Just wait for it... eventually there will be a Rock Band Terry Bozzio set. Which would be rather funny, but I have a feeling that it would lead to the loss of arms for many people. Same for Rock Band: Tool, and Rock Band Meshuggah.
I am a fan of Rock Band, and have to admit that playing bands like Rush in it make me somewhat sad.
As stated above: Relax, and stop caring what people do for fun. You'll live a longer, happier life that way.
I love music, but I'm not a musician (unless you count playing the jews harp), don't have the desire to be one either. I support my local musicians, half of my friends are musicians (who play, surprise, Rock Band), I buy them beer, and hype their shows. I don't get my music for free, I pay real money for it. I every time a band is in town that I like I go to it, and spend money on t-shirts to show my support. But I also think Rock Band is a very fun game to play, especially with a couple of beers in my gut. Oddly enough, I also play it with a lot of my friends who are musicians, some of whom are (locally) successful ones. Odd, some of them have seemed to realize that music isn't "serious business". Some of them, I might add, are pretty serious, and classically trained.
And, as I also stated earlier, these games might get a certain percentage of their players actually interested in music. Interested enough to actually pick up an instrument and make their neighbors life hell for awhile. They force people to actually LISTEN to the music that they enjoy, deeply. Not all of them, obviously, but some. This is actually somewhat noble, being that most of the schools I know of have dropped any music programs that they used to have. This, to me as a non-musician, is tragic, as the selection of music would go up if people actually appreciate it.
Another fun thing, the drums in Rock Band is actually decent training for real drums, as is the bass guitar, since they teach actual rhythm and beat, which is pretty difficult to actually grasp for most of us.
Don't really want to. Does that mean I'm not allowed have have innocent fun without people telling me I'm not allowed to? I can go get drunk and have a bunch of idiotic fun with my friends right now, without having to spend years learning guitar, and decades to actually be good at it. For what? Growing up (too late) to be a rock star, like the people I acknowledge will always be much better than me at it. I'm never going to be Adam Jones, or Pete Townsend, or Les Paul, or Tom Morello, or Slash, or... You get the point.
Can I play racing games without being an Formula One racer? Can I play an FPS without joining the Marines? A sports game with out being professional Athlete?
Does this also apply to books and movies? I watched the X-Men movies, and I'm not a mutant. I read the Bible, and I'm not God (or even Christian).
Relax, people do what they want. Its harmless fun. And on the upshot, a certain percentage of the people who play might actually get interested in music, and learn to play something real. Stop caring about what people do, you'll live a longer happier life.
Not really, look at game consoles, people buy them at roughly the same prices, and they epitomize of one trick ponies. I think a lot of people don't buy Kindles because they don't see the point in it, why spend $200 for something that I can already do for cheaper. $200 buys a lot of books (well, not as many as it used to, but still around 15 hardcovers, or around 50 paperbacks), and really doesn't offer as much as real books. Sure you can carry more books on it, but how often does the average person need access to 100 books at any given time?
Actually, even sadder, another reason that the Kindle doesn't sell, is that a shockingly low percentage of Americans read books for fun.
I can see it excelling in the academic market though, and markets that need quick access to many documents at any given time.
I won't buy a Kindle because I see no need for one, even if I can afford one. Sure, they are neat, but I like books better. Yes, they are "book like", but this is just evidence that books are superior (if they weren't, why emulate them?). A lot of the books I read are nonfiction (philosophy, and history texts), and I take tons of marginal notes. I reread these books fairly often, and use the marginal in them often as well. So far the Kindle really sucks for this. The page flip delay is also a deal killer, people generally start reading a new page before the even finish flipping the old page, to me (yes, personal preference) this is also a deal breaker, since it breaks the flow. I don't like the fact that Amazon can deny me access to my purchased books. I would like to see someone break into my home and try to grab a book from my library. Yes, being able to read PDFs is nice, BUT, there is a lot of good books that aren't ripped to PDF, and from my last experience Kindle's handling of PDFs was sub-par. Also a Kindle's battery might last 8 hours, but with proper care a book's battery can last hundreds of years (perhaps thousands).
I also, less empirically, like having a paper copy, something I can fidget with, fan the pages, dog ear, etc... I like the smell of books, I like the tactile experience. I like walking into my room of books and staring at them. I like buying a new book, and carefully cracking its spine before reading it. I like the feel of paper.
Yes, I might not live up to the technophile vibe of/. for any of this, but I'm okay with that.
