...chime in now, so that many years down the road, I might look back on this post and feel a sense of righteousness, or something (yeah, I plan on living a terribly pathetic life, since I'll be returning to slashdot to boost my ego).
How is this good or beneficial to Linux? We already saw arguments over in the recent "Firefox user stats" thread about how numbers don't mean anything to the people concerned, and how it might even be argued that the people who would rely on numbers are exactly the sort of people that Open Source has little interest in at the moment - being that they account for 90%* of all idiotic technical support timewasting questions.
It's like a poster above said about switching pedophiles to Linux, only worse - Linux still has to combat a certain "cowboy hax0r d00d3" legacy in the fields its most interested in (the Workplace, the High End Market) - and seeing "WELCOME TO GOOGALL.COM! CLICK HERE TO SEARCH FOR ALL PRODUCTS ON GOOGALL! GOOGALL XBOX 360 GOOGAL XXX GOOGAL ADULT GOOGAL IPOD GOOGAL WEBCAM GOOGAL MODCHIP YOUR INTERNET IS BEING MONITORED RIGHT NOW, CLICK HERE FOR INFO this site powered by Linux" on every former 404 / typo URL isn't exactly going to endear the Linux name to the average decision-making Middle Manager in Charge of Accounts at BigCompanyConCo.
Anyway, just my $0.02 / YMMV / mod me down all you want / Bill Gates Sux / Linux rulez / IANAL / Cowboy Neal in Soviet Russia / FP FP FP FP FP FP / PONIES POINES PONEYS / etc
(*) - numbers fudged with tongue firmly in the ironic cheek
An anonymous dipshit who started visiting Slashdot after the OMG Ponies!!1! episode writes "When Penguin-Kun Wars came out at the arcades in 1985, many people were perplexed and vaguely disoriented at how different than "normal" table tennis it was. This game was never designed to be a table tennis title at all. Instead, it's actually a game loosely based on table tennis, in that there's a table, and two players, one at either side of the table. Hey, finding enough stories to keep all you oldskool First Posters busy is hard! Here's a review of the original Pong as designed by Nolan Bushnell. UPL Company Limited felt that the blocky graphics and 'outdated mechanics' made it too primitive for audiences of the futuristic, progressive-thinking mid-1980s." http://rr.cheats.ign.com/rr/009096/005/005100.html
Am I the only person who genuinely misses seeing a bunch of crap copy-and-paste FPs at the beginning of every article? Looks like the latest batch of banal, clueless editors finally alienated the one thing that gave visiting Slashdot some sense of tradition.
I'm just waiting for the next idiot clueless Zork copy/paste - for instance, one that reads "PowerPlay seems to be a promising step forward for internet gaming - apparently it will make your modem feel like a LAN party!?" or maybe one about how "the Playstation 2's 'Emotion Engine' will hopefully allow programmers the ability to enhance AI with human-like traits".
That franchise is played out. Old news. Last year. Passé. If they could have worked out the rights to The Hobbit in time for Christmas 2005, then maybe there'd be time for one final she-bang, and perhaps a TV spinoff or two - but by now people've moved on to World of Lovecraft.
However, LAN: A Dog - now that's a book I can identify with.
The trouble being that, yes, the vocal minority (we hope) of people complaining about titty in Grand Theft Auto and the S-word on TV are pretty much mindless zombies who have little or no control over their actions, but for the weak nature of their faith alone. I mean, these are people who use a 2000 year old fairytale to explain life on Earth - "suggestible" doesn't even begin to describe it
These are the same people who like to believe that the First Amendment was a fluke, only designed to protect Puritan family values, and never thought of as a justification for, you know, teaching our children that there may not be any Santa Claus riding on clouds, or shouting "FUCK THE POPE" in a crowded movie theater.
Sales are weaker than expected, but this is considered "strong"?
Sorta like the MPAA's "weak" sales in reverse... or the very opposite of the plight of the poor, downtrodden Major League Baseball owner.
So were Intel/the PC makers (Zork is a little fuzzy on the specifics here - protip: Intel doesn't account for 100% of chipsets - but hey, this is slashdot after all) just super-duper hyper-rosy-optimistic in their predictions for Q1, or...
