Yes this is accurate. MS Office didn't exist until much later. MS held off on several important pieces of software for the Mac OS in exchange for licensing of technology. This software includes MS Word (first for Mac), MS Excel (also first for Mac), MS File, and a entry-level visual programming language for beginners. You know, all the foundations for what would later become Office in the later days of Windows development, the early- to mid-90s.
In fact, one of the things MS also held off on Word and Excel for was the rights to be the vendor of a visual BASIC development environment for the Mac. Apple had been developing their own, but MS howled for the rights to be the sole vendor or else. Apple dropped theirs, MS never came out with theirs until much later and then dropped it due to lack of interest, and a frustrated Apple developer name Bill Atkinson came up with Hypercard as a substitute in the mean time.
The history of this and many other MS dirty dealings can be found at Mackido, under the history section. It's a fine site which has unfortunately been very infrequently updated since the author got a job writing for MacWEEK.
Of course they've ported Quicktime. Quicktime is part of the core Mac OS APIs. Demos of early Quicktime work were shown as far back as when they were still calling the developmental OS Rhapsody (a far cooler name than Mac OS X, IMHO).
OK, Linux isn't 100% user friendly to people weened on Windows. But has anyone heard of X over at Infoasis? Evidently not.
Sorry, but have you ever worked in some sort of customer support job where you had to deal with novice computer users? I have -- in a Mac lab, no less. It's really hard to get users to step out of thinking in terms of Windows and to attempt to figure out the logic of the system from a true beginner's approach. Can you imagine Windows users getting used to configuring and using X?
Personally, I can, and I agree that Linux isn't viable for consumers. It's bad enough talking some of my fellow computer science and computer engineering students into doing their first kernel recompile when they need new hardware support. Can you imagine trying to talk someone completely uninformed through adding hardware support in Linux?
The problem is that once again, people underestimate how much of Apple's income comes from their hardware. Apple makes nearly nothing off of OS sales. That's one reason new versions of the OS are relatively cheap compared to a full copy of NT or Win2K. Apple gets all its money from the hardware sales.
It's been demonstrated many times in the past that your average consumer will go for low price over high performance. If Apple ported Mac OS X to Intel, you can kiss their PPC machine sales goodbye. People would install the system on $500 PCs and say to heck with a $1000 iMac in spite of the nice color.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a Mac user and a major Apple supporter, but this article is nothing but seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. I do think Mac OS X will eat into Linux sales somewhat, because it is a viable Unix platform all to itself, in the end it may boost Linux sales as people get interested in using the command line provided.
I think Apple's best chance for domination is to reinstate the Yellow Box (now Cocoa) APIs for Windows. With no Office leverage to fear for making apps easier to port between Mac and Windows, it would be the best way to encourage software to be written for both platforms.
...with the proceeds to benefit a charity chosen by Shawn Fanning and Dexter Holland.
Yeah. I read that part and was once again puzzled by how Napster is planning to make money. I mean, that's just tossing away a possible revenue stream. I'm glad they're giving it to charity, but I just can't figure out the motivation behind Napster, Inc. This is getting more mysterious than Transmeta was.
Good point. I have abso-freakin'-lutely no idea how they're supposed to be making money -- that is unless their entire business plan is to grab VC until the final version of 2.0 comes out and then skip country with it. Maybe they're waiting until they get a large enough user base and then start to integrate ads into the clients.
(BTW, the venture capital was what I was referring to as "making money." Of course, I realize that they're not really making money that way since they're supposed to pay it back -- hence the skip country interpretation.)
Well, as someone whose club has gone out and had shirts produced for them before, I can safely say that it isn't a helluva lot of profit. Consider what Offspring shirts sell for at their concerts. This is nickels and dimes compared to that.
Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to. To-may-to, to-mah-to. <singing>Let's call the whole thing off.</singing>
Seriously, though. Copyright is ownership of the right to copy the material in a product such as a book, a song, or a video game. Trademark is ownership of the right to copy a product name or logo. The core issue is use of someone else's idea.
You're wrong. Napster is, in its purest form, a distributed filesystem that doesn't even know it. Napster is a very useful tool for sharing legal songs as well.
Hey, that's right, and a thermonuclear device is at it's purest form a recreation of the live-giving energy of the sun. It's a very useful tool for clearing land for canals and hydroelectric dams.
Just because 99.44% of its users are shuttling crappy, copyrighted material around doesn't remove the usefulness of the program. Napster is a good tool for the job of shuttling around mp3s, whether crappy or copyrighted or both or neither.
So, you're saying that Napster would've gotten all this media attention and accompanying venture capital with only 0.56% of it's current user base? Face the (pirated) music. Napster is only making money due to the large pirated user base and has no financial interest in stopping it.
Out of curiosity, what led you to choose the name for the site as a gaming site for women except for the association created by the Barbie toy line? I've never heard of Barbies as a description for anything other than Mattel's toys and Australian barbeque grills.
Re:The Environment is a Property-Rights Issue
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Natural Capitalism
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· Score: 2
People always use the excuse "one person can make no difference" to justify either inaction or throwing away the system and starting over. Both are silly.
