on all three similar Linux PCs I have at home.
Since about the 170.x commercial NVIDIA drivers (about a year ago), I had problems with artifacts, Gnome/X crashing on logout and, more recently, X not even starting at all. The Open Source Nouveau drivers worked okay but since I also play games, they just didn't have good enough performance in comparison to the commercial drivers.
As it happens, I tend to upgrade graphics cards about every 18 months (I don't play the latest games so buy mid-range graphics cards) and have just swapped out all the NVIDIA cards for AMD/ATI 6xxx HD ones and they work much nicer with AMD's Catalyst drivers.
Unfortunately, it's just one of the things with Linux as long as there are closed source graphics drivers. I spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of the NVIDIA card problem and did have them working stably with old pre-170.x driver versions but then had all sorts of problems moving to the later versions of X-Windows. So I gave up in the end and changed the hardware.
Why is Richard Stallman's religious fervour around free software any less extreme than Apple's religious fervour over their commercial-software based walled garden approach?
I'm not saying you're an Apple fanboi and whilst I myself use and work with Linux and free software, even I believe Stallman's views are somewhat extreme, and that harmony exists somewhere along the line that joins Stallman to Apple - namely that there's a place for both free and commercial software.
It's very easy to sit back and sneer at the man but the fact is that someone of his software programming talents could have chosen to make himself very rich had he chosen the commercial software path, whereupon the loss of his laptop would have probably been not so much of a biggie to him.
Even if you don't agree with someone's ideals (and, again, I don't agree with all of what Stallman says), sometimes the humane and adult thing to do is just to keep your mouth shut and perhaps demonstrate at least a little sympathy.
Neither of us have any problem with walking 2 miles unless traffic getting into London has delayed us to the point where you have 15 minutes to get to the venue before the band comes on.
Being a "carrot chomper in the Shires" I rarely go up to the "Big Smoke" so use the Underground rarely - but will remember it for the future.
Fortunately most of the bands I like usually tour across the country and whilst Southampton is equal distance from me as London is, I tend to try to go there for gigs first - lower (if not free) parking, much easier to get in and out of, and at least two of the venues there serve good British ale at pub prices!:-)
I had 3 similar AMD64 multi-core PCs, all of them with NVIDIA GT440 cards in them, and for over a month now I've been trying to get them to work with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers that are up in the v295.x range - I cannot get any of them to start an X-session at all, and since about v173 of the drivers, there's been a problem that when they did work, if you logged out of the X-Session, you'd get a black screen with a few white dots and dashes in the top left corner with a total machine hang.
Incidentally, I dropped an ATI card in one of the machines, jiggled about with the kernel a bit, dropped in the proprietary ATI drivers and an accelerated Gnome desktop fired up fine. (Nope, I'm not an ATI fanboy by any means, there are BIG issues with their drivers on Linux and always have been.)
I have managed to get accelerated desktops working on the NVIDIA machines using the open source "nouveau" drivers but they, of course, are still reasonably early in development and give nowhere near the framerates of the proprietary NVIDIA drivers under normal circumstances.
The worse thing about it is that I used to own an NVIDIA GT-250 card that worked flawlessly under Linux but sold and replaced it with one of the GT-440 cards. I have since discovered on a forum (though not sure of the truth of this) that the only real difference between the GT440 and GT250 is that the former supports DirectX 11 whereas the latter does not, which is of course irrelevant to Linux.
Incidentally, if anyone can recommend me a reasonably good NVIDIA card for up to $100 (I don't need bleeding edge cards, if it can run Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas then that's fine for me) that also works well under Linux, I'd be grateful. I've lost touch with graphics cards specs over the past few years and when you check out reviews and comments on the Interweb, there's always a lot of conflicting information given.
...the London Underground, on a per-mile basis, is one of the most expensive transit systems in the world, so to say that the wi-fi is free is totally misleading as the cost is covered within the extortionate ticket prices.
Just to give people outside the UK some idea, two weeks ago the missus and I went to a concert in London. I drove the car to Hammersmith in West London and parked there, we got on the Underground to travel two stops to Shepherd's Bush, no more than two miles up the road.
The total cost for 2 return tickets was just under £14 or around $20.
