Let's say Sony makes 1 million PSPs and ships them out to retailers. Shipped = 1,000,000 units. Let's say BIG_RETAILER sends back 100,000 PSPs because they were, well, gathering dust. Shipped = 1,000,000 units (Sony did ship 1,000,000 units, after all, just that BIG_RETAILER shipped Sony 100,000 PSPs). Now lets say Sony sells to DISCOUNT_RETAILER those 100,000 PSPs. Look! Shipped = 1,100,000 units.
This is, of course, fascinating, but is there real evidence that Sony is actually doing this? I mean, real evidence as in at least a link to a reputable source that has something very solid.
I would agree that would be not only very misleading, but highly unethical. In a publically traded company, it might even be illegal.
BTW, is homebrew good enough to justify a second PSP? I have just one that I only play comercial games on. I've been a little leary about playing fast and loose with firmware upgrades and downgrades. I know a lot of people love homebrew, but does the software justify the price of a second, dedicated console?
This is, of course, assuming there would be sales of the PSP between now and 3 months from now.
They sold about 800,000 units last month and about 5 million units in the last two months last year.
The Slashdot crowd likes to pretend the PSP is an abject failure, but I think I'd be pretty happy if my company was failing as bad as this.
TW
Oh yeah, save your breath about units shipped vs units sold. The "shipped" number is only inaccurate as far as units in customer hands is concerned. As far as historical data is concerned, it's fairly accurate (though not over a given period).
We're talking about the holiday season already? Isn't it August?
I was at Costco last night. They had Christmas wrapping paper, a lot more toys than usual, and an assortment of musical instruments and youngster-oriented art supplies that they typically put up only around the Christmas holiday season.
On the summer breeze I could have sworn I heard sleigh bells as I left the warehouse. I felt an instant rush of icy wind that vanished as quickly as it came. As I got into my 140 degree car, I felt the joy start to fade to melancholy, but I could have sworn I saw a golden glow around the building in my rear view mirror as I drove out of sight.
According to the big boys, Xmas is imminent. Seriously.
I just had a user send in a laptop in a FedEx box... WITHOUT A LICK OF PADDING!!!
Jeez, I got a cold chill up my spine when I read this. We've had more than one of these over the years. Sometimes it happened with the variation that they'd use a single layer of the tiniest bubble wrap they could find.
Ignoring the fact that these users are abviously clueless about the dangers of shipping and the fragility of laptops, they were pretty clever about one thing. It just so happens that the regular FedEx shipping box is just the perfect size for a normal 14" laptop with no padding. They must have felt like absolute geniuses as they slid that sucker into the box ("IT will be so happy I found this perfect box!").
HP and Insight paired up to give us a good one. We ordered from Insight the "Advanced Pack" for HPs integrated Lights Out (iLO) feature on a Proliant server. This was several years ago when they had just started including the "basic" iLO for free on all their servers.
We recieved from Insight a box about 3/4 the size of a standard tower computer box. We opened it up to find a box the size you'd expect to find a full-sized array controller card in, plus a few large shipping air-bladders.
We opened up the array-controller sized box to find foam egg crate packaging securing what looked like a cd sleeve.
We opened up the CD sleeve to find inside the front cover, a number. We then used that number to "unlock" the "advanced features" that had really been there all the time.
The thing that I think makes this packaging especially over the top is that the number could have just as easily been put in a plain text email. "Shipping" and "packaging" were not even necessary to get this into our hands. We would have gotten it faster, cheaper and it would have cost them less to do it.
After all that, I'm afraid to say it actually got a little worse. The truth is, we didn't really order just one of them; we ordered three. All came packaged exactly the same way. Insight didn't make any effort to consolidate the smaller boxes into just one of the larger ones.
Mozilla/Camino/Firefox is standards compliant, free and safe. I don't think IE7 can touch that.
Internet Explorer if bundled with every copy of Windows. Seriously, you can't touch that. As long as the IE browser remains "a part of the operating system", and and as long as Microsoft continues to dominate the OS market, no other browser will be any better than second place, regardless of how wonderful it is.
