Microsoft is intentionally distorting the message to make it look like Apple was stereotyping PC users
Which is why it's such a brilliant ad.
(Although I find it hard to believe that Apple never intended to direct any stereotyping towards users, given the way that each character appeared - i.e, older guy in business suit for the "PC", younger guy in casual clothes for the "Mac".)
So? Aren't Microsoft allowed to do something with their own adverts? Anyhow, it is a rebuttal to the stereotype that the Apple ads used, associating PCs with only being used for business, by business users. So showing what PC users actually look like, along with what sort of "business" they use them for, is relevant.
Yeah, the fact that they had an older guy in a business suit for the PC, and a younger guy in "trendy" clothing for the Mac, was just an accident, wasn't it.
You miss the point, if you are only capable of observing the literal words stated, and miss the blatant stereotyping of people who might use such products too.
If someone put on a big bushy fake beard with bits of food stuck in it, sandals, and danced around his mum's basement going "I'm Linux, information wants to be free", you'd tell me that's not at all intended as a stereotype of Linux users?
Anyhow, your argument applies to the MS ads too - they say "I'm a PC" too, so surely they're just rebutting the stereotype about the machine, too?
Oh and before somebody steps-in and starts spouting about what a PC can do --- that's only because those features were invented by more-advanced machines like Commodore, Amiga, and Apple who were the first to create the multimedia computer. Had those companies not existed & pushed for innovation, we'd still be using boring monochrome monitors with sounds consisting of "beep" and "boop".
Yes, but you can't judge modern PCs by how they were 20 years ago. It's no longer IBM's machine - yes, Commodore innovated with the Amiga, but companies like NVIDIA are now taking that onwards. The PC of today now does feel like a modern descendant of the Amiga, far more so than a descendant of an old PC - multitasking GUIs, dedicated graphics chipsets, cheap low end machines that are still relatively powerful and good enough for most users. Those are all the things I liked about the Amiga, and all the things that PCs didn't do.
As I say elsewhere, the "PC stereotype" that Apple push is dated by about 15-20 years. If we're going to judge PCs by their 1980s versions, perhaps we can judge OS X Macs by criticising the abysmal joke of an OS that was classic MacOS?
Well, the Apple ads blatantly were stereotyping users, not just the machines themselves.
But even if we say you're right - the same argument could be made for these new ads! I.e., you didn't take the time to understand the Microsoft ads. The purpose was not to stereotype users. The idea was that the more artistic nature of PCs should appeal to users of all walks of life. You obviously didn't get that. Note - they still say "I'm a PC", not "I'm a PC user", so surely, by your own logic, this means it's about the machines, not the users?
These ads will preach to the choir
That's even more true of the Apple ads, since in addition they mocked the competition.
If anything, Microsoft has just drawn MORE attention to Apple.
But they didn't mention Macs at all. The Apple ads, however, drew attention to PCs.
I agree - the Apple ads were far more "condescending", to use the OP's words.
A crucial difference is that the MS ads focus on promoting the PC in a good light, rather than ripping the piss out of their competitor, as Apple did, and which I view as a poor tactic. Actually the Apple ads were worse than that - they were mocking PC users, i.e., their potential customers. I'm not sure why they expected this to work - does insulting people usually work to get them to buy your product?
And the MS ads make an excellent point. The Apple ads were 15 years or more out of date - the "boring PC user" stereotype might have worked back in the 80s or early 90s, but given how mainstream PCs are now, the notion is ludicrous. The Microsoft advert shows this by demonstrating a range of people who would reasonably be PC users. It's obvious really, but it's refreshing to see a response to those obnoxious Apple ads.
I thought the second ad was rather funny (in a good way), rebutting the point about PCs only being for business. Yeah, that was the argument we Amiga users used back in the 80s and early 90s, when that point was actually valid. Macs, as ever, are about 15 years behind the times.
I agree, though the great thing about Opera Mini is that it's written in Java, meaning that just about any cheap old phone can run it. Whilst most phones these days have built-in browsers, they're often not very good, but Opera Mini means they have a decent web browser. (I'm always amused when I see Iphone-fans say how wonderful it is they can now view "proper web pages", mistakenly thinking that all that was possible before the Iphone was WAP pages...)
However, I don't think it likely that too many people without an unlimited data plan would be doing much if any browsing on their phones.
It's not clear to me there is necessarily much of a correlation - I'm on Pay-as-you-go, because I don't do much phone calling or texting, but I still occasionally want to look at a webpage. But not enough that a unlimited data plan would be worth it.