The Kindle, like all technology, is something we should question; does it improve my experience or not? You probably have a different answer to this than me, and that is fine. But then again, I didn't even own a cell phone until recently, because I couldn't see how it would improve my life. Money might have less to play into this equation than you think, spending money on stupid things that you don't need, is dumb, no matter how much money you have.
I'm hardly rich, or even comfortably middle class, and I have a high end PC, a full on laptop (haven't found a reason for a netbook yet, working on the excuse though), a smart phone, a mac mini, etc... Don't have a Kindle, I love the idea (it just screams "neat!"), but hate the actual practicality of them. I might change my mind when they make them smell like old books, translate my margin notes, and make them into convenient places for my cat to sleep when I'm trying to read.
That said, all of this is available and affordable even to those of us who know how to shop around. I probably got it all for $2k, with a bit of research, some elbow grease, and some saving. Really, this isn't the 80's, having decent tech is pretty cheap and easy. My high end PC cost around $800, $1k with the 24" monitor, the MacMini was damn cheap, but decent with some 3rd party upgrades. The phone was a killer deal, especially with a bit of haggling with the commission happy service drone. The laptop was exceedingly cheap (around $200), but still more than I really need for a Linux play toy. Right now, even strapped for cash, I could grab a Kindle and a netbook off of savings, but I need to decide whether moving to Seattle is more important than having another tiny little computer (Phoenix sucks, bad).
I probably make half of what the average/.er makes, too. Though I'm beginning to think that the average age here is around 25, so maybe not.
For accuracy, the 9th and 10th man owned the bar in the first place, and in actuality the daily bill only cost $20, the other $60 was pure profit. And the 4th man used to work at bar, but got laid off. but was out of work because the 10th man bought every other bar in town, and moved them to Mexico. The 2nd and 3rd men were employees of the 9th and 10th man. And, well, the 1st man used to go beat up people for the 9th and 10th man, but got brain damage when some upstart thinking to open his own bar hit him in the head.
Or did we forget that the 10th man owns 80%ish of everything? While 1-8 own basically nothing?
Yes, yes... the internet is the culmination of all of human innovation and knowledge... Very uplifting until you remember that the internet brought us 4Chan and LOL cats.
I was on the "internet" before 1993, and I am pretty damn young still (I was just entering high school then, or so), so I was hardly a military strategist. Usenet, Gopher, Archie, Veronic, IRC, email, etc... they are all part of the "internet" too. And a lot of people had access to them before HTTP and Mosaic, some of the old BBSs I was on allowed you to hop on the early net via telnet, and later by TCP/IP lines. I even had an email address before 1993, granted it never got any use because it was through a BBS, and using the built in mail system was easier, and for most other things there was FIDO and Usenet.
When I first saw Mosiac, I thought it was a goofy copy of Gopher.
Just because the internet now means HTTP, doesn't make it so. It's like saying the space program didn't actually start until Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon.
Either that or your a wingnut because you think Al Gore seriously claimed he invented the internet, a claim that has been debunked around 10 million times, and that is only here on/.
The year 2000 called it wants its/. nostalgia back. Btw you need to get with the times, troll now== something bad about apple || anything nice about libertarianism || lower taxes/less regulation.
Thats why I love/. politics. The left sees the place as dominated completely by Libertarians with little shrines to Ayn Rand sitting in their living rooms (parents basement). The right sees it as a bunch of Leftist radicals with little shrines to Karl Marx sitting in their living rooms (parents basement). I think/. is basically reprentative of the lunatic fringe. Which lunatic fringe? ALL OF THEM. If there is something with a lunatic fringe,/. wholly embraces it.
Yes, it makes sense like that, but from a usability perspective it kind of sucks. What part of the browser GUI controls do you use the most? The tab bar, I'd guess, you probably switch tabs more often than you type in URLs or hit the back/forward button. But Chrome moves the tab bar the farthest way from the actual page view area, which is where most mice default when idle. Moving the most used element as far away as possible, and past parts that are hardly used, doesn't make much sense.
Why do you have so much bad music? I only have a fraction of the amount of music you have (around 5-6k songs), but I like around 90% of it (or I wouldn't have bought it, or ripped it), and even that 10% of it that isn't my favorite, is around for situational uses and remains unchecked.
Easy advice, delete all the crap, or at least uncheck it, go find music you like (try Last.fm or Pandora) and buy that.