In order to legaly put Windows on your Mac, you're going to need the full version of one of these products. If Microsoft has significan't better pricing with Vista than with XP, this will be cheaper, but the full version of their curren't OS, when sold shrink-wrapped to the public, is significantly more expensive than most people think.
Dude! this _is_ cool. I have a tendency to put my phone on the desk right near my mouse. I can't tell you the number of times I've reached over for the mouse without really looking and grabbed the phone by mistake.
Other features:
-No extra mouse when you travel - saves weight -No extra dongle for your wireless mouse (assuming you have laptop with built-in bluetooth) -You can take a call and at the same time rub your head against the wall to use the mouse. I'm currently unaware of any mouse that has this as a feature. -No extra batteries or charger for your seperate mouse. -People will talk about your mouse on slashdot (no one has so much as mentioned my "Target" brand mouse yet) -People will gawk at you in the board room.
Now my biggest problem is that I don't have a Nokia!
One thing to note: The "low-quality cheap crap" that Dell sells will come with Vista at no additional charge. Also, Dell will have convieniently loaded Vista and installed all relevant drivers, a new-computer task that quite a few people would like to avoid.
My quick math:
Vista full version = $200 2 hours of labor to install vista and drivers = $100 Total additional cost of haveing Vista on your Mac = $300 Mac Mini (cheapest version = $599) with Vista = $899 or $800 if you supply your own labor and your time isn't worth anything.
Now, I still think Apple could kick Dell's a**. The hardware is gorgeous to look at and fabulously effcient in space and layout, something modern consumer highly value. But in order to get past the ugh factor of loading your own OS and the "holly crap, I have to pay $200 more!" factor of buying that new OS, they're going to have to preload.
Oh, BTW, there are a lot of sales to be had in the business world with slick Mac notebooks. That won't happen in significant numbers until Apple ships with Windows preinstalled.
It's just like every other business out there. Some people don't know how to run them. Unfortunately, with spam, these idiots are able to make a major anoyance of themselves with their ill-concieved, badly run catastrophies.
Trust me, the illiterate folks really don't make any money. But they're only part of your spam. The one where, you know, you can actually find some information on how to buy a product? They're doing ok.
We have a saying at my house: Even Hitler was fun at parties.
No Jews, blacks, gays or mac users in your family then....? WTF, Hitler was fun? I think you just said something silly.
I'm sure I won't change your mind about the relative merits of Mac vs. Windows, but I thought I'd explain this a little more. Hitler was horrible. He belongs in a select group of truly horrible, evil people that are full of special badness many, many times more powerful than your run-of-the-mill murderer. But he had to have some quality that some people valued if he was going to get elected as the leader of Germany. In my family, we've concluded that he was probably a hoot at parties and this must have helped him seem like an allright guy long enough to get elected. I don't know this for a fact, but it's as good an explenation as the next.
Now we use this expression to indicate that no matter how horrible, awful or evil something is, it will probably have some small positive element. Shit makes great fertilizer. Snakes keep crop fields free of rodents. Hitler was fun at parties.
If you can't think of a single small redeaming quality of Windows, then I'm forced to question your abojectivity and credibility. WindowsXP couldn't possibly be worse than Hitler, and at least he was fun at parties.
I remember these TV ads. They were pretty good. I also remember one where the managers sit back and ask each other which is the best computer. One says, "the one they're actually using," and it's a Mac. But these are all pre second coming of Jobs. Jobs came back in with glitz and hasn't stopped. Style has taken stage one.
I really enjoyed the print ads. I wish Apple would shoot straight like this more often. Thanks for finding them.
point is, I guess, that it only seems elitist to use a mac because Apple has a smaller marketshare than the Commodity PC market so to those with a narrow mind and biased perceptions, someone who opts for a system outside of the status quo is "elitist".
It's not the market share, though I do have to admit it would be difficult to be elitist with 95% of the market. It's the attitude. Mac users tend to act like their machines are better than the rest and that betterness somehow extends to them, personally. It's quite a lot what you see in high-end sports car owners. No, it doesn't always happen, but it's quite common amoung the mac users I've interacted with.