Most people don't browse on their phone because they still aren't aware it's possible, but it's not clear this is related to what payment plan they have either.
It depends what you mean by "that stuff"? I mean, are you arguing that pages should never be deleted, or only "that stuff" you think should be on Wikipedia?
If the former, that's bad for other reasons. If the latter, the problem is that not everyone agrees what "stuff" should stay, and what should go.
I think this ought to be good evidence of a clear overwhelming consensus that articles about things in a fictional Universe are encyclopedic, to refer to in future deletion debates, or when trying to get deletion review. I'll have a look at the Weapons of Warhammer article to see if there are differences (as I say elsewhere, I agree it is a problem that ordinary editors can't see an article after deletion, making any attempt at deletion review far harder - hopefully the Deletionpedia site will be working again soon).
As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
But it's not your article. If you want a place to write your articles, get a blog. If you want to contribute to an encyclopedia, accept that not all contributions will make it.
Now sure, when an article first goes up, there is the risk of an invalid drive-by-speedy-delete which is a mild hassle to overturn, and I also agree it would be a good thing if ordinary users could still get access to the deleted versions of an article. Personally when I've started an article, I make sure I keep a local copy.
But long term, assuming I'm not trying to put some material in violation of Wikipedia's policies, and the article has independent references, there should be no worry about the article being deleted.
Would people complain that they're not going to contribute to open source, because at some later date somebody else might rewrite their code or decide it's no longer needed? Of course not. Wikipedia is a group effort, and part of working as a group is accepting that not everything is down to your say.
They are have a very distinct world view and anything not fitting into that gets removed completely or edited out. There are certain subjects you cannot keep to their own page if on the site at all even with real sources simply because it does not fit their view of what is right.
I'm no fan of Vista, but I think this is rather misleading.
It's actually beating Vista anywhere consumers have a choice
Well, even if that is true, companies don't care about qualifiers like "where consumers have a choice", they care about the market as a whole. (And do you have a source? Also any statistics would likely be misleading, because obviously anyone who wants to run XP will have to go and buy the small number of PCs where it is offered as a choice, whilst those who want Vista can buy any PC.)
Vista can't play games XP can on the same hardware. That's a pretty damning indictment. (Increased system resources)
An Amiga 500 will beat Windows hard down on the same hardware. However, hardware improves, and it's not unreasonable that newer software has increased system resources. On the sort of hardware than PCs come with now, and the sort of hardware than NVIDIA are targetting, do you have evidence that games still run slower? In fact in some cases, games will run poorer or not at all on XP, due to lack of support for DirectX 10 - which brings me to another point, NVIDIA don't have a choice if they want to use the latest API for Windows.
To do otherwise is the same as deleting any entry about Harry Potter because the only source is the author, J K Rowling, or any entry about Star Wars which is based on the 6 movies, since that would not be 'independent' of George Lucas, leaving only the non-Lucas stuff. Clearly mad.
I can't comment on the article being referred to (the page doesn't work at the moment), but clearly there are numerous mainstream highly-notable independent reliable sources for all of these.
No one is suggesting that any entry about Harry Potter be deleted (just as there are presumably still articles about Warhammer on Wikipedia). The analogy would be something like "List of magic spells in Harry Potter".
Also, im just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."
This has got nothing to do with deletion policy. Deleting the article wouldn't be appropriate for a general article that briefly mentions some popular culture reference - the correct response is to simply remove the reference.
I don't see how the existence of other articles affects your read. Don't like it? Don't read those articles.
Wikipedia doesn't actually have an official policy against notability - it's just something that a lot of editors think is important, and often comes as a side effect of verifiability.
So if Megapedia was also a Wiki, it either would have the same problem, or you'd have to drop the rule on verifiability which would just lead to all sorts of crap, and it would be useless as an encyclopedia.
Yes - I dislike it when ppl whine "Wikipedia is crap because my page got deleted" (when more likely than not the page would have been rightly deleted, and other people simultaneously criticise Wikipedia from the other way, complaining that it has too many articles that shouldn't be there), but yes sometimes things go wrong when there is an overzealous admin doing speedy delete.
I think it would be useful if the page content was still accessable via a special URL (i.e., so it's obviously not confused as being part of Wikipedia, but is viewable - I'm sure the data is kept, because pages can be undeleted, and I think admins can view it). The problem is it's much harder to argue a case of deletion review, or try to recreate a page without the problems that caused speedy delete, if you don't have access to the deleted article.
In the past I've had to rely on Google's cache to overturn an unfair deletion, but sometimes I don't check Google in time.