Not to mention the fact that there are still large coal reserves under the British Isles which are not being mined much now because it became cheaper to import it.
With ever increasing fuel costs, at some point it presumably becomes economical to start mining coal here again, I assume the Draft Energy Bill covers that eventuality also.
Not that I am aligned to any UK political party at this moment in time, but anything that stops my taxes being spent on organisations like the UK Carbon Trust built entirely on unproven Al Gore loony theories ("I didn't massage the global temperature change figures by 60 years, honestly I didn't") is a good thing in my book.
I am not unsympathetic to current events in India and China but why are the economic events taking place their now any different to what took place in Europe and the USA around a century ago?
I have Indian colleagues in my work team and even they will fully admit that personal wealth plays a big factor in Indian society and the caste system that still exists there - I suspect the same is true in China where the new rich there are able to use their new wealth to buy properties in London and spend their money in the West.
Wealth is a new thing to many people in Asia and therefore those people haven't yet learnt or focused on some of the consequences of attaining that wealth that we in the West identified decades ago - why do you think we came up with employee unions to fight for workers' rights or made sure that, for example, coal-miners were equipped with protective face masks to restrict coal dust exposure and resultant lung and respiratory problems?
The best people to change poor working conditions in the less developed areas of the world are the people that work in those conditions, simply because that's what everyone else in the West had to do at some point. No corporation is going to ever give anything to anyone away free unless it hits them directly in their profits - and if workers get organised and angry enough to withdraw or restrict their labour en masse, that's when conditions get changed.
If anything, the developing nations now do have an advantage now that the West didn't have then because of organisations like Amnesty International, the United Nations, etc. that exist to bring pressure to bear on bad living or working conditions. But they're not going to do anything unless the workers themselves take their eyes of the money they are earning and want to change it.
Let me put my cards on the table - I could care less about Apple.
I've been using computers now for more than a quarter of a century and never felt the least bit inclined to buy any Apple product because nothing they've ever made would ever have enhanced my computing experience - and, yes, as a techno-geek I keep abreast of as many new products as I can, Apple or not Apple.
At this moment in time, I use mostly Linux - but even that doesn't do all I need a computer to do which is why I also do a lot of work on Windows - and even have some killer purchased apps on Windows that don't have Open Source equivalents that are anywhere near as good. But that's just the way it is, using a bit of both I can get a computer to do all I need a computer to do.
As such, Apple have no effect on my computing experience, they are entirely irrelevant to me and if other people like and buy their stuff then so be it - knock yourselves out.
But Apple or not, I do have a problem with people who believe that aligning themselves to a logo or brand makes them better than anyone else - if anything, doing so demonstrates a greater need to be with the "in-crowd" rather than buying something based purely on its technical or functional merits.
I recently purchased a new Asus laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed. I've nothing against Windows 7 but currently it does nothing for me that Windows XP won't and I therefore see no point in learning a new OS that, in every other respect, is just change for change's sake in the way that everything has been moved around and renamed by Microsoft.
I have a shop bought copy of XP but discovered that despite XP still being supported, Asus doesn't have drivers for all of the hardware in the laptop for XP. So in this case I resigned myself to keeping Windows 7 on the laptop.
I'm mainly a Linux guy and wanted to partition the laptop to dual boot Gentoo Linux. I backed up the Asus Windows installation partitions and then trashed the hard drive with the partitions that I wanted. But when I re-installed Windows 7 from the back-up, it trashed my partition structure and put itself back on exactly as it was when I bought it.
A friend of mine is an MSDN subscriber and gave me an ISO of Windows 7 Home Premium, exactly as on the laptop originally. So I partitioned the drive as I wanted it and installed from the Windows 7 installation DVD I had made from the ISO. When it came to putting in the W7 License Key, I copied in the one from the base of laptop, but when it finished installing W7 it told me the License Key was invalid.
I read in a magazine article that an ISO image of W7 contains all W7 versions and you can prompt W7 to ask you what version of W7 to install by removing a config file from the ISO image and reburning to DVD.
So I repeated the installation and, sure enough, I got asked which version to install - again, I chose W7 Home Premium as the laptop had come with. But once again it rejected my license key.