Also, your never going to be able to stream "the entire library of music ever", the library will depend on whoever is in charge wants to make available, or what labels he can get backing from. It will, generally, always preclude smaller labels, truly independent music, and local music (these three categories generally have the best music, so you'd be missing more than you'd think).
that is the advantage of owning, and I am sure that some folks had the same argument back in the 80's with movies. They wanted to own them in case they could not rent them when they needed, but video rentals became ubiquitous.
And sadly it still is problem for people who don't have mainstream tastes, or like strange and obscure movies from the past. Go to your local Blockbuster, and look at the selection some time, its only best sellers from the last 10 years, current movies, or movies with huge followings or awards. Redbox is, obviously, much worse. Netflix is better, but there are still some movies I own that aren't available through them, and you lose the spontaneity of watching what you want when the whim takes you ("Man, I really want to watch Ultrachrist, followed by Dog Star Man or Zardoz!"). Rental is good for trying new things, watching throw away movies, and new releases, but thats about it, for everything you actually love you're better off owning it. There still is a ton of movies which never hit DVD, and thus never hit the rental market. (Though there was a place by my college which never removed a single rental item, barring damaged ones, which had about everything no matter how obscure, even VHS).
The same goes for Music. Over the last 20 years I've accumulated around 300 CDs (and in the last couple I download tons of music from iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon), so I always have something interesting to listen to as my whim takes me. The great thing about HDD MP3 players is not having to plan what you want to listen to in the mysterious future, you can carry pretty much your full library around with you, this is killed by renting. Also I have a hard time justifying spending the price of a CD, just to listen to get someone's permission to listen to music as long as they feel I deserve, when for a small amount more I could actually own it for.
Another problem is that rental places generally go for only the most broadly profitable music, chopping out a lot of the obscure bands I listen to, and being that we're talking of proprietary hardware using a proprietary format, I can't simply add my own music to it as well. Why not just support putting your own MP3s on it, and then allow access to a good streaming source, like Last.fm or Pandora?
If so though I still think it would be worth it to buy the Mac Box Set for $170 than invalidate the year I have left of Apple care.
A bit of a non-issue for me, I never bother with Apple Care. Mostly out of habit, if I can't fix it myself, then perhaps I asked for the problem. Granted this mantra dies a bit with Apple, since replacing their hardware is a rather nasty (bordering on impossible) issue. That and with my Mini, one of first things I did was rip it apart and put in 3rd party RAM (Apple's RAM prices are insane), voiding all support I would have got to begin with.
Actually one of the things I like about Apple is that if I have a problem with my Mac I may have to wait 12 hours or so but I can put the Mac in my car and drive to one of 3 Apple stores where I can make an appointment with a Genius to have my problems diagnosed and possibly fixed then and there.
Your lucky! My girlfriends MacBook Pro died awhile back (it was our fault, heffeweizen spills are not under the warrenty), and we had to wait 6 days to get an appointment. Granted Phoenix only has two stores (might be three now), and for some reason they all are preternaturally busy.
Ah... thanks for the clarification. I'm always shocked at how shocked people are over wildfires, and here (AZ) how little precautions people generally take to avoid property damage from them.
Reading that makes me want to dig my eyes out. Thanks.
Please do, though blind people might see this as a curse, adding to the ASL and braille pedants out there.
Yes, I typed "your" as opposed to "you're", I accept this criticism, though I really should start doing it on purpose just for the amusing over reactions I get from pedants who really want to loft the "holier than thou" flag for whatever small reasons they have. Misusing your/you're is a common, and often innocuous, mistake. When typing fast, or typing things that really don't matter one bit, people generally default to the simpler version without even thinking of it, and being it is just a silly/. post, it isn't worth the bother of reviewing or fixing. If this mattered, I would have went back and fixed it, but as it stands, it wasn't worth the added second or two of my time.
If I lose the pedant crowd as my audience, so be it, 90% of people didn't notice, and of the 10% who did, 90% didn't care.
As for "Googleing" vs. "Googling", I don't find actually using hit results as relevant, or very good for the general cause of pedantry. How can you sit on the throne of linguistic elitism, but then use what the plebes do as proof? Also, in a less tongue and cheek vein, "Google" is a proper noun, so I'd prefer to leave the word intact, I understand that this is generally an awkward way of verbing a noun (which is a pretty dumb thing to do), but I doubt there is any hard-and-fast rules for this circumstance, being that verbing nouns is not generally acceptable in the first place.
Not to sound callus, but doesn't this happen every year around there?
I don't have much sympathy if you answer "yes", since its a normal occurrence, that for some reason people are shocked by yearly. Just like I felt a very bare minimum of sympathy for people after Katrina, or every time the Mississippi floods, or those morons who build houses on sandy cliffs in California, who then bitch about erosion, or all the morons here in AZ that will be washed away the next "100 year flood" when their houses in river beds get destroyed. There are some disasters that you can see coming...