Apple has no problem reinforcing that view, either. Maybe they're just proud? Sure they are. But if it was only pride, I can't help but think they wouldn't spend so much time picking on the 95% of us who don't own a Mac.
Could you please link me to these Apple fans you're talking about? And I don't mean Slashdot trolls, I mean real people. And, could you please show me that this group is a statistically significant percentage of the 19 million OS X users Jobs talked about? Cause I don't think you can.
Well, ya got me there. I dont actually have statistical evidence that Mac users are elitist. However, the Mac users I've encountered in real life have tended to be elitist as have the Mac users I've encounter on Slashdot. Seriously, even if I did have statistics, wouldn't you just attack the word "elitist" as being so dificult to define as to be unprovable? Yet, all the same, the PC users I've know who have helped out Mac users have a strong tendency to use this word. I think there's a lot of truth to it.
Actually, if you had paid attention you would've seen that the recent ads make Wintel machines look harder to use than Macs. Users are never mentioned. Don't believe me? Watch the ads yourself and see how many times users are mentioned.
The users don't have to be mentioned. They show "the PC guy" as slightly uptight bafoon who wears ugly, ill-fitting clothes, while they show "the Mac guy" as cool, smart and relaxed. You could watch the ads without any sound at all and you'd know they're making fun of PC users.
It's our culture. Many people want to be rich and oversexed. Very few want to be a receptionist.
There is much truth in this, but it is not exactly true. Though many ad campaigns show the consumer a wonderful life and insinuate that your life will be wonderful if you use their product, that is not, by far, the only way. Many ad campaigns show (slightly idealized versions of) regular people using the products. Sure, the houswife may have an imaculate house where she won't need that cleaning product, but she's still a houswife. Apple insinuates you can be John Lennon.
I don't count the ads alone as my reason why I consider Mac users and Apple to tend toward elitism. It's just one of the signs. If you really want to understand the Apple elitism then all you have to do is talk to a few Mac users about PCs. I think average people would come away using the "E" word nearly every time.
This seems to describe advertising, throughout my lifetime, pretty well. Every beer commercial I have ever seen has featured "people smarter, hipper and better looking" than myself, but I would hardly call Budweiser elitist.
Miller Lite
"Tastes great!" "Less Filling!"
These guys, despite being football pros, were played as "everymen" in the beer-drinking sense of the word. They were overweight, roudy and they were placed in ordinary looking living rooms where they were being portrayed as "just watching the game" like other average folks. It was one of the most successfull ad campaigns in beer history.
By comparison, recent Budweiser comercials are elitist.
Apple is a business trying to compete in a market dominated by a single organization with a 95% market share. Of course Apple is going to compare their operating system to Vista. It doesn't even really make sense to do otherwise
True. Companies use the good stuff they see. This is called "being smart." I sure hope Microsoft continues using that whole Graphical User Interface thingy they copycatted from Apple. That was smart too.
And a good way of attracting people is to flaunt your system's superiority. I don't really see it as elitism.
It's a fine line, but Apple is so far over that line it's not even funny. Whether you call them elitists, fan-boys, or "the Mac Faithful", it all boils down to Apple catering to a group of people who's default position is that everything Apple and all apple users are awesome while everything launched out of Microsoft and all microsoft users couldn't possibly be as good.
Apple itself has not always taken this elitist position. Didn't Jobs take a $150 million investment from Microsoft and put IE on all Macs for years? However, their recent ads have been designed to make PC users look like bafoons while Apple users bask in, really, an entirely different plane of computer use. I can't think of a more classic definition of elitism.
Answer me this, when in the modern Mac era has apple ever showed it's computers being used by buisnessmen in ties or blue-collar types playing games with their kids? I'm not saying that not being a "company of the people" automatically makes them elitist, but really it doesn't help. Macs are featured as being used by people smarter, hipper and better looking than you or me (well, me anyway). These people are elite. If Apple ever want's to be considered anything but elitist, they can start by showing ads of a receptionist using a Mac. Or is that just too... common?
