As a British citizen, I feel it appropriate to interject at this point with some important news.
It has come to my attention that all of your members were subject to a Ministry of Defence secret experiment during the 1950s that involved invasive surgery to their brains to enhance their mental capabilities. Your members will not be aware of the surgery until now due to the fact that these events took place at Porton Down before any of them had reached 6 months of age.
The experiment planned for the injection of chimp foetus cells into their brains in order to enhance brain growth during the early years of life, thus expanding mental capacity at an accelerated rate during childhood.
Unfortunately, on that particular day, there was a goddawful cock-up at the Ministry due to the incorrect P144T form being issued instead of the Q99S form. This resulted in all of you membership having their entire brains removed and replaced by lime flavoured jelly.
So please accept our deepest apologies as well as our notification that you are all total fuckwits.
My friend, just because you don't agree with my comments, that doesn't make me a troll. If you're not sure, please go read the Slashdot FAQ.
1) I can use Microsoft Office (and do), Adobe et. al. as well as any number of Opensourced tools. That's why I ditched linux on the desktop back in 2002 for OSX. Last time I checked there wasn't any propitary file formats. I could watch videos with Quicktime or VLC or Mplayer or anything else I can install via MacPorts.
Just because you can play a format on the MAC does not mean it is not proprietary. Off the top of my head, I can think of three Apple proprietary formats - Quicktime, MP4 (AAC) and the DRM used for iTunes.
2) If you go back in time to when iTunes started, Apple pretty much had to use DRM in order to gain access to the music catalogs. But guess what, I can still burn and rip the songs back to MP3 and play the songs on upto 5 different computers/devices. Frankly they were the ones that were able to strike a balance between protecting digital rights, which the record companies wanted, and allowing fair use. On another note, I installed the codecs and have no problems listening to FLAC or Ogg encoded files.
Okay, so in order to gain access to music catalogs & to make money, Apple sold their soul to the devil - just like Microsoft did. Good comparison.
You can still burn and rip songs back? Nice & all in two processes. But I can buy an open format CD and just rip it to MP3 or Ogg - one process, cheaper & I can play them on an many devices as I like. (Oh, and please don't get me started on music downloads, legal or illegal. They're killing music, I'm sticking to CDs and that's a whole other debate.)
As for DRM, so you pay for your music & as an honest music buyer (as I am) you're just going to roll over like a little puppy & play dead are you? "I accept DRM because Apple say it's cool so it must be okay." Please don't even go there - DRM extracts more money from honest people like you and me, that's why it's evil.
4) Maybe to you, but my time is worth about $60 an hour. With my Mac's, I'm not wasting time tracking down some linux tweak or running virus scans. If a client sends me a document in.docx, I open it with Office 2008. The time I save easily makes up for the initial cost difference. Where I'm working now were developing an application for Linux. All I will say is that the product versions are being shipped on Macs instead of Linux. When they did the pilot testing, they tried both Macs and Linux. Our target market was smaller businesses. Put everything on the Mac and they were far less weary of it than bringing in a Single Board Computer or PC loaded with Linux.
I'm a senior security consultant for a telecoms company - I earn a good salary, let's not talk hourly rates. It's irrelevant & I'll just show you up.
I can't argue with anything else in the paragraph. It's a statement of irrelevant fact that has no bearing on the point I've made. If you want, I'll tell you that in my company where telecoms systems are moving from proprietary platforms to servers, Linux successfully provides the underlying server OS, Windows does the client integration & desktop stuff, OS X doesn't even figure except for a few bits of Softphone client software on our web site.
But again, that's irrelevant because what I was talking about were comparisons between Microsoft and Apple, not their market penetration.
Dude, you're still stuck on this brand name thing.
Have a bit more intelligence than starting your reply with the word "Dude" because you're already fitting into the stereotype of Apple user that I have defined. We've moved on 30 years beyond surfboards & The Beach Boys - & at least 10 beyond Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle speak...