If the answer is "no", of course its a terrible thing, especially if its man caused.
LA is in the DESERT, which is generally where wild fires happen, but never seems to realize this simple fact.
I think your wrong, or just being overly pedantic. "Ya'll" is translated 90% of the time as the second person plural, at least as far as my anecdotal evidence shows (and a quick Googleing). Being a good Midwesterner, though, I prefer "you'uns" or "you guys". "Ya'll" forces me to drawl, which annoys me.
Actually the rest of the world has the part of speech (second person plural) that "Ya'll" nothing but a cheap hack to fill in for. So I'm sure they understand it very well, though they might be perplexed as to why English lacks that somewhat important part of speech.
I remember taking Latin, and constantly running into second person plurals, and not being able to find a decent English translating to say, so I'd replace it with "Ya'll". By the end of the course our translations sounded very much like a red neck parody hour. Especially since calling ones wife "woman" was perfectly acceptable (as in "come to the gate, woman!")
From all I heard the Snow Leopard disk is a full install of OS X, and not an upgrade. I might be wrong though, I'm going mostly on hearsay.
There is no must upgrade.
This might be true as far as official Apple software goes (actually isn't this release killing Rosetta support?), but Apple also adds very small API (which don't effect OS operations in any noticeable way) changes that third party developers pick up and run with, and promptly stop supporting older versions of the software. Quicksilver did this about a month after Leopard came out, so basically you drop out of the upgrade cycle if you don't go spend $X on an new OS release that is pretty much the same as the last one. A couple of the big editors did the same, as did a couple GTD apps. Its not official, but it still puts pressure to upgrade on the consumer.
Most people would be best off upgrading every OTHER release, since the changes are generally rather small. Compare Tiger -> Leopard, to XP -> Vista, or Vista -> Win7, or ever between most Ubuntu or Debian major releases.
That said, I'll probably pick it up as well. $30 for a OS isn't bad, and I've been meaning to convert my Mini into a media center/hub.
But it isn't really a shared connection. What did you learn about the person, what insight did you gain into your common humanity, by knowing that they really think about tonights American Idiot contestant, or that they just bought eggs at Safeway? If it is like most cell conversations, or text message conversations, its one person say "I did so-and-so", and another person saying "I did this, then", which isn't even a connection. Its mouth noise, empty and meaningless.
A connection involves caring, not just communications (as such). Do you really care that Bob Smith went shopping today, or watched Deadliest Catch? Do you care that I'm reading Slashdot today, and might finish out the day by a quick jaunt to the store for some beer and smokes, and oh-lord the traffic this morning during the daily commute (which I do daily, through the same traffic), and that secretary has no taste in make-up. Or worse the stupid "I'm doing fine" bullshit, as if fine wasn't the default condition for most of us... I'll let you know when things change, not that things are boringly, banally, normal.
None of this means anything, nor is the motivation to form some deep "connection" with our fellow man, its nothing but a cry for attention. The act of broadcasting or boring, insignificant lives is an attempt to make us matter, to make us more real. Its like blogging, you want people to know you exist, you want tons of hits, but you really don't care about what others say. No one thinks "if I was reading this from someone else, would I give two shits?" Its just a meaningless attempt at being special, a purely egotistical goal, and a purely shallow one.
When I go out with my real friends, I actually care about the updates, and generally they aren't vapid enough to think I want to hear them merely list the events of the days since we've last seen each other, only the significant ones, the ones that have some meaning. This is a connection, a two way play, I speak they listen, they speak and I listen, and the whole thing is loaded with genuine interest and significance. After this small period, then we move on to talking about things with actual content, things not specific to any one of us, but general to existence. You know, real conversation.
Where in TFA did it say that Sony would also block you from installing Firefox, Opera, or even (ugh) IE? Sure, the average user might stick with Chrome (it is a decent browser, performance wise, at least), but people who care about privacy will go with the options of their choice, as usual. I think we should all just accept that online privacy is pretty much an active pursuit, and not some strange passive right.
The internet is pretty much a public place now, going to a website is much like walking into a store from the street. Anyone can see you do it, unless you care enough to put a paper bag on your head.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait for it... eventually there will be a Rock Band Terry Bozzio set. Which would be rather funny, but I have a feeling that it would lead to the loss of arms for many people. Same for Rock Band: Tool, and Rock Band Meshuggah.