Having done a few searches on Google (I'm reasonably competent with Windows but more Linux orientated), I discover that I have only an OEM license for Windows 7, which basically means I am piece of shit on the bottom of Steve Ballmer's hand-made shoes and am therefore not worthy enough to install the version of Windows 7 I legally have a license to use from an installation DVD that has that version on it.
At that point in time, I could have got a W7 license key from the Internet, or maybe scrounged one from my MSDN-subscribing friend but I'm not into using pirated software any more, for the simple fact that when the time I stopped using pirated software about 5 years ago, I have never had a virus or piece of malware on Windows XP since.
As of now, I've given up with W7 on the laptop, I actually wish I'd not accepted the Microsoft T&Cs and got a refund because it's of no use to me - instead the laptop is now a Linux-only PC and I shall put my legitimate copy of XP on as a VirtualBox VM.
I do wonder if I have a case under "Fair Usage" with UK Trading Standards in this instance since it does not strike me as unreasonable to want to partition my hard drive the way I want to and to then install the provided W7 installation files onto that partition structure so I could build a dual boot.
Maybe the BSA would be interested in taking the case up as someone who, despite being treated like shit by a software company, has not chosen to pirate software as an easy solution to the problem of getting fair usage?
Yep, it's fine, very big, and filled to the brim with honest people with spines like me whose dicks are big enough to admit they're part of the problem.
Oh please STOP with the typical fanboi elevating yourself on a lofty pedestal and sneering down at the rest of the Great Unwashed.
I don't own one single Apple product because I don't buy into walled gardens, it's that simple. But my study at home is full to the brim with products made by Asus, Samsung, Netgear and probably even a Foxconn motherboard in the very PC I'm using to type this response on. And I'm sure every single one of those devices is assembled by Asian hands somewhere in China or Korea.
You, as an Apple fan, are NO DIFFERENT to me or anyone else that uses a modern piece of electronic equipment, so get used to it!
And, quite frankly, much as I don't like to think about people working in Oriental production lines earning less in a month than I probably do in a day, I am as much of the cause of that as you yourself are. If I'm completely honest, I actually don't care very much because ultimately this is about capitalism and supply and demand - people in the rich West want iPads, laptops and Android phones, and people in China want better standards of living and are prepared to do those jobs.
And if they don't like those conditions then they can go through the same processes as happened in Europe and the USA around a century ago when workers formed unions and fought for proper employment rights and better pay.
Don't get me wrong, I don't *LIKE* the fact that workers are exploited so that the few rich at the top line their pockets even more, but the fact is that because I buy the goods they make that would make me a hypocrite unless I stopped buying those products.
At least I have a backbone and can therefore speak honestly, rather than trying to mask foaming-mouthed fanboi-ism in some non-existant social conscience.
So kindly shut the fuck up and stop pretending you are any different to the rest of us.
...organised ourselves the world over such that for just 24 hours, not one person on this planet bought or downloaded a single piece of music.
The fact that we could organise a single mass protest of that magnitude would send send earthquakes through the RIAA and the rest of the music industry and the whole issue of copyright would change overnight.
But unfortunately far too many of us are selfish, greedy "have-it-nows" with too much money in our hands. (Yes, I include myself in that.)
Incidentally, please don't get me started on music downloads and the "Pick 'n' Mix" concept behind music distribution, I'm an album enthusiast, I like sleeve notes to read on the toilet and a nice shiny disc to file alphabetically and anally on shelves. I'm a music snob, proud of the fact and don't get me started on "... but there's only one or two good tracks on every album" because I'll just tell you to go buy music by real musicians as a response.
However, I do have a big music collection, I probably buy 10-12 CDs a month and I personally think £10 or so of local currency is a good price for a piece of music I'll hopefully be listening to over the next 30 years or so - all the better if it's a nicely remastered classic with a few interesting bonus tracks.
If I do see an album I like the look of, the first thing I do is go find a copy of it on Usenet or BitTorrent to listen to it first. If it's good, I can never be satisfied with someone else's sub-quality rip of it so I go buy it myself. If it's crap, I delete it because I can always use the hard disk space for the albums I do buy and rip myself to FLAC.
The result of this is that I never buy a crap album, music is therefore always a good value product to me and therefore I am happy enough to continue buying it. In other words, a bit of "temporary personal piracy" on my part benefits the music industry and artists in the longer term.