You are ignoring his point. Propose and explain exactly how one or even a significant majority of consumers can force G.E. to spend money to remove PCBs for water supplies. Don't buy their products? Then where are they going to get the capital to fund such a cleanup?
The fact is either the government has to force them to clean it up, the government has to clean it up, or a wealthy individual or group has to voluntarily throw money into cleaning it up with no chance of recovering a profit from it -- what's the free market motivation, then?
Democracy is a dictatorship with more than one foot on your neck.
If you somehow consider democracy to "less free" than capitalism (not that I'm seeing how "soft" is less pleasant than "blue"), what do you propose? Anarchy?
What [the USSR or China] practiced is socialism, without the "power is exercised by the whole community" bit.
In other words, facism, not socialism. Socialism, as Marx defined it, inherently involves democracy because the community controls it. Facism is totalitarian control with government controlled industry. The people have no input. The problem with talking about socialism or communisim versus capitalism is that there have been no pure socialist or communist societies. In practice, the Soviets were less socialist than France or modern day Japan -- which both have large Socialist parties, incidentally.
In a true free market economy, as he pointed out, corporations are feudal states. While their customers can more from state to state (most of the time), if all the lords are behaving badly, there's nowhere to turn. Consumers do not get a vote unles they're rich enough to own significant stock in the company. However, if they own significant stock, they may let their financial concerns override their ethical concerns due to the profit brought by the company's illicit behavior. Witness Microsoft.
It's not like they have a free market over there [in China].
Yeah, after all, the state/people owns and controls all the Microsoft, GM, etc. plants and subsidaries over there. It's not like union groups are in an uproar because American corporations are going to be giving jobs to the Chinese that used to be done by Americans. After all, the state owns everything over there.
Face reality. While China is more controlling of the market, it's just as much a hybrid market as that of most of the "free world."
I've also read a lot of other things. I've even thought about things myself, and talked them over with others who have different viewpoints. Which is why I have an informed opinion. Maybe you should try it?
If you've been just a thorough in your research and polite and thoughful in your discussions as you have been here, it's no wonder you're spouting off uninformed.
As another poster pointed out, maybe you should do some more research. The conspiracy theories of government investment via the Social Security fund show just how little you knew about the actual issue.
AS LONG as everyone's property rights are recognized, and air and water pollution is paid for by those producing it
Of course, the problem is that it is not the case that everyone's property rights are recognized, or that our definitions of property rights doesn't really cover the environment as a whole. This is like saying that as long as everyone's property rights are recognized, all the bad blood and wasted consumer and 3rd party resources are paid for by those producing spam.
Besides, it's this fixation with money that causes people to place hard quantified values on the worth of human life, health, and happiness. When a consumer buys a Twinkie, they aren't truly understanding the full implications of the manufacturing process that went into that little snack nor are they understanding the full implications of the wrapper, left behind for next few centuries. (That is, assuming that it is left open to the air to decompose rather than buried in a landfill for eternity.) The assertion that people left to their own devices will create a utopia ignores the effects of greed, cutthroat competition, and other baser human emotions.
Perhaps Leonard Read should write a sequel about what thousands of untold hands working without restrictions can do. He should title it "I, Ethnic Cleansing."
Re:MERMAID FOREST GORY?!?!?!
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Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
Isn't that the one where the kid sticks his finger in the guy's eye?...or is that Mermaid's Scar, which is also in the same series?
BTW nerds don't use Apples so why does any news about them matter?
I beg to differ. I'm using a Mac right now, and I challenge you to find someone who wouldn't consider me a nerd. <grin>
Some of us are quite happy with the amount of Apple reporting, and dammit, if it's true, then bundling a wireless, buttonless, programmable mouse with a system as a default option is quite cool.
It really has to do with what you're exposed to, and to be honest, many geeks are attracted to anime for the sexual content. Perennial favorites like Ninja Scroll (which I personally can't stand because of the rape scenes) attest to this. It sound from your description, you've been exposed to the genre of anime known as hentai, which is Japanese porn. However, to dismiss the entirety of anime based on this is like dismissing all of American television based on tuning into the Playboy channel once or twice.
There are a wide variety of more gentle shows in anime. Anime is just another film media for Japan. Tragic real-life dramas like "Grave of the Fireflies," gentle kids movies like "My Neighbor Totoro," and charged psycho-dramas like the recent "Perfect Blue" all are animated. There is an entire genre called shoujo, which is young girls anime that tends to focus on romance, relationships between friends, and situational comedy. They also can be cute to the point of delivering insulin shock.
To be honest, I like a lot of the girls shows because they're so damn funny at times. Comedy is my biggest interest in anime. The above mentioned show "Trigun" is one of the better ones, and does not have any negative sexual portrayals of women. You should give anime a second chance. This time, do an informed search on the web and stay away from anything which has too sexed-up of a cover. (This may unfortunately make you miss a few good things to because of companies like A.D.V. Film's constant attempts at making their stuff look like it has more sex in it than it actually does.) Oh, and get some informed friends to show you some anime rather than whatever perv shoved the stuff you watched in your face. The Anime Turnpike is a good resource for finding fan sites that will give you a good idea of what kind of people are watching what.