I am a fan of Rock Band, and have to admit that playing bands like Rush in it make me somewhat sad.
Only losers play FPSs, real men go and shoot each other!
As stated above: Relax, and stop caring what people do for fun. You'll live a longer, happier life that way.
I love music, but I'm not a musician (unless you count playing the jews harp), don't have the desire to be one either. I support my local musicians, half of my friends are musicians (who play, surprise, Rock Band), I buy them beer, and hype their shows. I don't get my music for free, I pay real money for it. I every time a band is in town that I like I go to it, and spend money on t-shirts to show my support. But I also think Rock Band is a very fun game to play, especially with a couple of beers in my gut. Oddly enough, I also play it with a lot of my friends who are musicians, some of whom are (locally) successful ones. Odd, some of them have seemed to realize that music isn't "serious business". Some of them, I might add, are pretty serious, and classically trained.
And, as I also stated earlier, these games might get a certain percentage of their players actually interested in music. Interested enough to actually pick up an instrument and make their neighbors life hell for awhile. They force people to actually LISTEN to the music that they enjoy, deeply. Not all of them, obviously, but some. This is actually somewhat noble, being that most of the schools I know of have dropped any music programs that they used to have. This, to me as a non-musician, is tragic, as the selection of music would go up if people actually appreciate it.
Another fun thing, the drums in Rock Band is actually decent training for real drums, as is the bass guitar, since they teach actual rhythm and beat, which is pretty difficult to actually grasp for most of us.
Learn how to play a real freakin' guitar.
Don't really want to. Does that mean I'm not allowed have have innocent fun without people telling me I'm not allowed to? I can go get drunk and have a bunch of idiotic fun with my friends right now, without having to spend years learning guitar, and decades to actually be good at it. For what? Growing up (too late) to be a rock star, like the people I acknowledge will always be much better than me at it. I'm never going to be Adam Jones, or Pete Townsend, or Les Paul, or Tom Morello, or Slash, or... You get the point.
Can I play racing games without being an Formula One racer? Can I play an FPS without joining the Marines? A sports game with out being professional Athlete?
Does this also apply to books and movies? I watched the X-Men movies, and I'm not a mutant. I read the Bible, and I'm not God (or even Christian).
Relax, people do what they want. Its harmless fun. And on the upshot, a certain percentage of the people who play might actually get interested in music, and learn to play something real. Stop caring about what people do, you'll live a longer happier life.
Not really, look at game consoles, people buy them at roughly the same prices, and they epitomize of one trick ponies. I think a lot of people don't buy Kindles because they don't see the point in it, why spend $200 for something that I can already do for cheaper. $200 buys a lot of books (well, not as many as it used to, but still around 15 hardcovers, or around 50 paperbacks), and really doesn't offer as much as real books. Sure you can carry more books on it, but how often does the average person need access to 100 books at any given time?
Actually, even sadder, another reason that the Kindle doesn't sell, is that a shockingly low percentage of Americans read books for fun.
I can see it excelling in the academic market though, and markets that need quick access to many documents at any given time.
Elitism much?
I won't buy a Kindle because I see no need for one, even if I can afford one. Sure, they are neat, but I like books better. Yes, they are "book like", but this is just evidence that books are superior (if they weren't, why emulate them?). A lot of the books I read are nonfiction (philosophy, and history texts), and I take tons of marginal notes. I reread these books fairly often, and use the marginal in them often as well. So far the Kindle really sucks for this. The page flip delay is also a deal killer, people generally start reading a new page before the even finish flipping the old page, to me (yes, personal preference) this is also a deal breaker, since it breaks the flow. I don't like the fact that Amazon can deny me access to my purchased books. I would like to see someone break into my home and try to grab a book from my library. Yes, being able to read PDFs is nice, BUT, there is a lot of good books that aren't ripped to PDF, and from my last experience Kindle's handling of PDFs was sub-par. Also a Kindle's battery might last 8 hours, but with proper care a book's battery can last hundreds of years (perhaps thousands).
I also, less empirically, like having a paper copy, something I can fidget with, fan the pages, dog ear, etc... I like the smell of books, I like the tactile experience. I like walking into my room of books and staring at them. I like buying a new book, and carefully cracking its spine before reading it. I like the feel of paper.
Yes, I might not live up to the technophile vibe of /. for any of this, but I'm okay with that.
