Disclaimer: I don't own a digtial musice player, but if I did it would be an iPod and there are a nujmber of reasons behind that.
1. Confusion. There is a problem with the various Windows WMA music stores, a big problem: There are too many of them. Napster, Yahoo, MSN, Coke, Wallmart etc. Yahoo's store looks like the cheapest/month, at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that some other store will somehow compete pretty soon. The problem is that these stores are not compatible with one another (obviously) and that there is no vast difference between them. While they all offer subscription, only a few offer the ability to download and buy single tracks. This cannot be stated enough. All of these stores are fighting amongst one another for a small slice of the market. They all claim to be "The iPod/iTunes alternative", but the reality is that they fight amongst one another for the paying twice for the same song. Once to listen to it on subscription, and twice to "own" it forever.
3. Features vs. Ease of use. All of these stores, and especially this Yahoo one, offer loads of features. Look at this idiot geek wetting himself about features like skins and plug-ins. He's basically saying that WinAmp is now part of an online store. The thing is that one of the reasons that the iPod and iTunes is so popular is that it is very very simple. It offers a basic, easy to understand business model. Basically, it is, you pay for a song and you can play and do with it what you want afterwards, basta.
The iPod doesn't have built in TV, FM, or a razor. It just plays music. It's also simple.
Most people just want to listen to their music that they bought. They are not interested in skins for the player, or OGG format or having to fork out next month's payment.
4. All of Apple's competitors complain about the iPod and iTunes not being "open". What they are essentially complaining about is that they don't have a slice of the pie. If they were in Apple's position, they wouldn't open their stuff to Apple either.
Fuck you you hypocritical coward. Too fucking scared to post your username, but, typically, real man enough to make a big noise. You must be a Christian american bigot fuckprick.
perhaps he was as much an arrogant fuck about it as you were in your post, and thereby managed to piss off a whole load of people who would have otherwise listened to him.
No shit, fuckstick. And what were the fucking Crusades then? Peace and brotherly love? Your post just proves how fucking dumb and blind you Christians really are. Enjoy your stay in the dark ages, morons. The rest of the world will send you a postcard every century or so.
Damn straight. If there are people that are taking your country straight back to the dark ages, it is a huge irony that one of them is a respected science fiction author, with his christian bigotry.
I find the whole american christian scene pathetic and backwards and the guarantor of losing your country's place in this world. It happened once before in history, when Islam came out of the desert and rapidly overran a lot of christian territory, one of the reasons was that Islam was a lot more progressive at the time than Christianity. All the centres of knowledge in the world at the time were in Islamic countries.
Christianity's response was the fucking Crusades and the inquisition. It took several hundred years before the renaissance slowly started changing all that.
Your country, with its backward christian superstition, is going to plunge itself back into a state of unquestioning stupidity and backwardness.
I didn't care much for the interviewer in the Salon interview, who seemed more interested in her world of hurt than anything else, and I didn't care much for Card's Christian Crusader mentality of thinking it ok to slaughter the heathens.
The second link, where Card rabbits on about his fucking church (yet another American crap shit sect that makes OBL look progressive) and his fucking lopsided view of homos, which he defends entirely with his being a mormon moron, instead of trying to fucking think and realise that there is more to life than fucking cristianity.
It's a pity, because the cretins that make up the cream of the Hollywood scum are certain to fuck it up in their mindless and tasteless greedy quest for more money at the expense of everything else on earth.
It's days like this that I think it a pity the Soviets never launched all the SS-18s at the USA and vice versa so that humanity can start over again.
" The Bible leaves no room for other religions, no other way."
But the Koran basically also says it's the only way, and the Jews don't think they're wrong either. So who's right?
You say you experience the bible through the written word, but it wasn't even written in a language you understand, and you can only read it through a series of many, many translations (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic->latin->old english->middle english->modern english(King James)->modern american version). At least the Koran is still in Classical Arabic and the Torah in Hebrew. What about their experience of the written word.
I'm sorry, but your explanation has about as much meaning as someone who is inspired by a poem or a song, even though it might be a good song or poem. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
While obviously not all Americans are religious fundamentalist Christians, reports in the news during the last election indicate that a good 40% or so are and that the number is climbing. Apart from rabidly theocratic nations like Saudi Arabia, Iran and a few others, there is nowhere else on ths planet where there is such a growth of dogmatic religious beliefs along with the resulting intolerance of other faiths and the scientific worldview. For these people, the enlightenment never happened.
