I find that the biggest mistake you can make in giving somebody support is bundling the impression that your time means nothing. Non-technical people often don't understand what most computer people do for a living, and it would not be a stretch to say that some don't have a great deal of respect for our profession. Try to project yourself as a lawyer giving legal advice: you never have time to talk on the phone, and you always need to reschedule something for at least five days in the future. A lot of people are just addicted to having somebody magically fix their problems at every whim.
Also, I don't do anything for anybody related to computers for less than a good-quality pizza and a six-pack of beer. I don't like to charge people money because then it creates an employer/employee relationship, and makes it easier for me to sever a particular relationship.
Also, right now is right about when prospective freshmen decide which college they're going to. Most of the decisions have been mailed out and the SIR (Statement of Intent to Register) deadlines, at least for the UCs*, have just passed last week. They need to get on the market for those parental purchases now. If they are viewed as having an outdated consumer-level product after this month, they will lose sales, because the parents are starting to shop for their kids now.
Additionally, a lot of parents use the promise of a new computer as a bargaining chip in where the student ends up going to school ("Well, I want to get you a new computer, but if you go to that private university I'll only be able to afford a Dell...").
* Forgive my bias, I'm a cal alum and this is the only date I know off the top of my head.
Dude, I'm totally going to make a mod for Oblivion where Adolf Hitler guns down a hundred Redguards while sodomozing an underage Khajiit as a party of Dunmer in turbans burns the american flag. In the background, thanks to the Distant Lands LOD, you will see an endless sea of nude Imperial wenches singing an a capella version of "Flight of the Valkyries." Bethesda's going to be in so much trouble!
The problem is that most people in Hollywood are so busy patting each other on the back that they can't tell a good movie from a bad one before it's finished (unless it's part of a serial like Potter).
They couldn't look at the screenplay for The Wild and recognize it as totally derivative and only marginally funny. John Travolta had no idea he was making the worst movie of all time when he started Battlefield Earth. All they can really do is make ten movies, watch nine of them flop and hope the 10th will be a hit and hope to make some of that money back. And it's not like the crap movies cost less. Look at Waterworld. That was the most expensive movie that had ever been made at the time, and it was utter crap.
I'm inclined to think that it's because they're too busy giving each other (metaphorical) handjobs to care about movies: that they are all stupid, immature assholes who run crying to their mommies if they get even an ounce of constructive criticism; that they are so blinded by drugs, sex and Yes Men that they have no faculty to objectively analyze the merit of a movie. But that's probably only partially true. Even after George Clooney's acceptance speech, I recognize that it's really, really hard to predict where the market is going to go with its thousand billion variables.
But hey, let's go through a few scenarios:
They set Gigli and LoTR at the same price level. Three days go by and it's clear that LoTR is inspiring and that Gigli is shit. If they price Gigli down to $5, chances are now that even less people are going to go see it than before, because not only do they have word of mouth information telling them that it's shit, the price says so too. So now nobody goes to see it.
They set LoTR at $5 because it was made by a bunch of New Zealanders (snicker), and Gigli at $12 because it was made by spoiled rich people in Los Angeles. Three days go by. If they jack up the price of LoTR, people will think it's price gouging (and it is) because it's not the type of good that really HAS a supply. Those people who saw it 8 times will probably just wait until it comes out on DVD.
So, the problem is really that nobody knows what the demand curve looks like in advance, and adjusting the prices mid-run has dubious benefits. Oh, and there's also the fact that the theaters themselves have no incentive to maximize box office profits, because they make all of their money off of concessions.
Get off your goddamn soapbox, Anonymous Coward. Katie Sackhoff is not (as far as I know) an ace fighter pilot. That's the suspension of disbelief that I was talking about.
"In absolute terms, they have weaker bones. But relative to the demands put on them, they may be stronger than men," he said. "They adapt to loading in a very similar way that men do, and may even have a slight advantage that is related to estrogen."
Of course, brute strength does provide you with some advantage, but I'm pretty sure withstanding G forces is more about power/mass ratio than absolute power. I've noticed that smaller people tend to have the advantage there as well.