The Kindle, like all technology, is something we should question; does it improve my experience or not? You probably have a different answer to this than me, and that is fine. But then again, I didn't even own a cell phone until recently, because I couldn't see how it would improve my life. Money might have less to play into this equation than you think, spending money on stupid things that you don't need, is dumb, no matter how much money you have.
I'm hardly rich, or even comfortably middle class, and I have a high end PC, a full on laptop (haven't found a reason for a netbook yet, working on the excuse though), a smart phone, a mac mini, etc... Don't have a Kindle, I love the idea (it just screams "neat!"), but hate the actual practicality of them. I might change my mind when they make them smell like old books, translate my margin notes, and make them into convenient places for my cat to sleep when I'm trying to read.
That said, all of this is available and affordable even to those of us who know how to shop around. I probably got it all for $2k, with a bit of research, some elbow grease, and some saving. Really, this isn't the 80's, having decent tech is pretty cheap and easy. My high end PC cost around $800, $1k with the 24" monitor, the MacMini was damn cheap, but decent with some 3rd party upgrades. The phone was a killer deal, especially with a bit of haggling with the commission happy service drone. The laptop was exceedingly cheap (around $200), but still more than I really need for a Linux play toy. Right now, even strapped for cash, I could grab a Kindle and a netbook off of savings, but I need to decide whether moving to Seattle is more important than having another tiny little computer (Phoenix sucks, bad).
I probably make half of what the average /.er makes, too. Though I'm beginning to think that the average age here is around 25, so maybe not.
For accuracy, the 9th and 10th man owned the bar in the first place, and in actuality the daily bill only cost $20, the other $60 was pure profit. And the 4th man used to work at bar, but got laid off. but was out of work because the 10th man bought every other bar in town, and moved them to Mexico. The 2nd and 3rd men were employees of the 9th and 10th man. And, well, the 1st man used to go beat up people for the 9th and 10th man, but got brain damage when some upstart thinking to open his own bar hit him in the head.
Or did we forget that the 10th man owns 80%ish of everything? While 1-8 own basically nothing?
Yes, yes... the internet is the culmination of all of human innovation and knowledge... Very uplifting until you remember that the internet brought us 4Chan and LOL cats.
Says a lot about humans, no?
I was on the "internet" before 1993, and I am pretty damn young still (I was just entering high school then, or so), so I was hardly a military strategist. Usenet, Gopher, Archie, Veronic, IRC, email, etc... they are all part of the "internet" too. And a lot of people had access to them before HTTP and Mosaic, some of the old BBSs I was on allowed you to hop on the early net via telnet, and later by TCP/IP lines. I even had an email address before 1993, granted it never got any use because it was through a BBS, and using the built in mail system was easier, and for most other things there was FIDO and Usenet.
When I first saw Mosiac, I thought it was a goofy copy of Gopher.
Just because the internet now means HTTP, doesn't make it so. It's like saying the space program didn't actually start until Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon.
Either that or your a wingnut because you think Al Gore seriously claimed he invented the internet, a claim that has been debunked around 10 million times, and that is only here on /.
The year 2000 called it wants its /. nostalgia back. Btw you need to get with the times, troll now== something bad about apple || anything nice about libertarianism || lower taxes/less regulation.
Thats why I love /. politics. The left sees the place as dominated completely by Libertarians with little shrines to Ayn Rand sitting in their living rooms (parents basement). The right sees it as a bunch of Leftist radicals with little shrines to Karl Marx sitting in their living rooms (parents basement). I think /. is basically reprentative of the lunatic fringe. Which lunatic fringe? ALL OF THEM. If there is something with a lunatic fringe, /. wholly embraces it.
Yes, it makes sense like that, but from a usability perspective it kind of sucks. What part of the browser GUI controls do you use the most? The tab bar, I'd guess, you probably switch tabs more often than you type in URLs or hit the back/forward button. But Chrome moves the tab bar the farthest way from the actual page view area, which is where most mice default when idle. Moving the most used element as far away as possible, and past parts that are hardly used, doesn't make much sense.
Why do you have so much bad music? I only have a fraction of the amount of music you have (around 5-6k songs), but I like around 90% of it (or I wouldn't have bought it, or ripped it), and even that 10% of it that isn't my favorite, is around for situational uses and remains unchecked.
Easy advice, delete all the crap, or at least uncheck it, go find music you like (try Last.fm or Pandora) and buy that.
Also, your never going to be able to stream "the entire library of music ever", the library will depend on whoever is in charge wants to make available, or what labels he can get backing from. It will, generally, always preclude smaller labels, truly independent music, and local music (these three categories generally have the best music, so you'd be missing more than you'd think).
that is the advantage of owning, and I am sure that some folks had the same argument back in the 80's with movies. They wanted to own them in case they could not rent them when they needed, but video rentals became ubiquitous.