I bought mine at launch, have had it listed on Craigs List for almost 6 months and cant get rid of the thing so I guess my definition would be "paperweight".
What's your price? A quick look at ebay shows one going for $167 with 3 min left. Not bad for a paperweight.
This 99% of games suck bullshit has just about got to stop. Have you bought a game in the last 6 months? There are many fine games for the console now, even if they weren't there at launch.
My advice is to take it off of Craigslist, buy a couple of games that users have rated highly on the PSP forums and play them. It'll be fun, trust me. If it's still not fun for you then I'm not quite sure what might help. Have you considered taking up knitting?
I appreciate your tone and your thoughtfulness. I'm not actually using a legal type of argument. My argument is that most people know what is moral and ethical and in very many cases, those who pirate music are going beyond the bounds of ethics with their piracy.
Like many things in life, there's a kind of good, bad, and everything in between going on here that makes the issue grey as mud.
If you buy the CD and rip it, by most accounts this is 100% legal, even though a few greedy record company execs have said otherwise. No one would give you a hard time about this.
If you want to settle a bet about the lyrics of a song, and you download it for free and play it and never listen to it again, most reasonable people would not have a problem with the ethics of the scenerio. It may not be technically legal, but it's fair.
What about if you download a whole bunch of songs, but only listen to them occasionally? Is this fair? It's not legal, and I wouldn't want to see someone in trouble for something he really only occasionally uses, but I doubt most people would consider this 100% ethical.
And finally, many people who're memmbers of Slashdot have downloaded vast amounts of music and listen to it regularly. They have iPods choc full of 40gb of this stuff and they wish Apple would release a 60gb or 100gb model because they could fill those as well. These people will often tell you that they have some "reason" why they think this is perfectly ethical. The do have some reason. But even they know, in their heart of hearts, that this is massively unethical behavior. In a random survey, there is no way you'd get a majority oppinion stating that this is ok, ethically speaking.
When I say people need to own up on the issue, they often think, "well I just ripped my buddies CD and I don't think that's an ethical problem." They're probably right. But that's not the same as lumping all "file sharing" in that same ethical categorie and defending it as ok.
The judges were right in both the Napster and Kazaa cases. We all really knew it. Why did we spend so much time defending what we all knew was wrong.?
it seems to me like introducing failed ideas is part of their business plan.
It's like they're aiming at the the game warden and then they bitch that the deer wont run in front of their bullets.
I have an AC/DC DVD. I've never actually watched it. I'd love to have the music in my MP3 collection, but I just haven't had the time to figure out the process of ripping the DVD and then extracting the audio I want. I'd love to set it up like my own personal MTV with a bunch of other music DVDs, but the previously mentioned ripping and extracting process is just painful, not to mention that I can't really find most of the music I want on DVD.
I've looked at the dual DVD-CDs, but it's pretty hard to figure out if the CD part is DRMed. I'd personally rather change my taste in music than buy from a seller that's purposely trying to make my life harder.
Then of course there's the regular ol' CDs that are being DRMed. As previously mentioned, I don't really want to buy these if I have to jump through hoops to put the music on my MP3 player.
DRMed iTunes. Bullshit. I can't play it on my cell phone or my PSP without, you know, jumping through more fucking hoops. I'm not an acrobat, folks!
Stolen, ehem, I mean "shared" music? Grow up folks. It's kinda silly when you pretend this is all right. Spare me your lawyering. You're getting a product that is traditionally paid for, without the permission of the folks you traditionally pay, and you're not paying for it. I don't care if the RIAA, Mettalica, and EMI all suck big donkey dick, you know it's not quite right, don't you? Do I need to send Jimminy Cricket over to your house?
So music companies, if you're listening, all I want is regular old CDs, or, if you feel the need to sell me a modern "new" format, sell me high quality MP3s or, hell, any high quality digital format that's easily converted without losing much quality. That's what I want. That's what everyone wants (except the selfish ones who want free stuff.) Go do it and I'll buy more of your music.