I will recommend the following:
Trigun -- A funny slapstick comedy centered around a character who hides his competence, and a cool sci-fi tinted western.
Giant Robo -- Epic drama, badass fights between espers, and retro 70s animation. One of the best of all time.
Evangelion -- A psychological study in depression, with cool living robots, though there's a little fan-service they bring up constantly as a joke.
Visions of Escaflowne -- Beautiful visuals, cool fantasy, a tale of altered fate and romance.
Cowboy Bebop -- An ultra-cool vision of the future that's neither dystopian nor utopian. Lots of great action and intriguing characters.
Serial Experiments Lain -- Wow. What more can I say? This is the penultimate work of cyberspace mergine with the real world. See it, but be prepared to be confused as most of what happens in the plot is a mystery and much of it is allegorical or left unexplained.
Slayers -- The series from Software Sculptors, not the OAVs or the movies as they feature Naga, which fits the stereotype, though you never see her once do anything sexual. The series is a hillarious swords and sorcery romp that refuses to get serious for more than a few minutes at a time (much to the dismay of Zelgadis, one of the characters).
P.S. I'm not just the president of my college anime club, I'm also a client.
First off, let me save a lot of quoting and redundant responses by asking this: Where do you get off assuming that just because the poster you responded to doesn't like User Friendly that they are a Windows bigot? You are demonstrating first-hand the poster's assertions about User Friendly's problem being with it's fans, and you're giving fellow Linux users a bad reputation, especially with that "burn in NT hell" line.
A bit of jealousy perhaps? We never hear about "Suprise, Suprise. With the sale of new distributions Linus is once again bringing his sub-standard kernel to the universe". Why is that? Is it because he makes no money off of Linux and Illiad does? Money != bad.
That's a total non-issue. Comic strip artists like Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance do not have this issue because they handle marketing in a tasteful manner, unlike Illiad's crass "branding" web site. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame once wrote an article in his 10th anniversary special book about how marketing in the manner Illiad is doing devalues and cheapens the art of the strip. Illiad can only hope to be half the comic strip artist that Bill Watterson was.
Audiences can not be commodized, product can.
Ah, but is that really true? Illiad has a fanatically loyal following of techie fans. Illiad is selling the ability for companies like SuSE to target and market to his audience by using his branded characters. In effect, Illiad is selling his audience to interested companies. Of course, this is just dithering about semantics, so I'll leave it at that.
First of all, since when has CARTOONS been considered art? It's COMEDY, by definition it's going to be formulaic, get over it. If you're looking for high-brow technical humor read some April 1st RFCs or something.
My, my. It's a sad commentary when a fan of an artistic media doesn't even recognize it as art. Perhaps your satisfaction with sit-com style formulae has stagnated your appreciation of what truly innovative and creative artwork and comedy should be.
Once again, I refer to Bill Watterson's 10th anniversary Calvin and Hobbes book on issues of the artform of comics. The essay there, which delves into the history of the artform before it became wedged into its current limited panel layout and forced schtick format is very educational.
The rich and gentle satire of politics and day to day living, Pogo, and it's modern day successor, Ozy and Millie, certainly qualify as a some of the best of the 20th century. Who can deny that the Sandman series of graphic novels are art? Certainly not the people who awarded it the Hugo award for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Perhaps you should pick up the latest offering, The Dream Hunters, which features a return of Neil Gaiman's strong evocative writing with Yoshitaka Amano's etherial, otherworldy artwork narrating the tale. Then you may still attempt to deny to the world that comics are art.
Just because User Friendly and many syndicated sellouts like Garfield and Dilbert seem increasingly incapable of producing art and non-formulaic humor as their profits from merchandising increase, don't assume that comics cannot be art. You are only appreciating the most bastardised version of it.
And this would prove what? You might has well have said "The first person that compares Tux to MS Bob gets a sticker"
That makes absolutely no sense. It's obvious you aren't familiar with the character Opus from Bloom Count or you'd be able to see the ways in which the Dust Puppy and he share many, many similar personality traits. The Dust Puppy is at best a tribute to and at worst a rip-off of Opus.
Jezus...what did they do to you to rip your sense of humour out so completely?
Perhaps, he just doesn't think that all comedy by definition should be formulaic as you do. Making fun of something can be funny. Making fun of someone making fun of something rarely is.
The keys to comedy are spontaneity, creativity, timing, and relevance to the audience. In the world of comic strips, #1 and #3 are usually handled in the layout and pacing of when certain lines happen, with the comedic twist almost always happening in the last panel. User Friendly well appreciates its market and has #4 well in hand.
It's #2, creativity, that User Friendly is sometimes seen as lacking in. This is much the same as Odie getting punted off a table by Garfield or Dilbert's boss saying something really stupid. They're running gags that have been run into the ground. Since you think all humor should be formulaic, you probably don't have an appreciation for the importance of this. However, those of us who do see the complete lack of creativity in a spoof of a spoof.
Do some exploring. There are plenty of good web comics that break the formulaic mold. I read about 30 or so of them a day. It shouldn't be hard to find one to match your tastes that is better than UF.