And sadly it still is problem for people who don't have mainstream tastes, or like strange and obscure movies from the past. Go to your local Blockbuster, and look at the selection some time, its only best sellers from the last 10 years, current movies, or movies with huge followings or awards. Redbox is, obviously, much worse. Netflix is better, but there are still some movies I own that aren't available through them, and you lose the spontaneity of watching what you want when the whim takes you ("Man, I really want to watch Ultrachrist, followed by Dog Star Man or Zardoz!"). Rental is good for trying new things, watching throw away movies, and new releases, but thats about it, for everything you actually love you're better off owning it. There still is a ton of movies which never hit DVD, and thus never hit the rental market. (Though there was a place by my college which never removed a single rental item, barring damaged ones, which had about everything no matter how obscure, even VHS).
The same goes for Music. Over the last 20 years I've accumulated around 300 CDs (and in the last couple I download tons of music from iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon), so I always have something interesting to listen to as my whim takes me. The great thing about HDD MP3 players is not having to plan what you want to listen to in the mysterious future, you can carry pretty much your full library around with you, this is killed by renting. Also I have a hard time justifying spending the price of a CD, just to listen to get someone's permission to listen to music as long as they feel I deserve, when for a small amount more I could actually own it for.
Another problem is that rental places generally go for only the most broadly profitable music, chopping out a lot of the obscure bands I listen to, and being that we're talking of proprietary hardware using a proprietary format, I can't simply add my own music to it as well. Why not just support putting your own MP3s on it, and then allow access to a good streaming source, like Last.fm or Pandora?
If so though I still think it would be worth it to buy the Mac Box Set for $170 than invalidate the year I have left of Apple care.
A bit of a non-issue for me, I never bother with Apple Care. Mostly out of habit, if I can't fix it myself, then perhaps I asked for the problem. Granted this mantra dies a bit with Apple, since replacing their hardware is a rather nasty (bordering on impossible) issue. That and with my Mini, one of first things I did was rip it apart and put in 3rd party RAM (Apple's RAM prices are insane), voiding all support I would have got to begin with.
Actually one of the things I like about Apple is that if I have a problem with my Mac I may have to wait 12 hours or so but I can put the Mac in my car and drive to one of 3 Apple stores where I can make an appointment with a Genius to have my problems diagnosed and possibly fixed then and there.
Your lucky! My girlfriends MacBook Pro died awhile back (it was our fault, heffeweizen spills are not under the warrenty), and we had to wait 6 days to get an appointment. Granted Phoenix only has two stores (might be three now), and for some reason they all are preternaturally busy.
Ah... thanks for the clarification. I'm always shocked at how shocked people are over wildfires, and here (AZ) how little precautions people generally take to avoid property damage from them.
Reading that makes me want to dig my eyes out. Thanks.
Please do, though blind people might see this as a curse, adding to the ASL and braille pedants out there.
Yes, I typed "your" as opposed to "you're", I accept this criticism, though I really should start doing it on purpose just for the amusing over reactions I get from pedants who really want to loft the "holier than thou" flag for whatever small reasons they have. Misusing your/you're is a common, and often innocuous, mistake. When typing fast, or typing things that really don't matter one bit, people generally default to the simpler version without even thinking of it, and being it is just a silly /. post, it isn't worth the bother of reviewing or fixing. If this mattered, I would have went back and fixed it, but as it stands, it wasn't worth the added second or two of my time.
If I lose the pedant crowd as my audience, so be it, 90% of people didn't notice, and of the 10% who did, 90% didn't care.
As for "Googleing" vs. "Googling", I don't find actually using hit results as relevant, or very good for the general cause of pedantry. How can you sit on the throne of linguistic elitism, but then use what the plebes do as proof? Also, in a less tongue and cheek vein, "Google" is a proper noun, so I'd prefer to leave the word intact, I understand that this is generally an awkward way of verbing a noun (which is a pretty dumb thing to do), but I doubt there is any hard-and-fast rules for this circumstance, being that verbing nouns is not generally acceptable in the first place.
Yes, I verbed the noun "verb", shoot me.
Not to sound callus, but doesn't this happen every year around there?