...well, I was going to imply that perhaps this is some sort of bullshit fluff slow-news-day piece, but on Slashdot? About PC sales? Nahhhhhhhhhh, couldn't be. Guess whoever made the predictions was just Positive Thinking.
I've watched my wife surfing in the past, and when *anything* popped-up she clicked ok; I freaked one time as she clicked 4 pop-ups out of the way before I could cross the room. I gave her a lecture about spyware, malware, etc. and she was all open-eyed and "OMG, really?" and now she calls me whenever something pops up on her screen.
Similar story with my girlfriend. One day she's browsing the web, and from across the room, I hear "OMG, PONIES!?!/1/11?1/11!?!?!?11?!"
(Actually, it wasn't really my girlfriend, I just read Slashdot in a high pitched voice... an old habit from the days of timothy and John Katz, I suppose:-\ ).
Maybe he means the freedom to plug all sorts of different hardware into the PC, without having Apple somewhere along the line making sure everything is DRM-compliant -- er, I mean, ":-) - riffic"?
I'm not Newegg.com, but I'd wager that the number of companies making PC components is about 100 times that of the companies making Apple parts. Variety, variety, variety.
Re:What about the other side of this?
on
Apple vs Bloggers
·
· Score: 1
You made sure to button up all the buttons on that famesuit, right?
Nono, FLAMEsuit. The other suit's for when I'm defending Linux and exposing security holes in IE via links to my blog.
-Game development started shortly after E3 2005. Ubisoft saw and demoed the controller before E3 2005.
-Ubisoft Paris took their idea directly to Iwata and Miyamoto, and were given the go ahead. After that meeting they were given prototype controllers. The article states that Ubisoft worked "closely" with Nintendo's engineers in Japan on the title
You know who else probably worked "closely" with Nintendo's engineers? The Turok team.
-Game Informer mentions that while conducting the interviews with Ubisoft, they were handed the "latest version" of the controller
I'm sure this doesn't taint their enthusiasm one bit.
-During the beginning of the game, you are encouraged to use your weapons ruthlessly, but as the game progresses you become more proficient and strategic. This gameplay idea led Ubisoft to decide to give the game a martial arts setting. "Enter the Yakuza"
Something about this seems backwards, but maybe I'm just old fashioned. Didn't settings used to come before the gameplay?
-The first third of the game will be all about being "brutal by necessity"
-You will be less precise and favor more devastating weapons (machine guns)
This sounds reasonably cool. It's about time a FPS starts with the fun guns.
-As you progress and become more precise, smaller guns will be used
-"The goal...is to use five bullets to kill five enemies"
...so in other words, it turns into Resident Evil? Here's a hint: when a shooting game starts talking about conserving ammo, it's walking the line. And on the other side of that line are jumping puzzles with cones of vision and 100 invinco-guards.
-"When fighting with this level of skill, the music and sound effects will reflect it, remaining calm and peaceful"
So, basically, looking on the bright side, it's like Half Life, looking on the jaded but probably more accurate side, it's just like any other game with different music for different levels. W00 Rev0lution in my pants.
-"When you fight brutally, the sounds around you grow increasingly more intense"
REALLY???????? NO WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!! I hope Ubi*Soft can figure out another revolutionary immersion scheme - like, "when you wave the controller around like an epileptic while randomly smacking buttons, your character will begin to act spastic". Or maybe give those graphics a similar Immersion Feel(TM) - "when you run fast, the on-screen graphics come at you with increasing speed"
-"Audio...."
I don't get how this can be considered a feature, but I guess I'm glad and excited. Woo Revolution.
-Freeze shot: by fighting effciently you fill the Freeze Shot gauge...fighting chaotically causes to decreases
So, this is going to be one of those games that relies on doing everything perfectly, else your guage/multiplier/sex appeal falls back to zero. I remember other games with the same mechanic, and every single game reviewed poorly.
-When the gauge is filled you can hit a button to momentarily stop time, and then target specific locations on enemy bodies
REVOLUTIONARY!!! Like Red Dead Revolver - only this game is controlled with a Magical Immersion Reality 3D Wand of Revolutions!!
