I don't think that the "redundant" modifier really works the same way when we're discussing an election. In the particular case of a popularity contest, "you're saying the same thing as everyone else" starts to get pretty close to "you're right".
It's a down day. AAPL's down 5.4% The Nasdaq is down 2.5%.
More to the point, the stock always runs up in the month before macworld, and dips immediately afterward. That's because everyone buys beforehand and sells immediately afterward to take advantage of this cycle, not because of anything related to whatever gets announced.
Notice the exact same dip immediately after the beginning of every year.
Replace our terrible stacked plurality electoral system with a single-layer approval or condorcet vote. (A plurality vote is an atrocious way to determine the will of the electorate. And, like stacking lossy compression, our current caucus->delegates->primary->per state plurality->electoral college arrangement just adds more and more noise to the system.)
Rapidly withdraw all US troops from Iraq, and attempt to, y'know, not murder a million innocent people here and there for no reason beyond a cheap political stunt.
Conversely, stop ignoring the war in Afghanistan that we started and then have let sit halfway done for six years. Afghanistan actually was directly complicit in an attack on the US, and a military response was justified. But we need to finish making it a non-miserable place to live, or it will continue to generate people whose lives are so awful that they feel they have no better options than throwing them at us.
Reduce defense[sic] spending by around 80%. The US has not been in significant danger of attack for many decades, and during that time our military has only been used to increase that small chance.
Simplify the tax code by about five orders of magnitude. A simple flat tax is an awful idea, but the simplest and most clearly predictable curve that is genuinely progressive will do the trick. The endless loopholes and credits and subsidies that have been used to encourage various behaviours have far exceeded their utility.
Remove marriage as a legal construct. Marriage is a social and sometimes religious construct, and not something that the government has any business regulating. Something akin to power of attorney, which grants the things currently covered by the legal construct of marriage, should be available to any combination of people, regardless of the nature of their relationship.
End the prohibition on recreational drugs, including the release and rehabilitation of all people currently incarcerated for drug offenses. The US imprisons a greater portion of its populace than any other nation on earth, at enormous cost, and with terrible effects. Invest in drug education and treatment centers, and treat unhealthy addiction like the health problem that it is, rather than the criminal problem that it is not.
Last but very much not least, completely nationalized healthcare. I believe that our government should regulate and mandate considerably fewer things than it does today--but healthcare is one of those things. It precisely the variety of thing that should be handled collectively: it is a service which absolutely everyone requires, and it is disastrously expensive when purchased individually, but manageable when purchased collectively.
Rather than describing the shortcomings of our current healthcare "system", I'll refer you to one chart that sums them up nicely.
Or was it in 1980, when they managed to dupe IBM into shipping machines with an OS they licensed in beta form, ported badly, and quietly acquired the rights to just before IBM made it popular?
Those events are my first knowledge of Microsoft, so maybe they had a few seconds of coolness somewhere even earlier than that. But if so, it was in a far more fetal stage than Google's current one.
Ever since they showed up a few years ago, Secunia seems to have been nothing but a pro-Windows, anti-everything-else trolling group. They've published countless "studies" claiming that Windows is more secure than god, every one of which involves some extremely skewed definitions of what constitutes a vulnerability and how one classifies its severity.
Some glorious day, perhaps slashdot will learn to ignore this variety of trolling (I'm looking at you, Cringely and Dvorak.). But until then, we'll all just need to ignore them individually.
Shutting them off doesn't make them physically disappear.
Phones should be somewhere on the order of a sixth the size of those currently for sale in the US, with no decrease in battery life.
In fact, phones used to be; Japan was rife with thumb-sized phones in the 1990s, before they succumbed to the siren song of features, and started making these behemoths.
Moreover, why is ANYONE "against" convergence? Seriously? Do you really WANT to be carrying around a camera, a phone, a PDA, and a laptop?
No, I generally don't. Which is why "convergence" is such an atrocious idea: it means that I have to carry around all those things when I want to just be carrying a phone.
How many of your "twenty million" are interested in City of Heroes/Villains? How many would buy the game and then maintain a subscription? How much would it cost to develop and maintain the OSX client? What would be even more interesting: How many of your "twenty million" are Mac Minis with minimal gaming capability, and how many are truly new Mac users as opposed to Mac users who buy every upgrade?
