Interestingly enough, Wired currently has a longish story about a group called Arctic Monkeys that bypassed all the industry stuff and has been a big success because, not despite them giving songs away:
Their story is remarkable because of one fact: grassroots communication channels like MySpace and P2P file trading networks worked better than the major-label hype machine. The Arctic Monkeys became hugely popular because they wrote good songs, made them available to their fans for free, and encouraged them to share the MP3s with their friends.
Given my two latest, disasterous experiences with major-label hyped artists -- Enya and Kate Bush, whose new albums should both best be avoided -- I'm more than willing to look in other places.
Sigh. One of the worst things about Slashdot is dealing with the subset of people who have no sense of humor and do not recognize irony. That would make two today already: You and the guy who modded me down. Let me explain the joke:
1. Americans tend to dump on Canadians
2. A Canadian institution has seen the light on an issue where its U.S. counterpart is clueless
3. Dumping on Canada for this is therefore the incorrect response.
4. This is called "irony".
Irony is used in many everyday situations to great effect. One of the most common ones around here is entering a building on a rainy day and saying "What beautiful weather we're having." Your response it the equivalent of replying "No, we're not. Look, it's raining!"
Of course, to understand this, you would have to know the context, that is, have read the original posting or even the article. Since this is Slashdot, I'll assume that this is the real root of the problem.
Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain.
You know, I have a whole list of stuff that I think is "harmful to minors". I think it is harmful to minors to not give them access to real, serious sex education, resulting in the teenage pregnancy and STD rates the U.S. is justly infamous for. I think it is harmful to minors to tell them to turn off their brain and just believe God does everything instead. I think it is harmful to minors to pretend that drug abuse is a problem of supply, not of demand, that can be solved by bombing coca plantations in Columbia. It's a pretty long list, actually.
I think what I am going to do is take a look at that bill and see if my senator is somehow involved. And if yes, I am going try my best as a citizen of the United States to get his or her stupid ass kicked back out on the street where it belongs. My friends and countrymen are getting slaughtered in a senseless war in Iraq, North Korea has the bomb and Iran is going to get it, and here Congress is, trying to get around the First Amendment again. Just what is it with these people?
Every time I hear of yet another Vista feature being axed, I have to wonder if anyone will care about Vista when its released -- what will it actually do for us?
Give you the same experience as OS X at a higher price, in six confusing variants, with less security, on a new and unproven codebase. From what I've seen, the new Office actually has some pretty cool improvements, but Vista is simply a crude rip-off. "Gadgets" are Widgets, and even the picture-viewer-thingy is a straight iPhoto copy. The list is of things copied is pretty long.
Mind you, it will be big leap for Windows XP users, especially live search. Live search ("Spotlight" on the Mac) changes your life. But for those of us with Macs, it's just Microsoft catching up to the status quo again. Briefly.
One result of the Internet revolution is that more people are writing than ever before, including people who in the past might only have written to their mothers once a year, if at all. And guess what, this includes lots of people who aren't writing geniuses, so yes, the average quality of writing has gone downhill. Personally, I think it is better that more people are writing, and quality be damned, than only having a small elite doing what they consider "high-quality".
Two things are beyond me: How any sane person who has been following the history of Apple and knows about how they make money could assume this, and why Slashdot keeps putting this guy's stuff on the front page. I'm going to leave this to other people to tear up but not without pointing out one thing: Currently, that is OS X 10.4.5 vs. Windows XP, Apple kicks Microsoft's ass so bad it isn't even funny. Maybe Vista can catch up a little -- looks like a "Tiger" clone to me anyway -- but right now, no way. Apple can only charge their prices for top quality. Intel chips and OS X yes, but Intel chips and Windows, well, nobody fights Dell on their own ground and survives. Apple is very, very good at surviving.
