...I would rather see the money from the tax breaks going to finance local sports and getting kids interested in kicking a ball around so that we have some chance in the next 20 years of putting together a national football team worthy of wearing the "Three Lions".
Oh yes, the "joys" of the good old UK Post Office......a place where there are always as many closed counters as there open ones......a place where there is never any attempt made to stagger employee lunch breaks to take into account the fact that they are busiest during lunchtime periods......a place where the staff will openly moan at you if you drop in a parcel for which you have previously purchased postage online simply to try and help lessen the queues at the counters because it turns out that the actual Post Office gets no revenue from those types of parcel.
These days I go into a Post Office only when there is absolutely no alternative.
Games companies judge the success or failure of a game by how many copies it has sold within the first two weeks of release.
Knowledgeable gamers (and I include myself in that description) are never going to rush to buy a game on the first day, they're going to read reviews first and make an informed decision to purchase at a later stage.
I accept that those buying games within the first two weeks of release are probably not just kids, neither for one moment do I believe it's just kids who play games (I'm 48 years old, have been gaming for 30 years odd and am really struggling not to spend all my spare time playing Fallout 3 currently) - but because I'm a regular on Slashdot, I'm kept informed on things like overly restrictive DRM on games which ultimately means there are some games titles I will never buy, no matter how good they are.
Re:Starbucks Are Also Changing The Seating Plan...
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Starbucks Frees Wi-Fi
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· Score: 1
That seems to be something of a large and strange assumption you have made... so you're basically saying that it's impossible to have a wide circle of social friends if you don't like Apple?
I don't know why these types of stories actually get posted on Slashdot because the comments on here are in no way going to be a reflection of what happens in the real world.
If you read Slashdot then the chances are you're part geek & part interested in technology, maybe even techically savvy. That probably makes you above average intelligence (and that's not just trying to pander to everyone on Slashdot BTW) which therefore means that you're probably less susceptible to marketing "tricks of the trade" and advertising.
However, I suspect *most* of the people (including young kids or teenagers) who play games don't read Slashdot - and are probably not too bothered about adverts in games, especially if it's their parents who have forked out the money to pay for them.
Personally, I hope that marketing and advertising people will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, but I do give them some credit in being able to justify their own salaries by generating product sales through their methods of advertising - which are ultimately aimed at the lowest common denominator of games players.
So whatever the view on Slashdot about in-game advertising (and I myself have a black & white view that stuff should be free with adverts or paid for without adverts), it is not going to be an indicator of what will really happen in terms of games sales.
Starbucks Are Also Changing The Seating Plan....
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Starbucks Frees Wi-Fi
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...so all of the Apple fanbois can position themselves in such a way as to reflect the light from the little silver apple directly into the eyes of customers coming into the store.
...because in this 21st century world of ours where just about everything is driven by money, it's great to see a huge, world-wide collaborative project confusing the hell out of accountants and marketing types who simply cannot grasp the simple concept that *sometimes* things happen just because enough people *want* to making it happen, rather than being paid to make it happen.
And what's even better about the whole Open Source movement is that it benefits *everyone*. Nowadays, there's no justification for software piracy just because commercial software is overpriced in some parts of the world because now there are truly free alternatives that can, in most cases, give enough functionality - for example, about 10% of MS Office users use enough of its functionality to not be able to use an alternative package, but for the remaining 90% OpenOffice.org provides more than enough functionality.
Even if you don't use or support Open Source, there's no denying that its presence means that commercial software publishers now have a benchmark that they need to be better than, and that, in turn, can only mean better quality software all-round.
We're currently at a transition point in mobile communications.
Go back a couple of years and most people were accessing the Internet on desktop and portable computers running Windows, Linux and OS X. Now it's all about portable devices and already Apple's portable devices cannot and will not support Flash.
I don't see Microsoft being displaced from home and office desktops any time soon but they are certainly not making any great progress in getting an embedded or slimmed-down Windows onto portable devices - it's more likely the case that the only option they have is to wait for a time when portable devices have enough capacity and power to efficiently run a slightly slimmed-down version of Windows, by which time they will already be competing with Android and the other web OSes that are out there.
