One thing I find fascinating is that all you happy consumers are giving good reasons to block ads online, but hardly anybody here is criticizing the basic concept. Some here haven defended ads as good and important. Jesus. Just to remind you of some basics here:
The aim of an ad is to make you unhappy. The idea is to create a want, to make you feel dissatisfied, to feel that you can't live without a certain product, are ugly without a certain product, are not cool without that product. At the end of the ad, you are supposed to feel worse than before. Now, why should you subject yourself to something that makes you unhappy? What do you think the cumulative effect is on your life? How do you think this effects your children?
Ads burn resources. On a personal and global level, ads destroy resources -- money, paper and especially time -- on a scale that is beyond comprehension. Think of what could be done with the billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and mountains of paper that now go into telling people they just have to get that new five bladed razor, that Brittny ring-tone, or (cough) Windows Vista. How do you think history is going to judge this except as insanity?
Almost all ads are for crap you don't need. "Fight Club" and "No Logo" have spent lots of time on this. Turn on your television and think about which of those things you really need. You can only eat so much food and wear so many clothes. The iPod, of course, is something you need, so that doesn't count, and you can never have read enough books, but for most everything else, we're talking about purely artificial needs. Which takes us back to the first point: You're being made unhappy. And for no reason.
Consumer capitalism is not the only possible form. What Americans consider the normal state of affairs, rampant consumer capitalism with about two-thirds of their GNP based on private consumption, is actually a rarity in the world. Germany, for example, depends on exports for two-thirds of its GNP. This does bring it own set of problems, but Germans are not bombarded with anywhere close to the same number of ads. There are alternatives.
Remember that consumer capitalism was consciously introduced to create artificial needs when the markets when everybody had enough "real" products. The government and industry decided that it was time to start brainwashing the public to buy and buy and buy mindlessly. What this has produced is simply churn, churn that is fueled by ads, sucks up precious resources and as a side effect produces a general feeling of dissatisfaction.
For three generations now, Americans have been told that consumer capitalism is the only viable form and that having 10,000 ads forced in your face everyday is the price everybody has to pay to bring any wealth to the people. Anything else, we are told, is communism. This is bullshit, but as you can see in this discussion, this is what the majority now believes. This majority will protect the very system that makes them unhappy (insert Matrix quote here).
So, unless you are Neo, you and I are not going to wean the U.S. off consumer capitalism to a more sane form.
However, you can protect yourself from people whose job is to make you unhappy and dissatisfied. Blocking ads with your browser is a good step. Don't listen to radio (that's what you bought your iPod for, remember). Read books. If you feel you have to watch TV -- beats me why, but okay -- your remote control has a "mute" button. Hit it whenever and ads comes, and talk to the person you are watching TV with. Yes, this will feel strange at first, but you will get over it. And you never know, your partner or friend might turn out to be an interesting person.
Umm, did I miss the part where Bush did, or threatened to, or mentioned "shutting down the internet?"
No, Bush has never threatened to shut down the Internet. But, and this is all other countries care about, he could.
Let's assume for the moment that you are the president of France or the chancellor of Germany, two highly industrialized countries with whom our recent relations have been, er, somewhat strained. Would you want a vital part of your commercial infrastructure to be in a different country's hands? No. No matter how benevolent they might (or might not be) at the moment, you don't want somebody else to be able to pull the plug.
That was fine when the Internet was considered an oversized research project or a toy for university students. Now, it is big business, and other countries will not want the U.S. -- or any other single country for that matter -- to have control over that any more than they would turn over their banking system.
Which brings me to my next point:
Who's more likely to tamper with the nameservers (or the backbone), the US, China, Cuba, Iran?
Nice objective selection you picked. How about Denmark, Sweden and Switzland? Most other countries would trust them far more than they would the U.S., I'm afraid. Want to hazard a guess why that might be?
But that is not the choice here. The idea is to build the Internet base so that no one single country can bring it down, neither the U.S. nor China nor Cuba nor Iran. Is is either that or watch the Internet fragment because people don't want to be dependent on U.S. goodwill. Or the goodwill of China. Or the goodwill of Denmark, for that matter. The Internet will either become independent of any single country or it will cease to exist as we know it. And the longer the U.S. plays power games about this, the more likely fragmentation because because the others just are not going to wait.
And a generally pretty good record on free speech.
Yeah, we Americans were really ahead on human rights, no competition in sight at all anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, that was 200 years ago.