And I also go to many live concerts and spend money on tour shirts, overpriced gassy beer at concert halls and the odd meal before or after the gig - so everyone's happy.
Slashdot Mirror
...my Google Android phone gets the importance of standard connectors.
Ultimately it's the same type of religious hatred you are demonstrating that changes the world, not religion itself.
I don't follow an organised religion but I'm still an honest, law-abiding citizen that has respect for those around me. If some of those around me need organised religion to get themselves to the same point, I don't see a problem with that, whatever works.
The problem I have with 4X games is that the best games are those with human opponents, and the number of people prepared to sit and patiently play turn-based strategy games seems to get fewer and fewer by the day...
I always find that playing against the AI, I tend to fall into the same strategy of play that always lets me win in the end - in my case, it tends to be a strategy of getting as technologically advanced as possible whilst not expanding too much and keeping all my opponents friendly until I can roll out my tank divisions and bombers against their archers and catapults...
I can never play the evil conquering warmonger in 4X games, just as I've never been able to play the evil murderous bastard in either Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas...
Yeah, thanks, you're right and I should have read the article more carefully.
But even so, isn't this just indicative of 4X computer strategy games in general anyway?
When you play games of this type that start with 8 or so players, then you usually end up with about half of them being wiped out in the early to mid-stages of the game because the successful players have been the quickest and fastest to follow a specific strategy - whether it's fast expansion and strength through numbers or being the most technologically advanced.
If you are at a situation where there are only 3 players left in a game then it's because there's a stalemate situation happening whereby no one player is big enough or bad enough to take out one of the other players. By the year 3991 AD, presumably every surviving player will have got to the end of the tech tree, so there's no advantage there; and by virtue of there being three surviving players, they must each occupy considerable land mass each.
You can play a game of chess in 30 minutes or it could take you 6 months to play the game if you made one move a day and played someone via email. But that doesn't mean that the moves are any different in either game.
Therefore I don't see the relevance of playing Civilization II over 10 years here, apart from it being a notable but geeky thing to do.
I've not played Civ in a long time but from what I recall the number of physical game turns are fixed and apart from a couple of the variants ("Test Of Time" springs to mind), the game starts in 4000BC and ends at around 2000AD - so how long it takes you to play that fixed number of turns seems largely irrelevant.
Sure, if the guy had reported that he'd replayed the same game over and over again using different strategies and it *ALWAYS* finished up with the three civilizations at constant war in a nuclear wasteland, then that might be worthy of mention.
But otherwise I must be missing something here or it's just a slow Slashdot news day...
Linux might have more freedom, but for most people they won't have much of a use for it, and so it doesn't provide enough of a compelling argument to use instead of something established, well-known and with a wealth of support like Windows or OS X.
I think the most compelling argument you can give is that using free software downloaded from a trusted source does a helluva lot to stop the threat of viruses.
I use both XP and Linux, go back 5 years or so and I used to run all manner of hooky software on XP with the associated virus problems that result. Now I just run free software or, in the case of some Windows killer apps I use, just buy and register them properly.
Yes, that meant running OpenOffice/LibreOffice on my home machines (because I didn't want to fork out for several MS Office licenses) and not having full compatibility with MS Office, but I've not seen a virus on XP in over 5 years now.
No, I'm not moralising for or against software piracy, I can only confirm what I myself have experienced since not using pirated software.
If it's any consolation, I have been having all sorts of similar graphics problems recently with NVIDIA GT440 cards on all three similar Linux PCs I have at home.
Since about the 170.x commercial NVIDIA drivers (about a year ago), I had problems with artifacts, Gnome/X crashing on logout and, more recently, X not even starting at all. The Open Source Nouveau drivers worked okay but since I also play games, they just didn't have good enough performance in comparison to the commercial drivers.
As it happens, I tend to upgrade graphics cards about every 18 months (I don't play the latest games so buy mid-range graphics cards) and have just swapped out all the NVIDIA cards for AMD/ATI 6xxx HD ones and they work much nicer with AMD's Catalyst drivers.