If you want to know what a country does if it doesn't have access to lots of cheap oil, check out what life was like in communist East Germany. Roads were paved with concrete, for example. You worked with wood and steel where you don't have plastics and rubber. You don't paint everything in sight.
The part about shooting people at the border, though, I think is optional...
Given the number of people I know who have become addicted to Civ IV -- not an EA game, I think -- I am not surprised: They are not out there buying more games as usual. This has made me wonder if there could ever be a "game to end all games", one that is so good that you spend so much time playing it that other games die of attention starvation, and their companies with them. Think of all the time people still spend playing Starcraft. Is that the reason why there has never been a new version, they are afraid it will be too good?
Me, I'm still busy with NetHack. But once I finish that -- any day now, really, or next week the latest -- I might take a look at this new-fangled stuff...
As far as I see it the only chance to get Fox to move its tail (pun weak but intended) in any way is to make them sick and tired of hearing about Firefly. Work this like a guerrilla PR campaign: Everytime you see, hear, watch anything about or by Fox and have the chance to say, write or even sing about how these people dropped one of the best shows around and are now sitting on it, well, do it. Everytime Fox is mentioned, mention Firefly. Work on it until it becomes a reflex. Make Firefly one of the first things people associate with the brand Fox: Fox, oh yeah, you're the guys who screwed up that show Firefly, right? I've heard of you.
You need to get to the point where the CEO of Fox starts throwing chairs when somebody mentions Firefly. Maybe then, they will decide to sell the rights.
What people need to realize is that Google doesn't really have a choice in the matter.
You always have a choice, such as not to ship poison gas precursors to Iraq, nuclear technology to Iran, or computer parts to Nazi Germany. All it takes is the concept that there is something more important in the world than profit. Unfortunately, that is the hard one for the type of people that run these corporations. Not to sound like the Pope here, but greed is king, and since Google's shareholders don't give a damn, watch their stock rise again tomorrow. The only amazing thing is that they were able to fool people into believing this "do no evil" crap for so long. Note how the people who work at Google are not voting with their feet, either.
Our companies will support China until it crashes. Then they will act surprised and hurt when the new, democratic government sues their asses off in U.S. court for aiding human right violations and tells them to take their products and shove them.
Actually, this makes me feel better. For a while I was getting worried -- could a company of this size and with this power actually be a good company? Now things are now back to normal, and I can return to despising all big corporations, since Google has proven they are no more willing to stand up for human rights than any other group of greedy jerks so beloved by our stock markets. And why should a company founded by American students care about a few thousand dead Chinese students, right? "Evil" is such a loaded term anyway.
There is a deeper lesson here, of course: Never try to create a Reality Distortion Field if you don't have fruit in your logo. Companies should realize that only The Steve has that sort of power.
I don't care about the logo. What I want to know is if they are dropping that stupid, rage-inducing jingle that they have been torturing the planet with for the last years. As far as I am concerned, that jingle alone is reason enough to buy an AMD instead of Intel -- it has gotten to the point where I switch channels the moment a TV ad for any computer hardware (except Apple, currently at least) starts so I don't have to hear those notes.
I swear, if I ever kill somebody, my defense will be "the Intel jingle made me do it"...
To give this discussion a bit more bite: In Germany, one of those places where they actually think privacy is something worth protecting, it is illegal to have a program transmit this sort of information without asking the user's permission. Mentioning it in some text on some website somewhere isn't enough. Heise has the details (if you understand German), but no word if somebody has sued yet. I think it is safe to assume that somebody will.
This is amazingly stupid of Apple. Not only should they have people who check the local laws, they also burned a lot of trust here. It all comes from running around on stage with that creepy guy from Sony last year.
Compiling everything is, like, the point of Gentoo
Maybe I've been doing it wrong all this time, but I always thought that the ideas was to have software that fit the hardware exactly, not just to compile stuff for compiling's sake. Anyway, even if I have to compile, it is still easier because you can offer pre-set USE-flags and whatnot for the Apple machines. You could have a system of macros or whatnot that would make that step easier.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of Linux people running around with Apples on the front of their laptops soon.