Perhaps a slightly lower percentage of those mac users are interested in games as a whole, but there are also fewer games competing for their attention. I don't think hard numbers exist, but my feeling is that the latter more than offsets the former, and the availability per-platform-user for a given game manufacturer is actually higher for mac users than Windows users.
Twenty million is around the number of macs in use now that are newer than City of Heroes itself; the total number of macs currently in use is a bit higher. It seems reasonable to assume that any machine that was brand new when the game was released would be able to run it acceptably.
I simply don't believe that large publishers (and NCSoft has become a large publisher) ignore the Mac userbase. I believe that they are well aware of the numbers and would create an OSX client if it was in their fiscal interest to do so. One of the biggest games of all time is Half-Life 2, which is already on multiple platforms. Yet, Source/Steam is still not available for OSX. Is that because Valve is stupid or could it be because that while they know they could sell the game to OSX users they've decided the advantages of creating a native OSX version of their software would provide minimal returns?
My suspicion is that their developers have a very strong bent toward one set of technologies. An authoritarian decree from management that one embrace a different set of technologies is incredibly hard to enforce if the actual geeks-at-keyboards have religion that runs contrary to it.
I'm certainly not suggesting a vast conspiracy, but I think that the behaviours of businesses can often be less rational than you imply. "This is the right decision because it's the decision people make" has a dangerously circular aspect to it.
But a big part of the reason behind that critical mass is that Blizzard has chosen to make WoW available to twenty million people that Cryptic has mysteriously chosen to ignore.
Twenty million recent macs in use leaves plenty of market for a playerbase larger than nearly any game ever sees.
Boot Camp, however, changes pretty much nothing. Most people who choose macs are very much choosing to not use Windows. Giving them a new way to run the exact OS they don't want to run does not appeal to very many of them.
The Mac behavior basically goes back to the original HFS, which technically didn't really have directories at all, just a UI that faked them. A folder was just a file with a list of files in it...
Um. What exactly do you think a directory is on every other posix filesystem in the world?
Actually, you don't need to go out of your way to do it safely; that's already the default. Dragging an item from one place to another on the same volume moves it, and between volumes copies it. That's been the Finder's behaviour since the 80s.
In fact, despite having used macs for fifteen years now, I didn't even know there was an option to non-copy-move between volumes. Which is why no one has complained about this before: it's an incredibly rare and hard to trigger bug. You need to be using a slightly hidden and non-default variety of file manipulation to do one particular thing at the same time as a volume completely disappears.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely a bug, and one that should be fixed. But it's an incredibly obscure one, which most of the doomsaying here is eliding.
...if it's not possible to make some sort of "virtual folder" in OS X which contains content which matches a search criteria? Is it?
Very much yes. They're called "smart folders", and they provide a live, constantly-current view of anything on any number of filesystems that matches any Spotlight query. So you can define views based upon everything Spotlight knows about--which is basically everything.
You can either use the standard spotlight interface and then just declare that you want any query as a persistent smart folder, or you can write your own raw queries by hand. As with so much of osx, whichever tool you prefer.
Unfortunately, I think that even if your stance were widely replicated, the message it would convey to the music industry is the opposite of that you intend.
Their parsing of the situation would likely be, "Look, our sales are declining even further! This must be the work of piracy! We must find a way to make our DRM more effective!"
All Itunes can do at this point is damage control.
Wait, what damage are they controlling? Apple has always been clear about the fact that the itunes music store only breaks even, and that they don't feel that attempting to lock users into their service is a good idea.
So I'm not really seeing how this hurts Apple. Apple isn't especially invested in people buying songs through itunes (on which they make no money); Apple is interested in people buying ipods (on which they do make money), and sometimes through that being convinced to buy macs (on which they make even more).
People will continue to purchase ipods because they're good devices, and will continue to sometimes be swayed to macs because of that. If those people are playing Amazon-purchased songs on their ipods, so much the better.
No, not Apple mice in particular, just any mice. I'm currently using a an 8-button logitech mouse, with the additional buttons controlling things like Expose, without any software installed other than the base OS.