-Headshots thus are tempting, but non lethal shots, such as shooting guns out of enemy hand, can be more beneficial
(and so on, and so on, and so on - reading any more of this outrageous, content-free hype would drag this post into -2 Flamebait land quicker than CmdrTaco can rub one out on a PONY)
Yesterday's games, running on last week's hardware, with a wacky controller from Tomorrowland that's good for nothing more than first person (shooters/adventures/platformers/racers, in decreasing order of playability) and MARIO POINT AND CLICKFEST REVOLUTION 7. I am getting a tremendous hard-on just imagining this.
Re:What about the other side of this?
on
Apple vs Bloggers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Apple are morons for doing this. They should be slowly stirring the pot, like Google is. It generates speculation, excites potential customers, and probably even reveals some good future product ideas in the process! I've never seen rumours subtract from the effectiveness of a Google product launch, and I see no reason why it should be any different for Apple.
*flamesuit on*
The key difference between Google and Apple is that Apple is an exterior trend. Their products are generally physically inferior (as in, throw an iPod and a Diamond Rio down the stairs, and my money's on the Diamond Rio to survive) and less cost-effective than the competition (fact, not opinion).
Google, on the other hand, provides arguably the best service of its class, usually at the best price. I'm thinking primarily of Gmail here, though it certainly applies to lots of other services as well. Basically, I'm not saying Apple sux Gmail rulez (though that's definitely how I'm biased) - but rather, we're comparing a Paris fashion design company (Apple) to Osh Kosh B'Gosh / Levy's Jeans (Google)
So, basically, the theory goes that people are buying Apple because A) it's a surprise, and B) it'll be guarenteed trendy and eye-catching for months to come.
If the nefarious "competition" can figure out how an Apple device is going to look, and manages to rush something that looks substantially similar out the door - bang. Apple's lost a substantial number of customers. It doesn't matter if the "competition"'s device is half as good and self-destructs when the batteries go out - because by the time iWhatever comes out and is deemed "twice as good" as Nigerian Products Ltd's Gloriously Functioning Audio Versatile Unit, it's still not the first on the block to look the way it does.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't really lose as much from not being the first on the block. A startup site can copy Google's basic look and feel and have free webmail, free blogspace, free web hosting and even bonus free spyware (FOR FREE!!) - so what, who cares. People will migrate to Google's services, provided they're better/faster/cheaper/etc than the startup. While a Gmail address is a sexy, trendy thing in some circles, it's not something I'm chained to in the great wide out of doors. iWhatever, on the other hand, is - and if I, the shallow and none-too-savvy trendy consumer on the street, can save $20 to put towards Gapercombie and Fitch jeans AND buy something "totally new and seXXXy", then so be it.
Just my (probably incoherant and bouncing all over the place) two cents.
Neither one of you intelligent, +5 Insightful posters seem to have a clue regarding how to analyze a survey or why this is just more Slow News Day hot air.
Guess the +5 Insightful are just having trouble with the +1 Fucking Obvious today.
--
Next on Slashdot - research indicates that as of today, Bush's remaining time in the Oval Office "decreasing steadily every minute"!
Slashdot posters: *500 post clusterfuck of a thread analyzing just why this is the case and what might be done to "recover" or "hasten the process", discussing everything from society's shifting views on war and abortion to the proportion of blue ties to black ties at GOP conventions to whether tin foil hats really work and whether they cause cell phone interference or not, and of course Sony vs. Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux*
Really, Captain Planet, it'd be best if you knew what the fuck you were talking about before you opened your mouth. No wonder environmentalism has such a bad reputation.
Read the parent, grandparent, original article, parent article, et al very carefully.
Now ask yourself - will using a cellphone once, for a five minute period, cause your brain to swell up, grow numerous brains of its own, and eventually explode? (PROTIP: No)
The point is that even if (and yes, that is an "if" - Swedish scientists aren't perfect; nobody is) cell phones cause cancer, the question then remains - how much use does it take for this to occur?
If you really think hysteria's ever going to solve anything, you obviously weren't paying much attention to the fall 2001 political climate.
I've engineered a solution, which is to not give a crap about Apple until they can come out with a product that is well designed, well supported, won't break after two weeks of use, and, oh yeah, can be fixed by anyone when something minor goes wrong - maybe then I'll start groaning at the predictable journalism jokes.
(yes, I know the iPod has had replaceable batteries for a year or so now, but that doesn't change the fact that for three years, they didn't).
Also, common/. policy is to keep all quoted material in italics, which would have clarified just who doesn't know how to use an apostrophe - but let's not get into that.