I had trouble with Starbuck's character at first, but nowadays she's pretty believable. My suspension of disbelief as far as her piloting skills is not threatened, though in some of the last episodes of the second season I thought her responses and inner turmoil were a bit overplayed.
And as far as that ship being a soap opera. It seems pretty reasonable to me. I mean, there were love tetrahedrons in my college dorm, and that was on a much smaller scale without the looming threat of humanity's doom. And as Wally said on the Dilbert animated series, post-apocalyptic dystopias lower girls' standards by leaps and bounds.
Yep. I wouldn't have even considered transferring into the Engineering CS track.
I was actually targetting myself at the L&S CS program. IIRC, there were like seven requirements for declaration: 65B, calculus physics, natural sciences Diff. Eq/Linear Algebra, Calculus, Discrete Math, and Circuits. They strongly wanted you to have 5 of them completed by the time you transferred. Circuits weren't offered at Foothill (but rather De Anza, which is not too far away). I had calculus and natural sciences squared away. Diff. Eq. was proving pretty hard. I hadn't yet taken linear algebra, physics, or discrete math. On top of that, I had to complete my breadth requirements. Normally they don't want you to do this if you're a CS major, but one of the conditions of my guaranteed transfer agreement was that I complete breadth prior to entry.
The real kicker was the fact that my sixteen units of CS coursework wouldn't articulate and I'd have to take them over again. Apparently it was just a big political thing in Berkeley at the time: they wanted everything done from a very theoretical approach, they did everything in Scheme, and they were really difficult about giving other colleges course equivalency. Foothill's CS courses would've satisfied requirements at any other UC, but not UCB. None of the counselors brought this to my attention at the time, but then again, we all know that community college staff, counselors in particular, are utterly braindead.
The upshot of it was that if I worked my butt off and taken a full load the entire time with very little room for extracurriculars or working, I could've transferred only to have to take a year and a half of remedial coursework that I anticipated would be unnecessarily tedious to separate the Big Geeks from the Little Geeks. This would've meant, in the long run, staying on for an extra semester or two in Berkeley, and accumulating another year's worth of debt.
Anyway, I'm not really fishing for sympathy per se. Rather, despite my talents in the subject, the university made it unduly hard for me to get what I wanted, so I decided to major in English instead and program in my spare time. UCB set up red tape to discourage people from getting CS degrees, and it worked. Looking at the L&S site now, it seems like their requirements are less draconian. It's not regret I feel, really. I just feel like I was cheated.
There are whole families here who haven't had a job for generations and just survive off the welfare system.
We have those here too. It kind of reminds me of a funny story. My mother-in-law worked for the welfare administration, deciding who needed it and who didn't. There was one particular family where two people were claimed as severely brain-damaged/mentally retarded invalids, the mother and the eldest son.
The thing was, she'd call and say she was coming over to check in on the son, and the mother would appear to be completely normal, while the son didn't have control of his bodily functions, could barely move, couldn't speak, and basically chattered and drooled. Then, she'd come to check on the mother, and the son, now fine, would deplore the condition of his drooling, barely sentient mother. Well, needless to say, she denied them welfare.
They then sued the state, and not only got their welfare money, but the courts made it illegal for social workers to perform house calls to see who gets welfare and who doesn't. Drives me up the wall, that one.
What area do you live in, so I know not to go there?
I've not had the same experience. My friend, whose husband is a network admin in San Francisco, has some really awesome parties that are chock full of nerds who seem socially well-adjusted and revel in technology. Lots of them are women (most of the women are goths, but goth girls are notoriously easy so that's never bothered me). I'd hate to think that I live in the only place in the world where it's like this.
There's no reason to change the definition of CS just because we need more technical colleges teaching people how to write code.
True, but it is a fact that most competitive schools inflated their CS requirements to unbelievable proportions. I know a programmer who chose CS over EE 15 years ago because he wouldn't have to take Differential Equations, Linear Algebra and three semesters of Physics. I found that when I was slated to transfer to Berkeley, I would not only need all of the aforementioned courses, but I'd also need to take the entire lower division introductor series over again because Berkeley and Foothill couldn't work out a transfer agreement. Now, I actually ended up majoring in English (and thanks to my extradisciplinary skills I'm employed as a technical writer), so I can't answer this question, but what CS problem that I might encounter in an upper-division CS course requires the use of Diff. Eq., Linear Algebra or Physics?