I have no idea what it is that causes the historic episodes of religious sects, religions and ideologies. My personal theory is that it starts off with a certain part of the culture that has these specific beliefs, and that in times of financial and social despair, people turn to extremism as a crutch in their fear and uncertainty. That was the case in Europe in the dark ages and that was the case in Nazi Germany, and that is the case in many Islamic countries governed by tyrannical heretics.
I don't know if the current resurgence of dogmatic christianity in the USA is a result of the vietnam years liberalism and humiliation, a feeling of being lost in the world (very often a reason, I think) or 9/11 and the realisation that there is indeed a world beyond the borders of the USA. Probably a combination.
But the consequences of forcing the teaching of nonsensical dogmas as science in schools, coupled with the already extremely poor US education system and the fact that foreign students are no longer bolstering the US' scientific institutions due to the security paranoia is likely to be the cause of the US becoming an overpopulated poor backwards country in the future. It won't happen overnight, but it might happen in 50 years.
Something that bothers me about ID or Christian, Judaic or Islamic belief is that those beliefs base their beliefs on the written word. In other words, it's something that you read somewhere. I beg all of those who are Christians to tell me what makes their particular brand better than the next one. Why is Jesus right for a Christian but not for a Jew? What makes a Muslim a heretic and a Christian holy?
Those are all things you either heard in your particular culture, group, family, church or mosque or read in your particular holy book.
Please tell me, and I don't mean this as a way to bait you, how you experience "God and his son Jesus" as one person put it further down. Do you mean that the two of them chat to you personally?
Why can't my particular idea of religion be right? I believe in a light that shines inside all things. That is the way I experience a God like experience, except that I don't give it a name or try to explain it in terms of some previous religion, book or science.
Am I in your eyes somehow unholy because I don't believe in your particular book or your physical place of worship? Am I a sinner because I am not interested in your religious rites?
Explain all of that to me in terms of THINGS YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED, and not in terms of things that you have read or heard from others.
I didn't really understand a word you said, to be honest. Are you implying that the KGB is still communist, at least the one that aren't in the FSB or in the Russian mafia? Or the Stasi, at least those who were not prosecuted by German post reunification trials and exposes? Or the Bulgarian hit squads, in a country now having signed agreements to join the EU?
I know that there is a communist party in Italy, as much as there is one in France, but neither has ever been in government and their popularity is not exactly astronomic, and they are not taken as seriously in their country, as you in your country take them.
I've seen numerous people here on slashdot being totally obsessed with the idea of a space elevator, since it offers a cheap and efficient way to get into orbit, but less obsessed with some real dangers in the real world, should an elevator ever be constructed.
Consider that a space elevator is built, with carbon nanotubes, or whatever suitable material. Now, what can damage or destroy the elevator? There is so much space junk hurtling around the planet, about which slashdot has already had articles, that something is bound to hit some portion of the cable on it's 35'000 kilometer length up to geostationary orbit. I assume that even an extremely strong material would be liable to break under such extreme velocity impacts and stress. For instance, a piece of old rocket booster has considerable kinetic energy and I wouldn't like to bet on the elevator being over engineered enough to withstand such an impact.
Or what about that asteroid that is scheduled to pass close to the earth in 2029 or so, or any of the car sized asteroids that hit the earth regularly? What impact and damage could they do to the elevator?
And what happens if the elevator is cut? If part of it comes down on the earth it is going to be one massive impact, far more dangerous than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
I really hate the way that Americans often seem to lose their sanity the minute the word "communist" is mentioned, since it seems like such a knee jerk reflex, especially since the cold war ended around 15 years ago. However, I think that Sgrena's attitude toward the US was probably not the most favourable, as I can't imagine a European communist paper employing a giddy yay america type person. While communist papers and parties in Europe are dinosaurs, as not many are interested in them, I think that the general view of the US in Europe has nothing to do with being communist or not.
Living here myself, I simply see European attitudes as being one's of suspicion and disbelief at the rhetoric and actions of the current US government.
However, a lot of Europeans are just as supicious of their own governments as these are just as opaque in the way they do things.
I remember when some or other court in the fabulous US of A decided that the word "Windows" was too generic to be used as a basis for a lawsuit. That was during the Lindows which became Linpsire episode, which Microsoft won, unsurprisingly, eventually.