I had the idea that Windows tends to want drivers for anything so outre as even mice, printers, scanners, cameras, and so on. But I'll be the first to say that my knowledge of Windows is negligible, so I'll take your word for it if you say that's not the case these days.
That probably shows you how little I know about Macs.
I'm afraid that it does, yes. While I don't mean to be insulting, you may want to be slightly less willing to denounce people as wrong regarding a topic about which you have very little information.
(And yes, it has been possible to use multiple-button mice with macs since os8, which was released in 1997. Multi-button mouse support has in fact traditionally been far better for macs than for Windows; the OS itself is quite capable of handling 5+ buttons, scrollwheels, and so on automatically, without any third-party software or special drivers needed.)
Guild Wars is in fact one of the titles I'd been thinking of as being far less successful than it should have been. Between the combination of being what sounds like a relatively fun game, and being free of subscription fees, it should have had a much more substantial impact on the market. I suppose the most damning way of phrasing it is that Guild Wars can only give away about a quarter as many subscriptions for free as World of Warcraft can charge fifteen dollars a month for.
I also play WoW, and most people I know--including 100% of my guild--play on macs. But I don't think that either your anecdotal evidence or mine is worth very much, so let's try some actual numbers:
- The number of macs currently in use that can run WoW: around 20 million.
- The number of other games of similar scope and genre available for the platform: 0.
- So if even just 10% of mac users have any interest at all in any mmorpg, the mac portion of WoW subscribers: 22%.
- Or, to put it another way, two million subscribers. The same number as the entirety of the Guild Wars player base that you tout, and all paying a monthly fee for it.
- So if NCsoft even just managed to split the mac market evenly with Blizzard (which one would think they should be able to do, given the freeness), offering a mac version would instantly increase their player base by 50%.
I'm not disputing that the mac gaming market is an afterthought for most developers. What I'm asserting is that that's very unwise of them.
I have this suspicion that some of the developers who left Blizzard to found their own companies wanted to be free of having to worry about portable development, and thus gleefully shackled their products to Windows only.
I do hope that they enjoy the respite from having to worry about product viability. But it turns out that good, synchronous mac versions have been a huge contributor to the success of Blizzard's products. And the lack of them probably a contributor to the fact that none of these Blizzard-émigré companies have ever gotten very far.
Because watching the content through nbc's website is hugely inconvenient:
- I'd have to be watching it on a currently-net-connected computer. No watching it on my phone while on a plane.
- They probably only offer current or at most current-season episodes, right? So I'd still be locked into watching one episode per week, missing something if I skip a week, and unable to start from the beginning with new-to-me shows that have been out a few years?
- If they don't let you keep episodes locally, there goes finding a good show and then bringing friends into watching it later on. You all start at once or they miss parts.
- I don't want to have to maintain different sources and interactions with shows based upon whether they're distributed by NBC, ABC, HBO, BBC, or anyone else. I don't even want to know or care who distributed them, I just care about the content itself.
Captive streaming from a distributor's website is worse than using something like the itunes store for all the same reasons that watching live television is worse than using something like tivo. It locks you into the scheduling of the broacaster rather than granting you the freedom to interact with whatever content you want when and how you want.
If you're really really really broke, I guess that watching via a captive website or antenna might be the only choice. But if your time and flexibility are worth much to you, paying a couple of bucks per episode of content you find worthwhile seems to be an immensely good deal.
Admittedly, it looks as if my inbox only contains about 80,000 items right now, totalling around 500M. But I appear to be able to do full-text searches in about three seconds.
I find that extra second is a pretty good deal for astounding functionality like being able to have more than one message or mailbox open at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that the "redundant" modifier really works the same way when we're discussing an election. In the particular case of a popularity contest, "you're saying the same thing as everyone else" starts to get pretty close to "you're right".
"Tanks"? "OUCH"? Alarmist much?
It's a down day. AAPL's down 5.4% The Nasdaq is down 2.5%.
More to the point, the stock always runs up in the month before macworld, and dips immediately afterward. That's because everyone buys beforehand and sells immediately afterward to take advantage of this cycle, not because of anything related to whatever gets announced.
Notice the exact same dip immediately after the beginning of every year.
Wait Microsoft used to be cool? When was that?
Was it in 1976, when their only actual product (BASIC) was less well-known for its use than for Bill Gates's whining letter to the community scolding them for piracy?