Unfortunately, it's just one of the things with Linux as long as there are closed source graphics drivers. I spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of the NVIDIA card problem and did have them working stably with old pre-170.x driver versions but then had all sorts of problems moving to the later versions of X-Windows. So I gave up in the end and changed the hardware.
Tell me something...
Why is Richard Stallman's religious fervour around free software any less extreme than Apple's religious fervour over their commercial-software based walled garden approach?
I'm not saying you're an Apple fanboi and whilst I myself use and work with Linux and free software, even I believe Stallman's views are somewhat extreme, and that harmony exists somewhere along the line that joins Stallman to Apple - namely that there's a place for both free and commercial software.
It's very easy to sit back and sneer at the man but the fact is that someone of his software programming talents could have chosen to make himself very rich had he chosen the commercial software path, whereupon the loss of his laptop would have probably been not so much of a biggie to him.
Even if you don't agree with someone's ideals (and, again, I don't agree with all of what Stallman says), sometimes the humane and adult thing to do is just to keep your mouth shut and perhaps demonstrate at least a little sympathy.
Thank you for the health tips.
Neither of us have any problem with walking 2 miles unless traffic getting into London has delayed us to the point where you have 15 minutes to get to the venue before the band comes on.
So don't be a smart-ass!
Thanks (to all the replies) for the advice.
Being a "carrot chomper in the Shires" I rarely go up to the "Big Smoke" so use the Underground rarely - but will remember it for the future.
Fortunately most of the bands I like usually tour across the country and whilst Southampton is equal distance from me as London is, I tend to try to go there for gigs first - lower (if not free) parking, much easier to get in and out of, and at least two of the venues there serve good British ale at pub prices! :-)
Not to mention the fact that NVIDIA have now dropped all support for ION chipsets in those laptops...
That's not my experience, I'm afraid.
I had 3 similar AMD64 multi-core PCs, all of them with NVIDIA GT440 cards in them, and for over a month now I've been trying to get them to work with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers that are up in the v295.x range - I cannot get any of them to start an X-session at all, and since about v173 of the drivers, there's been a problem that when they did work, if you logged out of the X-Session, you'd get a black screen with a few white dots and dashes in the top left corner with a total machine hang.
Incidentally, I dropped an ATI card in one of the machines, jiggled about with the kernel a bit, dropped in the proprietary ATI drivers and an accelerated Gnome desktop fired up fine. (Nope, I'm not an ATI fanboy by any means, there are BIG issues with their drivers on Linux and always have been.)
I have managed to get accelerated desktops working on the NVIDIA machines using the open source "nouveau" drivers but they, of course, are still reasonably early in development and give nowhere near the framerates of the proprietary NVIDIA drivers under normal circumstances.
The worse thing about it is that I used to own an NVIDIA GT-250 card that worked flawlessly under Linux but sold and replaced it with one of the GT-440 cards. I have since discovered on a forum (though not sure of the truth of this) that the only real difference between the GT440 and GT250 is that the former supports DirectX 11 whereas the latter does not, which is of course irrelevant to Linux.
Incidentally, if anyone can recommend me a reasonably good NVIDIA card for up to $100 (I don't need bleeding edge cards, if it can run Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas then that's fine for me) that also works well under Linux, I'd be grateful. I've lost touch with graphics cards specs over the past few years and when you check out reviews and comments on the Interweb, there's always a lot of conflicting information given.
...the London Underground, on a per-mile basis, is one of the most expensive transit systems in the world, so to say that the wi-fi is free is totally misleading as the cost is covered within the extortionate ticket prices.
Just to give people outside the UK some idea, two weeks ago the missus and I went to a concert in London. I drove the car to Hammersmith in West London and parked there, we got on the Underground to travel two stops to Shepherd's Bush, no more than two miles up the road.
The total cost for 2 return tickets was just under £14 or around $20.
I think that speaks for itself...
You're just jealous because RaspberryPi is British design.
Not to mention the fact that there are still large coal reserves under the British Isles which are not being mined much now because it became cheaper to import it.
With ever increasing fuel costs, at some point it presumably becomes economical to start mining coal here again, I assume the Draft Energy Bill covers that eventuality also.