The other side of the story is that you're totally right about coding being different from CS. The problem is that most HR/Business types don't know the difference. Heck, we all know most of those people don't know their own ass from a hole in the ground. These types posted job ads requiring 5 years experience in Java when the technology was, in fact, only 2 years old. But, when they're going through applications at a rate of about thirty per minute, they're immediately going to toss anybody who doesn't have a 4 year CS degree. It seems the best course of action is to expand software engineering programs to fill the void and make sure those are focused on turning out pratical, level-headed engineers who can solve a variety of problems but do not care to learn any more about math or physics than it takes to get an equation from a mathematician or physicist and implement it.
Jeeze, if one of my professors was doing something like this, I'd not only complain to the administration, but blog about it, put colorful posters all over campus denouncing him, make some friends at the paper, and generally be a pain in the ass to the administration. I mean, come on, doesn't "Corrupt administration refuses to censure professor for ruthless profiteering" sound catchy?"
Sounds a little quixotic, I know, but I went to Berkeley. It's a great way to kill time and meet people.
Dear vortex2.71,
Your use of the Latin alphabet is in violation of my client The Roman Empire's copyright. Please refrain from using letters A-z, as well as all punctionation and diacritical marks (which are derivative works)unless you obtain a per-letter license. Alternately, you can license our letters on a per-page basis (The Stamp Tax (tm)). We understand that the Cyrillic alphabet is in the public domain as well; however, its use on an extensive basis may lead to the secret police executing you as a communist.
We must also warn you on behalf of Geoffrey Chaucer that your use of modern English is in violation of his copyrights thereto. You may either use a more antequated version of English (e.g., Gawain and the Green Knight), another language, or a regional dialect like Yorkshirese or Canadian. As French is non-licensable, however, we regret to inform you that you may have to revert to a system of grunts and clicks to convey meaning if the only other language you know is French.
Why, oh why can't the future be like Brave New World instead? Seriously, I find nothing at all wrong with happy drugs, mindless orgies on a weekly basis and 50-60 years of youth.
I suspect even big fish like Adobe would stop porting. Their apps already look like shit in OS X - I still see the old spinning hourglass icon, so I think this means they're sitting on a ton of legacy code which they have deemed is not worth porting to the more modern APIs. I find it hard to imagine that they'd look worse in a compatibility layer scenario. Add to that the fact that they're basically telling any Intel/Mac user to screw themselves and wait for the next $900 copy of photoshop. And do you recall why Apple makes Final Cut Pro? Because Adobe flatly refused to port its video software to OS X. Hmm.
Seriously, Adobe's just waiting for an excuse to drop Mac support entirely.
So that makes the Department of Homeland Security the Ministry of Love, AOL/Time Warner, Verizon and AT&T the Ministry of Truth, and Citibank the Ministry of Plenty.
By the way, the correct newspeak term is "Double double-plus ungood." Minus no longer exists in our vocabular, nor does bad, as ungood and unminus are much more structured and logical. Please report to the Ministry of Love immediately for reeducation.
Second paragraph. Besides, normal people - like, people with commodity computers and not too much savvy - are more likely to play console games, in my experience. Most PC users aren't gamers.
While it's true that there is less software available on the mac platform, a lot of people have a poor conception of the problem, and think there's more competition in the PC space than there actually is.
For niche stuff there's definitely an issue. This hits home with me in the games department, but I understand that for some really specific business-related tasks it's a big hurdle to adoption as well.