The Intel Macs are probably the best news for Gentoo Linux this year (sorry, couldn't resist). Think of it: There are going to be millions of standardized Intel machines out there soon. All Gentoo needs to do is to create a setup for, say, the MacBook Pro, and you can skip so much of the recompile part it should be very close to just downloading it.
Forget installing Windows -- who cares? Let's get Mac on Linux running on these suckers, and then you can have your cake and eat it, too...
critics are already predicting the Reader's success.
Yeah yeah.
These are the people that have been predicting e-books would take off now for how long? The same people who told us that push technology is the next great thing. Oh, and the iPod-killer, mustn't forget how many iPod-killers they have predicted. Fact: "Critics" and "expert" and (even worse) "analysts" tend to be terrible in predicting what people will buy. If they did know jack, they would be wearing black turtlenecks, earning a dollar a year, and making people in San Francisco swoon with the really successful things.
I'll say it again and again, until I can drop my e-book in the bathtub without ill effects, the batteries will never go out on me, I can scrawl notes on the margins of "Cryptonomicon" where Stephenson got the German wrong, and dog-ear it where I like to reread, the things will remain a toy. Paper has too many advantages and too few disadvantages to be in danger.
Please calm down an actually read what I wrote and what I was writing it as a reply to. The first post was an pro-French rant that was ignoring certain historical truths (such as the Hundred Year's War) that needed correcting because they were simply wrong. It also left out a lot of things like Algeria and Indochina, which is sort of like writing U.S. military history without mentioning Vietnam.
I am in fact very grateful for the French support for the American Revolution, and the Louisiana Purchase, and a whole host of other things that France did for the United States. This does not change the fact that they were, from a French point of view, unbelievably stupid. Helping the Colonies against the British doomed French monarchy, and giving away the whole center part of the continental USA is was even more short-sighted than the Russians selling Alaska.
The definition of when the Normandy became French is a bit more tricky than you make it seem. At the time, they were not considered French, and later, they were technically part of England, which was what the Hundred Year's War was all about. The only view that makes sense is looking at what the people thought at the time, not what we think of them being today. For the record, if you have Norman blood, we share ancestors, which makes your (rather offense) claim of rascism a bit silly. For all you know, I might be sitting in Quebec.
Your link is interesting, but one-sided, too. For example, Joan of Arc was of course as great as they come, but this is not the point. The point is what happened to her once she had been used. The point is also not if the French could have won against the Wehrmacht -- as your text correctly points out and I never disputed, nobody could have, and in the end it took a Russian winter and 20 million dead Soviets. The question here was how hard they tried, which is why I referred to the Netherlands and Norway. Both punched far above their weight. France didn't.
Oh, and one more thing: Don't take this stuff personally.
Seriously kicked the Romans Butts many times as Galacia.
But in the end, lost. Germans slaughtered the Romans in the Teuteburg Forest, kept their independence. The French lost their language -- modern French is mutilated Latin -- and the good things about French cooking were introduced by the Romans.
Did so again under Charlemange.
Whose capital was in Aachen, Germany -- the empire was as much German as it was French.
Kicked the English's butts under William the conqueror.
Er, no. The Normans kicked English ass, in other words, those parts of France that were of Scandinavien decent. So, the Vikings kicked French ass, and the children of the Vikings invaded England.
Kicked the English's butts again several times during the 100 years war.
Now, this one is downright silly. The English owned half of France for most of that war, and the Battle of Poitiers was one of the worst military defeats in history. The French even let the English capture their king! Then, when Joan of Arc comes to rescue them, the French burn her at the stake.
Supported the rebels during the American Revolution.
Which, from their point of view, was a really, really stupid move because the American influence on France helped pave the way for the French Revolution.