Not that I am aligned to any UK political party at this moment in time, but anything that stops my taxes being spent on organisations like the UK Carbon Trust built entirely on unproven Al Gore loony theories ("I didn't massage the global temperature change figures by 60 years, honestly I didn't") is a good thing in my book.
...tickets for the "How many days does Ballmer have left" sweepstake went on sale today.
I am not unsympathetic to current events in India and China but why are the economic events taking place their now any different to what took place in Europe and the USA around a century ago?
I have Indian colleagues in my work team and even they will fully admit that personal wealth plays a big factor in Indian society and the caste system that still exists there - I suspect the same is true in China where the new rich there are able to use their new wealth to buy properties in London and spend their money in the West.
Wealth is a new thing to many people in Asia and therefore those people haven't yet learnt or focused on some of the consequences of attaining that wealth that we in the West identified decades ago - why do you think we came up with employee unions to fight for workers' rights or made sure that, for example, coal-miners were equipped with protective face masks to restrict coal dust exposure and resultant lung and respiratory problems?
The best people to change poor working conditions in the less developed areas of the world are the people that work in those conditions, simply because that's what everyone else in the West had to do at some point. No corporation is going to ever give anything to anyone away free unless it hits them directly in their profits - and if workers get organised and angry enough to withdraw or restrict their labour en masse, that's when conditions get changed.
If anything, the developing nations now do have an advantage now that the West didn't have then because of organisations like Amnesty International, the United Nations, etc. that exist to bring pressure to bear on bad living or working conditions. But they're not going to do anything unless the workers themselves take their eyes of the money they are earning and want to change it.
Let me put my cards on the table - I could care less about Apple.
I've been using computers now for more than a quarter of a century and never felt the least bit inclined to buy any Apple product because nothing they've ever made would ever have enhanced my computing experience - and, yes, as a techno-geek I keep abreast of as many new products as I can, Apple or not Apple.
At this moment in time, I use mostly Linux - but even that doesn't do all I need a computer to do which is why I also do a lot of work on Windows - and even have some killer purchased apps on Windows that don't have Open Source equivalents that are anywhere near as good. But that's just the way it is, using a bit of both I can get a computer to do all I need a computer to do.
As such, Apple have no effect on my computing experience, they are entirely irrelevant to me and if other people like and buy their stuff then so be it - knock yourselves out.
But Apple or not, I do have a problem with people who believe that aligning themselves to a logo or brand makes them better than anyone else - if anything, doing so demonstrates a greater need to be with the "in-crowd" rather than buying something based purely on its technical or functional merits.
Case in point...
I recently purchased a new Asus laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed. I've nothing against Windows 7 but currently it does nothing for me that Windows XP won't and I therefore see no point in learning a new OS that, in every other respect, is just change for change's sake in the way that everything has been moved around and renamed by Microsoft.
I have a shop bought copy of XP but discovered that despite XP still being supported, Asus doesn't have drivers for all of the hardware in the laptop for XP. So in this case I resigned myself to keeping Windows 7 on the laptop.
I'm mainly a Linux guy and wanted to partition the laptop to dual boot Gentoo Linux. I backed up the Asus Windows installation partitions and then trashed the hard drive with the partitions that I wanted. But when I re-installed Windows 7 from the back-up, it trashed my partition structure and put itself back on exactly as it was when I bought it.
A friend of mine is an MSDN subscriber and gave me an ISO of Windows 7 Home Premium, exactly as on the laptop originally. So I partitioned the drive as I wanted it and installed from the Windows 7 installation DVD I had made from the ISO. When it came to putting in the W7 License Key, I copied in the one from the base of laptop, but when it finished installing W7 it told me the License Key was invalid.
I read in a magazine article that an ISO image of W7 contains all W7 versions and you can prompt W7 to ask you what version of W7 to install by removing a config file from the ISO image and reburning to DVD.
So I repeated the installation and, sure enough, I got asked which version to install - again, I chose W7 Home Premium as the laptop had come with. But once again it rejected my license key.
Having done a few searches on Google (I'm reasonably competent with Windows but more Linux orientated), I discover that I have only an OEM license for Windows 7, which basically means I am piece of shit on the bottom of Steve Ballmer's hand-made shoes and am therefore not worthy enough to install the version of Windows 7 I legally have a license to use from an installation DVD that has that version on it.