Then there's what normal people do with their computers:
Surf the web
Write papers
Send and recieve email
Chat
Accounting
That's about it. People who bitch about a big vaccuum of software on the Mac platform are still thinking in the 1990's, when the web was static and people published things like interactive, searchable Bibles and Microsoft Fucking Encarta. That stuff is like ice makers in a car: novel but totally unnecessary and easily replaceable by, say, getting ice from the freezer. It was an immature space and you had a lot of weird stuff out there, but now people realize it's less of a pain in the butt just to get it on the web for free or look at Wikipedia. Therefore, there are only five applications that people use:
IE - Office - Outlook - AIM - Quicken
Choice doesn't matter. Even though choices exist, 90% of people will use those 5 applications most of the time. It's a space where there's 31 flavors but everybody buys vanilla, and the clerk knows you want vanilla in advance so he starts scooping it and rings you up before you have a chance to say a word. In light of that, is it so horrible that on a Mac, you'll be using:
Safari - Office - Mail - iChat - Quicken
Oh noes! No ActiveX! Whatever shall I do? Furthermore, there are, in fact, alternatives to all of these. You could use Camino, Firefox, Shiira, OO.org, Opera, Thunderbird, Eudora, Fire, GAIM, Pages, or event Pine, Lynx, TeX, and centericq if you really, really like terminals. People have just been trained to think a certain way about the Mac/PC rift, and many of their ideas are sort of fossilized in 1996.
Yep. That's the curse of slashdot: whenever you start talking about the sanctity and integrity of the english language and punctuation, you make some kind of a typgraphical mistake.
Misspelling words is nothing: editing a paper from a highly recognized professor who clearly can't write worth a damn is another. Trust me, there's a whole lot of people out there who rely on their underlings to make them sound good.
Grammar and punctuation errors offend my sight. I can't look at something that's obviously wrong without wanting to correct it. I think I could end a friendship over somebody typing, "r u going 2 skool 2day?"
Back when I was in college I carried pens around with me for notetaking. This also enabled me to correct posters on campus, which I turned into kind of a hobbie. God, sometimes I wish I'd packed a red sharpie just for that purpose. The Health Advisor would print up all of these flyers every week ("Don't do uppers and downers at the same time!" "Use a condom, even if it's anal!"), and while I was taking a dump I'd methodically correct them, being sure to add comments on style and mark sentences in need of restructuring. It was insanely fun.
As for a contract, god, I can't even imagine.
OK PEEPZ LISTN UP U GOTTA IF U BEEN OF SOND MIND N BODY HAB3UZ CRPUZ IPO FACTO LOL OMG I JUST HIT MY HEAD OK IF YOU DON GIVE ME 4 $$/WEEK 4 WATRN YO LAWN I GONNA SH1T ON IT ZOMG LOLZ !!!! cn i tuch ur boobz
Most of them have long since lost that creative spark by the time they're thirty anyway. One could reasonably argue that from the perspective of the business, they are merely trying to get as much useful work out of them during the handful of years in which they will actually be productive.
Balderdash.
Arguments such as these have been made hundreds of times over about every creative profession, and there are enough counterexamples to prove it's utter bunk. Take Cezanne. He did most of his important, really revolutionary work in the last few years of his life. He was only actually discovered by the around the turn of the century, when he was finally honored with an exhibition. Monet himself came up to him and esposed his genius, saying he was, in fact, the greatest genius of them all. He said (T. J. Clark's paraphrase) "Maybe... but back to work!" Can I offer you, perhaps, John Milton, or Robert Frost, or, hell, Neal Stephenson (he's 46, you know)?
Young people generally have the advantage that they're poor, desparate to make their mark on the world, too inexperienced to know what they're doing is stupid. Their brains also have a higher degree of plasticity, but this countered on the other end of the scale by the experience and wisdom that comes with age. What happens to older artists is that they get rich when they're 30 and are too busy with the trappings of fame and fortune to really produce anything good after that. After all, I don't think the decline in the Harry Potter books is because Rowling (not a spring chicken, by the way, she's 40) is now incapable of true innovation, but because she's writing big sloppy books as fast as she can. She knows they'll sell and her dedication to the craft of writing has become lax.
Well, okay, maybe not full virtual machine technology, but something more on the order of Wine/WineX/Cedega, a compatibility layer. I think the technology would be VERY interesting for the Mac/Intel platform, especially if MS developed it, because they have far more resources than the Cedega guys as well as their own source code. The problem with this implementation is not speed. It'd be a cash cow if it had good compatibility.