The article insinuates that regulators can stop him. I doubt that's true. Unless the numbers are Enron-like, the board is very unlikely to dump him. My take on the article is that the overstatement of profits is significant, but not as significant as Steve Jobs leadership.
once you realize that the value of your collection doesn't lay in it's internal value (they're just cards or china or whatever) or your enjoyment using the collection (most collections are sealed away. Even if you do use them, how could you possibly get real use out of 100 cars or 1000 beanie babies?), then the only thing you have left is monetary value and bragging rights. And you only have monetary value and bragging rights, really, with other collectors. Did you tell your aunt polly about your Star Wars figure collection? What did she say? "Bad-ass"? Sure she did.
I have been caught up in the collecting bug in the past and as soon as I'm done, I just wonder where all my time/money/space/soul has gone.
Slashdot Mirror
This is, of course, fascinating, but is there real evidence that Sony is actually doing this? I mean, real evidence as in at least a link to a reputable source that has something very solid.
I would agree that would be not only very misleading, but highly unethical. In a publically traded company, it might even be illegal.
BTW, is homebrew good enough to justify a second PSP? I have just one that I only play comercial games on. I've been a little leary about playing fast and loose with firmware upgrades and downgrades. I know a lot of people love homebrew, but does the software justify the price of a second, dedicated console?
Thanks,
TW
They sold about 800,000 units last month and about 5 million units in the last two months last year.
The Slashdot crowd likes to pretend the PSP is an abject failure, but I think I'd be pretty happy if my company was failing as bad as this.
TW
Oh yeah, save your breath about units shipped vs units sold. The "shipped" number is only inaccurate as far as units in customer hands is concerned. As far as historical data is concerned, it's fairly accurate (though not over a given period).
We're talking about the holiday season already? Isn't it August?
I was at Costco last night. They had Christmas wrapping paper, a lot more toys than usual, and an assortment of musical instruments and youngster-oriented art supplies that they typically put up only around the Christmas holiday season.
On the summer breeze I could have sworn I heard sleigh bells as I left the warehouse. I felt an instant rush of icy wind that vanished as quickly as it came. As I got into my 140 degree car, I felt the joy start to fade to melancholy, but I could have sworn I saw a golden glow around the building in my rear view mirror as I drove out of sight.
According to the big boys, Xmas is imminent. Seriously.
TW
I just had a user send in a laptop in a FedEx box... WITHOUT A LICK OF PADDING!!!
Jeez, I got a cold chill up my spine when I read this. We've had more than one of these over the years. Sometimes it happened with the variation that they'd use a single layer of the tiniest bubble wrap they could find.
Ignoring the fact that these users are abviously clueless about the dangers of shipping and the fragility of laptops, they were pretty clever about one thing. It just so happens that the regular FedEx shipping box is just the perfect size for a normal 14" laptop with no padding. They must have felt like absolute geniuses as they slid that sucker into the box ("IT will be so happy I found this perfect box!").
TW
HP and Insight paired up to give us a good one. We ordered from Insight the "Advanced Pack" for HPs integrated Lights Out (iLO) feature on a Proliant server. This was several years ago when they had just started including the "basic" iLO for free on all their servers.
We recieved from Insight a box about 3/4 the size of a standard tower computer box. We opened it up to find a box the size you'd expect to find a full-sized array controller card in, plus a few large shipping air-bladders.
We opened up the array-controller sized box to find foam egg crate packaging securing what looked like a cd sleeve.
We opened up the CD sleeve to find inside the front cover, a number. We then used that number to "unlock" the "advanced features" that had really been there all the time.
The thing that I think makes this packaging especially over the top is that the number could have just as easily been put in a plain text email. "Shipping" and "packaging" were not even necessary to get this into our hands. We would have gotten it faster, cheaper and it would have cost them less to do it.
After all that, I'm afraid to say it actually got a little worse. The truth is, we didn't really order just one of them; we ordered three. All came packaged exactly the same way. Insight didn't make any effort to consolidate the smaller boxes into just one of the larger ones.
TW
Mozilla/Camino/Firefox is standards compliant, free and safe. I don't think IE7 can touch that.
