Wow, hey, a Mac user group didn't even occur to me. Would you have any idea where one might go to search for local mac user groups? I'm going to go google for it right now, but it would be nice if you knew of a good spot off the top of your head, if my search doesn't turn anything up.
A very interesting thought, try before you buy. You know, I've always wanted to go to a mac store, have you ever been to one? Really, I would only need a few hours to evaluate a system to see if it was worth the money.
Which is an intriguing thought in and of itself...
Perhaps instead of a 30 day trial, the mac stores started operating "classes" for different users. Advanced users could sit down in a room with a bunch of macs in their default install state and an intelligent Tech-Rep there to answer their advanced questions while they were allowed to install sample software provided by the good folks at Apple and try it out. They could walk you through various bench marks, or tell you where to go to script a little special something you want to make Mac OS X feel more like home.
See, if I had a positive experience getting an ibook in its as-shipped state, and installing photoshop 7, and testing it for a while to get a feel for the performance of the system and quality of the hardware you can bet I'd be buying quickly. But I don't have a mac store nearby, nor do I have any friends with mac hardware. And asking me to invest $1000 in system and hardware I'm incredibly unfamiliar with is just not going to work. It doesn't matter how many testimonies I hear.
Hmm... does Best Buy sell macs? Do any other major retailers sell macs? I never leave my office/home so I would honestly appreciate some info on these things.
I have to agree with Blaine Hilton. In the last month I've clicked on far more text ads ( about a dozen ) than I have graphic ads ( about zero ). They simply tend to be more informative and more attention grabbing for me. And it's not as if this can merely be explained away by "graphic-blindness." No sir, as a fellow web designer I do have a tendancy to evaluate each and every new ad for its content, placement, relevancy to the subject at hand, and general appeal. Slashdot is a good example. I must see a few dozen VB.net or other Microsoft ads in the topics each day.
I've never clicked on a single one of them. And not because I hate Microsoft. Afterall, I am just as intrigued as many others about what ".net" really means. The problem is that every.net ad I've seen of theirs is uninformative, and I am given the impression that clicking on the ad will merely bring me to the same uninformative page I viewed the first time.
It seems the only reason microsoft uses these graphic ads as opposed to text ads is because they know they have the money to afford them.
Marketing preferences also likely have a lot to do with the entire issue. I can walk over to the graphics department right now and start a discussion about advertising methods and it will be a matter of minutes before I hear that wonderful phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words."
I won't argue that a picture isn't "worth a thousand words." I assure you it is. But in the case of advertising, those thousand words are completely generated by the potential customer viewing them.
I seem to recall this one.net add that was merely a laptop (apparantly powered off) sitting on a pine table in front of some glass windows which gave way to some rather nice tree scenery.
Now there's a thousand words that come to mind with this image but what purpose did this ad end up serving in my case? Well I'll have you know that after viewing that ad I had successfully equated.net to computers. That's right, I now know.net runs on a computer.
And this was on some RIAA article.
Now let's take a text ad I saw on the same page. "Register your copyrights easily." Before I even clicked I knew there was a company willing to register my copyrights with the United States government via the internet for a fraction of the cost via lawyer. I clicked it, I read the entire page, I bookmarked, I loved it. I will likely use these guys later due to their marketing decision. Oh sure, they could have put up some random stock photo with a fountain pen resting atop a rather intimidating form that said "Skip the lawyer, skip the hassle." But that just wouldn't be as effective.
It all comes down to the medium on which these companies have chosen to advertise. This is the internet, not television. One can direct me to a page that says "buy now buy now buy now." I'll merely go somewhere else. However, if you create a good product, and put your best effort forward to give as much detail as possible about the product, its uses, what standards it adheres to, etc. etc. then I promise you, as a potential customer, that I will evaluate your product and consider buying.
Information goes on the internet. Pretty pictures go on the television. Easy.
And there's no better time than now to be doing this (are you listning Microsoft, Intel, Amazon?). With most companies still in the "pretty pictures sell stuff" paradigm there is no better time to begin a campaign of traditional advertising in traditional media, and informative advertising on the internet.
So c'mon, get over the dot-com-bust already and start advertising on the web the way it was MEANT to be done. With genuine information about genuine products!
I'm saying that, in my world, a poor interface is a fundamental flaw. But then I'm a designer, and good design is one of my standards. In this case, however, both linux (okay, I haven't checked out KDE3 yet, sue me) and windows fail, at least the default configurations.
However, suppose someone's fundamental baseline by which they chose to judge all operating systems is security. Doesn't OpenBSD win out over all of them?
I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that it's all a matter of perspective. From a business perspective it makes sense for one to choose windows. When it comes to the user's experience, I hear Macs are the way to go. But if we want to say "fundamentals" of an operating system, which is what the parent of my post seemed to imply, then I believe GNU/Linux flavors, the BSDs, and MacOS X win out when it comes the stated functions of an operating system.