How about Porsche, BMW, SUN SPARC, IBM pSeries/zSeries,
I have no idea, you tell me. I doubt you'd get Porsche or BMW drivers to remove the brand logo from their cars, if that's what you mean. Therefore the fact that the logo is displayed publicly has some significance (as it does with Apple products). Therefore those items are part fashion accessory as an outward display of allegiance to a particular "club" - a club made elitist by virtue of the minority of people being in it.
As for Sun SPARCS? Who knows? I've certainly never seen anyone posing in a coffee shop with a SPARC on his lap.
Moreover, there is nothing wrong with anyone else buying actual fashion accessories, just because I choose not to buy them.
I absolutely 100% agree with you. Like you, I enjoy capitalism and freedom of choice & being a consumer. But "brand loyalty" means "having to display a logo" which in turn means "I need to feel I belong to an elitist club because I am slightly insecure."
I succumbed to peer pressure, and bought a damned $50 pair of jeans one day.
Well more fool you then. You should buy stuff because it's worth the money, not because insecure people pressurize you into doing so.
My stuff started lasting longer, and didn't look like shit.
Good on you. And maybe $50 for a pair of jeans is value for money in your eyes, that's great. If you're wearing them most of the time and they wash well and you have them for a year or two, then I can't argue that.
But if I, for example, only wear jeans once a week to do the gardening in, then I might feel $50 is too high a price.
I don't want to judge every single thing I buy on price alone anymore.
And with all respect, if you believe I'm doing that they you've totally missed my original point. I'm not talking about lowest price, I am talking about value for money.
I think anyone can at least go buy some top shelf toilet paper and enjoy the luxury of not sandpapering your ass off.
Yes, and you'll be pleased to know that I do the same thing myself. But at the same time, if it suddenly becomes fashionable to buy green toilet paper, I shall still go on buying an appropriately soft toilet paper at the best price without giving a damn as to what colour it is.
Maybe you don't care how nice something looks. Maybe you don't care to know all the technical details, or engineering behind what you buy. Some people do care, and they pay the premium. So what?
Yes, I care how something pleases my eye but probably less so than it's technical specification. But what I don't give a damn about is buying something purely because I want to show it off to everyone else. I have enough faith in my own decision making process to not need reassurance or bolstering from others.
Those are extreme examples... Apple is clearly much more accessible to a wider audience.
And your point is what?
As I said previously, a big thing about owning an Apple is the fact that you become a member of an elitist club. That is part of the reason why some of the money you pay goes into the design of the item and the clearly viewable Apple logo on it.
Yes, I'm sure Apple has done a much better job of component quality control than your average Chinese PC component builder - but if I asked you to permanently remove or hide the Apple logo on your device, would you do so? No, of course not. Therefore the logo is important to you, not *just* the technical specification.
Be careful here. Do brand name clothes exist because Walmart sells $10 jeans?
I'm in the UK so I'll take "Walmart" to mean "general superma
By travelling to an alien star system at faster than the speed of light, we would be going back in time.
Thus, when the friendly aliens arrived in orbit round the Earth with their big flying saucer full of nice, free technology to give to their new human friends, they would actually be doing so before we'd sent the ship out to ask them for it.
And you know what we *humans* are like! There'd be one smartass somewhere who'd wonder what the hell that flying saucer was doing in Earth orbit and pronptly nuke the shit out of it.
At my age, mine's suffering from increased attenuation due to conductor degradation, high signal to noise ratio & the image goes all fuzzy when I wiggle it.
If you were to make a measurement on units sold, the number of Dells sold in the world would far exceed the number of Macs sold, bearing in mind Dell produces server-quality PCs as well as desktops & notebooks.
Plus the reality of the situation is that the average price of a Dell computer is a lot less than the average price of a Mac and I also suspect that due to the nature of the competition in the PC marketplace, there is nowhere near the same profit margin on a Dell PC than there is on a Mac.
Also bear in mind that Apple also sells phones and music players whereas Dell just sells computers - so it's not really comparing "like-for-like".
Though I do accept that Michael Dell's Apple comment will go down in history alongside Bill Gates' "640K is enough for anyone" comment.