You might want to read up on the fact that an American journalist was just sent to jail for protecting her sources, a right considered so fundamental in terms of free speech and a free press in other democracies that it has them stunned. We could go on about the question of rights -- heard of this place called Guantanamo Bay? Everybody thinks this is just a fine symbol of the U.S.'s respect for human rights -- but my point is: The U.S. likes to consider itself the freest country on Earth. And in some things, this is still true, for instance free speech when it comes to pornography. In others, well, you might notice that human rights activists aren't really impressed with our record anymore. This is not the 19th Century, the Europeans are not a bunch of kingdoms and fascist dictatorships anymore (thanks in no small part to the U.S., of course), and the bar has been raised accordingly. And in lots of areas, that leaves us wanting. Privacy, for example, we simply flunk from a European point of view. Which takes us right back to the Internet.
Yes, the U.S. is better than average, far better. But for a lot of other countries, that isn't good enough. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it shouldn't be good enough for us Americans either. If you are happy with us having "a generally pretty good record" on free speech instead of the best one on the planet, you might want to think about what the people who wrote the Bill of Rights were trying to tell you.
...they are going to replace it with something far more hidious. You guys are just too optimistic.
** Spoiler Warning for The Ring **
I was just watching The Ring yesterday, and it occured to me that these days, if the MIAA got their wish, everybody would be dead, because nobody would be able to make a copy of the tape. In fact, the whole film wouldn't even work if the MIAA hat their say, because the audience would be going Make a copy? But nobody can do that! And it's illegal!
Of course it might get rid of the MIAA altogether, because to hear them speak, they are the only people around who don't make copies. So, send a DVD of the cursed Ring video to your local MIAA member, wait seven days, and all this DRM will be taken care of in no time. Evolution in action.
You know, that little girl is just obviously misunderstood.
Among its efforts, the government has worked to shield private U.S. companies from demands by the United Nations and other countries for multilateral control of the Net.
"Shield"? You make it sound like somethiing positive. Frankly, the idea that Mr. WMD-in-Iraq, God-told-me-to-do-it has the power to shut down the Internet anytime he chooses anywhere he chooses is not a happy one. This is a simple and brutal power grab, and in the long run, it will lead to the Internet breaking apart because other countries -- even the allies we have left -- will not suffer a heavy-handed bully to have a stranglehold over such an important part of their economy.
Can't say I blame them, honestly. Google and the other companies are of course happy with this setup, because this way, they only have to bribe one set of politicians.
A game in which adults are encouraged to indulge their sexual fantasies is bound to attract the media's attention but, so far, Republik's Spend the Night has been keeping a low profile.
So you have nothing better to do than to put it on Slashdot so that spin vultures we call The Press can grab it and use it to push their conservative, anti-games agenda at the expense of the people who are quietly enjoying it?
Because I remembered it for all the wrong reasons: The thing that sticks in my mind is how absolutely stupid that ad was, and how it implied that I am an idiot, too. "Wow, they're right, if I were in space, I wouldn't care, but here on Earth..." Add the nauseatingly unrealistic woman with her plastic smile -- do HP laptops have some form of LSD that rubs off on your hands? -- and you have got an ad that tarnishes the company's image instead of enhancing it. In other words, even if I do care that it has nine hours of battery time (I don't even use the five hours my machine has now fully), the brand HP has been damaged in my mind.
Now compare this to the IBM ads that are being shown (in Europe, at least). They get their point across while being funny (the one for shock protection has the greate line "That was not my laptop"), and I for one look forward to the next ad in the series. Even if I'm not going to buy, say, a blade server, my view of IBM has been altered, and I tend to see these guys as a bunch of fun, friendly people. Their brand is enhanced.
For the record, I have an iBook and don't care either way because my next laptop will probably be a Intel PowerBook in late 2006. It is the image that these ads form that I'm talking about: HP thinks I'm stupid, IBM has a sense of humor. And in a way, your posting proves my main point, that HP's ad strategy here is terribly short term: Get the message with the nine hourse across at the expense of the core brand is stupid. What's next, the woman takes off her clothes?
We have Microsoft on record now saying that they have no such thing planned. That's as maybe, but this episode shows the extent of their PR problem: People have no trouble at all believing that Microsoft would produce a product that would screw the consumer that badly. There is hardly any post here that shows that sense of betrayal that is so prominent when, say, Apple or Google screws their costumers. Anger, yes. Outrage, yes. But not betrayal.