Or was it in 1980, when they managed to dupe IBM into shipping machines with an OS they licensed in beta form, ported badly, and quietly acquired the rights to just before IBM made it popular?
Those events are my first knowledge of Microsoft, so maybe they had a few seconds of coolness somewhere even earlier than that. But if so, it was in a far more fetal stage than Google's current one.
Ever since they showed up a few years ago, Secunia seems to have been nothing but a pro-Windows, anti-everything-else trolling group. They've published countless "studies" claiming that Windows is more secure than god, every one of which involves some extremely skewed definitions of what constitutes a vulnerability and how one classifies its severity.
Some glorious day, perhaps slashdot will learn to ignore this variety of trolling (I'm looking at you, Cringely and Dvorak.). But until then, we'll all just need to ignore them individually.
Shutting them off doesn't make them physically disappear.
Phones should be somewhere on the order of a sixth the size of those currently for sale in the US, with no decrease in battery life.
In fact, phones used to be; Japan was rife with thumb-sized phones in the 1990s, before they succumbed to the siren song of features, and started making these behemoths.
No, I generally don't. Which is why "convergence" is such an atrocious idea: it means that I have to carry around all those things when I want to just be carrying a phone.
Perhaps a slightly lower percentage of those mac users are interested in games as a whole, but there are also fewer games competing for their attention. I don't think hard numbers exist, but my feeling is that the latter more than offsets the former, and the availability per-platform-user for a given game manufacturer is actually higher for mac users than Windows users.
Twenty million is around the number of macs in use now that are newer than City of Heroes itself; the total number of macs currently in use is a bit higher. It seems reasonable to assume that any machine that was brand new when the game was released would be able to run it acceptably.
My suspicion is that their developers have a very strong bent toward one set of technologies. An authoritarian decree from management that one embrace a different set of technologies is incredibly hard to enforce if the actual geeks-at-keyboards have religion that runs contrary to it.
I'm certainly not suggesting a vast conspiracy, but I think that the behaviours of businesses can often be less rational than you imply. "This is the right decision because it's the decision people make" has a dangerously circular aspect to it.
But a big part of the reason behind that critical mass is that Blizzard has chosen to make WoW available to twenty million people that Cryptic has mysteriously chosen to ignore.
Twenty million recent macs in use leaves plenty of market for a playerbase larger than nearly any game ever sees.
Boot Camp, however, changes pretty much nothing. Most people who choose macs are very much choosing to not use Windows. Giving them a new way to run the exact OS they don't want to run does not appeal to very many of them.
Um. What exactly do you think a directory is on every other posix filesystem in the world?
(Hint: run "vi /" some time.)
Actually, you don't need to go out of your way to do it safely; that's already the default. Dragging an item from one place to another on the same volume moves it, and between volumes copies it. That's been the Finder's behaviour since the 80s.
In fact, despite having used macs for fifteen years now, I didn't even know there was an option to non-copy-move between volumes. Which is why no one has complained about this before: it's an incredibly rare and hard to trigger bug. You need to be using a slightly hidden and non-default variety of file manipulation to do one particular thing at the same time as a volume completely disappears.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely a bug, and one that should be fixed. But it's an incredibly obscure one, which most of the doomsaying here is eliding.
Very much yes. They're called "smart folders", and they provide a live, constantly-current view of anything on any number of filesystems that matches any Spotlight query. So you can define views based upon everything Spotlight knows about--which is basically everything.
You can either use the standard spotlight interface and then just declare that you want any query as a persistent smart folder, or you can write your own raw queries by hand. As with so much of osx, whichever tool you prefer.
It's srm rather than shred, but yeah, same idea.
Unfortunately, I think that even if your stance were widely replicated, the message it would convey to the music industry is the opposite of that you intend.
Their parsing of the situation would likely be, "Look, our sales are declining even further! This must be the work of piracy! We must find a way to make our DRM more effective!"
Wait, what damage are they controlling? Apple has always been clear about the fact that the itunes music store only breaks even, and that they don't feel that attempting to lock users into their service is a good idea.
So I'm not really seeing how this hurts Apple. Apple isn't especially invested in people buying songs through itunes (on which they make no money); Apple is interested in people buying ipods (on which they do make money), and sometimes through that being convinced to buy macs (on which they make even more).