Besides which, you like Oolite so I quite like you.
I drank the Kool-Aid and shaved my head because MAC was doing what the Linux people were hoping that Linux would do: provide an alternative to Windows that actually worked.
What UTTER UTTER drivel!
Tell me something - why would a "Linux" person be using Linux on the basis that it did not do at least some of the things he/she needed it to do? This may shock you to know but an operating system is a *tool* meaning that helps you get stuff done as easily possible.
I am a Linux person and a Windows person. Yes, I'd dearly love for one or the other to be capable of doing everything I want to do with a computer but I'm happy with second best - namely both of them doing all that I need to do without my once ever having to consider the merest notion of buying anything by Apple. And all that after at least a quarter of a century working and playing with computers.
Sorry, my friend, but you even write like what the rest of here believes a stereotypical Apple-worshipping fanboi to be - to top it all off for us, how about ending your posts with "Welllll, the sixties were such a blurrrrr, man!"
Sorry, remind me. When was the last time people queued up outside a Dell stockist for 24 hours in anticipation of getting hold of getting the very latest Dell laptop?
You fail to consider the fact that because most of we "great unwashed" consider a computer as a tool to do a certain job without any great regard for brand loyalty, this creates the perfect environment for Mr Jobs and Apple to appeal to a certain small proportion of the populace who need computers that are also fashion accessories and allow them to become part of an elitist little club.
Look in *ANY* marketplace and you will see precisely the same thing - Rolls Royce amongst car manufacturers, Gucci amongst shoe manufacturers, etc. etc. In *ALL* cases, those items are about showing off the brand and the logo first, price is secondary and they exist because most people just buy the common, cheaper stuff.
Apple's very existence *DEPENDS* on the fact that HP, Dell and Lenovo are selling the computers that MOST people buy...
Neither Microsoft nor Apple do this. You are perfectly free to use open source applications and open file formats on their operating systems.
So why aren't the specifications to the Office document formats and iTunes published openly then?
Both Microsoft and Apple only do this to keep in with the content providers.
Yes, so their products can be counted on as DRM delivery platforms for those providers.
Nobody does that from the perspective of the person who can't get his work done because of the bug. It's a fact of life in any software that is developed according to a proper methodology.
What about the unfixed holes in Safari & DNS that, as you rightly say, don't stop me doing my work but may allow that work to be tampered with or stolen by persons unknown?
What do you mean by "overpriced"? The fact that neither Apple nor Microsoft seem to have any problems finding buyers for their products tells us that they are not overpriced.
Just how many copies of Vista does Microsoft shift as shrinkwrapped boxes from the shelves of computer stores? How many people have actually paid full price for an iPhone rather than getting it discounted within a mobile contract? Why are Nokia and Motorola still healthily selling millions of phones if the iPhone is that great a seller?
Apple products are marketed as "exclusive" to appeal to a bunch of people who need to feel part of an exclusive club - that means they are priced higher to sell less and meet with what Apple can manufacture in time. And no, please don't quote the "enforced scarcities" of iPods that happened a few years ago - that was just about clever marketing.
I have no idea why you should care. The fact is that you obviously do care because you have bothered to read this thread and bothered to make a post on it.
I am making an observation as to how fickle a lot of people are. Why should anyone give a toss what size a company is? The majority of consumers concern themselves with meaningless twaddle - all that matters is that whatever you bought was good value for money or not, nothing more.
The primary function of DRM is not to stop piracy, it's to extort more money out of the people who buy the stuff legally in order to counterbalance perceived money loss through piracy and make the fat shareholders even fatter. That's why pirates are as bad as the corporations because they create the justifications for DRM usage.
Let's face it, if there were no pirates, the only case for DRM from the corporations would be "we are putting in place new copy protection mechanisms so that rather than owning the stuff we've sold you, we're now going to rent it to you."