The short and nasty of it is: People expect to be screwed by Microsoft. Their feeling is that this is what Ballmer and Gates do. When your a monopoly, of course, you don't have to care. But on the long run, that can't be good. If I were working in their PR department, I'd probably feel suicidal after reading this thread.
Strange coincidence, I just saw a HP ad this morning before reading this article, and it started off with something like "Time is not important in space, but it is on Earth, and we give you nine hours of laptop battery time, so buy them."
These guys are going for the crash so bad it hurts.
Next time your computer is busy, say, with another anti-virus update, please take a moment to thank those nice people over at OpenOffice.org for including this PDF-function since just about ever and thereby putting pressure on Microsoft that it couldn't ignore. And when the new version of IE comes out, send a little om of thanks to those nice people over at Mozilla, whose Firefox browser ripped Ballmer so bad that he decided they had to update that monster of theirs after all.
Now, those of us who actually use OpenOffice.org and Firefox (and Thunderbird and Linux and BSD) realize that you are either not too bright because you are still paying $400 a shot for MS Office and whatever it is they charge for Windows these days, or that you are dishonest -- a criminal! -- because you ripped it off. Shame! But we do believe you are intelligent enough to realize that the only reason Microsoft is doing jack at all anymore is because they have Open Source (and the BSD-based Mac OS X) breathing down their necks, and you should be honest enough to admit it. Our guys -- yes, yes, and the Apple people, we do admit it -- are forcing innovation down their throats one byte at at time.
Okay, it's back to that virus scanner update for you. And no daydreaming about what you could do for your family or buy for yourself with those hundreds of dollars (or euros or pounds) that you will soon be paying for MS Office 12 and that "Tiger"-clone called Longhorn or Vista or whatever it is now. After all, monopolies don't pay for themselves, you know. Gates and Ballmer are counting on people like you for their next billion or two. Or three. Or four. Don't disappoint them!
One of the areas where Apple screwed up badly was not to build their own office suite. The result is that Microsoft has Apple by the balls in this area: If Microsoft pulls the plug on MS Office for Mac, Apple is in serious trouble. Write or wrong, the public wants a full suite, not just two programs, and AppleWorks is a pathetic joke that should have Jobs crying at night. The fact that Apple still is shipping it shows how desperate they are.
I don't think Microsoft would tolerate Apple moving to OpenDocument; OS X must be really pissing Ballmer off as it is, not because of the numbers sold, but because it rubs in just how late Vista is -- and that you can just buy OS X 10.4 "Tiger" right now if you want Vista's oh-so-cool features. Apple would not survive a frontal attack by Microsoft. Don't look for help there.
However:
The Mac-specific port of OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J is very good indeed, though not fully aquafied (yet). What is more, it is GPL. The "Tiger" live search system spotlight doesn't support OpenDocument out of the bo- er, off the website, but the NeoOffice/J people provide a nice plugin called NeoLight that does the trick. I can recommend NeoOffice/J wholeheartedly. It is a bit slow on my iBook 800MHz G4 with 640 MByte RAM, but then most things are, and it hasn't crashed once.
IMHO, NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org are Apple's best long-term hope to get out from Microsoft's thumb. I am disappointed that Apple is not doing more to support their work, but then again, I'm sure Microsoft has somebody sitting in the MS Office for Mac department making sure Apple doesn't do anything to hurt their cash cow. The price tag on the full standard retail version of MS Office if you are not a student is $399, after all. Where would Microsoft be if people used OpenOffice and did something else with that money?
I would have agreed with you a few years ago, but with the advent of Mac OS X (in a usable form), the administration problems have just about vanished. I'm going to be getting my parents Macs to replace their current PCs because they can administer them themselves, they don't need to care about the guts of the machine, and they don't have to worry about the number one administation problem for Windows computers: Viruses. Evening being forced to understand the technical basis of a computer virus is offensive to the user.
PCs are alive and well. You just have to pick the right one.
This is stupid for one very simple, real-life reason that corporate American can't (officially) let itself understand: Pornography. There is now way in hell that I - er, that somebody who has pornography on his computer is going to store it somewhere with an corporation even if it is just naked women, especially if Homeland Security is out there shifting through big company's files. People who have music on their computers, people who who have films, hell, people who have love letters are not going to trust companies to store them.
This is one reason why.Mac sucks: Why would I want to store my personal stuff with them? And if I were to store it there, I wouldn't want a measly gigabyte for that price.