This isn't an area in which I am very well-versed technically, but I do know this: Mac users would rather run Windows apps as bastard children than boot into Windows. However, if, as your sibling post suggests, you can boot into windows in 30 seconds on one of these boxes, well, maybe it's not so bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that the biggest mistake you can make in giving somebody support is bundling the impression that your time means nothing. Non-technical people often don't understand what most computer people do for a living, and it would not be a stretch to say that some don't have a great deal of respect for our profession. Try to project yourself as a lawyer giving legal advice: you never have time to talk on the phone, and you always need to reschedule something for at least five days in the future. A lot of people are just addicted to having somebody magically fix their problems at every whim.
Also, I don't do anything for anybody related to computers for less than a good-quality pizza and a six-pack of beer. I don't like to charge people money because then it creates an employer/employee relationship, and makes it easier for me to sever a particular relationship.
Also, right now is right about when prospective freshmen decide which college they're going to. Most of the decisions have been mailed out and the SIR (Statement of Intent to Register) deadlines, at least for the UCs*, have just passed last week. They need to get on the market for those parental purchases now. If they are viewed as having an outdated consumer-level product after this month, they will lose sales, because the parents are starting to shop for their kids now.
Additionally, a lot of parents use the promise of a new computer as a bargaining chip in where the student ends up going to school ("Well, I want to get you a new computer, but if you go to that private university I'll only be able to afford a Dell...").
* Forgive my bias, I'm a cal alum and this is the only date I know off the top of my head.
Though pornography is quite old, I think primates have been having group sex (well, bonobos at least) for far longer.
Dude, I'm totally going to make a mod for Oblivion where Adolf Hitler guns down a hundred Redguards while sodomozing an underage Khajiit as a party of Dunmer in turbans burns the american flag. In the background, thanks to the Distant Lands LOD, you will see an endless sea of nude Imperial wenches singing an a capella version of "Flight of the Valkyries." Bethesda's going to be in so much trouble!
The problem is that most people in Hollywood are so busy patting each other on the back that they can't tell a good movie from a bad one before it's finished (unless it's part of a serial like Potter).
They couldn't look at the screenplay for The Wild and recognize it as totally derivative and only marginally funny. John Travolta had no idea he was making the worst movie of all time when he started Battlefield Earth. All they can really do is make ten movies, watch nine of them flop and hope the 10th will be a hit and hope to make some of that money back. And it's not like the crap movies cost less. Look at Waterworld. That was the most expensive movie that had ever been made at the time, and it was utter crap.
I'm inclined to think that it's because they're too busy giving each other (metaphorical) handjobs to care about movies: that they are all stupid, immature assholes who run crying to their mommies if they get even an ounce of constructive criticism; that they are so blinded by drugs, sex and Yes Men that they have no faculty to objectively analyze the merit of a movie. But that's probably only partially true. Even after George Clooney's acceptance speech, I recognize that it's really, really hard to predict where the market is going to go with its thousand billion variables.
But hey, let's go through a few scenarios:
They set Gigli and LoTR at the same price level. Three days go by and it's clear that LoTR is inspiring and that Gigli is shit. If they price Gigli down to $5, chances are now that even less people are going to go see it than before, because not only do they have word of mouth information telling them that it's shit, the price says so too. So now nobody goes to see it.
They set LoTR at $5 because it was made by a bunch of New Zealanders (snicker), and Gigli at $12 because it was made by spoiled rich people in Los Angeles. Three days go by. If they jack up the price of LoTR, people will think it's price gouging (and it is) because it's not the type of good that really HAS a supply. Those people who saw it 8 times will probably just wait until it comes out on DVD.
So, the problem is really that nobody knows what the demand curve looks like in advance, and adjusting the prices mid-run has dubious benefits. Oh, and there's also the fact that the theaters themselves have no incentive to maximize box office profits, because they make all of their money off of concessions.
Get off your goddamn soapbox, Anonymous Coward. Katie Sackhoff is not (as far as I know) an ace fighter pilot. That's the suspension of disbelief that I was talking about.
Women can make good pilots, biologically.