It's exactly the same as for banks and credit card companies. They're not interested in stopping fraud because to do so would take a huge amount of money putting the appropriate systems in place - rather they're just interested in making sure that fraud doesn't exceed the level they predicted it would be as, in that instance, they've covered the fraud loss by what they've put in place as additional charges to the legal customers.
To corporations, all that matters is that everything adds up on the end of financial year balance sheet, that's all.
Much as I love the Valve games, to me Steam is the "best of a bad bunch" and given the choice of having Steam installed *OR* buying the game legally and using a CD/DVD crack so I don't have to put the disk in the drive every time, I would always choose the latter.
I do quite a bit of LAN party gaming with friends & I don't think it's an unreasonable request to expect a games publisher to let me run a LAN party with one legal copy of a game without hindering me. Okay, limit me to 8 players per copy & only let the game owner connect to online game servers with a single key, I can live with that.
When I tried to do LAN gaming with Steam games, I did eventually get it to work of a fashion but I found part of the answer of how to do it on the general Internet and the other part hidden deep within the bowels of Steam's own FAQ. Sure, they want everyone to buy a copy of every game but they're also not doing that good a job supporting existing users if that type of information is obfuscated.
Even then, I've found LAN gaming with Steam (by putting it in Offline mode) to be flaky at best - if you get it to work then the LAN gameplay is fine from then on but getting that initial connectivity between clients & server can be a headache.
So no, Steam isn't as bad as many people make it out to be but I certainly wouldn't sing its praises from the rooftops. I give great kudos to Stardock and Galactic Civilizations 2 - install the game, register it online once then put the DVD back in it's box to gather dust.
These days, I view people who copy games (or other media) as being as evil as the games/media companies they're ripping off as well as being weak-minded.
I'm in my 40s and I've done more than my share of copying stuff, right from the days of the ZX Spectrum, through the Commodore to the PC. Maybe it's an age thing but about 6 or 7 years ago, I came to the realization that I had horded a mass of copied games and music that, ultimately, I spent more time cataloguing, archiving and burning disks for friends & family (I never ever sold any of the copied stuff that I amassed) than I did actually playing or listening to the stuff myself. I also understood that because I could download the stuff so easily, it actually had little or no value to me & couldn't therefore see any further justification in downloading any more of it. So I threw away just about all of the CDRs I'd burnt and erased my hard drives.
At that point, I started listening to my legal music collection & playing some of the legal games I'd purchased in the past. There was a lot of stuff I no longer liked so, over a period of time, sold it off on eBay and used the proceeds to buy stuff I did want. I actually got a real buzz from finding the best & cheapest prices for games & CDs, read all the reviews that I could & for music, I'd still download an album from Usenet or BitTorrent just to play it through before deciding to buy it or not. In the end, and to this day still, I have a really treasured music & PC games collection, all of it legal.
The point I'm making is that I am by no means a saint but I have now got into this mindset where I don't consider anything as something I *must* have, or indeed, *must have there and then*. I'm very cynical of advertising, I try my best to ignore it, & even though I'm at an age and salary where I don't have any great financial worries, I set a monthly hard budget as to what I will allow myself to spend on entertainment for myself - consequently, I appreciate more the money I allow myself, I eke it out as much as I can & I just refuse to buy stuff unless I'm pretty sure that, to me, it's worth the price being asked for it.
For example, I'm a big fan of Unreal Tournament & was looking forward to playing UT 3 when it came out. But I simply will *not* pay anywhere near the standard £34.99 price for a PC game here in the UK. So I just waited, picked it up for £15 last week and I think for that price it's great value for money.
Think about it for a moment. When people queue up for 24 hours outside a store to buy the latest Harry Potter book or the latest iPhone, what message does this send to the corporations that produce all of that stuff? As far as I can work out, it sends only one - there are a whole heap of weak-minded people out there with a great big wedge of money that, by the power of marketing alone, can be manipulated into believing that they need something so bad, they'll stand in a line waiting for it and happily hand over their money as soon as they get to the front of the queue.