That's all as maybe, but all that resolution doesn't cure what is actually pissing me off: Scratches on the film, blurry spots, and films that are simply not in focus. I have none of those problems at home, and until cinemas fix those, home is where I will stay, even if that means taking a hit in resolution.
There are two reasons why I am less and less interested in going to a movie theater instead of watching it on DVD, even if it is months later:
Too expensive. And that is just the film. Factor in popcorn and coke, and the price for one evening is enough for me to rent the film many times over. Family outings are simply prohibitively expensive.
Too fuzzy. The quality of the picture in your average cinema is inexcusable. Maybe it is because I spend my life in front of a DVI screen and watch DVDs on a fairly large TV, but I simply will not accept scratches and blurs and lack of focus any more, especially not at that price. Simply said, the picture quality on my home system is better, and it's not like I spent thousands and thousands on it.
Other people I know complain about the obnoxious behavior of the other viewers, but I can't say that's a problem where I live. But one way or the other, if the people running the cinema chains want to stay in business, they will have to seriously re-adjust the price/quality ratio. At the moment, it is simply not worth it.
This is old, methinks, and not that spectacular, given Fink and a few other tools that have been out there for ages. It would be nice if the news was not only for nerds, but screened by nerds, so we don't get things like this on the front page. I love KDE and I haven an iBook, but really.
Note I didn't say anything about who makes the better player. From my point of view, all iPods are severely lacking certain features -- starting with Ogg Vorbis support. But that is not the question. The point is that Apple, for whatever reasons, many of them marketing, is currently unassailable in this market. Dell is just wasting money, and not to put too fine a point on it, it's the shareholder's money going down the drain here.
Maybe Dell makes the better player. It still isn't going to help them, because it is not, quote, "an iPod". Most people don't want an MP3 player, they want "an iPod". And Dell should have sense enough to wait until this fad is over and then get on the train for whatever is next. Sony slaughtered everybody with the Walkman -- but look where they are now...
Is this some clever way to save on taxes by having a product that they market as a loss? Or is this simply the mentality that gave us trench warfare in World War I and the Charge of the Light Brigade? They don't seriously believe that they stand a chance against the iPod, any iPod, at them moment, do they?
I think it is time for companies like Dell to say, okay, we lost that one. Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you, and when that happens, you do not waste money and resources in an hopeless attempt to gain a foothold. You concentrate on what you do well -- making ugly mass-market computers in Dell's case -- and wait until something changes in a fundamental way. At this moment in time, the iPod rules supreme, and the drool-factor of the Nano has just made that worse. Accept it, bid your time, and fight when you have a change. And spare us, yourselves, and your stockholders this sort of crap.
...during computer games comes from times when they were simply crap, and I realized that I had actually spent money on them. Take Masters of Orion 3, for example. How couldn't you cry over that waste of money?
... and the homosexuals and the blacks and the handicapped and the Communists and those of low intelligence once the Nazis come to power again. And this time, they can include genetic data! How
Anton Mussert must be crying in his grave over the lost opportunity -- if only he had had such tools...
What a wonderful basis to build a totalitarian state on. Given the backlash against foreigners (dark-skinned, non-Christian foreigners, that is) in the Netherlands at the moment, this would really, really make me nervous.
Linux video badness is one reason I switched
on
Cinelerra 2.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One reason I dropped Linux in favor of Mac OS X -- apart from the fact that I needed a laptop that would let me just slam the lid to put it to sleep -- for my main computer was that video editing is such a pain. Cin I never got to work, the documentation was useless (it was basically "if you don't know how professional editing works, go away"), and trying to recompile it was disaster. Kino was okay, but simply not advanced enough. At least the people working on it were polite.
I don't want much out of video editing -- short clips of the kids for the grandparents, mostly -- and the combination of iMovie and iDVD is simply awesome. Maybe it isn't enough for pros or even semi-pros, but this is one area where Apple kicks Linux ass. I did one DVD using Linux, and that was enough for a lifetime, or at least until somebody gets a good clone of iDVD working.
Slashdot Mirror
The aim of an ad is to make you unhappy. The idea is to create a want, to make you feel dissatisfied, to feel that you can't live without a certain product, are ugly without a certain product, are not cool without that product. At the end of the ad, you are supposed to feel worse than before. Now, why should you subject yourself to something that makes you unhappy? What do you think the cumulative effect is on your life? How do you think this effects your children?