Of course, brute strength does provide you with some advantage, but I'm pretty sure withstanding G forces is more about power/mass ratio than absolute power. I've noticed that smaller people tend to have the advantage there as well.
I had trouble with Starbuck's character at first, but nowadays she's pretty believable. My suspension of disbelief as far as her piloting skills is not threatened, though in some of the last episodes of the second season I thought her responses and inner turmoil were a bit overplayed.
And as far as that ship being a soap opera. It seems pretty reasonable to me. I mean, there were love tetrahedrons in my college dorm, and that was on a much smaller scale without the looming threat of humanity's doom. And as Wally said on the Dilbert animated series, post-apocalyptic dystopias lower girls' standards by leaps and bounds.
Yep. I wouldn't have even considered transferring into the Engineering CS track.
I was actually targetting myself at the L&S CS program. IIRC, there were like seven requirements for declaration: 65B, calculus physics, natural sciences Diff. Eq/Linear Algebra, Calculus, Discrete Math, and Circuits. They strongly wanted you to have 5 of them completed by the time you transferred. Circuits weren't offered at Foothill (but rather De Anza, which is not too far away). I had calculus and natural sciences squared away. Diff. Eq. was proving pretty hard. I hadn't yet taken linear algebra, physics, or discrete math. On top of that, I had to complete my breadth requirements. Normally they don't want you to do this if you're a CS major, but one of the conditions of my guaranteed transfer agreement was that I complete breadth prior to entry.
The real kicker was the fact that my sixteen units of CS coursework wouldn't articulate and I'd have to take them over again. Apparently it was just a big political thing in Berkeley at the time: they wanted everything done from a very theoretical approach, they did everything in Scheme, and they were really difficult about giving other colleges course equivalency. Foothill's CS courses would've satisfied requirements at any other UC, but not UCB. None of the counselors brought this to my attention at the time, but then again, we all know that community college staff, counselors in particular, are utterly braindead.
The upshot of it was that if I worked my butt off and taken a full load the entire time with very little room for extracurriculars or working, I could've transferred only to have to take a year and a half of remedial coursework that I anticipated would be unnecessarily tedious to separate the Big Geeks from the Little Geeks. This would've meant, in the long run, staying on for an extra semester or two in Berkeley, and accumulating another year's worth of debt.
Anyway, I'm not really fishing for sympathy per se. Rather, despite my talents in the subject, the university made it unduly hard for me to get what I wanted, so I decided to major in English instead and program in my spare time. UCB set up red tape to discourage people from getting CS degrees, and it worked. Looking at the L&S site now, it seems like their requirements are less draconian. It's not regret I feel, really. I just feel like I was cheated.
We have those here too. It kind of reminds me of a funny story. My mother-in-law worked for the welfare administration, deciding who needed it and who didn't. There was one particular family where two people were claimed as severely brain-damaged/mentally retarded invalids, the mother and the eldest son.
The thing was, she'd call and say she was coming over to check in on the son, and the mother would appear to be completely normal, while the son didn't have control of his bodily functions, could barely move, couldn't speak, and basically chattered and drooled. Then, she'd come to check on the mother, and the son, now fine, would deplore the condition of his drooling, barely sentient mother. Well, needless to say, she denied them welfare.
They then sued the state, and not only got their welfare money, but the courts made it illegal for social workers to perform house calls to see who gets welfare and who doesn't. Drives me up the wall, that one.
What area do you live in, so I know not to go there?
I've not had the same experience. My friend, whose husband is a network admin in San Francisco, has some really awesome parties that are chock full of nerds who seem socially well-adjusted and revel in technology. Lots of them are women (most of the women are goths, but goth girls are notoriously easy so that's never bothered me). I'd hate to think that I live in the only place in the world where it's like this.
True, but it is a fact that most competitive schools inflated their CS requirements to unbelievable proportions. I know a programmer who chose CS over EE 15 years ago because he wouldn't have to take Differential Equations, Linear Algebra and three semesters of Physics. I found that when I was slated to transfer to Berkeley, I would not only need all of the aforementioned courses, but I'd also need to take the entire lower division introductor series over again because Berkeley and Foothill couldn't work out a transfer agreement. Now, I actually ended up majoring in English (and thanks to my extradisciplinary skills I'm employed as a technical writer), so I can't answer this question, but what CS problem that I might encounter in an upper-division CS course requires the use of Diff. Eq., Linear Algebra or Physics?