I'm mostly Linux user and although I've not seen too many issues with 64-bit Flash so far, Adobe's support of it sucks which ultimately means something else, more than likely HTML 5, will gain more ground on them and start pushing them out.
It really won't surprise me to see, in about 18 months time, Adobe releasing at least some of the source to Flash as they desperately try to hold onto their market share and to try and encourage the Open Source community to continue using Flash.
I'm like you, I've never bought an Apple product & the only thing I own made by Apple is a Touch given to me by my missus when she upgraded to an iPhone.
Over here in the UK, Apple has never been a big player anyway (sure, that may change from this point onwards) and despite 30-odd years of both working with and messing about with computers, they've never made anything at a good enough price that was better than other cheaper options. Recently, they've got too greedy and too closed, just giving me one more reason not to buy their stuff.
But I would side with Google here. I do have concerns about privacy when using their stuff and I hate advertising - but they make a lot of neat stuff, it's made using open standards and as a Windows/Linux user, it's great that I their stuff works on both platforms pretty much equally well.
The actual problem is more intrinsic - personal information is valuable to *any* company, not just Google, and privacy is an issue for most people nowadays because they don't bother to stop and think about the type of information they are potentially revealing on applications like Facebook, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. It is entirely possible to make use of these applications provided that you think about what you are revealing about yourself and not put the responsibility for you personal information into the hands of some big faceless corporation.
It's not *just* about Google, it's about education and making people realise that the safest place to store your information is somewhere where only you can get to it.
iTunes is "kindergarten" software, it's designed to be completely usable by non-technical people and does a less-than-average job. However, as a techie, I find the interface totally unintuitive.
I also hate the fact that it won't *JUST* download music to the device without touching my music collection. I am a bit anal when it comes to having correct tags on my music, I don't buy any downloadable music (and won't ever because again it's just for kids who haven't got the patience to listen to an entire album).
Fortunately, there is a better solution, Media Monkey which as of recent versions appears to support the iPod Touch very well, as well as other players, phones, etc. It also easily handles my collection of over 1200 ripped CDs and can convert to lower bitrates as you sync - plus it appears to work really well under WINE in Linux.
I've already turned off the intrusive iTunes startup services in Windows, I'll just leave it on the PC for any updates or app store purchases.
Just because everyone agrees HTML5 is a better and more open technology than Flash does not mean the former will win over the latter.
Jobs has his own reasons for trying to destroy Adobe and I can imagine him in his office now repeating the words "Adobe is a cancer" to himself, over and over again, as Ballmer did with Linux.
The reason Apple is doing iAds is to improve the experience of in-app ads.
Please, please, please, stop with the marketeer-speak!
Personally, I don't want *ANY* advertising so I don't give a toss what someone else does to "improve the experience" because to me, it's *STILL* advertising.
The *ONLY* criteria I have is whether or not an advertising-free paid-for service is worth the money or not - if it is, I'll buy it and enjoy an "advert-free experience", otherwise I will endure the advertising for the sake of getting it free.
Bearing in mind that most of what Apple sells is bought by kids and teenagers who never venture onto Slashdot, leaving a minority of fanbois who do, why-oh-why do we have to keep putting up with these "zero content" articles every day just so we can be constantly reminded that Apple exist in the first place?
But I'll bite anyway...
1. Comparisons to TV purchases in 1959 are meaningless figures unless you take into account the relative populations of the USA then and now. Also, you probably should look at the relative costs of TVs then and Apple devices now, based on the fact that people, in general, have a lot more disposable income now than they did then.
2. I have a MythTV box at home (here in the UK) that has both satellite and terrestrial capture cards in it, I can receive and record TV from both sources, as well as from the Internet, and I understand you can do pretty much the same thing with PVR software on Windows. In either case, these exist already and give you far more freedom with what you view than just a single provider.
3. Why would any company going into TV broadcasting over the Internet restrict viewing of it to just a single subset of devices? Why would they not create client software for Windows, and possibly Linux, if they could charge each user for the service? Surely it would be commercial suicide not to do it that way? And if broadcasting is available to multiple clients, why is the number of Apple unit sales important, since it would still be a small fraction of the number of users viewing through Windows?