Ads burn resources. On a personal and global level, ads destroy resources -- money, paper and especially time -- on a scale that is beyond comprehension. Think of what could be done with the billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and mountains of paper that now go into telling people they just have to get that new five bladed razor, that Brittny ring-tone, or (cough) Windows Vista. How do you think history is going to judge this except as insanity?
Almost all ads are for crap you don't need. "Fight Club" and "No Logo" have spent lots of time on this. Turn on your television and think about which of those things you really need. You can only eat so much food and wear so many clothes. The iPod, of course, is something you need, so that doesn't count, and you can never have read enough books, but for most everything else, we're talking about purely artificial needs. Which takes us back to the first point: You're being made unhappy. And for no reason.
Consumer capitalism is not the only possible form. What Americans consider the normal state of affairs, rampant consumer capitalism with about two-thirds of their GNP based on private consumption, is actually a rarity in the world. Germany, for example, depends on exports for two-thirds of its GNP. This does bring it own set of problems, but Germans are not bombarded with anywhere close to the same number of ads. There are alternatives.
Remember that consumer capitalism was consciously introduced to create artificial needs when the markets when everybody had enough "real" products. The government and industry decided that it was time to start brainwashing the public to buy and buy and buy mindlessly. What this has produced is simply churn, churn that is fueled by ads, sucks up precious resources and as a side effect produces a general feeling of dissatisfaction.
For three generations now, Americans have been told that consumer capitalism is the only viable form and that having 10,000 ads forced in your face everyday is the price everybody has to pay to bring any wealth to the people. Anything else, we are told, is communism. This is bullshit, but as you can see in this discussion, this is what the majority now believes. This majority will protect the very system that makes them unhappy (insert Matrix quote here). So, unless you are Neo, you and I are not going to wean the U.S. off consumer capitalism to a more sane form.
However, you can protect yourself from people whose job is to make you unhappy and dissatisfied. Blocking ads with your browser is a good step. Don't listen to radio (that's what you bought your iPod for, remember). Read books. If you feel you have to watch TV -- beats me why, but okay -- your remote control has a "mute" button. Hit it whenever and ads comes, and talk to the person you are watching TV with. Yes, this will feel strange at first, but you will get over it. And you never know, your partner or friend might turn out to be an interesting person.
No, Bush has never threatened to shut down the Internet. But, and this is all other countries care about, he could.
Let's assume for the moment that you are the president of France or the chancellor of Germany, two highly industrialized countries with whom our recent relations have been, er, somewhat strained. Would you want a vital part of your commercial infrastructure to be in a different country's hands? No. No matter how benevolent they might (or might not be) at the moment, you don't want somebody else to be able to pull the plug.
That was fine when the Internet was considered an oversized research project or a toy for university students. Now, it is big business, and other countries will not want the U.S. -- or any other single country for that matter -- to have control over that any more than they would turn over their banking system.
Which brings me to my next point:
Who's more likely to tamper with the nameservers (or the backbone), the US, China, Cuba, Iran?
Nice objective selection you picked. How about Denmark, Sweden and Switzland? Most other countries would trust them far more than they would the U.S., I'm afraid. Want to hazard a guess why that might be?
But that is not the choice here. The idea is to build the Internet base so that no one single country can bring it down, neither the U.S. nor China nor Cuba nor Iran. Is is either that or watch the Internet fragment because people don't want to be dependent on U.S. goodwill. Or the goodwill of China. Or the goodwill of Denmark, for that matter. The Internet will either become independent of any single country or it will cease to exist as we know it. And the longer the U.S. plays power games about this, the more likely fragmentation because because the others just are not going to wait.
And a generally pretty good record on free speech.
Yeah, we Americans were really ahead on human rights, no competition in sight at all anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, that was 200 years ago.
You might want to read up on the fact that an American journalist was just sent to jail for protecting her sources, a right considered so fundamental in terms of free speech and a free press in other democracies that it has them stunned. We could go on about the question of rights -- heard of this place called Guantanamo Bay? Everybody thinks this is just a fine symbol of the U.S.'s respect for human rights -- but my point is: The U.S. likes to consider itself the freest country on Earth. And in some things, this is still true, for instance free speech when it comes to pornography. In others, well, you might notice that human rights activists aren't really impressed with our record anymore. This is not the 19th Century, the Europeans are not a bunch of kingdoms and fascist dictatorships anymore (thanks in no small part to the U.S., of course), and the bar has been raised accordingly. And in lots of areas, that leaves us wanting. Privacy, for example, we simply flunk from a European point of view. Which takes us right back to the Internet.