The other side of the story is that you're totally right about coding being different from CS. The problem is that most HR/Business types don't know the difference. Heck, we all know most of those people don't know their own ass from a hole in the ground. These types posted job ads requiring 5 years experience in Java when the technology was, in fact, only 2 years old. But, when they're going through applications at a rate of about thirty per minute, they're immediately going to toss anybody who doesn't have a 4 year CS degree. It seems the best course of action is to expand software engineering programs to fill the void and make sure those are focused on turning out pratical, level-headed engineers who can solve a variety of problems but do not care to learn any more about math or physics than it takes to get an equation from a mathematician or physicist and implement it.
Jeeze, if one of my professors was doing something like this, I'd not only complain to the administration, but blog about it, put colorful posters all over campus denouncing him, make some friends at the paper, and generally be a pain in the ass to the administration. I mean, come on, doesn't "Corrupt administration refuses to censure professor for ruthless profiteering" sound catchy?"
Sounds a little quixotic, I know, but I went to Berkeley. It's a great way to kill time and meet people.
Sorta reminds me of the Crimson King. Seemingly all-powerful and malevolent from afar, and as pathetic as a screaming, insane old coot up close.
Dear vortex2.71, Your use of the Latin alphabet is in violation of my client The Roman Empire's copyright. Please refrain from using letters A-z, as well as all punctionation and diacritical marks (which are derivative works)unless you obtain a per-letter license. Alternately, you can license our letters on a per-page basis (The Stamp Tax (tm)). We understand that the Cyrillic alphabet is in the public domain as well; however, its use on an extensive basis may lead to the secret police executing you as a communist. We must also warn you on behalf of Geoffrey Chaucer that your use of modern English is in violation of his copyrights thereto. You may either use a more antequated version of English (e.g., Gawain and the Green Knight), another language, or a regional dialect like Yorkshirese or Canadian. As French is non-licensable, however, we regret to inform you that you may have to revert to a system of grunts and clicks to convey meaning if the only other language you know is French.
Why, oh why can't the future be like Brave New World instead? Seriously, I find nothing at all wrong with happy drugs, mindless orgies on a weekly basis and 50-60 years of youth.
I suspect even big fish like Adobe would stop porting. Their apps already look like shit in OS X - I still see the old spinning hourglass icon, so I think this means they're sitting on a ton of legacy code which they have deemed is not worth porting to the more modern APIs. I find it hard to imagine that they'd look worse in a compatibility layer scenario. Add to that the fact that they're basically telling any Intel/Mac user to screw themselves and wait for the next $900 copy of photoshop. And do you recall why Apple makes Final Cut Pro? Because Adobe flatly refused to port its video software to OS X. Hmm.
Seriously, Adobe's just waiting for an excuse to drop Mac support entirely.
So that makes the Department of Homeland Security the Ministry of Love, AOL/Time Warner, Verizon and AT&T the Ministry of Truth, and Citibank the Ministry of Plenty.
By the way, the correct newspeak term is "Double double-plus ungood." Minus no longer exists in our vocabular, nor does bad, as ungood and unminus are much more structured and logical. Please report to the Ministry of Love immediately for reeducation.
or a secret underground tunnel... the iTube!
Second paragraph. Besides, normal people - like, people with commodity computers and not too much savvy - are more likely to play console games, in my experience. Most PC users aren't gamers.
While it's true that there is less software available on the mac platform, a lot of people have a poor conception of the problem, and think there's more competition in the PC space than there actually is.
For niche stuff there's definitely an issue. This hits home with me in the games department, but I understand that for some really specific business-related tasks it's a big hurdle to adoption as well.