I would dearly love to know just how one can trademark actual nouns and verbs (and adverbs and adjectives) from any language. Considering that a tiger is an animal, it kind of blows me away. Didn't Apple simply trademark it as "Mac OS X Tiger" in any case?
I think, if this suite gets through, I am going to go into business trademarking every word I possibly can from a number of dictionaries, including such terms as Doors, Roofs, Walls, Toilets, Floors, Beds, Tables etc to prevent any growth of Microsoft's empire and sue the crap out of Microsoft for every copy of Excell ever sold, and Tim Berners-Lee and everyone else in the software world for the use of any kind of Tables in software. Then I will trademark every animal in existence and sue everyone who uses one of those poor creatures in a name.
Seriously, though, I wonder why we're even allowed to speak or write the language anymore? Maybe Bush's next phase of the revolution will be to bring out a law enforcing three years of jail for using words that criticise the government.
As per usual the patriotic Boeing (yay USA) fanclub has to go and piss on an accomplishment of some other company because it isn't American and because it's bigger and better than Made In USA whatever.
Get over yourselves. Boeing outsources as much of its planes to foreign countries as any other corporation. There is no real competeing vision for the 787 or the A380 as they serve different sectors of the market. Not to mention that it's just a fucking airplane, for crying out loud. What the fuck is wrong with you americans anyway?
For one thing, there is a major point you didn't mention in your poor sob story of oh so bullied Microsoft/Windows and how many user rate OSX good: The amount of Windows users here on Slashdot that regularly complain about Microsoft/Windows bashing.
And they do this even though articles on C# and.Net are often heavily supported as being good to code in by a decent amount of posters, for example.
A few years ago, when Adobe canned Premier for the Mac on OSX because Adobe was all in a huff about Apple competing with them with Final Cut Pro, was the time when Adobe started developing primarily for Windows. Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 were superb on my WinXP laptop at work, but they sucked big, hairy, sweaty, donkey balls on OSX, being slow, not fitting in with the OS HI guides very well and above all, being drastically late to the platform.
At the time (Mac OSX 10.1) one could have had the distinct impression that Adobe had given up on the Mac platform and was only developing for those die hards in the pre-press and printing industry. And since then, Adobe has brought out new tools, such as that Audio app (ex Cool Edit Pro) which are Windows only. Even Acrobat, that bloated piece of pig fat, ran better on Windows.
Then, it seemed as if Adobe realised that OSX was surprisingly (to them and their utterly clueless marketing staff) making big gains rapidly, and lo and behold, The CS set is much better in its OSX integration.
But what makes me really laugh is that Adobe is suddenly being faced with a major competitor to one of its main cash cows (PDF is used in governments and official papers worldwide), and this by no less than Microsoft which has both the resources and the time to slowly bring printer makers to write drivers for it and to let it slowly gain acceptance. Microsoft is about the only company that can afford to let this Metro thing flop through three versions until it gains traction.
I bet you the people in Mountain View (Adobe), are crapping themselves. This could be one of the reasons they bought Macromedia, in order to have Flash as a barganing chip with MS.
This is bad news for Apple, its customers (i.e. me and everyone else using a Mac or an iPod), and its shareholders.
No one likes an arrogant arsehole, and people like arrogant arseholes even less who act like mini dictators. It's not like Apple has a 90% marketshare in the computer market to play with, and investors shy away from erratic, irrational CEOs. I can understand him withdrawing the book on his life from the Apple store shelves, as he has the power to do that, but the Dumies series is extremely popular and it could make an enemy of extremely influential people like David Pogue, whose NYTimes tech articles get read by millions.
What worries me most about this is that it reminds me of the bat shit megalomanic attitude that Jobs had before he was canned from Apple the first time in 1985, trying to push others around.
Steve, if you or one of your slaves is reading this, take these words of advice: You, as a celebrity and CEO of a very trendy company, give away a certain amount of privacy as part of your status. You, like me and everyone else, are not an island. You depend on literally millions of other people for your success, from customers, to shareholders, to employees, to reviewers, to the press. Think about that before you fly into a rage like a spoilt five year old brat the next time.
While this post will no doubt generate some "Eurotrash" comment, I think this will not be legally acceptable in the EU, as data privacy laws are far stricter there. Sharing of private data without the explicit consent of a person is against the law.