Your science lessons obviously didn't include scientific terminology - it makes things much easier if we understand what is meant by the terms.
a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural
A proposed explanation for evidence is a hypothesis. Conjecture is, well, conjecture.
well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact
A scientific theory is a model that explains facts, and is supported by evidence, and has been tested. Moreover, evolution refers to both a theory and a fact. So my comparison was spot on.
The truth is that science was never designed to testify for historical events.
Well first of all, I disagree that we can't say anything about the past - historians do this all the time, as do courts of law. Clearly we can decide that some things are very likely to be true, and this is the case for evolution. The methods we use to judge such evidence can themselves be tested.
And evolution can be tested, because it (including speciation, before you draw out the micro vs. macro distinction) can and has been observed.
Historical testimony, that is something that creationism has much more of on it's side.
Historical testimony is still something that involves science (how reliable are witnesses? Are the things they claim likely to be true?) Historians and archaeologists use scientific methods - indeed, archaeology is a science. What on earth do you think counts as historical testimony for creationism, dare I ask?
If someone claimed he wasn't the murderer, when all evidence pointed towards the fact, are you telling me you'd trust his word, because you think evidence can't be obtained for the past (other than "historical testimony", which for some reason you think is different)? What if two people claimed you committed a crime, when there was no evidence for it, or even evidence against it - would you think the court should find you guilty?
You've got to remember this is the UK, not the US - hardly anyone, even among religious people, believes in creationism. The Church of England doesn't support creationism, and supports evolution (e.g., http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/21/archbishop_backs_evolution/ , or there was also a recent case where bishops and scientists wrote together to the Government to oppose a school that was teaching evolution).
So there wasn't any reason beforehand to think that he needed to take extra care to distance himself from creationism.
(I also have this amusing image where fellow priests call for his resignation as a priest, based on them thinking he supports creationism...)
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is intentionally distorting the message to make it look like Apple was stereotyping PC users
Which is why it's such a brilliant ad.
(Although I find it hard to believe that Apple never intended to direct any stereotyping towards users, given the way that each character appeared - i.e, older guy in business suit for the "PC", younger guy in casual clothes for the "Mac".)
So? Aren't Microsoft allowed to do something with their own adverts? Anyhow, it is a rebuttal to the stereotype that the Apple ads used, associating PCs with only being used for business, by business users. So showing what PC users actually look like, along with what sort of "business" they use them for, is relevant.
The Apple ads are not saying PCs are boring.
Yeah, the fact that they had an older guy in a business suit for the PC, and a younger guy in "trendy" clothing for the Mac, was just an accident, wasn't it.
You miss the point, if you are only capable of observing the literal words stated, and miss the blatant stereotyping of people who might use such products too.
If someone put on a big bushy fake beard with bits of food stuck in it, sandals, and danced around his mum's basement going "I'm Linux, information wants to be free", you'd tell me that's not at all intended as a stereotype of Linux users?
Anyhow, your argument applies to the MS ads too - they say "I'm a PC" too, so surely they're just rebutting the stereotype about the machine, too?
Oh and before somebody steps-in and starts spouting about what a PC can do --- that's only because those features were invented by more-advanced machines like Commodore, Amiga, and Apple who were the first to create the multimedia computer. Had those companies not existed & pushed for innovation, we'd still be using boring monochrome monitors with sounds consisting of "beep" and "boop".
Yes, but you can't judge modern PCs by how they were 20 years ago. It's no longer IBM's machine - yes, Commodore innovated with the Amiga, but companies like NVIDIA are now taking that onwards. The PC of today now does feel like a modern descendant of the Amiga, far more so than a descendant of an old PC - multitasking GUIs, dedicated graphics chipsets, cheap low end machines that are still relatively powerful and good enough for most users. Those are all the things I liked about the Amiga, and all the things that PCs didn't do.
As I say elsewhere, the "PC stereotype" that Apple push is dated by about 15-20 years. If we're going to judge PCs by their 1980s versions, perhaps we can judge OS X Macs by criticising the abysmal joke of an OS that was classic MacOS?
Well, the Apple ads blatantly were stereotyping users, not just the machines themselves.
But even if we say you're right - the same argument could be made for these new ads! I.e., you didn't take the time to understand the Microsoft ads. The purpose was not to stereotype users. The idea was that the more artistic nature of PCs should appeal to users of all walks of life. You obviously didn't get that. Note - they still say "I'm a PC", not "I'm a PC user", so surely, by your own logic, this means it's about the machines, not the users?