People need to calm down with the "I want it now" mentality. It's great living in a part of the world where we have lots of money to spend but if we part with the stuff so easily, why do all these corporations need to bother with making good quality stuff any more? Just churn out any old stuff and force people to want it through marketing - and that explains why today, in music, computer games & just about everywhere else, there is simply *SO MUCH CRAP* about.
And when there's so much crap about at so high prices, some people find their own justifications to pirate it rather than buying it, this gives the corporations the excuse they need to use copy protection and DRM as a basis for extorting more money out of the people who do buy the stuff, pisses the pirates off even more, etc. etc. *WHERE DOES IT END?*
People *NEED* to start developing some self-control. If something isn't worth the money, don't buy it and don't copy it. Then the corporations have no justifications for DRM, the only thing they can do is reduce prices, churn out better stuff or go out of business - it's that simple.
Microsoft is currently the biggest IT company there is & most people believe that they got their unfairly for the following reasons:
1. They lock in the customer to proprietary applications and file formats.
2. They are a big supporter of DRM.
3. They do not fix bugs in their software quickly enough.
4. Their products are overpriced.
But Apple is doing all of the above also. So why are they any different?
And, to be honest, why should I care how big a company is when I've never for one moment given even the slightest consideration to buying one of their products?
Credit where credit is due - I use Google stuff daily & Microsoft were big and bad enough to force me into a situation where I have to use some of their products...
Re:Nice review, but I don't understand something.
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Bash Cookbook
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· Score: 1
That's as maybe, but just because Dick Van Dyke said "Gor blimee Mary Poppins" whilst dancing round a chimney brush, that didn't make him British like me either...
In all seriousness, the Germans I occasionally work with always seem very serious but are amongst the first to start laughing whenever someone else cracks a good joke.
It's just stereotyping humour - we British think you Germans have no sense of humour while you Germans think we eat nothing but "Fish and Chips"...
Mind you, you make the finest sausages in the world but we make the best beer.
Re:Nice review, but I don't understand something.
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Bash Cookbook
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· Score: 3, Informative
It's a play on words. In the US, if you declare bankruptcy, you "file a Chapter 11".
It's just that as a British citizen who spent a week there some 10 years ago, it struck me that the inside of a New Jersey jail could only be nicer than the rest of New Jersey outside of it.
Ahem... 46 years and counting, just manually compiled and dropped in a new 2.6.26 kernel on my Linux server, now off to smash teenager butt on "World Of Padman".
Slashdot Mirror
As a British citizen, I feel it appropriate to interject at this point with some important news.
It has come to my attention that all of your members were subject to a Ministry of Defence secret experiment during the 1950s that involved invasive surgery to their brains to enhance their mental capabilities. Your members will not be aware of the surgery until now due to the fact that these events took place at Porton Down before any of them had reached 6 months of age.
The experiment planned for the injection of chimp foetus cells into their brains in order to enhance brain growth during the early years of life, thus expanding mental capacity at an accelerated rate during childhood.
Unfortunately, on that particular day, there was a goddawful cock-up at the Ministry due to the incorrect P144T form being issued instead of the Q99S form. This resulted in all of you membership having their entire brains removed and replaced by lime flavoured jelly.
So please accept our deepest apologies as well as our notification that you are all total fuckwits.
Tally Ho!
Signed
The Ministry
Macs don't even appear on my radar because for the apps and games I need to run, what Linux can't handle, Windows does.
We're going round in circles, we have different needs, neither is wrong or right.
But my point serves to show that for as many people singing Apple's praises, there are equally as many who have no need for their stuff.
I'll feed the troll:
My friend, just because you don't agree with my comments, that doesn't make me a troll. If you're not sure, please go read the Slashdot FAQ.
1) I can use Microsoft Office (and do), Adobe et. al. as well as any number of Opensourced tools. That's why I ditched linux on the desktop back in 2002 for OSX. Last time I checked there wasn't any propitary file formats. I could watch videos with Quicktime or VLC or Mplayer or anything else I can install via MacPorts.
Just because you can play a format on the MAC does not mean it is not proprietary. Off the top of my head, I can think of three Apple proprietary formats - Quicktime, MP4 (AAC) and the DRM used for iTunes.