I wonder if a yes/no or send/don't send box is enough to be considered as explicit consent.
I think that if they simply fixed the search tool, they'd be part of the way there. That way, they'd be able to do a quick search before they posted an article. Alternativley, they could just use google.
I think it's time that there was an open discussion of dupes (This article is a dupe of one poasted last night).
There have been pro and against arguments. The pro argument have been that some people miss the original articles and have a second chance to post. The neutral argument has been that if one doesn't like the dupe, one should simpy ignore it. Both of these arguments make good sense.
However, slashdot is in some sense a commercial enterprise. The majority are, of course, not subscribers, but there must be quite a few all the same. Slashdot also gets paid by advertisers to get many hits. Advertisers could argue that they get less hits on dupe articles.
In these last two cases, it isn't exactly a shiny example of quality in a product (if one can look upin slashdot as a product) to see so many dupes. I know that the sheer number of dupes in slashdot would prevent me from subscribing as I see it as a problem of editors being disinterested in checking what they post.
Firstly, I am happy that I see some people here reflecting critically on the problem. In fact, accepting that there is a problem at all. I expected to mainly see a mass slashdot deinal that there could be a problem with computers and learning.
I do wonder though, if the problem is really related to email at all. I personally suspect that the problem might instead be more systemic, in that a combination of shiny graphics, graphical games, the spell checker mentaility and a lack of social interaction aren't the problem.
In other words, would the same problem be prevalent in people who spend most of their time in a command line environment of vi, emacs, bash, mutt, lynx etc?
While I'm pretty sure that a lack of social interaction can make a social idiot of anyone, I have an idea that the world of computer graphics and easy user interaction can make people both lazy and more enveloped in their computer worlds.
A prime example in gaming is the classical hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy text game back in the dos days compared with the mindless fps games of today which have almost no intelligent thought behind the actual gameplay.
All that said, I'm pleased that people are finally starting to take notice of this. It's about time that the unquestionability of computers was questioned. I suspect though, that every major player in the computer world, including IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Intel and others, would try their best to get this pushed under the carpet.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I don't own a digtial musice player, but if I did it would be an iPod and there are a nujmber of reasons behind that.
1. Confusion. There is a problem with the various Windows WMA music stores, a big problem: There are too many of them. Napster, Yahoo, MSN, Coke, Wallmart etc. Yahoo's store looks like the cheapest/month, at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that some other store will somehow compete pretty soon. The problem is that these stores are not compatible with one another (obviously) and that there is no vast difference between them. While they all offer subscription, only a few offer the ability to download and buy single tracks. This cannot be stated enough. All of these stores are fighting amongst one another for a small slice of the market. They all claim to be "The iPod/iTunes alternative", but the reality is that they fight amongst one another for the paying twice for the same song. Once to listen to it on subscription, and twice to "own" it forever.
3. Features vs. Ease of use. All of these stores, and especially this Yahoo one, offer loads of features. Look at this idiot geek wetting himself about features like skins and plug-ins. He's basically saying that WinAmp is now part of an online store. The thing is that one of the reasons that the iPod and iTunes is so popular is that it is very very simple. It offers a basic, easy to understand business model. Basically, it is, you pay for a song and you can play and do with it what you want afterwards, basta.
The iPod doesn't have built in TV, FM, or a razor. It just plays music. It's also simple.
Most people just want to listen to their music that they bought. They are not interested in skins for the player, or OGG format or having to fork out next month's payment.
4. All of Apple's competitors complain about the iPod and iTunes not being "open". What they are essentially complaining about is that they don't have a slice of the pie. If they were in Apple's position, they wouldn't open their stuff to Apple either.
How's it going with the job search
Switzerland has one of the highest percentages of Mac users worldwide, and it's about time that the bloody itms showed up here.
Fuck you you hypocritical coward. Too fucking scared to post your username, but, typically, real man enough to make a big noise. You must be a Christian american bigot fuckprick.
perhaps he was as much an arrogant fuck about it as you were in your post, and thereby managed to piss off a whole load of people who would have otherwise listened to him.
No shit, fuckstick. And what were the fucking Crusades then? Peace and brotherly love? Your post just proves how fucking dumb and blind you Christians really are. Enjoy your stay in the dark ages, morons. The rest of the world will send you a postcard every century or so.