These ads will preach to the choir
That's even more true of the Apple ads, since in addition they mocked the competition.
If anything, Microsoft has just drawn MORE attention to Apple.
But they didn't mention Macs at all. The Apple ads, however, drew attention to PCs.
I agree - the Apple ads were far more "condescending", to use the OP's words.
A crucial difference is that the MS ads focus on promoting the PC in a good light, rather than ripping the piss out of their competitor, as Apple did, and which I view as a poor tactic. Actually the Apple ads were worse than that - they were mocking PC users, i.e., their potential customers. I'm not sure why they expected this to work - does insulting people usually work to get them to buy your product?
And the MS ads make an excellent point. The Apple ads were 15 years or more out of date - the "boring PC user" stereotype might have worked back in the 80s or early 90s, but given how mainstream PCs are now, the notion is ludicrous. The Microsoft advert shows this by demonstrating a range of people who would reasonably be PC users. It's obvious really, but it's refreshing to see a response to those obnoxious Apple ads.
I thought the second ad was rather funny (in a good way), rebutting the point about PCs only being for business. Yeah, that was the argument we Amiga users used back in the 80s and early 90s, when that point was actually valid. Macs, as ever, are about 15 years behind the times.
I agree, though the great thing about Opera Mini is that it's written in Java, meaning that just about any cheap old phone can run it. Whilst most phones these days have built-in browsers, they're often not very good, but Opera Mini means they have a decent web browser. (I'm always amused when I see Iphone-fans say how wonderful it is they can now view "proper web pages", mistakenly thinking that all that was possible before the Iphone was WAP pages...)
He does indeed mean compression.
However, I don't think it likely that too many people without an unlimited data plan would be doing much if any browsing on their phones.
It's not clear to me there is necessarily much of a correlation - I'm on Pay-as-you-go, because I don't do much phone calling or texting, but I still occasionally want to look at a webpage. But not enough that a unlimited data plan would be worth it.
Most people don't browse on their phone because they still aren't aware it's possible, but it's not clear this is related to what payment plan they have either.
Whenever I see someone mention "fancruft" in an deletion debate, I respond back at them with Cruftcruft.
The OP implied buying - I'm not the Linux user. Piracy means that it's even harder to back up the OP's claims about Vista being less popular than XP.
It depends what you mean by "that stuff"? I mean, are you arguing that pages should never be deleted, or only "that stuff" you think should be on Wikipedia?
If the former, that's bad for other reasons. If the latter, the problem is that not everyone agrees what "stuff" should stay, and what should go.
Hmm, good point - given that this not only survived a deletion debate, but was "snowballed" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Spells_in_Harry_Potter ).
I think this ought to be good evidence of a clear overwhelming consensus that articles about things in a fictional Universe are encyclopedic, to refer to in future deletion debates, or when trying to get deletion review. I'll have a look at the Weapons of Warhammer article to see if there are differences (as I say elsewhere, I agree it is a problem that ordinary editors can't see an article after deletion, making any attempt at deletion review far harder - hopefully the Deletionpedia site will be working again soon).
I'm curious, do you have an example where this occurred?
(I once had it happen in reverse - an anon editor decided to give me a warning because we disagreed over an edit...)
As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
But it's not your article. If you want a place to write your articles, get a blog. If you want to contribute to an encyclopedia, accept that not all contributions will make it.
Now sure, when an article first goes up, there is the risk of an invalid drive-by-speedy-delete which is a mild hassle to overturn, and I also agree it would be a good thing if ordinary users could still get access to the deleted versions of an article. Personally when I've started an article, I make sure I keep a local copy.
But long term, assuming I'm not trying to put some material in violation of Wikipedia's policies, and the article has independent references, there should be no worry about the article being deleted.
Would people complain that they're not going to contribute to open source, because at some later date somebody else might rewrite their code or decide it's no longer needed? Of course not. Wikipedia is a group effort, and part of working as a group is accepting that not everything is down to your say.
They are have a very distinct world view and anything not fitting into that gets removed completely or edited out. There are certain subjects you cannot keep to their own page if on the site at all even with real sources simply because it does not fit their view of what is right.
[[citation needed]]
I'm no fan of Vista, but I think this is rather misleading.
It's actually beating Vista anywhere consumers have a choice
Well, even if that is true, companies don't care about qualifiers like "where consumers have a choice", they care about the market as a whole. (And do you have a source? Also any statistics would likely be misleading, because obviously anyone who wants to run XP will have to go and buy the small number of PCs where it is offered as a choice, whilst those who want Vista can buy any PC.)