At that point in time, I could have got a W7 license key from the Internet, or maybe scrounged one from my MSDN-subscribing friend but I'm not into using pirated software any more, for the simple fact that when the time I stopped using pirated software about 5 years ago, I have never had a virus or piece of malware on Windows XP since.
As of now, I've given up with W7 on the laptop, I actually wish I'd not accepted the Microsoft T&Cs and got a refund because it's of no use to me - instead the laptop is now a Linux-only PC and I shall put my legitimate copy of XP on as a VirtualBox VM.
I do wonder if I have a case under "Fair Usage" with UK Trading Standards in this instance since it does not strike me as unreasonable to want to partition my hard drive the way I want to and to then install the provided W7 installation files onto that partition structure so I could build a dual boot.
Maybe the BSA would be interested in taking the case up as someone who, despite being treated like shit by a software company, has not chosen to pirate software as an easy solution to the problem of getting fair usage?
Yep, it's fine, very big, and filled to the brim with honest people with spines like me whose dicks are big enough to admit they're part of the problem.
Oh please STOP with the typical fanboi elevating yourself on a lofty pedestal and sneering down at the rest of the Great Unwashed.
I don't own one single Apple product because I don't buy into walled gardens, it's that simple. But my study at home is full to the brim with products made by Asus, Samsung, Netgear and probably even a Foxconn motherboard in the very PC I'm using to type this response on. And I'm sure every single one of those devices is assembled by Asian hands somewhere in China or Korea.
You, as an Apple fan, are NO DIFFERENT to me or anyone else that uses a modern piece of electronic equipment, so get used to it!
And, quite frankly, much as I don't like to think about people working in Oriental production lines earning less in a month than I probably do in a day, I am as much of the cause of that as you yourself are. If I'm completely honest, I actually don't care very much because ultimately this is about capitalism and supply and demand - people in the rich West want iPads, laptops and Android phones, and people in China want better standards of living and are prepared to do those jobs.
And if they don't like those conditions then they can go through the same processes as happened in Europe and the USA around a century ago when workers formed unions and fought for proper employment rights and better pay.
Don't get me wrong, I don't *LIKE* the fact that workers are exploited so that the few rich at the top line their pockets even more, but the fact is that because I buy the goods they make that would make me a hypocrite unless I stopped buying those products.
At least I have a backbone and can therefore speak honestly, rather than trying to mask foaming-mouthed fanboi-ism in some non-existant social conscience.
So kindly shut the fuck up and stop pretending you are any different to the rest of us.
...organised ourselves the world over such that for just 24 hours, not one person on this planet bought or downloaded a single piece of music.
The fact that we could organise a single mass protest of that magnitude would send send earthquakes through the RIAA and the rest of the music industry and the whole issue of copyright would change overnight.
But unfortunately far too many of us are selfish, greedy "have-it-nows" with too much money in our hands. (Yes, I include myself in that.)
...for me the concept is true.
Incidentally, please don't get me started on music downloads and the "Pick 'n' Mix" concept behind music distribution, I'm an album enthusiast, I like sleeve notes to read on the toilet and a nice shiny disc to file alphabetically and anally on shelves. I'm a music snob, proud of the fact and don't get me started on "... but there's only one or two good tracks on every album" because I'll just tell you to go buy music by real musicians as a response.
However, I do have a big music collection, I probably buy 10-12 CDs a month and I personally think £10 or so of local currency is a good price for a piece of music I'll hopefully be listening to over the next 30 years or so - all the better if it's a nicely remastered classic with a few interesting bonus tracks.
If I do see an album I like the look of, the first thing I do is go find a copy of it on Usenet or BitTorrent to listen to it first. If it's good, I can never be satisfied with someone else's sub-quality rip of it so I go buy it myself. If it's crap, I delete it because I can always use the hard disk space for the albums I do buy and rip myself to FLAC.
The result of this is that I never buy a crap album, music is therefore always a good value product to me and therefore I am happy enough to continue buying it. In other words, a bit of "temporary personal piracy" on my part benefits the music industry and artists in the longer term.
And I also go to many live concerts and spend money on tour shirts, overpriced gassy beer at concert halls and the odd meal before or after the gig - so everyone's happy.
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