Damn straight. If there are people that are taking your country straight back to the dark ages, it is a huge irony that one of them is a respected science fiction author, with his christian bigotry.
I find the whole american christian scene pathetic and backwards and the guarantor of losing your country's place in this world. It happened once before in history, when Islam came out of the desert and rapidly overran a lot of christian territory, one of the reasons was that Islam was a lot more progressive at the time than Christianity. All the centres of knowledge in the world at the time were in Islamic countries.
Christianity's response was the fucking Crusades and the inquisition. It took several hundred years before the renaissance slowly started changing all that.
Your country, with its backward christian superstition, is going to plunge itself back into a state of unquestioning stupidity and backwardness.
I didn't care much for the interviewer in the Salon interview, who seemed more interested in her world of hurt than anything else, and I didn't care much for Card's Christian Crusader mentality of thinking it ok to slaughter the heathens.
The second link, where Card rabbits on about his fucking church (yet another American crap shit sect that makes OBL look progressive) and his fucking lopsided view of homos, which he defends entirely with his being a mormon moron, instead of trying to fucking think and realise that there is more to life than fucking cristianity.
Stupid fuckwad bastard.
It's a pity, because the cretins that make up the cream of the Hollywood scum are certain to fuck it up in their mindless and tasteless greedy quest for more money at the expense of everything else on earth.
It's days like this that I think it a pity the Soviets never launched all the SS-18s at the USA and vice versa so that humanity can start over again.
" The Bible leaves no room for other religions, no other way."
But the Koran basically also says it's the only way, and the Jews don't think they're wrong either. So who's right?
You say you experience the bible through the written word, but it wasn't even written in a language you understand, and you can only read it through a series of many, many translations (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic->latin->old english->middle english->modern english(King James)->modern american version). At least the Koran is still in Classical Arabic and the Torah in Hebrew. What about their experience of the written word.
I'm sorry, but your explanation has about as much meaning as someone who is inspired by a poem or a song, even though it might be a good song or poem. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
While obviously not all Americans are religious fundamentalist Christians, reports in the news during the last election indicate that a good 40% or so are and that the number is climbing. Apart from rabidly theocratic nations like Saudi Arabia, Iran and a few others, there is nowhere else on ths planet where there is such a growth of dogmatic religious beliefs along with the resulting intolerance of other faiths and the scientific worldview. For these people, the enlightenment never happened.
I have no idea what it is that causes the historic episodes of religious sects, religions and ideologies. My personal theory is that it starts off with a certain part of the culture that has these specific beliefs, and that in times of financial and social despair, people turn to extremism as a crutch in their fear and uncertainty. That was the case in Europe in the dark ages and that was the case in Nazi Germany, and that is the case in many Islamic countries governed by tyrannical heretics.
I don't know if the current resurgence of dogmatic christianity in the USA is a result of the vietnam years liberalism and humiliation, a feeling of being lost in the world (very often a reason, I think) or 9/11 and the realisation that there is indeed a world beyond the borders of the USA. Probably a combination.
But the consequences of forcing the teaching of nonsensical dogmas as science in schools, coupled with the already extremely poor US education system and the fact that foreign students are no longer bolstering the US' scientific institutions due to the security paranoia is likely to be the cause of the US becoming an overpopulated poor backwards country in the future. It won't happen overnight, but it might happen in 50 years.
Something that bothers me about ID or Christian, Judaic or Islamic belief is that those beliefs base their beliefs on the written word. In other words, it's something that you read somewhere. I beg all of those who are Christians to tell me what makes their particular brand better than the next one. Why is Jesus right for a Christian but not for a Jew? What makes a Muslim a heretic and a Christian holy?
Those are all things you either heard in your particular culture, group, family, church or mosque or read in your particular holy book.
Please tell me, and I don't mean this as a way to bait you, how you experience "God and his son Jesus" as one person put it further down. Do you mean that the two of them chat to you personally?
Why can't my particular idea of religion be right? I believe in a light that shines inside all things. That is the way I experience a God like experience, except that I don't give it a name or try to explain it in terms of some previous religion, book or science.
Am I in your eyes somehow unholy because I don't believe in your particular book or your physical place of worship? Am I a sinner because I am not interested in your religious rites?
Explain all of that to me in terms of THINGS YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED, and not in terms of things that you have read or heard from others.