4. This service makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless you have the facility to watch live-streamed video wherever and whenever you want - otherwise people will just keep doing what they do at the moment which is download stuff and transfer it to a portable device where they can watch it at their leisure (and you don't need anything by Apple to do that). You can't stream live video when you're on an aircraft, if you're traveling anywhere then it depends on having good wi-fi coverage wherever you go (and the ability to hop seamlessly between wi-fi networks as you move) plus the cellular network, whilst having better coverage than wi-fi, is not geared up to stream video and gets very expensive very quickly when you do it.
5. What's the *ACTUAL* news here? So a new TV service provider is going to stream video over the Internet - big deal, wake me up when it's something that hasn't been done before...
Bletchley Park's archive is to be digitised and put online. It seems HP made an offer to help out with scanners and expertise...which will result in yet more "authentic" WW2 movies starring Matthew McConaughy as the Yanks credit themselves with creating the technology that our glorious "British Boffins at Bletchley" created.
Did they ever make that movie about The Battle Of Britain where the top Allied fighter ace was going to be played by an American, despite the fact they wouldn't be entering the war for another year or so?
I disagree. Zappa was fastidious about his music - wierd and wonderful time changes, surrounding himself with the highest quality musicians, etc.
A Linux user is invariably fastidious about getting the best speed from a computer, optimising compiler flags, carefully choosing all the right desktop components, etc.
Not that I care either way (I'm mostly Linux user without being a zealot, I like Zappa's humour in his music without caring too much about his self-indulgent guitar solos) but Britney Spears is more closer to Apple - nice to look at, easy on the ears and eyes, but definitely corporate-controlled and no real substance.
Unfortunately, the succession of companies that bought the Amiga name have never managed to get their act together and do anything more interesting with it - nowadays, AmigaOS seems to be some kind of embedded environment that runs on Windows, I know nothing more than that because I got bored with all the messing around with it to be honest.
I said "old", not "mature" - and Metallicock are "Mastered As Puppets" by their corporate lords... plus all their "music" sounds like each band member is racing to finish each song first.
There, out of my system now, switching back to "mature" mode...
Windows is relatively secure with the correct corporate policies in place and proxies/firewalls to block access to sites where malware can be easily downloaded from - problems occur if malware gets brought in behind the firewall because of users taking corporate laptops onto their home network or plugging in their own infected USB hard disks and memory sticks.
But Linux security has *nothing* to do with the distribution you are using for precisely the same reason more corporations use their own Windows builds for PC rollouts rather than a standard installation CD.
Linux insecurity is not about viruses and malware, it's about brute force and buffer overflow attacks to get access onto a system. The way to counter those is to turn off unnecessary network daemons, updating them as soon as a known vulnerability is reported, and keeping a handle on user accounts so that users have strong passwords and password expiry set - and no distro in the world will have all that set optimally out of the box, hence the need for some customisation anyway.
I think that's the difference - on UK flights, officially you can turn on MP3 players and computers when the seat belt lights go off after the aircraft has completed the steepest part of its climb. However, I normally start switching stuff on (without undoing my seatbelt) as soon as the attendants get up from their seats to start messing around with trolleys and none of them have ever said anything to me about it.
This may be okay for some small businesses but most large businesses usually have more than one custom client application that runs on Windows - that application would need to be ported to Mac, that costs money and before spending any money any IT or software development manager is going to expect some other advantage from changing to Macs first.
And please don't say change some of them to Macs because no IT department is going to want to change from supporting one desktop OS to two.
The Iron Man movies weren't bad (from someone who's not really a fan of superhero movies except stuff written by Alan Moore) and it was kind of nice to see AC/DC get to do the soundtrack for IM 2 - but I'm in my 40s, not that much younger than Angus and the boys themselves, and really cannot be doing with standing amongst hordes of screaming kids with their parents at the next AC/DC concert just because they saw the movie.
Let's leave the kiddie metal to Metallicock, and leave us old duffers alone to enjoy the mighty AC/DC.
Slashdot Mirror
...I would rather see the money from the tax breaks going to finance local sports and getting kids interested in kicking a ball around so that we have some chance in the next 20 years of putting together a national football team worthy of wearing the "Three Lions".