You're missing an entry here: Bungled their Revolution, thereby giving democracy a bad reputation in Europe that would remain for more than 100 years.
Nearly united europe during the napoleonic wars (then foolishly tried to invade Russia during the winter).
This one is pretty sick -- this is sort of like saying the Nazis nearly united Europe (note: I am not comparing Nazi war crimes to what Napoleon did). Conquest doesn't count as unification. Well, unless you win, of course...but there we are again, right?
Held off the german forces in WW I
And afterwards made a point of humiliating Germany so badly that it didn't take much for the Germans to really want to get them. Technically you are right, but still not France's finest hour.
When invaded by germany in WW II, held out just long enough for the British Expiditionary force to sail from Dunkirk.
This one, again, is downright silly. Compared to how the Dutch and the Norwegeans fought, the French rolled over and played dead. For every Frenchman in the Resistance, there was one happily supporting the Nazis. The French spent the time before the war telling themselves how great they were instead of paying attention to military advances.
You forgot: Lost badly against Prussia. Created a slaughter in Algeria. Lost a war in Indochina (but then, who hasn't).
Now, strangely enough I actually agree with the original poster that French bashing is getting sort of old, and their opposition to the Second Gulf War turned out to be very much the right choice. They said there were no WMD, and they were right, and we were wrong, and now our kids are dying in Iraq for a lie, and their kids aren't. Chalk this one up for the French.
But that does not mean that we need to pretend that French military history is anything other than a fiasco all the way through. The did good things in literature, had some great scientists, some people even like their food. But great fighters, no. Those were one country further east.
Does anybody know if this will have any impact on how VLC works? On the Mac, for example, the basically useless DVDPlayer program has the regional code thingy, but VLC just bypasses all of that.
That aside, this is just more good news for Apple. If this bugs you, get a Mac. The new ones with Intel will be able to dual boot Windows, Apple has said, so your usual excuse about not being able to play games doesn't work anymore. Use OS X for work and switch over to Windows for the games, all on hardware that doesn't look like crap. Watch DVDs with any operating system, as long as you use VLC.
We had a little discussion here and can't figure it out: Is "leap" a verb ("Leap ahead with this chip") or a noun ("This is a leap ahead")? And if it is a verb, which mood is it -- are we talking about the imperative as in "You there, leap ahead!" or something more mundane like the "Leap ahead with this..." like above?
I'm sure this all sounded good on paper to Intels little army of highly paid marketing droids, but to be honest, it's left me somewhat confused.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Americans tend to dump on Canadians
2. A Canadian institution has seen the light on an issue where its U.S. counterpart is clueless
3. Dumping on Canada for this is therefore the incorrect response.
4. This is called "irony".
Irony is used in many everyday situations to great effect. One of the most common ones around here is entering a building on a rainy day and saying "What beautiful weather we're having." Your response it the equivalent of replying "No, we're not. Look, it's raining!"
Of course, to understand this, you would have to know the context, that is, have read the original posting or even the article. Since this is Slashdot, I'll assume that this is the real root of the problem.
...just can't get anything right, can they...sheesh.
You know, I have a whole list of stuff that I think is "harmful to minors". I think it is harmful to minors to not give them access to real, serious sex education, resulting in the teenage pregnancy and STD rates the U.S. is justly infamous for. I think it is harmful to minors to tell them to turn off their brain and just believe God does everything instead. I think it is harmful to minors to pretend that drug abuse is a problem of supply, not of demand, that can be solved by bombing coca plantations in Columbia. It's a pretty long list, actually.
I think what I am going to do is take a look at that bill and see if my senator is somehow involved. And if yes, I am going try my best as a citizen of the United States to get his or her stupid ass kicked back out on the street where it belongs. My friends and countrymen are getting slaughtered in a senseless war in Iraq, North Korea has the bomb and Iran is going to get it, and here Congress is, trying to get around the First Amendment again. Just what is it with these people?