I didn't really understand a word you said, to be honest. Are you implying that the KGB is still communist, at least the one that aren't in the FSB or in the Russian mafia? Or the Stasi, at least those who were not prosecuted by German post reunification trials and exposes? Or the Bulgarian hit squads, in a country now having signed agreements to join the EU?
I know that there is a communist party in Italy, as much as there is one in France, but neither has ever been in government and their popularity is not exactly astronomic, and they are not taken as seriously in their country, as you in your country take them.
I've seen numerous people here on slashdot being totally obsessed with the idea of a space elevator, since it offers a cheap and efficient way to get into orbit, but less obsessed with some real dangers in the real world, should an elevator ever be constructed.
Consider that a space elevator is built, with carbon nanotubes, or whatever suitable material. Now, what can damage or destroy the elevator? There is so much space junk hurtling around the planet, about which slashdot has already had articles, that something is bound to hit some portion of the cable on it's 35'000 kilometer length up to geostationary orbit. I assume that even an extremely strong material would be liable to break under such extreme velocity impacts and stress. For instance, a piece of old rocket booster has considerable kinetic energy and I wouldn't like to bet on the elevator being over engineered enough to withstand such an impact.
Or what about that asteroid that is scheduled to pass close to the earth in 2029 or so, or any of the car sized asteroids that hit the earth regularly? What impact and damage could they do to the elevator?
And what happens if the elevator is cut? If part of it comes down on the earth it is going to be one massive impact, far more dangerous than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
I really hate the way that Americans often seem to lose their sanity the minute the word "communist" is mentioned, since it seems like such a knee jerk reflex, especially since the cold war ended around 15 years ago. However, I think that Sgrena's attitude toward the US was probably not the most favourable, as I can't imagine a European communist paper employing a giddy yay america type person. While communist papers and parties in Europe are dinosaurs, as not many are interested in them, I think that the general view of the US in Europe has nothing to do with being communist or not.
Living here myself, I simply see European attitudes as being one's of suspicion and disbelief at the rhetoric and actions of the current US government.
However, a lot of Europeans are just as supicious of their own governments as these are just as opaque in the way they do things.
I remember when some or other court in the fabulous US of A decided that the word "Windows" was too generic to be used as a basis for a lawsuit. That was during the Lindows which became Linpsire episode, which Microsoft won, unsurprisingly, eventually.
I would dearly love to know just how one can trademark actual nouns and verbs (and adverbs and adjectives) from any language. Considering that a tiger is an animal, it kind of blows me away. Didn't Apple simply trademark it as "Mac OS X Tiger" in any case?
I think, if this suite gets through, I am going to go into business trademarking every word I possibly can from a number of dictionaries, including such terms as Doors, Roofs, Walls, Toilets, Floors, Beds, Tables etc to prevent any growth of Microsoft's empire and sue the crap out of Microsoft for every copy of Excell ever sold, and Tim Berners-Lee and everyone else in the software world for the use of any kind of Tables in software. Then I will trademark every animal in existence and sue everyone who uses one of those poor creatures in a name.
Seriously, though, I wonder why we're even allowed to speak or write the language anymore? Maybe Bush's next phase of the revolution will be to bring out a law enforcing three years of jail for using words that criticise the government.
As per usual the patriotic Boeing (yay USA) fanclub has to go and piss on an accomplishment of some other company because it isn't American and because it's bigger and better than Made In USA whatever.
Get over yourselves. Boeing outsources as much of its planes to foreign countries as any other corporation. There is no real competeing vision for the 787 or the A380 as they serve different sectors of the market. Not to mention that it's just a fucking airplane, for crying out loud. What the fuck is wrong with you americans anyway?
I don'r actually care. If subsidising Airbus means more jobs are created in the industry, then all the more power to them.
For one thing, there is a major point you didn't mention in your poor sob story of oh so bullied Microsoft/Windows and how many user rate OSX good: The amount of Windows users here on Slashdot that regularly complain about Microsoft/Windows bashing.
.Net are often heavily supported as being good to code in by a decent amount of posters, for example.
And they do this even though articles on C# and
A few years ago, when Adobe canned Premier for the Mac on OSX because Adobe was all in a huff about Apple competing with them with Final Cut Pro, was the time when Adobe started developing primarily for Windows. Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 were superb on my WinXP laptop at work, but they sucked big, hairy, sweaty, donkey balls on OSX, being slow, not fitting in with the OS HI guides very well and above all, being drastically late to the platform.