What exactly did you intend to mod him down for? Expressing a valid opinion? I don't remember that one being on the moderation options. What you are admitting is that you were planning on abusing your moderator points to damage someone whose opinion you disagreed with.
What's this about him having to sellout to keep his people paid? I mean, cry me a river. Just look at Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance fame, and he does employ a staff of people to help him run the site and his business. I don't think he's having a problem getting by on banner ads, t-shirts, and book sales. The 30 or so other web cartoonist I read as part of my day don't seem to be having any trouble supporting theirselves economically. When you get as big as Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance, David Simpson of Ozy and Millie, Bill Holbrook of Kevin and Kell, or Scott Kurtz of PVP, book sales and ad banners seem to be more than enough to keep yourself solvent. That doesn't even count the many popular artists who don't have anything beyond banner ads to sponsor themselves, such as Zach Stroum of Etherlife, Gabriel and Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade, and Maritza Campos of College Roomies from Hell! -- all of whom are either college students or fully employed and do their strips as hobbies.
While I still find User Friendly mostly funny and still read it regularly, I lost a lot of respect for Illiad when I came across UF Media. The image he puts for on the site is one of someone whoring themselves out to corporate sponsorship. Illiad doesn't seem content with just selling t-shirts and books directly. He is actively calling to have his characters used as logos to curry favor with his fans for companies like SuSE. He wants the airline commercial spots, the suction cup animals, and co-branded food that syndicated sell-outs like Garfield have engendered.
I think this strip from Penny Arcade illustrates the opinions that many of us have for his ethics and credibility, in spite of or along with our opinions of his work on its own. It hurts his credibility because corporate sponsorship and co-branding are often the vicious monetary cycle that keeps comics going in newspapers long after they stopped being funny or original and sometimes even long after the creator of the strip has died. It's that we object to.
P.S. Slashdot readers should hopefully get a kick out of this strip. Just a friendly reminder for when talking to people who don't read Slashdot.
And I've apparently attracted my own division of trolls.
No, sir, you are the troll. As acknowledged by one of your first rebuttals to one of the first replies, you fully expected to marked down. That is prima face evidence that you posted the original post with the full intention of angering people. <b>That</b> is a troll. People who respond back in an angry fashion are flaming you. You are the troll.
I hope you enjoyed wasting moderator time with your rapid spewing of ill thought out messages. It's sad to see at this deeply nested of a level a final admission that, yes, hardware people can be at fault.
A reminder: If hardware people are so perfect, why does the Linux kernel have patches to avoid the Pentium F00F bug?
So, basically, it boils down to you wanting all programmers to be perfect and for software to auto-magically work. Well, gosh. I know my job as a software developer would be a lot easier if everyone else was perfect.
There is basically only one way to prevent users from having problems installing new software and hardware -- don't give them options. The only way for this to work is if everyone sticks to a hard set of standards or a closed, proprietary system. This is one reason hardware is plug-and-play on Macintoshes -- you follow Apple's standards, or it's unsupported and probably doesn't work across OS upgrades.
What do you get then? People bitching about not having options. It's one or the other. You have to choose which.
Okay, I remember from one of my classes the difference between SMP and NUMA. I remember a very brief discussion on SGI's CC-NUMA, and how it was basically as switched network for processors to be talking to different segemented areas of memory so that not all processors are trying to access the same address space of memory and blocking each other's access to the memory bus.
Now, does anyone know what the differences are between SGI's CC-NUMA and IBM's NUMA-Q?
Actually, there's another method for storing and retrieving energy from a flywheel based on embedding magnets in the flywheel and keeping it levitated in a vacuum. You use the rotating magnets to drive an electric motor and charge them up by reversing the polarity. Since there's no mechanical attachment to an engine and next to no friction, you can theoretically keep the momentum stored in the flywheel indefinitely. I remember reading about a guy who had come up with an automobile engine based on this design in Discover magazine about a few years ago. Unfortunately, the guy was a bit of a patriotic zealot and refused to sell the design to anybody but American auto manufacturers who had only a passing interest in making it into a backup for a hybrid engine design. The Japanese were biting at the bit to buy his technology for use in non-hybrid applications, but he refused to sell. A shame. People all over the world might be using his engine design now if he hadn't been so against letting a foreign company use it.
Face it, Linux isn't hurting Apple's bottom line at all. The strengths of the Mac OS are all of Linux's weaknesses. The large number of first time computer users and Windows converts buying new iMacs FAR outweighs the numbers that they might be losing to Linux.
Let's not forget too that most Mac users that might get interested in Linux dual boot instead of abandoning the Mac totally. Linux only helps sell Macs because of the small PPC Linux following.
Try out this old article on Ars Technica about the issue. Basically, everything that holds true for Quartz also held true for Display Postscript. The originating markup language behind the display version has just changed from Postscript to PDF. DPS was WAY ahead of its time. I just hope Apple keeps the networked aspect of the rendering system or makes it easy to extend to do networking.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes this is accurate. MS Office didn't exist until much later. MS held off on several important pieces of software for the Mac OS in exchange for licensing of technology. This software includes MS Word (first for Mac), MS Excel (also first for Mac), MS File, and a entry-level visual programming language for beginners. You know, all the foundations for what would later become Office in the later days of Windows development, the early- to mid-90s.