Give you the same experience as OS X at a higher price, in six confusing variants, with less security, on a new and unproven codebase. From what I've seen, the new Office actually has some pretty cool improvements, but Vista is simply a crude rip-off. "Gadgets" are Widgets, and even the picture-viewer-thingy is a straight iPhoto copy. The list is of things copied is pretty long.
Mind you, it will be big leap for Windows XP users, especially live search. Live search ("Spotlight" on the Mac) changes your life. But for those of us with Macs, it's just Microsoft catching up to the status quo again. Briefly.
The part about shooting people at the border, though, I think is optional...
Not that I really care either way, I'm still busy with NetHack, but just curious how far they are going with this.
Me, I'm still busy with NetHack. But once I finish that -- any day now, really, or next week the latest -- I might take a look at this new-fangled stuff...
...that my tax money is supporting literature, not going to something questionable like nuclear weapons or new torture cells in Guantanamo...
You need to get to the point where the CEO of Fox starts throwing chairs when somebody mentions Firefly. Maybe then, they will decide to sell the rights.
You always have a choice, such as not to ship poison gas precursors to Iraq, nuclear technology to Iran, or computer parts to Nazi Germany. All it takes is the concept that there is something more important in the world than profit. Unfortunately, that is the hard one for the type of people that run these corporations. Not to sound like the Pope here, but greed is king, and since Google's shareholders don't give a damn, watch their stock rise again tomorrow. The only amazing thing is that they were able to fool people into believing this "do no evil" crap for so long. Note how the people who work at Google are not voting with their feet, either.
Our companies will support China until it crashes. Then they will act surprised and hurt when the new, democratic government sues their asses off in U.S. court for aiding human right violations and tells them to take their products and shove them.
There is a deeper lesson here, of course: Never try to create a Reality Distortion Field if you don't have fruit in your logo. Companies should realize that only The Steve has that sort of power.
I swear, if I ever kill somebody, my defense will be "the Intel jingle made me do it" ...
... run NetHack. I mean, what other game do you need? All this new-fangled stuff, colors, sound. Good grief.
This is amazingly stupid of Apple. Not only should they have people who check the local laws, they also burned a lot of trust here. It all comes from running around on stage with that creepy guy from Sony last year.
Maybe I've been doing it wrong all this time, but I always thought that the ideas was to have software that fit the hardware exactly, not just to compile stuff for compiling's sake. Anyway, even if I have to compile, it is still easier because you can offer pre-set USE-flags and whatnot for the Apple machines. You could have a system of macros or whatnot that would make that step easier.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of Linux people running around with Apples on the front of their laptops soon.
Forget installing Windows -- who cares? Let's get Mac on Linux running on these suckers, and then you can have your cake and eat it, too...
Yeah yeah.
These are the people that have been predicting e-books would take off now for how long? The same people who told us that push technology is the next great thing. Oh, and the iPod-killer, mustn't forget how many iPod-killers they have predicted. Fact: "Critics" and "expert" and (even worse) "analysts" tend to be terrible in predicting what people will buy. If they did know jack, they would be wearing black turtlenecks, earning a dollar a year, and making people in San Francisco swoon with the really successful things.
I'll say it again and again, until I can drop my e-book in the bathtub without ill effects, the batteries will never go out on me, I can scrawl notes on the margins of "Cryptonomicon" where Stephenson got the German wrong, and dog-ear it where I like to reread, the things will remain a toy. Paper has too many advantages and too few disadvantages to be in danger.
I am in fact very grateful for the French support for the American Revolution, and the Louisiana Purchase, and a whole host of other things that France did for the United States. This does not change the fact that they were, from a French point of view, unbelievably stupid. Helping the Colonies against the British doomed French monarchy, and giving away the whole center part of the continental USA is was even more short-sighted than the Russians selling Alaska.