Oh yes, the "joys" of the good old UK Post Office... ...a place where there are always as many closed counters as there open ones... ...a place where there is never any attempt made to stagger employee lunch breaks to take into account the fact that they are busiest during lunchtime periods... ...a place where the staff will openly moan at you if you drop in a parcel for which you have previously purchased postage online simply to try and help lessen the queues at the counters because it turns out that the actual Post Office gets no revenue from those types of parcel.
These days I go into a Post Office only when there is absolutely no alternative.
Games companies judge the success or failure of a game by how many copies it has sold within the first two weeks of release.
Knowledgeable gamers (and I include myself in that description) are never going to rush to buy a game on the first day, they're going to read reviews first and make an informed decision to purchase at a later stage.
I accept that those buying games within the first two weeks of release are probably not just kids, neither for one moment do I believe it's just kids who play games (I'm 48 years old, have been gaming for 30 years odd and am really struggling not to spend all my spare time playing Fallout 3 currently) - but because I'm a regular on Slashdot, I'm kept informed on things like overly restrictive DRM on games which ultimately means there are some games titles I will never buy, no matter how good they are.
That seems to be something of a large and strange assumption you have made... so you're basically saying that it's impossible to have a wide circle of social friends if you don't like Apple?
I don't know why these types of stories actually get posted on Slashdot because the comments on here are in no way going to be a reflection of what happens in the real world.
If you read Slashdot then the chances are you're part geek & part interested in technology, maybe even techically savvy. That probably makes you above average intelligence (and that's not just trying to pander to everyone on Slashdot BTW) which therefore means that you're probably less susceptible to marketing "tricks of the trade" and advertising.
However, I suspect *most* of the people (including young kids or teenagers) who play games don't read Slashdot - and are probably not too bothered about adverts in games, especially if it's their parents who have forked out the money to pay for them.
Personally, I hope that marketing and advertising people will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, but I do give them some credit in being able to justify their own salaries by generating product sales through their methods of advertising - which are ultimately aimed at the lowest common denominator of games players.
So whatever the view on Slashdot about in-game advertising (and I myself have a black & white view that stuff should be free with adverts or paid for without adverts), it is not going to be an indicator of what will really happen in terms of games sales.
...so all of the Apple fanbois can position themselves in such a way as to reflect the light from the little silver apple directly into the eyes of customers coming into the store.
...because in this 21st century world of ours where just about everything is driven by money, it's great to see a huge, world-wide collaborative project confusing the hell out of accountants and marketing types who simply cannot grasp the simple concept that *sometimes* things happen just because enough people *want* to making it happen, rather than being paid to make it happen.
And what's even better about the whole Open Source movement is that it benefits *everyone*. Nowadays, there's no justification for software piracy just because commercial software is overpriced in some parts of the world because now there are truly free alternatives that can, in most cases, give enough functionality - for example, about 10% of MS Office users use enough of its functionality to not be able to use an alternative package, but for the remaining 90% OpenOffice.org provides more than enough functionality.
Even if you don't use or support Open Source, there's no denying that its presence means that commercial software publishers now have a benchmark that they need to be better than, and that, in turn, can only mean better quality software all-round.
We're currently at a transition point in mobile communications.
Go back a couple of years and most people were accessing the Internet on desktop and portable computers running Windows, Linux and OS X. Now it's all about portable devices and already Apple's portable devices cannot and will not support Flash.
I don't see Microsoft being displaced from home and office desktops any time soon but they are certainly not making any great progress in getting an embedded or slimmed-down Windows onto portable devices - it's more likely the case that the only option they have is to wait for a time when portable devices have enough capacity and power to efficiently run a slightly slimmed-down version of Windows, by which time they will already be competing with Android and the other web OSes that are out there.
I'm mostly Linux user and although I've not seen too many issues with 64-bit Flash so far, Adobe's support of it sucks which ultimately means something else, more than likely HTML 5, will gain more ground on them and start pushing them out.
It really won't surprise me to see, in about 18 months time, Adobe releasing at least some of the source to Flash as they desperately try to hold onto their market share and to try and encourage the Open Source community to continue using Flash.