People will continue to purchase ipods because they're good devices, and will continue to sometimes be swayed to macs because of that. If those people are playing Amazon-purchased songs on their ipods, so much the better.
Perhaps Google and Apple can compromise and collaborate on the hPhone.
No need to worry about that. We already know everything about you.
How's that move from Amherst to Nashua treating you?
(No need to tell us, we already know. Just making conversation.)
No, not Apple mice in particular, just any mice. I'm currently using a an 8-button logitech mouse, with the additional buttons controlling things like Expose, without any software installed other than the base OS.
I had the idea that Windows tends to want drivers for anything so outre as even mice, printers, scanners, cameras, and so on. But I'll be the first to say that my knowledge of Windows is negligible, so I'll take your word for it if you say that's not the case these days.
I'm afraid that it does, yes. While I don't mean to be insulting, you may want to be slightly less willing to denounce people as wrong regarding a topic about which you have very little information.
(And yes, it has been possible to use multiple-button mice with macs since os8, which was released in 1997. Multi-button mouse support has in fact traditionally been far better for macs than for Windows; the OS itself is quite capable of handling 5+ buttons, scrollwheels, and so on automatically, without any third-party software or special drivers needed.)
Guild Wars is in fact one of the titles I'd been thinking of as being far less successful than it should have been. Between the combination of being what sounds like a relatively fun game, and being free of subscription fees, it should have had a much more substantial impact on the market. I suppose the most damning way of phrasing it is that Guild Wars can only give away about a quarter as many subscriptions for free as World of Warcraft can charge fifteen dollars a month for.
I also play WoW, and most people I know--including 100% of my guild--play on macs. But I don't think that either your anecdotal evidence or mine is worth very much, so let's try some actual numbers:
- The number of macs currently in use that can run WoW: around 20 million.
- The number of other games of similar scope and genre available for the platform: 0.
- So if even just 10% of mac users have any interest at all in any mmorpg, the mac portion of WoW subscribers: 22%.
- Or, to put it another way, two million subscribers. The same number as the entirety of the Guild Wars player base that you tout, and all paying a monthly fee for it.
- So if NCsoft even just managed to split the mac market evenly with Blizzard (which one would think they should be able to do, given the freeness), offering a mac version would instantly increase their player base by 50%.
I'm not disputing that the mac gaming market is an afterthought for most developers. What I'm asserting is that that's very unwise of them.
I have this suspicion that some of the developers who left Blizzard to found their own companies wanted to be free of having to worry about portable development, and thus gleefully shackled their products to Windows only.
I do hope that they enjoy the respite from having to worry about product viability. But it turns out that good, synchronous mac versions have been a huge contributor to the success of Blizzard's products. And the lack of them probably a contributor to the fact that none of these Blizzard-émigré companies have ever gotten very far.
Because watching the content through nbc's website is hugely inconvenient:
- I'd have to be watching it on a currently-net-connected computer. No watching it on my phone while on a plane.
- They probably only offer current or at most current-season episodes, right? So I'd still be locked into watching one episode per week, missing something if I skip a week, and unable to start from the beginning with new-to-me shows that have been out a few years?
- If they don't let you keep episodes locally, there goes finding a good show and then bringing friends into watching it later on. You all start at once or they miss parts.
- I don't want to have to maintain different sources and interactions with shows based upon whether they're distributed by NBC, ABC, HBO, BBC, or anyone else. I don't even want to know or care who distributed them, I just care about the content itself.
Captive streaming from a distributor's website is worse than using something like the itunes store for all the same reasons that watching live television is worse than using something like tivo. It locks you into the scheduling of the broacaster rather than granting you the freedom to interact with whatever content you want when and how you want.
If you're really really really broke, I guess that watching via a captive website or antenna might be the only choice. But if your time and flexibility are worth much to you, paying a couple of bucks per episode of content you find worthwhile seems to be an immensely good deal.
IMAP.
Admittedly, it looks as if my inbox only contains about 80,000 items right now, totalling around 500M. But I appear to be able to do full-text searches in about three seconds.
I find that extra second is a pretty good deal for astounding functionality like being able to have more than one message or mailbox open at the same time.