In fact, one of the things MS also held off on Word and Excel for was the rights to be the vendor of a visual BASIC development environment for the Mac. Apple had been developing their own, but MS howled for the rights to be the sole vendor or else. Apple dropped theirs, MS never came out with theirs until much later and then dropped it due to lack of interest, and a frustrated Apple developer name Bill Atkinson came up with Hypercard as a substitute in the mean time.
The history of this and many other MS dirty dealings can be found at Mackido, under the history section. It's a fine site which has unfortunately been very infrequently updated since the author got a job writing for MacWEEK.
Of course they've ported Quicktime. Quicktime is part of the core Mac OS APIs. Demos of early Quicktime work were shown as far back as when they were still calling the developmental OS Rhapsody (a far cooler name than Mac OS X, IMHO).
OK, Linux isn't 100% user friendly to people weened on Windows. But has anyone heard of X over at Infoasis? Evidently not.
Sorry, but have you ever worked in some sort of customer support job where you had to deal with novice computer users? I have -- in a Mac lab, no less. It's really hard to get users to step out of thinking in terms of Windows and to attempt to figure out the logic of the system from a true beginner's approach. Can you imagine Windows users getting used to configuring and using X?
Personally, I can, and I agree that Linux isn't viable for consumers. It's bad enough talking some of my fellow computer science and computer engineering students into doing their first kernel recompile when they need new hardware support. Can you imagine trying to talk someone completely uninformed through adding hardware support in Linux?
Nope. Not viable.
The problem is that once again, people underestimate how much of Apple's income comes from their hardware. Apple makes nearly nothing off of OS sales. That's one reason new versions of the OS are relatively cheap compared to a full copy of NT or Win2K. Apple gets all its money from the hardware sales.
It's been demonstrated many times in the past that your average consumer will go for low price over high performance. If Apple ported Mac OS X to Intel, you can kiss their PPC machine sales goodbye. People would install the system on $500 PCs and say to heck with a $1000 iMac in spite of the nice color.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a Mac user and a major Apple supporter, but this article is nothing but seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. I do think Mac OS X will eat into Linux sales somewhat, because it is a viable Unix platform all to itself, in the end it may boost Linux sales as people get interested in using the command line provided.
I think Apple's best chance for domination is to reinstate the Yellow Box (now Cocoa) APIs for Windows. With no Office leverage to fear for making apps easier to port between Mac and Windows, it would be the best way to encourage software to be written for both platforms.
...with the proceeds to benefit a charity chosen by Shawn Fanning and Dexter Holland.
Yeah. I read that part and was once again puzzled by how Napster is planning to make money. I mean, that's just tossing away a possible revenue stream. I'm glad they're giving it to charity, but I just can't figure out the motivation behind Napster, Inc. This is getting more mysterious than Transmeta was.
Good point. I have abso-freakin'-lutely no idea how they're supposed to be making money -- that is unless their entire business plan is to grab VC until the final version of 2.0 comes out and then skip country with it. Maybe they're waiting until they get a large enough user base and then start to integrate ads into the clients.
(BTW, the venture capital was what I was referring to as "making money." Of course, I realize that they're not really making money that way since they're supposed to pay it back -- hence the skip country interpretation.)
Well, as someone whose club has gone out and had shirts produced for them before, I can safely say that it isn't a helluva lot of profit. Consider what Offspring shirts sell for at their concerts. This is nickels and dimes compared to that.
Trade-mark. Not copy-right.
Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to. To-may-to, to-mah-to. <singing>Let's call the whole thing off.</singing>
Seriously, though. Copyright is ownership of the right to copy the material in a product such as a book, a song, or a video game. Trademark is ownership of the right to copy a product name or logo. The core issue is use of someone else's idea.
You're wrong. Napster is, in its purest form, a distributed filesystem that doesn't even know it. Napster is a very useful tool for sharing legal songs as well.
Hey, that's right, and a thermonuclear device is at it's purest form a recreation of the live-giving energy of the sun. It's a very useful tool for clearing land for canals and hydroelectric dams.
Just because 99.44% of its users are shuttling crappy, copyrighted material around doesn't remove the usefulness of the program. Napster is a good tool for the job of shuttling around mp3s, whether crappy or copyrighted or both or neither.
So, you're saying that Napster would've gotten all this media attention and accompanying venture capital with only 0.56% of it's current user base? Face the (pirated) music. Napster is only making money due to the large pirated user base and has no financial interest in stopping it.
Out of curiosity, what led you to choose the name for the site as a gaming site for women except for the association created by the Barbie toy line? I've never heard of Barbies as a description for anything other than Mattel's toys and Australian barbeque grills.
People always use the excuse "one person can make no difference" to justify either inaction or throwing away the system and starting over. Both are silly.
You are ignoring his point. Propose and explain exactly how one or even a significant majority of consumers can force G.E. to spend money to remove PCBs for water supplies. Don't buy their products? Then where are they going to get the capital to fund such a cleanup?