I'm like you, I've never bought an Apple product & the only thing I own made by Apple is a Touch given to me by my missus when she upgraded to an iPhone.
Over here in the UK, Apple has never been a big player anyway (sure, that may change from this point onwards) and despite 30-odd years of both working with and messing about with computers, they've never made anything at a good enough price that was better than other cheaper options. Recently, they've got too greedy and too closed, just giving me one more reason not to buy their stuff.
But I would side with Google here. I do have concerns about privacy when using their stuff and I hate advertising - but they make a lot of neat stuff, it's made using open standards and as a Windows/Linux user, it's great that I their stuff works on both platforms pretty much equally well.
The actual problem is more intrinsic - personal information is valuable to *any* company, not just Google, and privacy is an issue for most people nowadays because they don't bother to stop and think about the type of information they are potentially revealing on applications like Facebook, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. It is entirely possible to make use of these applications provided that you think about what you are revealing about yourself and not put the responsibility for you personal information into the hands of some big faceless corporation.
It's not *just* about Google, it's about education and making people realise that the safest place to store your information is somewhere where only you can get to it.
...slow day in the world of Apple or what???
iTunes is "kindergarten" software, it's designed to be completely usable by non-technical people and does a less-than-average job. However, as a techie, I find the interface totally unintuitive.
I also hate the fact that it won't *JUST* download music to the device without touching my music collection. I am a bit anal when it comes to having correct tags on my music, I don't buy any downloadable music (and won't ever because again it's just for kids who haven't got the patience to listen to an entire album).
Fortunately, there is a better solution, Media Monkey which as of recent versions appears to support the iPod Touch very well, as well as other players, phones, etc. It also easily handles my collection of over 1200 ripped CDs and can convert to lower bitrates as you sync - plus it appears to work really well under WINE in Linux.
I've already turned off the intrusive iTunes startup services in Windows, I'll just leave it on the PC for any updates or app store purchases.
Three words:
"Betamax Versus VHS"
Just because everyone agrees HTML5 is a better and more open technology than Flash does not mean the former will win over the latter.
Jobs has his own reasons for trying to destroy Adobe and I can imagine him in his office now repeating the words "Adobe is a cancer" to himself, over and over again, as Ballmer did with Linux.
The reason Apple is doing iAds is to improve the experience of in-app ads.
Please, please, please, stop with the marketeer-speak!
Personally, I don't want *ANY* advertising so I don't give a toss what someone else does to "improve the experience" because to me, it's *STILL* advertising.
The *ONLY* criteria I have is whether or not an advertising-free paid-for service is worth the money or not - if it is, I'll buy it and enjoy an "advert-free experience", otherwise I will endure the advertising for the sake of getting it free.
Bearing in mind that most of what Apple sells is bought by kids and teenagers who never venture onto Slashdot, leaving a minority of fanbois who do, why-oh-why do we have to keep putting up with these "zero content" articles every day just so we can be constantly reminded that Apple exist in the first place?
But I'll bite anyway...
1. Comparisons to TV purchases in 1959 are meaningless figures unless you take into account the relative populations of the USA then and now. Also, you probably should look at the relative costs of TVs then and Apple devices now, based on the fact that people, in general, have a lot more disposable income now than they did then.
2. I have a MythTV box at home (here in the UK) that has both satellite and terrestrial capture cards in it, I can receive and record TV from both sources, as well as from the Internet, and I understand you can do pretty much the same thing with PVR software on Windows. In either case, these exist already and give you far more freedom with what you view than just a single provider.
3. Why would any company going into TV broadcasting over the Internet restrict viewing of it to just a single subset of devices? Why would they not create client software for Windows, and possibly Linux, if they could charge each user for the service? Surely it would be commercial suicide not to do it that way? And if broadcasting is available to multiple clients, why is the number of Apple unit sales important, since it would still be a small fraction of the number of users viewing through Windows?