The definition of when the Normandy became French is a bit more tricky than you make it seem. At the time, they were not considered French, and later, they were technically part of England, which was what the Hundred Year's War was all about. The only view that makes sense is looking at what the people thought at the time, not what we think of them being today. For the record, if you have Norman blood, we share ancestors, which makes your (rather offense) claim of rascism a bit silly. For all you know, I might be sitting in Quebec.
Your link is interesting, but one-sided, too. For example, Joan of Arc was of course as great as they come, but this is not the point. The point is what happened to her once she had been used. The point is also not if the French could have won against the Wehrmacht -- as your text correctly points out and I never disputed, nobody could have, and in the end it took a Russian winter and 20 million dead Soviets. The question here was how hard they tried, which is why I referred to the Netherlands and Norway. Both punched far above their weight. France didn't.
Oh, and one more thing: Don't take this stuff personally.
But in the end, lost. Germans slaughtered the Romans in the Teuteburg Forest, kept their independence. The French lost their language -- modern French is mutilated Latin -- and the good things about French cooking were introduced by the Romans.
Did so again under Charlemange.
Whose capital was in Aachen, Germany -- the empire was as much German as it was French.
Kicked the English's butts under William the conqueror.
Er, no. The Normans kicked English ass, in other words, those parts of France that were of Scandinavien decent. So, the Vikings kicked French ass, and the children of the Vikings invaded England.
Kicked the English's butts again several times during the 100 years war.
Now, this one is downright silly. The English owned half of France for most of that war, and the Battle of Poitiers was one of the worst military defeats in history. The French even let the English capture their king! Then, when Joan of Arc comes to rescue them, the French burn her at the stake.
Supported the rebels during the American Revolution.
Which, from their point of view, was a really, really stupid move because the American influence on France helped pave the way for the French Revolution.
You're missing an entry here: Bungled their Revolution, thereby giving democracy a bad reputation in Europe that would remain for more than 100 years.
Nearly united europe during the napoleonic wars (then foolishly tried to invade Russia during the winter).
This one is pretty sick -- this is sort of like saying the Nazis nearly united Europe (note: I am not comparing Nazi war crimes to what Napoleon did). Conquest doesn't count as unification. Well, unless you win, of course...but there we are again, right?
Held off the german forces in WW I
And afterwards made a point of humiliating Germany so badly that it didn't take much for the Germans to really want to get them. Technically you are right, but still not France's finest hour.
When invaded by germany in WW II, held out just long enough for the British Expiditionary force to sail from Dunkirk.
This one, again, is downright silly. Compared to how the Dutch and the Norwegeans fought, the French rolled over and played dead. For every Frenchman in the Resistance, there was one happily supporting the Nazis. The French spent the time before the war telling themselves how great they were instead of paying attention to military advances.
You forgot: Lost badly against Prussia. Created a slaughter in Algeria. Lost a war in Indochina (but then, who hasn't).
Now, strangely enough I actually agree with the original poster that French bashing is getting sort of old, and their opposition to the Second Gulf War turned out to be very much the right choice. They said there were no WMD, and they were right, and we were wrong, and now our kids are dying in Iraq for a lie, and their kids aren't. Chalk this one up for the French.
But that does not mean that we need to pretend that French military history is anything other than a fiasco all the way through. The did good things in literature, had some great scientists, some people even like their food. But great fighters, no. Those were one country further east.
Stupid question maybe, but can't you just replace the drive, or, if it is a PowerMac, just add another one? Still unsatisfactory, of course ...
That aside, this is just more good news for Apple. If this bugs you, get a Mac. The new ones with Intel will be able to dual boot Windows, Apple has said, so your usual excuse about not being able to play games doesn't work anymore. Use OS X for work and switch over to Windows for the games, all on hardware that doesn't look like crap. Watch DVDs with any operating system, as long as you use VLC.
I'm sure this all sounded good on paper to Intels little army of highly paid marketing droids, but to be honest, it's left me somewhat confused.