Internet Explorer if bundled with every copy of Windows. Seriously, you can't touch that. As long as the IE browser remains "a part of the operating system", and and as long as Microsoft continues to dominate the OS market, no other browser will be any better than second place, regardless of how wonderful it is.
TW
Most people think Windows XP Home Edition costs less than $100. In fact, that's the price of the upgrade only. The full version costs $200. Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition cost more than most people think.
In order to legaly put Windows on your Mac, you're going to need the full version of one of these products. If Microsoft has significan't better pricing with Vista than with XP, this will be cheaper, but the full version of their curren't OS, when sold shrink-wrapped to the public, is significantly more expensive than most people think.
TW
First time I've seen "dumb" spelled "c-o-o-l".
Dude! this _is_ cool. I have a tendency to put my phone on the desk right near my mouse. I can't tell you the number of times I've reached over for the mouse without really looking and grabbed the phone by mistake.
Other features:
-No extra mouse when you travel - saves weight
-No extra dongle for your wireless mouse (assuming you have laptop with built-in bluetooth)
-You can take a call and at the same time rub your head against the wall to use the mouse. I'm currently unaware of any mouse that has this as a feature.
-No extra batteries or charger for your seperate mouse.
-People will talk about your mouse on slashdot (no one has so much as mentioned my "Target" brand mouse yet)
-People will gawk at you in the board room.
Now my biggest problem is that I don't have a Nokia!
One thing to note: The "low-quality cheap crap" that Dell sells will come with Vista at no additional charge. Also, Dell will have convieniently loaded Vista and installed all relevant drivers, a new-computer task that quite a few people would like to avoid.
My quick math:
Vista full version = $200
2 hours of labor to install vista and drivers = $100
Total additional cost of haveing Vista on your Mac = $300
Mac Mini (cheapest version = $599) with Vista = $899 or $800 if you supply your own labor and your time isn't worth anything.
Now, I still think Apple could kick Dell's a**. The hardware is gorgeous to look at and fabulously effcient in space and layout, something modern consumer highly value. But in order to get past the ugh factor of loading your own OS and the "holly crap, I have to pay $200 more!" factor of buying that new OS, they're going to have to preload.
Oh, BTW, there are a lot of sales to be had in the business world with slick Mac notebooks. That won't happen in significant numbers until Apple ships with Windows preinstalled.
TW
Right you are, but I must take exception with your spelling. "grudge match" is not spelled d-e-b-a-t-e.
TW
It's just like every other business out there. Some people don't know how to run them. Unfortunately, with spam, these idiots are able to make a major anoyance of themselves with their ill-concieved, badly run catastrophies.
Trust me, the illiterate folks really don't make any money. But they're only part of your spam. The one where, you know, you can actually find some information on how to buy a product? They're doing ok.
TW
I'm sure I won't change your mind about the relative merits of Mac vs. Windows, but I thought I'd explain this a little more. Hitler was horrible. He belongs in a select group of truly horrible, evil people that are full of special badness many, many times more powerful than your run-of-the-mill murderer. But he had to have some quality that some people valued if he was going to get elected as the leader of Germany. In my family, we've concluded that he was probably a hoot at parties and this must have helped him seem like an allright guy long enough to get elected. I don't know this for a fact, but it's as good an explenation as the next.
Now we use this expression to indicate that no matter how horrible, awful or evil something is, it will probably have some small positive element. Shit makes great fertilizer. Snakes keep crop fields free of rodents. Hitler was fun at parties.
If you can't think of a single small redeaming quality of Windows, then I'm forced to question your abojectivity and credibility. WindowsXP couldn't possibly be worse than Hitler, and at least he was fun at parties.
TW
We have a saying at my house: Even Hitler was fun at parties.
Nothing is all bad, just as nothing is all good. Anyone who claims the contrary I regard with deep suspicion.
TW
I remember these TV ads. They were pretty good. I also remember one where the managers sit back and ask each other which is the best computer. One says, "the one they're actually using," and it's a Mac. But these are all pre second coming of Jobs. Jobs came back in with glitz and hasn't stopped. Style has taken stage one.