4. This service makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless you have the facility to watch live-streamed video wherever and whenever you want - otherwise people will just keep doing what they do at the moment which is download stuff and transfer it to a portable device where they can watch it at their leisure (and you don't need anything by Apple to do that). You can't stream live video when you're on an aircraft, if you're traveling anywhere then it depends on having good wi-fi coverage wherever you go (and the ability to hop seamlessly between wi-fi networks as you move) plus the cellular network, whilst having better coverage than wi-fi, is not geared up to stream video and gets very expensive very quickly when you do it.
5. What's the *ACTUAL* news here? So a new TV service provider is going to stream video over the Internet - big deal, wake me up when it's something that hasn't been done before...
Bletchley Park's archive is to be digitised and put online. It seems HP made an offer to help out with scanners and expertise ...which will result in yet more "authentic" WW2 movies starring Matthew McConaughy as the Yanks credit themselves with creating the technology that our glorious "British Boffins at Bletchley" created.
Did they ever make that movie about The Battle Of Britain where the top Allied fighter ace was going to be played by an American, despite the fact they wouldn't be entering the war for another year or so?
I disagree. Zappa was fastidious about his music - wierd and wonderful time changes, surrounding himself with the highest quality musicians, etc.
A Linux user is invariably fastidious about getting the best speed from a computer, optimising compiler flags, carefully choosing all the right desktop components, etc.
Not that I care either way (I'm mostly Linux user without being a zealot, I like Zappa's humour in his music without caring too much about his self-indulgent guitar solos) but Britney Spears is more closer to Apple - nice to look at, easy on the ears and eyes, but definitely corporate-controlled and no real substance.
For the same reason you cannot see they're evil due to being a fanboi.
Amiga OS was good! At least for its time...
Unfortunately, the succession of companies that bought the Amiga name have never managed to get their act together and do anything more interesting with it - nowadays, AmigaOS seems to be some kind of embedded environment that runs on Windows, I know nothing more than that because I got bored with all the messing around with it to be honest.
I said "old", not "mature" - and Metallicock are "Mastered As Puppets" by their corporate lords... plus all their "music" sounds like each band member is racing to finish each song first.
There, out of my system now, switching back to "mature" mode...
Actually, that's half rubbish.
Windows is relatively secure with the correct corporate policies in place and proxies/firewalls to block access to sites where malware can be easily downloaded from - problems occur if malware gets brought in behind the firewall because of users taking corporate laptops onto their home network or plugging in their own infected USB hard disks and memory sticks.
But Linux security has *nothing* to do with the distribution you are using for precisely the same reason more corporations use their own Windows builds for PC rollouts rather than a standard installation CD.
Linux insecurity is not about viruses and malware, it's about brute force and buffer overflow attacks to get access onto a system. The way to counter those is to turn off unnecessary network daemons, updating them as soon as a known vulnerability is reported, and keeping a handle on user accounts so that users have strong passwords and password expiry set - and no distro in the world will have all that set optimally out of the box, hence the need for some customisation anyway.
I think that's the difference - on UK flights, officially you can turn on MP3 players and computers when the seat belt lights go off after the aircraft has completed the steepest part of its climb. However, I normally start switching stuff on (without undoing my seatbelt) as soon as the attendants get up from their seats to start messing around with trolleys and none of them have ever said anything to me about it.
This may be okay for some small businesses but most large businesses usually have more than one custom client application that runs on Windows - that application would need to be ported to Mac, that costs money and before spending any money any IT or software development manager is going to expect some other advantage from changing to Macs first.
And please don't say change some of them to Macs because no IT department is going to want to change from supporting one desktop OS to two.
Please keep your panties on and wind you neck in!
The OP implied you needed Windows for Picasa, I was just showing that not to be the case, that's all.
Stop with the Iron Man associations already!!!
The Iron Man movies weren't bad (from someone who's not really a fan of superhero movies except stuff written by Alan Moore) and it was kind of nice to see AC/DC get to do the soundtrack for IM 2 - but I'm in my 40s, not that much younger than Angus and the boys themselves, and really cannot be doing with standing amongst hordes of screaming kids with their parents at the next AC/DC concert just because they saw the movie.
Let's leave the kiddie metal to Metallicock, and leave us old duffers alone to enjoy the mighty AC/DC.
It will be a problem when the kids start screaming because they cannot play the same Flash games on it that they can on their home PC!