Yes, the U.S. is better than average, far better. But for a lot of other countries, that isn't good enough. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it shouldn't be good enough for us Americans either. If you are happy with us having "a generally pretty good record" on free speech instead of the best one on the planet, you might want to think about what the people who wrote the Bill of Rights were trying to tell you.
** Spoiler Warning for The Ring **
I was just watching The Ring yesterday, and it occured to me that these days, if the MIAA got their wish, everybody would be dead, because nobody would be able to make a copy of the tape. In fact, the whole film wouldn't even work if the MIAA hat their say, because the audience would be going Make a copy? But nobody can do that! And it's illegal!
Of course it might get rid of the MIAA altogether, because to hear them speak, they are the only people around who don't make copies. So, send a DVD of the cursed Ring video to your local MIAA member, wait seven days, and all this DRM will be taken care of in no time. Evolution in action.
You know, that little girl is just obviously misunderstood.
"Shield"? You make it sound like somethiing positive. Frankly, the idea that Mr. WMD-in-Iraq, God-told-me-to-do-it has the power to shut down the Internet anytime he chooses anywhere he chooses is not a happy one. This is a simple and brutal power grab, and in the long run, it will lead to the Internet breaking apart because other countries -- even the allies we have left -- will not suffer a heavy-handed bully to have a stranglehold over such an important part of their economy. Can't say I blame them, honestly. Google and the other companies are of course happy with this setup, because this way, they only have to bribe one set of politicians.
So you have nothing better to do than to put it on Slashdot so that spin vultures we call The Press can grab it and use it to push their conservative, anti-games agenda at the expense of the people who are quietly enjoying it?
You, sir, are a horrible person.
Now compare this to the IBM ads that are being shown (in Europe, at least). They get their point across while being funny (the one for shock protection has the greate line "That was not my laptop"), and I for one look forward to the next ad in the series. Even if I'm not going to buy, say, a blade server, my view of IBM has been altered, and I tend to see these guys as a bunch of fun, friendly people. Their brand is enhanced.
For the record, I have an iBook and don't care either way because my next laptop will probably be a Intel PowerBook in late 2006. It is the image that these ads form that I'm talking about: HP thinks I'm stupid, IBM has a sense of humor. And in a way, your posting proves my main point, that HP's ad strategy here is terribly short term: Get the message with the nine hourse across at the expense of the core brand is stupid. What's next, the woman takes off her clothes?
The short and nasty of it is: People expect to be screwed by Microsoft. Their feeling is that this is what Ballmer and Gates do. When your a monopoly, of course, you don't have to care. But on the long run, that can't be good. If I were working in their PR department, I'd probably feel suicidal after reading this thread.
These guys are going for the crash so bad it hurts.
Sorry about the spelling. I'll get it right the next time I post the very same joke ...
(The joke is that "kurzweilig" in German means "not boring", as opposed to "langweilig", "boring". Hey, you guys think he's heard that one before?)
Next time your computer is busy, say, with another anti-virus update, please take a moment to thank those nice people over at OpenOffice.org for including this PDF-function since just about ever and thereby putting pressure on Microsoft that it couldn't ignore. And when the new version of IE comes out, send a little om of thanks to those nice people over at Mozilla, whose Firefox browser ripped Ballmer so bad that he decided they had to update that monster of theirs after all.
Now, those of us who actually use OpenOffice.org and Firefox (and Thunderbird and Linux and BSD) realize that you are either not too bright because you are still paying $400 a shot for MS Office and whatever it is they charge for Windows these days, or that you are dishonest -- a criminal! -- because you ripped it off. Shame! But we do believe you are intelligent enough to realize that the only reason Microsoft is doing jack at all anymore is because they have Open Source (and the BSD-based Mac OS X) breathing down their necks, and you should be honest enough to admit it. Our guys -- yes, yes, and the Apple people, we do admit it -- are forcing innovation down their throats one byte at at time.
Okay, it's back to that virus scanner update for you. And no daydreaming about what you could do for your family or buy for yourself with those hundreds of dollars (or euros or pounds) that you will soon be paying for MS Office 12 and that "Tiger"-clone called Longhorn or Vista or whatever it is now. After all, monopolies don't pay for themselves, you know. Gates and Ballmer are counting on people like you for their next billion or two. Or three. Or four. Don't disappoint them!