Re:Right tool for the job
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
You know, I never looked at it that way. Yet, when you explain it in this manner one might liken it unto the situation with Nike shoes.
There was a time when many people were avoiding shoes manufactured by Nike, due to the conditions under which these shoes were manufactured. They had "sweat shops" in foreign countries where children were payed extremely poor wages to construct their shoes for unreasonable hours every day.
When this situation was exposed, many people could buy Nike's shoes, as they'd get the job done just as good as any other pair, but many passed them by for the good of their culture, and cultures afar. Purchasing these shoes meant encouraging the company to continue its ways......so I can see your point in what RMS chooses to purchase/use. However, this still doesn't explain some of the unrealistic expectations he can have of some people, when considering the current state of the global society.
Re:Linus Not God, Says God
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 2, Funny
Pah, you Linetians and your Linus Torvalds.
Why don't you wake up? Clearly Carmack is the superior force on this planet. Death Match is the only true way to salvation...
The moment teens feel that they don't need to do something, they want to demonstrate their power ("I'm not a *kid* anymore") and ignore it.
Simply ignoring things you don't like generally acts as a pretty large anchor in your professional life, guys. Take advantage of this time to learn how to deal with people in authority that make bad calls.
Keep in mind, however, that these assertions (or "demonstrations") should be recognized. From infancy to puberty we can consider a child's life a period of preparation. It is often described in this manner. A period of time in which we outfit them with the tools neccessary to succeed in life. While we still do this during the middle to late teenage years, we also burden them with the lessons of direction.
A teenager is learning that they have options with the course their life is going to take. This is a very experimental stage in their lives. Some successful children will experiment with their grades. Further some, like me, will purposefully quit altogether, and not for a lack of knowledge nor stamina with which to drive oneself. Suffice it to say, this is frustrating for a caring parent.
I do agree with you that teenagers should not ignore their assignments. That they should have consideration for the many people who thought to give them the opportunities they have today. I merely wish to draw attention to the fact, that the best way to teach them to not ignore something, is to not ignore them. They're not children anymore. They're still your legal and (usually) biological offspring, however they have completed their early stages of character formation. I've known a lot of stupid, ditsy, strange, apathetic, maligned, and otherwise different teenagers in my life. I believe that I can say with some authority that none of them caused the trouble they did without reason. Evidence that they did would be indicative of a mental illness.
Right, AC, because clearly every person in the United States who has a problem with the DMCA can afford air-fare, train-fare, or bus-fare to California or D.C. Did you even read the article?
Of course not. Well here you go anyway, when it says "may submit a request by Apr. 1 to testify during the public forums." They mean, "This will present a chance for people to show up and make their case and build a good record."
Notice the necessity of physical presence? Notice the other complaints on/. about people being out of work? Do you see any conflict here?
Re:No one can own it???!
on
World of Ends
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· Score: 1
...I've got a nice piece of real estate to sell you on the gopher protocol...
While I do agree with the AC, you deserve an explenation.
... or why is there only one word per line on the very right side of the page?
I stopped reading somewhere in the middle because it's just too unreadable this way.
You see, Netscape 4.7 has poor support for Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading Style Sheets are a technology we webdesigners use to exercise greater control over the look and feel of a website. Sadly, during the first browser war, CSS and other standards were ignored. Companies thought they could win the war by providing proprietary functionality. Netscape 4.7 was the last version of Netscape before standards became their priority.
If you're looking for a similar browser, download Netscape 7, If you have not upgraded due to concern of CPU load and memory, you'll probably like Phoenix. Of course, there are other browsers out there. I just tend to ignore anything that isn't based on mozilla (which the new netscape and phoenix are).
Would you rather have the military and government using open source software or Microsoft?
In all seriousness, I would like both allies and enemies to be using linux (or for military purposes, specifically, OpenBSD) as the software for any weapon of destruction they might have to launch. I fear many more civilian lives would be claimed if a less stable operating system were used.
Does this make those idiots that go around calling Saudi-Arabians, Iraqis, Iranians and other middle-easterners "towel heads," big supporters of the use of Windows by the military? I mean with their mentality you'd think they'd want the military to use less accurate software so they'd have to fire more weapons...
...no, I don't know if I'm trying to be funny or serious.
I mean, imagine, unless they filled out their patent application by hand, they used at least some dozen assorted programs which made "...use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure, and the combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited..." to get to market so that they could write their patent! =)
I value Linus Torvald's decision to make his intellectual property freely available to me, so long as I do not take credit for it, nor distribute it without the source code...
Slashdot Mirror
Not to drag you down but, what legal trouble? Yeah things were looking hairy for a while back there but remember what they got? A slap on the wrist!
I'm sorry but I don't think that really discouraged them at all.