I really enjoyed the print ads. I wish Apple would shoot straight like this more often. Thanks for finding them.
TW
It's not the market share, though I do have to admit it would be difficult to be elitist with 95% of the market. It's the attitude. Mac users tend to act like their machines are better than the rest and that betterness somehow extends to them, personally. It's quite a lot what you see in high-end sports car owners. No, it doesn't always happen, but it's quite common amoung the mac users I've interacted with.
Apple has no problem reinforcing that view, either. Maybe they're just proud? Sure they are. But if it was only pride, I can't help but think they wouldn't spend so much time picking on the 95% of us who don't own a Mac.
TWWell, ya got me there. I dont actually have statistical evidence that Mac users are elitist. However, the Mac users I've encountered in real life have tended to be elitist as have the Mac users I've encounter on Slashdot. Seriously, even if I did have statistics, wouldn't you just attack the word "elitist" as being so dificult to define as to be unprovable? Yet, all the same, the PC users I've know who have helped out Mac users have a strong tendency to use this word. I think there's a lot of truth to it.
The users don't have to be mentioned. They show "the PC guy" as slightly uptight bafoon who wears ugly, ill-fitting clothes, while they show "the Mac guy" as cool, smart and relaxed. You could watch the ads without any sound at all and you'd know they're making fun of PC users.
There is much truth in this, but it is not exactly true. Though many ad campaigns show the consumer a wonderful life and insinuate that your life will be wonderful if you use their product, that is not, by far, the only way. Many ad campaigns show (slightly idealized versions of) regular people using the products. Sure, the houswife may have an imaculate house where she won't need that cleaning product, but she's still a houswife. Apple insinuates you can be John Lennon.
I don't count the ads alone as my reason why I consider Mac users and Apple to tend toward elitism. It's just one of the signs. If you really want to understand the Apple elitism then all you have to do is talk to a few Mac users about PCs. I think average people would come away using the "E" word nearly every time.
TW
This seems to describe advertising, throughout my lifetime, pretty well. Every beer commercial I have ever seen has featured "people smarter, hipper and better looking" than myself, but I would hardly call Budweiser elitist.
Miller Lite
"Tastes great!"
"Less Filling!"
These guys, despite being football pros, were played as "everymen" in the beer-drinking sense of the word. They were overweight, roudy and they were placed in ordinary looking living rooms where they were being portrayed as "just watching the game" like other average folks. It was one of the most successfull ad campaigns in beer history.
By comparison, recent Budweiser comercials are elitist.
Cheers!
TW
Have a great day,
TW
It's a fine line, but Apple is so far over that line it's not even funny. Whether you call them elitists, fan-boys, or "the Mac Faithful", it all boils down to Apple catering to a group of people who's default position is that everything Apple and all apple users are awesome while everything launched out of Microsoft and all microsoft users couldn't possibly be as good.
Apple itself has not always taken this elitist position. Didn't Jobs take a $150 million investment from Microsoft and put IE on all Macs for years? However, their recent ads have been designed to make PC users look like bafoons while Apple users bask in, really, an entirely different plane of computer use. I can't think of a more classic definition of elitism.
Answer me this, when in the modern Mac era has apple ever showed it's computers being used by buisnessmen in ties or blue-collar types playing games with their kids? I'm not saying that not being a "company of the people" automatically makes them elitist, but really it doesn't help. Macs are featured as being used by people smarter, hipper and better looking than you or me (well, me anyway). These people are elite. If Apple ever want's to be considered anything but elitist, they can start by showing ads of a receptionist using a Mac. Or is that just too... common?
TW
This 99% of games suck bullshit has just about got to stop. Have you bought a game in the last 6 months? There are many fine games for the console now, even if they weren't there at launch.
My advice is to take it off of Craigslist, buy a couple of games that users have rated highly on the PSP forums and play them. It'll be fun, trust me. If it's still not fun for you then I'm not quite sure what might help. Have you considered taking up knitting?
TW
I appreciate your tone and your thoughtfulness. I'm not actually using a legal type of argument. My argument is that most people know what is moral and ethical and in very many cases, those who pirate music are going beyond the bounds of ethics with their piracy.