Signed, laughing his head off
Oh, wait...
I don't think Microsoft would tolerate Apple moving to OpenDocument; OS X must be really pissing Ballmer off as it is, not because of the numbers sold, but because it rubs in just how late Vista is -- and that you can just buy OS X 10.4 "Tiger" right now if you want Vista's oh-so-cool features. Apple would not survive a frontal attack by Microsoft. Don't look for help there.
However:
The Mac-specific port of OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J is very good indeed, though not fully aquafied (yet). What is more, it is GPL. The "Tiger" live search system spotlight doesn't support OpenDocument out of the bo- er, off the website, but the NeoOffice/J people provide a nice plugin called NeoLight that does the trick. I can recommend NeoOffice/J wholeheartedly. It is a bit slow on my iBook 800MHz G4 with 640 MByte RAM, but then most things are, and it hasn't crashed once.
IMHO, NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org are Apple's best long-term hope to get out from Microsoft's thumb. I am disappointed that Apple is not doing more to support their work, but then again, I'm sure Microsoft has somebody sitting in the MS Office for Mac department making sure Apple doesn't do anything to hurt their cash cow. The price tag on the full standard retail version of MS Office if you are not a student is $399, after all. Where would Microsoft be if people used OpenOffice and did something else with that money?
...to see the first of these type articles coming from Bangalore, India.
For every problem, Linux has the solution. Have you taken a look at the Mock Mainfame HOWTO? Sounds like what you are looking for.
PCs are alive and well. You just have to pick the right one.
This is one reason why .Mac sucks: Why would I want to store my personal stuff with them? And if I were to store it there, I wouldn't want a measly gigabyte for that price.
That's all as maybe, but all that resolution doesn't cure what is actually pissing me off: Scratches on the film, blurry spots, and films that are simply not in focus. I have none of those problems at home, and until cinemas fix those, home is where I will stay, even if that means taking a hit in resolution.
Too expensive. And that is just the film. Factor in popcorn and coke, and the price for one evening is enough for me to rent the film many times over. Family outings are simply prohibitively expensive.
Too fuzzy. The quality of the picture in your average cinema is inexcusable. Maybe it is because I spend my life in front of a DVI screen and watch DVDs on a fairly large TV, but I simply will not accept scratches and blurs and lack of focus any more, especially not at that price. Simply said, the picture quality on my home system is better, and it's not like I spent thousands and thousands on it.
Other people I know complain about the obnoxious behavior of the other viewers, but I can't say that's a problem where I live. But one way or the other, if the people running the cinema chains want to stay in business, they will have to seriously re-adjust the price/quality ratio. At the moment, it is simply not worth it.
This is old, methinks, and not that spectacular, given Fink and a few other tools that have been out there for ages. It would be nice if the news was not only for nerds, but screened by nerds, so we don't get things like this on the front page. I love KDE and I haven an iBook, but really.
Maybe Dell makes the better player. It still isn't going to help them, because it is not, quote, "an iPod". Most people don't want an MP3 player, they want "an iPod". And Dell should have sense enough to wait until this fad is over and then get on the train for whatever is next. Sony slaughtered everybody with the Walkman -- but look where they are now...
I think it is time for companies like Dell to say, okay, we lost that one. Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you, and when that happens, you do not waste money and resources in an hopeless attempt to gain a foothold. You concentrate on what you do well -- making ugly mass-market computers in Dell's case -- and wait until something changes in a fundamental way. At this moment in time, the iPod rules supreme, and the drool-factor of the Nano has just made that worse. Accept it, bid your time, and fight when you have a change. And spare us, yourselves, and your stockholders this sort of crap.
...during computer games comes from times when they were simply crap, and I realized that I had actually spent money on them. Take Masters of Orion 3, for example. How couldn't you cry over that waste of money?
What a wonderful basis to build a totalitarian state on. Given the backlash against foreigners (dark-skinned, non-Christian foreigners, that is) in the Netherlands at the moment, this would really, really make me nervous.
I don't want much out of video editing -- short clips of the kids for the grandparents, mostly -- and the combination of iMovie and iDVD is simply awesome. Maybe it isn't enough for pros or even semi-pros, but this is one area where Apple kicks Linux ass. I did one DVD using Linux, and that was enough for a lifetime, or at least until somebody gets a good clone of iDVD working.