I personally like them. Give me some dry wit - or "32 Scoot to Shoot with Plane Aflame" (see comments above) - over a boring summary of the facts any day of the week. Personally, I'm apt to think this is symptomatic of the decay within our society - but then again, I'm apt to think that over the latest Steven Spielberg movie as well, so go figure. Really, it harkens back to a day when those who read the paper, read the entire newspaper, and thusly would know the entire news. The headlines were there more to prepare your mind for the inevitable than to attract the reader's eye. This USA Today trend of posting full color buzzwords on the front page, so Joe Schmoe can skim it and knows what names to drop around the water cooler today, has got to stop.
-1 Flamebait out of the way, it's time to go for my weak attempt at +1 Insightful:
Wouldn't it be relatively simple for Google to allow newspapers the use of "alt" or "meta" tags for their headlines? Considering there's a small, reasonably finite number of trusted news sources, couldn't some sort of whitelist be easily implemented?
Please don't use apostrophes to designate plurals. This is pretty basic high school freshman English.
It's my turn to grammar educate! = CORRECT (contraction for "it is")
It was nugneant's turn to grammar educate! = CORRECT (designating the possessive of a non-pronoun)
The con's of this argument . . . = NO, WRONG.
It is quite the pain in the ass when people with good opinion's butcher them with incompetant mechanic's = NO, WRONG AGAIN.
All these flame's are pissing me off, I cant help my grammer = WRONG ON MULTIPLE LEVELS
Except between 1993 - 2001, when they were a lapdog for the executive.
Yeah, that Clinton blowjob story was totally surpressed. If it weren't for Yahoo News and Rush Limbaugh, I don't think anyone would have known about it.
OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!11! HEmoS U cuTiE 4 ReAL r U rellY ThIR30? BCuz U LoOOK yungEr ReLLY:):) *KiSS* *mWAH* i loVe uR uPDateS sPEciaLLY wHen U sAy MiCROSoft sUX beCauSe TheY sOoOoOoOoOoOo dO! oMG rEaLLY!!! bIll GaTEs is a HIdEus TRoLl oF a MaN noT a HoTTIe lIak u AND LiNuS TrIvOlDooReEs!!1! ok u HottIE hIt mE baCk nD ADD mE to uR mySPace DARlinG;-);-) <3 *mWAH*
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Apple OS just as much a ripoff of a Xerox system GUI as Windows allegedly was/is of MacOS?
...chime in now, so that many years down the road, I might look back on this post and feel a sense of righteousness, or something (yeah, I plan on living a terribly pathetic life, since I'll be returning to slashdot to boost my ego).
How is this good or beneficial to Linux? We already saw arguments over in the recent "Firefox user stats" thread about how numbers don't mean anything to the people concerned, and how it might even be argued that the people who would rely on numbers are exactly the sort of people that Open Source has little interest in at the moment - being that they account for 90%* of all idiotic technical support timewasting questions.
It's like a poster above said about switching pedophiles to Linux, only worse - Linux still has to combat a certain "cowboy hax0r d00d3" legacy in the fields its most interested in (the Workplace, the High End Market) - and seeing "WELCOME TO GOOGALL.COM! CLICK HERE TO SEARCH FOR ALL PRODUCTS ON GOOGALL! GOOGALL XBOX 360 GOOGAL XXX GOOGAL ADULT GOOGAL IPOD GOOGAL WEBCAM GOOGAL MODCHIP YOUR INTERNET IS BEING MONITORED RIGHT NOW, CLICK HERE FOR INFO this site powered by Linux" on every former 404 / typo URL isn't exactly going to endear the Linux name to the average decision-making Middle Manager in Charge of Accounts at BigCompanyConCo.