Like many things in life, there's a kind of good, bad, and everything in between going on here that makes the issue grey as mud.
If you buy the CD and rip it, by most accounts this is 100% legal, even though a few greedy record company execs have said otherwise. No one would give you a hard time about this.
If you want to settle a bet about the lyrics of a song, and you download it for free and play it and never listen to it again, most reasonable people would not have a problem with the ethics of the scenerio. It may not be technically legal, but it's fair.
What about if you download a whole bunch of songs, but only listen to them occasionally? Is this fair? It's not legal, and I wouldn't want to see someone in trouble for something he really only occasionally uses, but I doubt most people would consider this 100% ethical.
And finally, many people who're memmbers of Slashdot have downloaded vast amounts of music and listen to it regularly. They have iPods choc full of 40gb of this stuff and they wish Apple would release a 60gb or 100gb model because they could fill those as well. These people will often tell you that they have some "reason" why they think this is perfectly ethical. The do have some reason. But even they know, in their heart of hearts, that this is massively unethical behavior. In a random survey, there is no way you'd get a majority oppinion stating that this is ok, ethically speaking.
When I say people need to own up on the issue, they often think, "well I just ripped my buddies CD and I don't think that's an ethical problem." They're probably right. But that's not the same as lumping all "file sharing" in that same ethical categorie and defending it as ok.
The judges were right in both the Napster and Kazaa cases. We all really knew it. Why did we spend so much time defending what we all knew was wrong.?
TW
Thanks!
It's like they're aiming at the the game warden and then they bitch that the deer wont run in front of their bullets.
I have an AC/DC DVD. I've never actually watched it. I'd love to have the music in my MP3 collection, but I just haven't had the time to figure out the process of ripping the DVD and then extracting the audio I want. I'd love to set it up like my own personal MTV with a bunch of other music DVDs, but the previously mentioned ripping and extracting process is just painful, not to mention that I can't really find most of the music I want on DVD.
I've looked at the dual DVD-CDs, but it's pretty hard to figure out if the CD part is DRMed. I'd personally rather change my taste in music than buy from a seller that's purposely trying to make my life harder.
Then of course there's the regular ol' CDs that are being DRMed. As previously mentioned, I don't really want to buy these if I have to jump through hoops to put the music on my MP3 player.
DRMed iTunes. Bullshit. I can't play it on my cell phone or my PSP without, you know, jumping through more fucking hoops. I'm not an acrobat, folks!
Stolen, ehem, I mean "shared" music? Grow up folks. It's kinda silly when you pretend this is all right. Spare me your lawyering. You're getting a product that is traditionally paid for, without the permission of the folks you traditionally pay, and you're not paying for it. I don't care if the RIAA, Mettalica, and EMI all suck big donkey dick, you know it's not quite right, don't you? Do I need to send Jimminy Cricket over to your house?
So music companies, if you're listening, all I want is regular old CDs, or, if you feel the need to sell me a modern "new" format, sell me high quality MP3s or, hell, any high quality digital format that's easily converted without losing much quality. That's what I want. That's what everyone wants (except the selfish ones who want free stuff.) Go do it and I'll buy more of your music.
TW
Steve Jobs leading Apple
What could stop him in the long run?
The article insinuates that regulators can stop him. I doubt that's true. Unless the numbers are Enron-like, the board is very unlikely to dump him. My take on the article is that the overstatement of profits is significant, but not as significant as Steve Jobs leadership.
TW
once you realize that the value of your collection doesn't lay in it's internal value (they're just cards or china or whatever) or your enjoyment using the collection (most collections are sealed away. Even if you do use them, how could you possibly get real use out of 100 cars or 1000 beanie babies?), then the only thing you have left is monetary value and bragging rights. And you only have monetary value and bragging rights, really, with other collectors. Did you tell your aunt polly about your Star Wars figure collection? What did she say? "Bad-ass"? Sure she did.
I have been caught up in the collecting bug in the past and as soon as I'm done, I just wonder where all my time/money/space/soul has gone.
Where are you Pogs now?
TW