The fact is either the government has to force them to clean it up, the government has to clean it up, or a wealthy individual or group has to voluntarily throw money into cleaning it up with no chance of recovering a profit from it -- what's the free market motivation, then?
Democracy is a dictatorship with more than one foot on your neck.
If you somehow consider democracy to "less free" than capitalism (not that I'm seeing how "soft" is less pleasant than "blue"), what do you propose? Anarchy?
What [the USSR or China] practiced is socialism, without the "power is exercised by the whole community" bit.
In other words, facism, not socialism. Socialism, as Marx defined it, inherently involves democracy because the community controls it. Facism is totalitarian control with government controlled industry. The people have no input. The problem with talking about socialism or communisim versus capitalism is that there have been no pure socialist or communist societies. In practice, the Soviets were less socialist than France or modern day Japan -- which both have large Socialist parties, incidentally.
In a true free market economy, as he pointed out, corporations are feudal states. While their customers can more from state to state (most of the time), if all the lords are behaving badly, there's nowhere to turn. Consumers do not get a vote unles they're rich enough to own significant stock in the company. However, if they own significant stock, they may let their financial concerns override their ethical concerns due to the profit brought by the company's illicit behavior. Witness Microsoft.
It's not like they have a free market over there [in China].
Yeah, after all, the state/people owns and controls all the Microsoft, GM, etc. plants and subsidaries over there. It's not like union groups are in an uproar because American corporations are going to be giving jobs to the Chinese that used to be done by Americans. After all, the state owns everything over there.
Face reality. While China is more controlling of the market, it's just as much a hybrid market as that of most of the "free world."
I've also read a lot of other things. I've even thought about things myself, and talked them over with others who have different viewpoints. Which is why I have an informed opinion. Maybe you should try it?
If you've been just a thorough in your research and polite and thoughful in your discussions as you have been here, it's no wonder you're spouting off uninformed.
As another poster pointed out, maybe you should do some more research. The conspiracy theories of government investment via the Social Security fund show just how little you knew about the actual issue.
AS LONG as everyone's property rights are recognized, and air and water pollution is paid for by those producing it
Of course, the problem is that it is not the case that everyone's property rights are recognized, or that our definitions of property rights doesn't really cover the environment as a whole. This is like saying that as long as everyone's property rights are recognized, all the bad blood and wasted consumer and 3rd party resources are paid for by those producing spam.
Besides, it's this fixation with money that causes people to place hard quantified values on the worth of human life, health, and happiness. When a consumer buys a Twinkie, they aren't truly understanding the full implications of the manufacturing process that went into that little snack nor are they understanding the full implications of the wrapper, left behind for next few centuries. (That is, assuming that it is left open to the air to decompose rather than buried in a landfill for eternity.) The assertion that people left to their own devices will create a utopia ignores the effects of greed, cutthroat competition, and other baser human emotions.
Perhaps Leonard Read should write a sequel about what thousands of untold hands working without restrictions can do. He should title it "I, Ethnic Cleansing."
Isn't that the one where the kid sticks his finger in the guy's eye? ...or is that Mermaid's Scar, which is also in the same series?
For those who don't know Megumi is the seiyuu (voice actor/actress) for a number of characters. Some of her most famous roles include:
Lina Inverse of the "Slayers" series.
Lime of "Saber Marionette J" and its sequels.
Ayanami Rei of "Evangelion"
Faye Valentine of "Cowboy Bebop"
Female Ranma of "Ranma 1/2"
Kitty of "Sanrio" (aka "Hello Kitty")
A more complete list can be found here. (In case you can't guess, she's one of my favorite voice actresses.)
BTW nerds don't use Apples so why does any news about them matter?
I beg to differ. I'm using a Mac right now, and I challenge you to find someone who wouldn't consider me a nerd. <grin>
Some of us are quite happy with the amount of Apple reporting, and dammit, if it's true, then bundling a wireless, buttonless, programmable mouse with a system as a default option is quite cool.
There are a wide variety of more gentle shows in anime. Anime is just another film media for Japan. Tragic real-life dramas like "Grave of the Fireflies," gentle kids movies like "My Neighbor Totoro," and charged psycho-dramas like the recent "Perfect Blue" all are animated. There is an entire genre called shoujo, which is young girls anime that tends to focus on romance, relationships between friends, and situational comedy. They also can be cute to the point of delivering insulin shock.
To be honest, I like a lot of the girls shows because they're so damn funny at times. Comedy is my biggest interest in anime. The above mentioned show "Trigun" is one of the better ones, and does not have any negative sexual portrayals of women. You should give anime a second chance. This time, do an informed search on the web and stay away from anything which has too sexed-up of a cover. (This may unfortunately make you miss a few good things to because of companies like A.D.V. Film's constant attempts at making their stuff look like it has more sex in it than it actually does.) Oh, and get some informed friends to show you some anime rather than whatever perv shoved the stuff you watched in your face. The Anime Turnpike is a good resource for finding fan sites that will give you a good idea of what kind of people are watching what.