Anyway, just my $0.02 / YMMV / mod me down all you want / Bill Gates Sux / Linux rulez / IANAL / Cowboy Neal in Soviet Russia / FP FP FP FP FP FP / PONIES POINES PONEYS / etc
(*) - numbers fudged with tongue firmly in the ironic cheek
An anonymous dipshit who started visiting Slashdot after the OMG Ponies!!1! episode writes "When Penguin-Kun Wars came out at the arcades in 1985, many people were perplexed and vaguely disoriented at how different than "normal" table tennis it was. This game was never designed to be a table tennis title at all. Instead, it's actually a game loosely based on table tennis, in that there's a table, and two players, one at either side of the table. Hey, finding enough stories to keep all you oldskool First Posters busy is hard! Here's a review of the original Pong as designed by Nolan Bushnell. UPL Company Limited felt that the blocky graphics and 'outdated mechanics' made it too primitive for audiences of the futuristic, progressive-thinking mid-1980s."l
http://rr.cheats.ign.com/rr/009096/005/005100.htm
Am I the only person who genuinely misses seeing a bunch of crap copy-and-paste FPs at the beginning of every article? Looks like the latest batch of banal, clueless editors finally alienated the one thing that gave visiting Slashdot some sense of tradition.
I'm just waiting for the next idiot clueless Zork copy/paste - for instance, one that reads "PowerPlay seems to be a promising step forward for internet gaming - apparently it will make your modem feel like a LAN party!?" or maybe one about how "the Playstation 2's 'Emotion Engine' will hopefully allow programmers the ability to enhance AI with human-like traits".
...um.
You do realize that AOL gets more hits in an hour than slashdot will all day, right?
Umm, yes, that's why this was a joke.
...sigh...
That franchise is played out. Old news. Last year. Passé. If they could have worked out the rights to The Hobbit in time for Christmas 2005, then maybe there'd be time for one final she-bang, and perhaps a TV spinoff or two - but by now people've moved on to World of Lovecraft.
However, LAN: A Dog - now that's a book I can identify with.
After that earlier item about the introduction of video tape (a mere 50 years late) I can't imagine what gave you that idea.
I'm extra-bitter because they totally forgot the 25th anniversary of My Little Pony.
(>_<) <-- me
The trouble being that, yes, the vocal minority (we hope) of people complaining about titty in Grand Theft Auto and the S-word on TV are pretty much mindless zombies who have little or no control over their actions, but for the weak nature of their faith alone. I mean, these are people who use a 2000 year old fairytale to explain life on Earth - "suggestible" doesn't even begin to describe it
These are the same people who like to believe that the First Amendment was a fluke, only designed to protect Puritan family values, and never thought of as a justification for, you know, teaching our children that there may not be any Santa Claus riding on clouds, or shouting "FUCK THE POPE" in a crowded movie theater.
Sales are weaker than expected, but this is considered "strong"?
...well, I was going to imply that perhaps this is some sort of bullshit fluff slow-news-day piece, but on Slashdot? About PC sales? Nahhhhhhhhhh, couldn't be. Guess whoever made the predictions was just Positive Thinking.
Sorta like the MPAA's "weak" sales in reverse... or the very opposite of the plight of the poor, downtrodden Major League Baseball owner.
So were Intel/the PC makers (Zork is a little fuzzy on the specifics here - protip: Intel doesn't account for 100% of chipsets - but hey, this is slashdot after all) just super-duper hyper-rosy-optimistic in their predictions for Q1, or...
Similar story with my girlfriend. One day she's browsing the web, and from across the room, I hear "OMG, PONIES!?!/1/11?1/11!?!?!?11?!"
(Actually, it wasn't really my girlfriend, I just read Slashdot in a high pitched voice... an old habit from the days of timothy and John Katz, I suppose
What's worse is that he's so unaware of just what really motivates him - and what's worst is that there are so many people like him in the world...
Maybe he means the freedom to plug all sorts of different hardware into the PC, without having Apple somewhere along the line making sure everything is DRM-compliant -- er, I mean, ":-) - riffic"?
I'm not Newegg.com, but I'd wager that the number of companies making PC components is about 100 times that of the companies making Apple parts. Variety, variety, variety.
You made sure to button up all the buttons on that famesuit, right?
Nono, FLAMEsuit. The other suit's for when I'm defending Linux and exposing security holes in IE via links to my
blog.
-Game development started shortly after E3 2005. Ubisoft saw and demoed the controller before E3 2005. -Ubisoft Paris took their idea directly to Iwata and Miyamoto, and were given the go ahead. After that meeting they were given prototype controllers. The article states that Ubisoft worked "closely" with Nintendo's engineers in Japan on the title
...so in other words, it turns into Resident Evil? Here's a hint: when a shooting game starts talking about conserving ammo, it's walking the line. And on the other side of that line are jumping puzzles with cones of vision and 100 invinco-guards.
