Explain the sales of iMacs? All the Mac sources make it sound like there were riots trying to get these things. Lots of new computer users bought them because they looked good. Even some PC people bought one. But still the overwhelming majority of iMac sales were by those who already owned Macs. So what's the big deal?
Since then, Apple has been suffering in PC sales just like everyone else. After all the hype, its market penetration really didn't change all that much. And that was my point. Once you get past all the ranting and raving by the Apple crowd, what you're left with is people who are bragging about scraping 1 or 2 percent off the PC crowd, which is peanuts in that industry.
But lots more people aren't buying Macs! As usual, Mac zealots cite anecdotal data to back their claims, year after year, and then Apple's financial reports come out and report more soft sales figures. It's been this way at least since I started using Macs a decade ago...
I do like playing with Macs -- Tibook running OSX is quite fun -- but I just can't stand all the unfulfilled hype.
Slashdotters have peculiar and wildly fluctuating feelings on whether the Internet should be free or not. In the Internet boom, everyone thought the Internet would change everything and make everything free. Now after the bubble has busted, people follow the psychological trail and claim that "the Internet is no longer free". They say that we SHOULD be expected to pay for stuff. We should empathize with site owners who have to pay for bandwidth and whatnot.
Well guess what? I DON'T CARE. $5. $1. Why should I care about whether they can afford to keep their site up or not?
It's just the way of the Internet, which allows people to pass through its time and space instantly, to have sites grow until they reach critical mass, exceed that, can't support themselves anymore, and flame out while their community members, who are not bound to stay at said site, just go to the next hotspot. It's not like trying to maintain your local neighborhood's sense of community or something physical, something you can't easily get away from or avoid. Moving to a new place is as easy as entering a new URL.
I simply do not care if slashdot survives or not. The information found on it is by no means exclusive or high quality. It's not like reading an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal or an editorial by a famous lobbyist in the Washington Post. It's mainly a bunch of Linux kiddies who think about the world in merely irresponsibly idealistic and theoretical terms (since they have no real world experience yet, which isn't their fault, but you think it should temper their arrogance at least, no?) commenting on news stories that other wires/news orgs break themselves. If you really think you're receiving "intellectual" content here, then I suggest you do yourself a favor and purchase subscriptions to "The Economist" or the "New York Times" and note the marked difference in integrity and creative thought.
You owe nothing to slashdot. This is how the Internet works. Slashdot has to deal with its own bulkiness now. Move on and let it die off.
If it's your personal site, do whatever the heck you want and don't listen to the design luddites. DO WHAT YOU WANT.
For any site, PLEASE have something worth reading. I think anyone who's actually worked in web design before should be able to understand the fact that most web sites are completely useless and really only serve to keep their web designers in business. I wonder how many sites actually generate business or encourage customers to communicate with/come back to a company?
Design luddites make me sick. They're no different now (when things are actually much better than they used to be) than when I read the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html newsgroup and participated in the incestuous web design clique years ago. While their basic demand for accessible web sites for all is impregnable, it's basically cowardice that prevents them from trying to do what a truly gifted web designer should do, which is to combine content, usability, and design all into one successful package. Whereas design with no content or usability is ignorance, it is the luddites who tend to show intellectual weakness by refusing to embrace design.
Of course they'll never admit it, and lash out at those who tell them as much, but it's plain as day to anyone who actually does this for a living instead of preaching from the Ivory Tower. =)
Many posts in this thread make the mistake of assuming when Brin prefers transparency over privacy, that he wants individuals to have absolutely NO privacy.
This of course shows which people have not read "The Transparent Society" and who are instead just reading headlines and jumping to conclusions. He addresses most all of the key concerns people have with transparency in the book.
So while leading by example IS a good thing, demanding things like "preferred sexual habits" is just stupid.
If you believe the Neal Stephenson Metaverse way of thinking about the future, the successful RPG/virtual reality will have some sort of tangible relation to the real world. A digital reality superimposed over the underlying organic reality, both integrated significantly with each other.
By the way, some MUDs have rather large regular populations, taking into account the large fragmentation of the mudding community versus the fewer, more publicized networks of more graphical RPGs/MUDs/whatever.
I'll always love MUDs more even though I mainly just experiment with le jeu de jour these days. Something neat and simple from a programmer's point of view, a flexible world where things can be added and removed easily without whole CD/patch updates and new art and models having to be drawn. And from a player's point of view, the MUD is less frustrating (your system not blue screening or freezing) and more imaginative.
Man, I remember sitting on Sierra's The Realm like the rest of us dumbasses listening to the programmers say they couldn't add new armor yet because they had to get the artists to draw it up first.:P So lame. Then I'd give up, quit that app, load up zMUD and telnet into my fave MUD, and work on my mudding script some more.
I'm in Richardson... I've had a nightmare talking to a bunch of trainees on the help line.
I can't figure out how to get my linux box to connect via DHCP to the net (I hacked together a connection using static IP over @Homeless but that won't work now) so I can't IP masquerade right now. And when I called them about adding extra IPs, they chewed their cud and mooed plaintively.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait until AI is capable of competent programming on its own...