I will recommend the following:
Trigun -- A funny slapstick comedy centered around a character who hides his competence, and a cool sci-fi tinted western.
Giant Robo -- Epic drama, badass fights between espers, and retro 70s animation. One of the best of all time.
Evangelion -- A psychological study in depression, with cool living robots, though there's a little fan-service they bring up constantly as a joke.
Visions of Escaflowne -- Beautiful visuals, cool fantasy, a tale of altered fate and romance.
Cowboy Bebop -- An ultra-cool vision of the future that's neither dystopian nor utopian. Lots of great action and intriguing characters.
Serial Experiments Lain -- Wow. What more can I say? This is the penultimate work of cyberspace mergine with the real world. See it, but be prepared to be confused as most of what happens in the plot is a mystery and much of it is allegorical or left unexplained.
Slayers -- The series from Software Sculptors, not the OAVs or the movies as they feature Naga, which fits the stereotype, though you never see her once do anything sexual. The series is a hillarious swords and sorcery romp that refuses to get serious for more than a few minutes at a time (much to the dismay of Zelgadis, one of the characters).
P.S. I'm not just the president of my college anime club, I'm also a client.
Okay, I give up. What is it?
I'm guessing a pig with a mohawk and its right eye hanging out of the socket sticking out it's tongue and saying, "WASSUP!!"
First off, let me save a lot of quoting and redundant responses by asking this: Where do you get off assuming that just because the poster you responded to doesn't like User Friendly that they are a Windows bigot? You are demonstrating first-hand the poster's assertions about User Friendly's problem being with it's fans, and you're giving fellow Linux users a bad reputation, especially with that "burn in NT hell" line.
A bit of jealousy perhaps? We never hear about "Suprise, Suprise. With the sale of new distributions Linus is once again bringing his sub-standard kernel to the universe". Why is that? Is it because he makes no money off of Linux and Illiad does? Money != bad.
That's a total non-issue. Comic strip artists like Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance do not have this issue because they handle marketing in a tasteful manner, unlike Illiad's crass "branding" web site. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame once wrote an article in his 10th anniversary special book about how marketing in the manner Illiad is doing devalues and cheapens the art of the strip. Illiad can only hope to be half the comic strip artist that Bill Watterson was.
Audiences can not be commodized, product can.
Ah, but is that really true? Illiad has a fanatically loyal following of techie fans. Illiad is selling the ability for companies like SuSE to target and market to his audience by using his branded characters. In effect, Illiad is selling his audience to interested companies. Of course, this is just dithering about semantics, so I'll leave it at that.
First of all, since when has CARTOONS been considered art? It's COMEDY, by definition it's going to be formulaic, get over it. If you're looking for high-brow technical humor read some April 1st RFCs or something.
My, my. It's a sad commentary when a fan of an artistic media doesn't even recognize it as art. Perhaps your satisfaction with sit-com style formulae has stagnated your appreciation of what truly innovative and creative artwork and comedy should be.
Once again, I refer to Bill Watterson's 10th anniversary Calvin and Hobbes book on issues of the artform of comics. The essay there, which delves into the history of the artform before it became wedged into its current limited panel layout and forced schtick format is very educational.
The rich and gentle satire of politics and day to day living, Pogo, and it's modern day successor, Ozy and Millie, certainly qualify as a some of the best of the 20th century. Who can deny that the Sandman series of graphic novels are art? Certainly not the people who awarded it the Hugo award for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Perhaps you should pick up the latest offering, The Dream Hunters, which features a return of Neil Gaiman's strong evocative writing with Yoshitaka Amano's etherial, otherworldy artwork narrating the tale. Then you may still attempt to deny to the world that comics are art.
Just because User Friendly and many syndicated sellouts like Garfield and Dilbert seem increasingly incapable of producing art and non-formulaic humor as their profits from merchandising increase, don't assume that comics cannot be art. You are only appreciating the most bastardised version of it.
And this would prove what? You might has well have said "The first person that compares Tux to MS Bob gets a sticker"
That makes absolutely no sense. It's obvious you aren't familiar with the character Opus from Bloom Count or you'd be able to see the ways in which the Dust Puppy and he share many, many similar personality traits. The Dust Puppy is at best a tribute to and at worst a rip-off of Opus.
Jezus...what did they do to you to rip your sense of humour out so completely?
Perhaps, he just doesn't think that all comedy by definition should be formulaic as you do. Making fun of something can be funny. Making fun of someone making fun of something rarely is.
The keys to comedy are spontaneity, creativity, timing, and relevance to the audience. In the world of comic strips, #1 and #3 are usually handled in the layout and pacing of when certain lines happen, with the comedic twist almost always happening in the last panel. User Friendly well appreciates its market and has #4 well in hand.
It's #2, creativity, that User Friendly is sometimes seen as lacking in. This is much the same as Odie getting punted off a table by Garfield or Dilbert's boss saying something really stupid. They're running gags that have been run into the ground. Since you think all humor should be formulaic, you probably don't have an appreciation for the importance of this. However, those of us who do see the complete lack of creativity in a spoof of a spoof.
Do some exploring. There are plenty of good web comics that break the formulaic mold. I read about 30 or so of them a day. It shouldn't be hard to find one to match your tastes that is better than UF.