I don't have much sympathy if you answer "yes", since its a normal occurrence, that for some reason people are shocked by yearly. Just like I felt a very bare minimum of sympathy for people after Katrina, or every time the Mississippi floods, or those morons who build houses on sandy cliffs in California, who then bitch about erosion, or all the morons here in AZ that will be washed away the next "100 year flood" when their houses in river beds get destroyed. There are some disasters that you can see coming...
If the answer is "no", of course its a terrible thing, especially if its man caused.
LA is in the DESERT, which is generally where wild fires happen, but never seems to realize this simple fact.
Can I just stick with drinking bourbon on my porch? The Arizona and Wisconsin/Minnesota already conspire to make my vowels long enough!
I think your wrong, or just being overly pedantic. "Ya'll" is translated 90% of the time as the second person plural, at least as far as my anecdotal evidence shows (and a quick Googleing). Being a good Midwesterner, though, I prefer "you'uns" or "you guys". "Ya'll" forces me to drawl, which annoys me.
Actually the rest of the world has the part of speech (second person plural) that "Ya'll" nothing but a cheap hack to fill in for. So I'm sure they understand it very well, though they might be perplexed as to why English lacks that somewhat important part of speech.
I remember taking Latin, and constantly running into second person plurals, and not being able to find a decent English translating to say, so I'd replace it with "Ya'll". By the end of the course our translations sounded very much like a red neck parody hour. Especially since calling ones wife "woman" was perfectly acceptable (as in "come to the gate, woman!")
From all I heard the Snow Leopard disk is a full install of OS X, and not an upgrade. I might be wrong though, I'm going mostly on hearsay.
There is no must upgrade.
This might be true as far as official Apple software goes (actually isn't this release killing Rosetta support?), but Apple also adds very small API (which don't effect OS operations in any noticeable way) changes that third party developers pick up and run with, and promptly stop supporting older versions of the software. Quicksilver did this about a month after Leopard came out, so basically you drop out of the upgrade cycle if you don't go spend $X on an new OS release that is pretty much the same as the last one. A couple of the big editors did the same, as did a couple GTD apps. Its not official, but it still puts pressure to upgrade on the consumer.
Most people would be best off upgrading every OTHER release, since the changes are generally rather small. Compare Tiger -> Leopard, to XP -> Vista, or Vista -> Win7, or ever between most Ubuntu or Debian major releases.
That said, I'll probably pick it up as well. $30 for a OS isn't bad, and I've been meaning to convert my Mini into a media center/hub.
But it isn't really a shared connection. What did you learn about the person, what insight did you gain into your common humanity, by knowing that they really think about tonights American Idiot contestant, or that they just bought eggs at Safeway? If it is like most cell conversations, or text message conversations, its one person say "I did so-and-so", and another person saying "I did this, then", which isn't even a connection. Its mouth noise, empty and meaningless.
A connection involves caring, not just communications (as such). Do you really care that Bob Smith went shopping today, or watched Deadliest Catch? Do you care that I'm reading Slashdot today, and might finish out the day by a quick jaunt to the store for some beer and smokes, and oh-lord the traffic this morning during the daily commute (which I do daily, through the same traffic), and that secretary has no taste in make-up. Or worse the stupid "I'm doing fine" bullshit, as if fine wasn't the default condition for most of us... I'll let you know when things change, not that things are boringly, banally, normal.
None of this means anything, nor is the motivation to form some deep "connection" with our fellow man, its nothing but a cry for attention. The act of broadcasting or boring, insignificant lives is an attempt to make us matter, to make us more real. Its like blogging, you want people to know you exist, you want tons of hits, but you really don't care about what others say. No one thinks "if I was reading this from someone else, would I give two shits?" Its just a meaningless attempt at being special, a purely egotistical goal, and a purely shallow one.
When I go out with my real friends, I actually care about the updates, and generally they aren't vapid enough to think I want to hear them merely list the events of the days since we've last seen each other, only the significant ones, the ones that have some meaning. This is a connection, a two way play, I speak they listen, they speak and I listen, and the whole thing is loaded with genuine interest and significance. After this small period, then we move on to talking about things with actual content, things not specific to any one of us, but general to existence. You know, real conversation.
By the way, Fluffy the cat is doing fine.
Where in TFA did it say that Sony would also block you from installing Firefox, Opera, or even (ugh) IE? Sure, the average user might stick with Chrome (it is a decent browser, performance wise, at least), but people who care about privacy will go with the options of their choice, as usual. I think we should all just accept that online privacy is pretty much an active pursuit, and not some strange passive right.
The internet is pretty much a public place now, going to a website is much like walking into a store from the street. Anyone can see you do it, unless you care enough to put a paper bag on your head.