I guess this is supposed to be some sort of insult to the french...
...but if we really want to put slashdottings in your terms then there's a lot more yellow-bellied american servers out there.
He expected you to believe that they just lost the graphics and physics engines for MAC and PC when they bought bungie or what?
This thing was ported to X-Box not the other way around. Remember?
Why are they so afraid of rewriting their shell instead of just adding new hacks?
...oh yeah...
Wow, hey, a Mac user group didn't even occur to me. Would you have any idea where one might go to search for local mac user groups? I'm going to go google for it right now, but it would be nice if you knew of a good spot off the top of your head, if my search doesn't turn anything up.
A very interesting thought, try before you buy. You know, I've always wanted to go to a mac store, have you ever been to one? Really, I would only need a few hours to evaluate a system to see if it was worth the money. Which is an intriguing thought in and of itself... Perhaps instead of a 30 day trial, the mac stores started operating "classes" for different users. Advanced users could sit down in a room with a bunch of macs in their default install state and an intelligent Tech-Rep there to answer their advanced questions while they were allowed to install sample software provided by the good folks at Apple and try it out. They could walk you through various bench marks, or tell you where to go to script a little special something you want to make Mac OS X feel more like home. See, if I had a positive experience getting an ibook in its as-shipped state, and installing photoshop 7, and testing it for a while to get a feel for the performance of the system and quality of the hardware you can bet I'd be buying quickly. But I don't have a mac store nearby, nor do I have any friends with mac hardware. And asking me to invest $1000 in system and hardware I'm incredibly unfamiliar with is just not going to work. It doesn't matter how many testimonies I hear. Hmm... does Best Buy sell macs? Do any other major retailers sell macs? I never leave my office/home so I would honestly appreciate some info on these things.
I have to agree with Blaine Hilton. In the last month I've clicked on far more text ads ( about a dozen ) than I have graphic ads ( about zero ). They simply tend to be more informative and more attention grabbing for me. And it's not as if this can merely be explained away by "graphic-blindness." No sir, as a fellow web designer I do have a tendancy to evaluate each and every new ad for its content, placement, relevancy to the subject at hand, and general appeal. Slashdot is a good example. I must see a few dozen VB.net or other Microsoft ads in the topics each day.
.net ad I've seen of theirs is uninformative, and I am given the impression that clicking on the ad will merely bring me to the same uninformative page I viewed the first time.
.net add that was merely a laptop (apparantly powered off) sitting on a pine table in front of some glass windows which gave way to some rather nice tree scenery.
.net to computers. That's right, I now know .net runs on a computer.
I've never clicked on a single one of them. And not because I hate Microsoft. Afterall, I am just as intrigued as many others about what ".net" really means. The problem is that every
It seems the only reason microsoft uses these graphic ads as opposed to text ads is because they know they have the money to afford them.
Marketing preferences also likely have a lot to do with the entire issue. I can walk over to the graphics department right now and start a discussion about advertising methods and it will be a matter of minutes before I hear that wonderful phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words."
I won't argue that a picture isn't "worth a thousand words." I assure you it is. But in the case of advertising, those thousand words are completely generated by the potential customer viewing them.
I seem to recall this one
Now there's a thousand words that come to mind with this image but what purpose did this ad end up serving in my case? Well I'll have you know that after viewing that ad I had successfully equated
And this was on some RIAA article.
Now let's take a text ad I saw on the same page. "Register your copyrights easily." Before I even clicked I knew there was a company willing to register my copyrights with the United States government via the internet for a fraction of the cost via lawyer. I clicked it, I read the entire page, I bookmarked, I loved it. I will likely use these guys later due to their marketing decision. Oh sure, they could have put up some random stock photo with a fountain pen resting atop a rather intimidating form that said "Skip the lawyer, skip the hassle." But that just wouldn't be as effective.
It all comes down to the medium on which these companies have chosen to advertise. This is the internet, not television. One can direct me to a page that says "buy now buy now buy now." I'll merely go somewhere else. However, if you create a good product, and put your best effort forward to give as much detail as possible about the product, its uses, what standards it adheres to, etc. etc. then I promise you, as a potential customer, that I will evaluate your product and consider buying.
Information goes on the internet. Pretty pictures go on the television. Easy.
And there's no better time than now to be doing this (are you listning Microsoft, Intel, Amazon?). With most companies still in the "pretty pictures sell stuff" paradigm there is no better time to begin a campaign of traditional advertising in traditional media, and informative advertising on the internet.
So c'mon, get over the dot-com-bust already and start advertising on the web the way it was MEANT to be done. With genuine information about genuine products!
Because Mac OS X sucks!
If you disagree then I don't understand why you wouldn't buy me a powerbook so I could prove myself wrong.
P.S. Could you please buy me a powerbook so I can prove myself wrong? Please?