Vista can't play games XP can on the same hardware. That's a pretty damning indictment. (Increased system resources)
An Amiga 500 will beat Windows hard down on the same hardware. However, hardware improves, and it's not unreasonable that newer software has increased system resources. On the sort of hardware than PCs come with now, and the sort of hardware than NVIDIA are targetting, do you have evidence that games still run slower? In fact in some cases, games will run poorer or not at all on XP, due to lack of support for DirectX 10 - which brings me to another point, NVIDIA don't have a choice if they want to use the latest API for Windows.
That's a good point.
And I'd say that claiming that Obama spins more, based on some automated analysis that uses a dubious definition of "spin", is itself spin!
How about they give some examples of quotes that were considered "spin"?
To do otherwise is the same as deleting any entry about Harry Potter because the only source is the author, J K Rowling, or any entry about Star Wars which is based on the 6 movies, since that would not be 'independent' of George Lucas, leaving only the non-Lucas stuff. Clearly mad.
I can't comment on the article being referred to (the page doesn't work at the moment), but clearly there are numerous mainstream highly-notable independent reliable sources for all of these.
No one is suggesting that any entry about Harry Potter be deleted (just as there are presumably still articles about Warhammer on Wikipedia). The analogy would be something like "List of magic spells in Harry Potter".
Also, im just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."
This has got nothing to do with deletion policy. Deleting the article wouldn't be appropriate for a general article that briefly mentions some popular culture reference - the correct response is to simply remove the reference.
I don't see how the existence of other articles affects your read. Don't like it? Don't read those articles.
But fan articles on sci-fi and so on are verifiable. Your daily routine is not ;)
Wikipedia doesn't actually have an official policy against notability - it's just something that a lot of editors think is important, and often comes as a side effect of verifiability.
So if Megapedia was also a Wiki, it either would have the same problem, or you'd have to drop the rule on verifiability which would just lead to all sorts of crap, and it would be useless as an encyclopedia.
Yes - I dislike it when ppl whine "Wikipedia is crap because my page got deleted" (when more likely than not the page would have been rightly deleted, and other people simultaneously criticise Wikipedia from the other way, complaining that it has too many articles that shouldn't be there), but yes sometimes things go wrong when there is an overzealous admin doing speedy delete.
I think it would be useful if the page content was still accessable via a special URL (i.e., so it's obviously not confused as being part of Wikipedia, but is viewable - I'm sure the data is kept, because pages can be undeleted, and I think admins can view it). The problem is it's much harder to argue a case of deletion review, or try to recreate a page without the problems that caused speedy delete, if you don't have access to the deleted article.
In the past I've had to rely on Google's cache to overturn an unfair deletion, but sometimes I don't check Google in time.
Your science lessons obviously didn't include scientific terminology - it makes things much easier if we understand what is meant by the terms.
a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural
A proposed explanation for evidence is a hypothesis. Conjecture is, well, conjecture.
well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact
A scientific theory is a model that explains facts, and is supported by evidence, and has been tested. Moreover, evolution refers to both a theory and a fact. So my comparison was spot on.
The truth is that science was never designed to testify for historical events.
Well first of all, I disagree that we can't say anything about the past - historians do this all the time, as do courts of law. Clearly we can decide that some things are very likely to be true, and this is the case for evolution. The methods we use to judge such evidence can themselves be tested.
And evolution can be tested, because it (including speciation, before you draw out the micro vs. macro distinction) can and has been observed.
Historical testimony, that is something that creationism has much more of on it's side.
Historical testimony is still something that involves science (how reliable are witnesses? Are the things they claim likely to be true?) Historians and archaeologists use scientific methods - indeed, archaeology is a science. What on earth do you think counts as historical testimony for creationism, dare I ask?
If someone claimed he wasn't the murderer, when all evidence pointed towards the fact, are you telling me you'd trust his word, because you think evidence can't be obtained for the past (other than "historical testimony", which for some reason you think is different)? What if two people claimed you committed a crime, when there was no evidence for it, or even evidence against it - would you think the court should find you guilty?
You've got to remember this is the UK, not the US - hardly anyone, even among religious people, believes in creationism. The Church of England doesn't support creationism, and supports evolution (e.g., http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/21/archbishop_backs_evolution/ , or there was also a recent case where bishops and scientists wrote together to the Government to oppose a school that was teaching evolution).
So there wasn't any reason beforehand to think that he needed to take extra care to distance himself from creationism.
(I also have this amusing image where fellow priests call for his resignation as a priest, based on them thinking he supports creationism...)