Explain the sales of iMacs? All the Mac sources make it sound like there were riots trying to get these things. Lots of new computer users bought them because they looked good. Even some PC people bought one. But still the overwhelming majority of iMac sales were by those who already owned Macs. So what's the big deal?
Since then, Apple has been suffering in PC sales just like everyone else. After all the hype, its market penetration really didn't change all that much. And that was my point. Once you get past all the ranting and raving by the Apple crowd, what you're left with is people who are bragging about scraping 1 or 2 percent off the PC crowd, which is peanuts in that industry.
But lots more people aren't buying Macs! As usual, Mac zealots cite anecdotal data to back their claims, year after year, and then Apple's financial reports come out and report more soft sales figures. It's been this way at least since I started using Macs a decade ago... I do like playing with Macs -- Tibook running OSX is quite fun -- but I just can't stand all the unfulfilled hype.
Slashdotters have peculiar and wildly fluctuating feelings on whether the Internet should be free or not. In the Internet boom, everyone thought the Internet would change everything and make everything free. Now after the bubble has busted, people follow the psychological trail and claim that "the Internet is no longer free". They say that we SHOULD be expected to pay for stuff. We should empathize with site owners who have to pay for bandwidth and whatnot.
Well guess what? I DON'T CARE. $5. $1. Why should I care about whether they can afford to keep their site up or not?
It's just the way of the Internet, which allows people to pass through its time and space instantly, to have sites grow until they reach critical mass, exceed that, can't support themselves anymore, and flame out while their community members, who are not bound to stay at said site, just go to the next hotspot. It's not like trying to maintain your local neighborhood's sense of community or something physical, something you can't easily get away from or avoid. Moving to a new place is as easy as entering a new URL.
I simply do not care if slashdot survives or not. The information found on it is by no means exclusive or high quality. It's not like reading an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal or an editorial by a famous lobbyist in the Washington Post. It's mainly a bunch of Linux kiddies who think about the world in merely irresponsibly idealistic and theoretical terms (since they have no real world experience yet, which isn't their fault, but you think it should temper their arrogance at least, no?) commenting on news stories that other wires/news orgs break themselves. If you really think you're receiving "intellectual" content here, then I suggest you do yourself a favor and purchase subscriptions to "The Economist" or the "New York Times" and note the marked difference in integrity and creative thought.
You owe nothing to slashdot. This is how the Internet works. Slashdot has to deal with its own bulkiness now. Move on and let it die off.
Hahaha, best post EVAR.
If it's your personal site, do whatever the heck you want and don't listen to the design luddites. DO WHAT YOU WANT.
For any site, PLEASE have something worth reading. I think anyone who's actually worked in web design before should be able to understand the fact that most web sites are completely useless and really only serve to keep their web designers in business. I wonder how many sites actually generate business or encourage customers to communicate with/come back to a company?
Design luddites make me sick. They're no different now (when things are actually much better than they used to be) than when I read the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html newsgroup and participated in the incestuous web design clique years ago. While their basic demand for accessible web sites for all is impregnable, it's basically cowardice that prevents them from trying to do what a truly gifted web designer should do, which is to combine content, usability, and design all into one successful package. Whereas design with no content or usability is ignorance, it is the luddites who tend to show intellectual weakness by refusing to embrace design.
Of course they'll never admit it, and lash out at those who tell them as much, but it's plain as day to anyone who actually does this for a living instead of preaching from the Ivory Tower. =)
Many posts in this thread make the mistake of assuming when Brin prefers transparency over privacy, that he wants individuals to have absolutely NO privacy.
This of course shows which people have not read "The Transparent Society" and who are instead just reading headlines and jumping to conclusions. He addresses most all of the key concerns people have with transparency in the book. So while leading by example IS a good thing, demanding things like "preferred sexual habits" is just stupid.
If you believe the Neal Stephenson Metaverse way of thinking about the future, the successful RPG/virtual reality will have some sort of tangible relation to the real world. A digital reality superimposed over the underlying organic reality, both integrated significantly with each other.
:P So lame. Then I'd give up, quit that app, load up zMUD and telnet into my fave MUD, and work on my mudding script some more.
By the way, some MUDs have rather large regular populations, taking into account the large fragmentation of the mudding community versus the fewer, more publicized networks of more graphical RPGs/MUDs/whatever.
I'll always love MUDs more even though I mainly just experiment with le jeu de jour these days. Something neat and simple from a programmer's point of view, a flexible world where things can be added and removed easily without whole CD/patch updates and new art and models having to be drawn. And from a player's point of view, the MUD is less frustrating (your system not blue screening or freezing) and more imaginative.
Man, I remember sitting on Sierra's The Realm like the rest of us dumbasses listening to the programmers say they couldn't add new armor yet because they had to get the artists to draw it up first.
I'm in Richardson... I've had a nightmare talking to a bunch of trainees on the help line.
I can't figure out how to get my linux box to connect via DHCP to the net (I hacked together a connection using static IP over @Homeless but that won't work now) so I can't IP masquerade right now. And when I called them about adding extra IPs, they chewed their cud and mooed plaintively.