...."
You know who else probably worked "closely" with Nintendo's engineers? The Turok team.
-Game Informer mentions that while conducting the interviews with Ubisoft, they were handed the "latest version" of the controller
I'm sure this doesn't taint their enthusiasm one bit.
-During the beginning of the game, you are encouraged to use your weapons ruthlessly, but as the game progresses you become more proficient and strategic. This gameplay idea led Ubisoft to decide to give the game a martial arts setting. "Enter the Yakuza"
Something about this seems backwards, but maybe I'm just old fashioned. Didn't settings used to come before the gameplay?
-The first third of the game will be all about being "brutal by necessity"
-You will be less precise and favor more devastating weapons (machine guns)
This sounds reasonably cool. It's about time a FPS starts with the fun guns.
-As you progress and become more precise, smaller guns will be used -"The goal...is to use five bullets to kill five enemies"
-"When fighting with this level of skill, the music and sound effects will reflect it, remaining calm and peaceful"
So, basically, looking on the bright side, it's like Half Life, looking on the jaded but probably more accurate side, it's just like any other game with different music for different levels. W00 Rev0lution in my pants.
-"When you fight brutally, the sounds around you grow increasingly more intense"
REALLY???????? NO WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!! I hope Ubi*Soft can figure out another revolutionary immersion scheme - like, "when you wave the controller around like an epileptic while randomly smacking buttons, your character will begin to act spastic". Or maybe give those graphics a similar Immersion Feel(TM) - "when you run fast, the on-screen graphics come at you with increasing speed"
-"Audio
I don't get how this can be considered a feature, but I guess I'm glad and excited. Woo Revolution.
-Freeze shot: by fighting effciently you fill the Freeze Shot gauge...fighting chaotically causes to decreases
So, this is going to be one of those games that relies on doing everything perfectly, else your guage/multiplier/sex appeal falls back to zero. I remember other games with the same mechanic, and every single game reviewed poorly.
-When the gauge is filled you can hit a button to momentarily stop time, and then target specific locations on enemy bodies
REVOLUTIONARY!!! Like Red Dead Revolver - only this game is controlled with a Magical Immersion Reality 3D Wand of Revolutions!!
-Headshots thus are tempting, but non lethal shots, such as shooting guns out of enemy hand, can be more beneficial
(and so on, and so on, and so on - reading any more of this outrageous, content-free hype would drag this post into -2 Flamebait land quicker than CmdrTaco can rub one out on a PONY)
Yesterday's games, running on last week's hardware, with a wacky controller from Tomorrowland that's good for nothing more than first person (shooters/adventures/platformers/racers, in decreasing order of playability) and MARIO POINT AND CLICKFEST REVOLUTION 7. I am getting a tremendous hard-on just imagining this.
Apple are morons for doing this. They should be slowly stirring the pot, like Google is. It generates speculation, excites potential customers, and probably even reveals some good future product ideas in the process! I've never seen rumours subtract from the effectiveness of a Google product launch, and I see no reason why it should be any different for Apple.
*flamesuit on*
The key difference between Google and Apple is that Apple is an exterior trend. Their products are generally physically inferior (as in, throw an iPod and a Diamond Rio down the stairs, and my money's on the Diamond Rio to survive) and less cost-effective than the competition (fact, not opinion).
Google, on the other hand, provides arguably the best service of its class, usually at the best price. I'm thinking primarily of Gmail here, though it certainly applies to lots of other services as well. Basically, I'm not saying Apple sux Gmail rulez (though that's definitely how I'm biased) - but rather, we're comparing a Paris fashion design company (Apple) to Osh Kosh B'Gosh / Levy's Jeans (Google)
So, basically, the theory goes that people are buying Apple because A) it's a surprise, and B) it'll be guarenteed trendy and eye-catching for months to come.