Then there's what normal people do with their computers:
That's about it. People who bitch about a big vaccuum of software on the Mac platform are still thinking in the 1990's, when the web was static and people published things like interactive, searchable Bibles and Microsoft Fucking Encarta. That stuff is like ice makers in a car: novel but totally unnecessary and easily replaceable by, say, getting ice from the freezer. It was an immature space and you had a lot of weird stuff out there, but now people realize it's less of a pain in the butt just to get it on the web for free or look at Wikipedia. Therefore, there are only five applications that people use:
IE - Office - Outlook - AIM - Quicken
Choice doesn't matter. Even though choices exist, 90% of people will use those 5 applications most of the time. It's a space where there's 31 flavors but everybody buys vanilla, and the clerk knows you want vanilla in advance so he starts scooping it and rings you up before you have a chance to say a word. In light of that, is it so horrible that on a Mac, you'll be using:
Safari - Office - Mail - iChat - Quicken
Oh noes! No ActiveX! Whatever shall I do? Furthermore, there are, in fact, alternatives to all of these. You could use Camino, Firefox, Shiira, OO.org, Opera, Thunderbird, Eudora, Fire, GAIM, Pages, or event Pine, Lynx, TeX, and centericq if you really, really like terminals. People have just been trained to think a certain way about the Mac/PC rift, and many of their ideas are sort of fossilized in 1996.
Yep. That's the curse of slashdot: whenever you start talking about the sanctity and integrity of the english language and punctuation, you make some kind of a typgraphical mistake.
Misspelling words is nothing: editing a paper from a highly recognized professor who clearly can't write worth a damn is another. Trust me, there's a whole lot of people out there who rely on their underlings to make them sound good.
Grammar and punctuation errors offend my sight. I can't look at something that's obviously wrong without wanting to correct it. I think I could end a friendship over somebody typing, "r u going 2 skool 2day?"
Back when I was in college I carried pens around with me for notetaking. This also enabled me to correct posters on campus, which I turned into kind of a hobbie. God, sometimes I wish I'd packed a red sharpie just for that purpose. The Health Advisor would print up all of these flyers every week ("Don't do uppers and downers at the same time!" "Use a condom, even if it's anal!"), and while I was taking a dump I'd methodically correct them, being sure to add comments on style and mark sentences in need of restructuring. It was insanely fun.
As for a contract, god, I can't even imagine.
Balderdash.
Arguments such as these have been made hundreds of times over about every creative profession, and there are enough counterexamples to prove it's utter bunk. Take Cezanne. He did most of his important, really revolutionary work in the last few years of his life. He was only actually discovered by the around the turn of the century, when he was finally honored with an exhibition. Monet himself came up to him and esposed his genius, saying he was, in fact, the greatest genius of them all. He said (T. J. Clark's paraphrase) "Maybe... but back to work!" Can I offer you, perhaps, John Milton, or Robert Frost, or, hell, Neal Stephenson (he's 46, you know)?
Young people generally have the advantage that they're poor, desparate to make their mark on the world, too inexperienced to know what they're doing is stupid. Their brains also have a higher degree of plasticity, but this countered on the other end of the scale by the experience and wisdom that comes with age. What happens to older artists is that they get rich when they're 30 and are too busy with the trappings of fame and fortune to really produce anything good after that. After all, I don't think the decline in the Harry Potter books is because Rowling (not a spring chicken, by the way, she's 40) is now incapable of true innovation, but because she's writing big sloppy books as fast as she can. She knows they'll sell and her dedication to the craft of writing has become lax.
Naw, AMD chips don't enter hardware interrupt mode when they overheat, they violently explode: http://www.azfar.name.my/2005/02/amd-duron-explode .php.
Well, okay, maybe not full virtual machine technology, but something more on the order of Wine/WineX/Cedega, a compatibility layer. I think the technology would be VERY interesting for the Mac/Intel platform, especially if MS developed it, because they have far more resources than the Cedega guys as well as their own source code. The problem with this implementation is not speed. It'd be a cash cow if it had good compatibility.
This isn't an area in which I am very well-versed technically, but I do know this: Mac users would rather run Windows apps as bastard children than boot into Windows. However, if, as your sibling post suggests, you can boot into windows in 30 seconds on one of these boxes, well, maybe it's not so bad.