Divorce... oh wait, that's not cheap.
No, not a double standard.
I'm saying that, in my world, a poor interface is a fundamental flaw. But then I'm a designer, and good design is one of my standards. In this case, however, both linux (okay, I haven't checked out KDE3 yet, sue me) and windows fail, at least the default configurations.
However, suppose someone's fundamental baseline by which they chose to judge all operating systems is security. Doesn't OpenBSD win out over all of them?
I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that it's all a matter of perspective. From a business perspective it makes sense for one to choose windows. When it comes to the user's experience, I hear Macs are the way to go. But if we want to say "fundamentals" of an operating system, which is what the parent of my post seemed to imply, then I believe GNU/Linux flavors, the BSDs, and MacOS X win out when it comes the stated functions of an operating system.
You know, I never looked at it that way. Yet, when you explain it in this manner one might liken it unto the situation with Nike shoes. There was a time when many people were avoiding shoes manufactured by Nike, due to the conditions under which these shoes were manufactured. They had "sweat shops" in foreign countries where children were payed extremely poor wages to construct their shoes for unreasonable hours every day. When this situation was exposed, many people could buy Nike's shoes, as they'd get the job done just as good as any other pair, but many passed them by for the good of their culture, and cultures afar. Purchasing these shoes meant encouraging the company to continue its ways... ...so I can see your point in what RMS chooses to purchase/use. However, this still doesn't explain some of the unrealistic expectations he can have of some people, when considering the current state of the global society.
Pah, you Linetians and your Linus Torvalds.
Why don't you wake up? Clearly Carmack is the superior force on this planet. Death Match is the only true way to salvation...
Wouldn't that rely upon your definition of fundamental?
A teenager is learning that they have options with the course their life is going to take. This is a very experimental stage in their lives. Some successful children will experiment with their grades. Further some, like me, will purposefully quit altogether, and not for a lack of knowledge nor stamina with which to drive oneself. Suffice it to say, this is frustrating for a caring parent.
I do agree with you that teenagers should not ignore their assignments. That they should have consideration for the many people who thought to give them the opportunities they have today. I merely wish to draw attention to the fact, that the best way to teach them to not ignore something, is to not ignore them. They're not children anymore. They're still your legal and (usually) biological offspring, however they have completed their early stages of character formation. I've known a lot of stupid, ditsy, strange, apathetic, maligned, and otherwise different teenagers in my life. I believe that I can say with some authority that none of them caused the trouble they did without reason. Evidence that they did would be indicative of a mental illness.
Where's that guy that owns the Microsoft (dis)enabled WinCE car (ironically named the Microsoft "iDrive" system), when you need him?
Right, AC, because clearly every person in the United States who has a problem with the DMCA can afford air-fare, train-fare, or bus-fare to California or D.C. Did you even read the article?
/. about people being out of work? Do you see any conflict here?
Of course not. Well here you go anyway, when it says "may submit a request by Apr. 1 to testify during the public forums." They mean, "This will present a chance for people to show up and make their case and build a good record."
Notice the necessity of physical presence? Notice the other complaints on
...I've got a nice piece of real estate to sell you on the gopher protocol...
While I do agree with the AC, you deserve an explenation.
You see, Netscape 4.7 has poor support for Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading Style Sheets are a technology we webdesigners use to exercise greater control over the look and feel of a website. Sadly, during the first browser war, CSS and other standards were ignored. Companies thought they could win the war by providing proprietary functionality. Netscape 4.7 was the last version of Netscape before standards became their priority.
If you're looking for a similar browser, download Netscape 7, If you have not upgraded due to concern of CPU load and memory, you'll probably like Phoenix. Of course, there are other browsers out there. I just tend to ignore anything that isn't based on mozilla (which the new netscape and phoenix are).
Doesn't hold a candle to the star that is Star Trek Deep Space Nine.
NOW THE FLAMING MAY BEGIN!
(I'm on my period, that means I troll)
Does this make those idiots that go around calling Saudi-Arabians, Iraqis, Iranians and other middle-easterners "towel heads," big supporters of the use of Windows by the military? I mean with their mentality you'd think they'd want the military to use less accurate software so they'd have to fire more weapons...
...no, I don't know if I'm trying to be funny or serious.
I must admire the irony of the entire situation.
I mean, imagine, unless they filled out their patent application by hand, they used at least some dozen assorted programs which made "...use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure, and the combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited..." to get to market so that they could write their patent! =)
(-1 emote)
Or "Digital Rights Management."
The phrases CAN be interprited differently, but are usually likened unto each other.
I value Linus Torvald's decision to make his intellectual property freely available to me, so long as I do not take credit for it, nor distribute it without the source code...
I'd say I value intellectual property plenty.
Here's my business contribution:
"Synergy"
Now, I expect to be entitled to a cut in whatever you end up manufacturing of course...