If the nefarious "competition" can figure out how an Apple device is going to look, and manages to rush something that looks substantially similar out the door - bang. Apple's lost a substantial number of customers. It doesn't matter if the "competition"'s device is half as good and self-destructs when the batteries go out - because by the time iWhatever comes out and is deemed "twice as good" as Nigerian Products Ltd's Gloriously Functioning Audio Versatile Unit, it's still not the first on the block to look the way it does.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't really lose as much from not being the first on the block. A startup site can copy Google's basic look and feel and have free webmail, free blogspace, free web hosting and even bonus free spyware (FOR FREE!!) - so what, who cares. People will migrate to Google's services, provided they're better/faster/cheaper/etc than the startup. While a Gmail address is a sexy, trendy thing in some circles, it's not something I'm chained to in the great wide out of doors. iWhatever, on the other hand, is - and if I, the shallow and none-too-savvy trendy consumer on the street, can save $20 to put towards Gapercombie and Fitch jeans AND buy something "totally new and seXXXy", then so be it.
Just my (probably incoherant and bouncing all over the place) two cents.
Neither one of you intelligent, +5 Insightful posters seem to have a clue regarding how to analyze a survey or why this is just more Slow News Day hot air.
Guess the +5 Insightful are just having trouble with the +1 Fucking Obvious today.
--
Next on Slashdot - research indicates that as of today, Bush's remaining time in the Oval Office "decreasing steadily every minute"!
Slashdot posters: *500 post clusterfuck of a thread analyzing just why this is the case and what might be done to "recover" or "hasten the process", discussing everything from society's shifting views on war and abortion to the proportion of blue ties to black ties at GOP conventions to whether tin foil hats really work and whether they cause cell phone interference or not, and of course Sony vs. Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux*
So you mean natural gas is suddenly not a limited fossil fuel?
Really, Captain Planet, it'd be best if you knew what the fuck you were talking about before you opened your mouth. No wonder environmentalism has such a bad reputation.
Read the parent, grandparent, original article, parent article, et al very carefully.
Now ask yourself - will using a cellphone once, for a five minute period, cause your brain to swell up, grow numerous brains of its own, and eventually explode? (PROTIP: No)
The point is that even if (and yes, that is an "if" - Swedish scientists aren't perfect; nobody is) cell phones cause cancer, the question then remains - how much use does it take for this to occur?
If you really think hysteria's ever going to solve anything, you obviously weren't paying much attention to the fall 2001 political climate.
I've engineered a solution, which is to not give a crap about Apple until they can come out with a product that is well designed, well supported, won't break after two weeks of use, and, oh yeah, can be fixed by anyone when something minor goes wrong - maybe then I'll start groaning at the predictable journalism jokes.
(yes, I know the iPod has had replaceable batteries for a year or so now, but that doesn't change the fact that for three years, they didn't).
You're still in the wrong, then.
/. policy is to keep all quoted material in italics, which would have clarified just who doesn't know how to use an apostrophe - but let's not get into that.
Also, common
I personally like them. Give me some dry wit - or "32 Scoot to Shoot with Plane Aflame" (see comments above) - over a boring summary of the facts any day of the week. Personally, I'm apt to think this is symptomatic of the decay within our society - but then again, I'm apt to think that over the latest Steven Spielberg movie as well, so go figure. Really, it harkens back to a day when those who read the paper, read the entire newspaper, and thusly would know the entire news. The headlines were there more to prepare your mind for the inevitable than to attract the reader's eye. This USA Today trend of posting full color buzzwords on the front page, so Joe Schmoe can skim it and knows what names to drop around the water cooler today, has got to stop.
-1 Flamebait out of the way, it's time to go for my weak attempt at +1 Insightful:
Wouldn't it be relatively simple for Google to allow newspapers the use of "alt" or "meta" tags for their headlines? Considering there's a small, reasonably finite number of trusted news sources, couldn't some sort of whitelist be easily implemented?
Please don't use apostrophes to designate plurals. This is pretty basic high school freshman English.
It's my turn to grammar educate! = CORRECT (contraction for "it is")
It was nugneant's turn to grammar educate! = CORRECT (designating the possessive of a non-pronoun)
The con's of this argument . . . = NO, WRONG.
It is quite the pain in the ass when people with good opinion's butcher them with incompetant mechanic's = NO, WRONG AGAIN.
All these flame's are pissing me off, I cant help my grammer = WRONG ON MULTIPLE LEVELS
Except between 1993 - 2001, when they were a lapdog for the executive.
Yeah, that Clinton blowjob story was totally surpressed. If it weren't for Yahoo News and Rush Limbaugh, I don't think anyone would have known about it.
"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried" - Winston Churchill.
I'm with Winston on this.
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