At the time (Mac OSX 10.1) one could have had the distinct impression that Adobe had given up on the Mac platform and was only developing for those die hards in the pre-press and printing industry. And since then, Adobe has brought out new tools, such as that Audio app (ex Cool Edit Pro) which are Windows only. Even Acrobat, that bloated piece of pig fat, ran better on Windows.
Then, it seemed as if Adobe realised that OSX was surprisingly (to them and their utterly clueless marketing staff) making big gains rapidly, and lo and behold, The CS set is much better in its OSX integration.
But what makes me really laugh is that Adobe is suddenly being faced with a major competitor to one of its main cash cows (PDF is used in governments and official papers worldwide), and this by no less than Microsoft which has both the resources and the time to slowly bring printer makers to write drivers for it and to let it slowly gain acceptance. Microsoft is about the only company that can afford to let this Metro thing flop through three versions until it gains traction.
I bet you the people in Mountain View (Adobe), are crapping themselves. This could be one of the reasons they bought Macromedia, in order to have Flash as a barganing chip with MS.
This is bad news for Apple, its customers (i.e. me and everyone else using a Mac or an iPod), and its shareholders.
No one likes an arrogant arsehole, and people like arrogant arseholes even less who act like mini dictators. It's not like Apple has a 90% marketshare in the computer market to play with, and investors shy away from erratic, irrational CEOs. I can understand him withdrawing the book on his life from the Apple store shelves, as he has the power to do that, but the Dumies series is extremely popular and it could make an enemy of extremely influential people like David Pogue, whose NYTimes tech articles get read by millions.
What worries me most about this is that it reminds me of the bat shit megalomanic attitude that Jobs had before he was canned from Apple the first time in 1985, trying to push others around.
Steve, if you or one of your slaves is reading this, take these words of advice: You, as a celebrity and CEO of a very trendy company, give away a certain amount of privacy as part of your status. You, like me and everyone else, are not an island. You depend on literally millions of other people for your success, from customers, to shareholders, to employees, to reviewers, to the press. Think about that before you fly into a rage like a spoilt five year old brat the next time.
While this post will no doubt generate some "Eurotrash" comment, I think this will not be legally acceptable in the EU, as data privacy laws are far stricter there. Sharing of private data without the explicit consent of a person is against the law.
I wonder if a yes/no or send/don't send box is enough to be considered as explicit consent.
I think that if they simply fixed the search tool, they'd be part of the way there. That way, they'd be able to do a quick search before they posted an article. Alternativley, they could just use google.
I think it's time that there was an open discussion of dupes (This article is a dupe of one poasted last night).
There have been pro and against arguments. The pro argument have been that some people miss the original articles and have a second chance to post. The neutral argument has been that if one doesn't like the dupe, one should simpy ignore it. Both of these arguments make good sense.
However, slashdot is in some sense a commercial enterprise. The majority are, of course, not subscribers, but there must be quite a few all the same. Slashdot also gets paid by advertisers to get many hits. Advertisers could argue that they get less hits on dupe articles.
In these last two cases, it isn't exactly a shiny example of quality in a product (if one can look upin slashdot as a product) to see so many dupes. I know that the sheer number of dupes in slashdot would prevent me from subscribing as I see it as a problem of editors being disinterested in checking what they post.
Firstly, I am happy that I see some people here reflecting critically on the problem. In fact, accepting that there is a problem at all. I expected to mainly see a mass slashdot deinal that there could be a problem with computers and learning.
I do wonder though, if the problem is really related to email at all. I personally suspect that the problem might instead be more systemic, in that a combination of shiny graphics, graphical games, the spell checker mentaility and a lack of social interaction aren't the problem.
In other words, would the same problem be prevalent in people who spend most of their time in a command line environment of vi, emacs, bash, mutt, lynx etc?
While I'm pretty sure that a lack of social interaction can make a social idiot of anyone, I have an idea that the world of computer graphics and easy user interaction can make people both lazy and more enveloped in their computer worlds.
A prime example in gaming is the classical hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy text game back in the dos days compared with the mindless fps games of today which have almost no intelligent thought behind the actual gameplay.
All that said, I'm pleased that people are finally starting to take notice of this. It's about time that the unquestionability of computers was questioned. I suspect though, that every major player in the computer world, including IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Intel and others, would try their best to get this pushed under the carpet.