What exactly did you intend to mod him down for? Expressing a valid opinion? I don't remember that one being on the moderation options. What you are admitting is that you were planning on abusing your moderator points to damage someone whose opinion you disagreed with.
What's this about him having to sellout to keep his people paid? I mean, cry me a river. Just look at Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance fame, and he does employ a staff of people to help him run the site and his business. I don't think he's having a problem getting by on banner ads, t-shirts, and book sales. The 30 or so other web cartoonist I read as part of my day don't seem to be having any trouble supporting theirselves economically. When you get as big as Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance, David Simpson of Ozy and Millie, Bill Holbrook of Kevin and Kell, or Scott Kurtz of PVP, book sales and ad banners seem to be more than enough to keep yourself solvent. That doesn't even count the many popular artists who don't have anything beyond banner ads to sponsor themselves, such as Zach Stroum of Etherlife, Gabriel and Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade, and Maritza Campos of College Roomies from Hell! -- all of whom are either college students or fully employed and do their strips as hobbies.
While I still find User Friendly mostly funny and still read it regularly, I lost a lot of respect for Illiad when I came across UF Media. The image he puts for on the site is one of someone whoring themselves out to corporate sponsorship. Illiad doesn't seem content with just selling t-shirts and books directly. He is actively calling to have his characters used as logos to curry favor with his fans for companies like SuSE. He wants the airline commercial spots, the suction cup animals, and co-branded food that syndicated sell-outs like Garfield have engendered.
I think this strip from Penny Arcade illustrates the opinions that many of us have for his ethics and credibility, in spite of or along with our opinions of his work on its own. It hurts his credibility because corporate sponsorship and co-branding are often the vicious monetary cycle that keeps comics going in newspapers long after they stopped being funny or original and sometimes even long after the creator of the strip has died. It's that we object to.
P.S. Slashdot readers should hopefully get a kick out of this strip. Just a friendly reminder for when talking to people who don't read Slashdot.
And I've apparently attracted my own division of trolls.
No, sir, you are the troll. As acknowledged by one of your first rebuttals to one of the first replies, you fully expected to marked down. That is prima face evidence that you posted the original post with the full intention of angering people. <b>That</b> is a troll. People who respond back in an angry fashion are flaming you. You are the troll.
I hope you enjoyed wasting moderator time with your rapid spewing of ill thought out messages. It's sad to see at this deeply nested of a level a final admission that, yes, hardware people can be at fault.
A reminder: If hardware people are so perfect, why does the Linux kernel have patches to avoid the Pentium F00F bug?
So, basically, it boils down to you wanting all programmers to be perfect and for software to auto-magically work. Well, gosh. I know my job as a software developer would be a lot easier if everyone else was perfect.
There is basically only one way to prevent users from having problems installing new software and hardware -- don't give them options. The only way for this to work is if everyone sticks to a hard set of standards or a closed, proprietary system. This is one reason hardware is plug-and-play on Macintoshes -- you follow Apple's standards, or it's unsupported and probably doesn't work across OS upgrades.
What do you get then? People bitching about not having options. It's one or the other. You have to choose which.
Okay, I remember from one of my classes the difference between SMP and NUMA. I remember a very brief discussion on SGI's CC-NUMA, and how it was basically as switched network for processors to be talking to different segemented areas of memory so that not all processors are trying to access the same address space of memory and blocking each other's access to the memory bus.
Now, does anyone know what the differences are between SGI's CC-NUMA and IBM's NUMA-Q?
Actually, there's another method for storing and retrieving energy from a flywheel based on embedding magnets in the flywheel and keeping it levitated in a vacuum. You use the rotating magnets to drive an electric motor and charge them up by reversing the polarity. Since there's no mechanical attachment to an engine and next to no friction, you can theoretically keep the momentum stored in the flywheel indefinitely. I remember reading about a guy who had come up with an automobile engine based on this design in Discover magazine about a few years ago. Unfortunately, the guy was a bit of a patriotic zealot and refused to sell the design to anybody but American auto manufacturers who had only a passing interest in making it into a backup for a hybrid engine design. The Japanese were biting at the bit to buy his technology for use in non-hybrid applications, but he refused to sell. A shame. People all over the world might be using his engine design now if he hadn't been so against letting a foreign company use it.
Face it, Linux isn't hurting Apple's bottom line at all. The strengths of the Mac OS are all of Linux's weaknesses. The large number of first time computer users and Windows converts buying new iMacs FAR outweighs the numbers that they might be losing to Linux.
Let's not forget too that most Mac users that might get interested in Linux dual boot instead of abandoning the Mac totally. Linux only helps sell Macs because of the small PPC Linux following.
Try out this old article on Ars Technica about the issue. Basically, everything that holds true for Quartz also held true for Display Postscript. The originating markup language behind the display version has just changed from Postscript to PDF. DPS was WAY ahead of its time. I just hope Apple keeps the networked aspect of the rendering system or makes it easy to extend to do networking.
Yes, and the use of typewriters and TVs instead of computers was demonstrated in Max Headroom.