2) If you go back in time to when iTunes started, Apple pretty much had to use DRM in order to gain access to the music catalogs. But guess what, I can still burn and rip the songs back to MP3 and play the songs on upto 5 different computers/devices. Frankly they were the ones that were able to strike a balance between protecting digital rights, which the record companies wanted, and allowing fair use. On another note, I installed the codecs and have no problems listening to FLAC or Ogg encoded files.
Okay, so in order to gain access to music catalogs & to make money, Apple sold their soul to the devil - just like Microsoft did. Good comparison.
You can still burn and rip songs back? Nice & all in two processes. But I can buy an open format CD and just rip it to MP3 or Ogg - one process, cheaper & I can play them on an many devices as I like. (Oh, and please don't get me started on music downloads, legal or illegal. They're killing music, I'm sticking to CDs and that's a whole other debate.)
As for DRM, so you pay for your music & as an honest music buyer (as I am) you're just going to roll over like a little puppy & play dead are you? "I accept DRM because Apple say it's cool so it must be okay." Please don't even go there - DRM extracts more money from honest people like you and me, that's why it's evil.
4) Maybe to you, but my time is worth about $60 an hour. With my Mac's, I'm not wasting time tracking down some linux tweak or running virus scans. If a client sends me a document in .docx, I open it with Office 2008. The time I save easily makes up for the initial cost difference. Where I'm working now were developing an application for Linux. All I will say is that the product versions are being shipped on Macs instead of Linux. When they did the pilot testing, they tried both Macs and Linux. Our target market was smaller businesses. Put everything on the Mac and they were far less weary of it than bringing in a Single Board Computer or PC loaded with Linux.
I'm a senior security consultant for a telecoms company - I earn a good salary, let's not talk hourly rates. It's irrelevant & I'll just show you up.
I can't argue with anything else in the paragraph. It's a statement of irrelevant fact that has no bearing on the point I've made. If you want, I'll tell you that in my company where telecoms systems are moving from proprietary platforms to servers, Linux successfully provides the underlying server OS, Windows does the client integration & desktop stuff, OS X doesn't even figure except for a few bits of Softphone client software on our web site.
But again, that's irrelevant because what I was talking about were comparisons between Microsoft and Apple, not their market penetration.
Dude, you're still stuck on this brand name thing.
Have a bit more intelligence than starting your reply with the word "Dude" because you're already fitting into the stereotype of Apple user that I have defined. We've moved on 30 years beyond surfboards & The Beach Boys - & at least 10 beyond Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle speak...
How about Porsche, BMW, SUN SPARC, IBM pSeries/zSeries,
I have no idea, you tell me. I doubt you'd get Porsche or BMW drivers to remove the brand logo from their cars, if that's what you mean. Therefore the fact that the logo is displayed publicly has some significance (as it does with Apple products). Therefore those items are part fashion accessory as an outward display of allegiance to a particular "club" - a club made elitist by virtue of the minority of people being in it.
As for Sun SPARCS? Who knows? I've certainly never seen anyone posing in a coffee shop with a SPARC on his lap.
Moreover, there is nothing wrong with anyone else buying actual fashion accessories, just because I choose not to buy them.
I absolutely 100% agree with you. Like you, I enjoy capitalism and freedom of choice & being a consumer. But "brand loyalty" means "having to display a logo" which in turn means "I need to feel I belong to an elitist club because I am slightly insecure."
I succumbed to peer pressure, and bought a damned $50 pair of jeans one day.
Well more fool you then. You should buy stuff because it's worth the money, not because insecure people pressurize you into doing so.
My stuff started lasting longer, and didn't look like shit.
Good on you. And maybe $50 for a pair of jeans is value for money in your eyes, that's great. If you're wearing them most of the time and they wash well and you have them for a year or two, then I can't argue that.
But if I, for example, only wear jeans once a week to do the gardening in, then I might feel $50 is too high a price.
I don't want to judge every single thing I buy on price alone anymore.
And with all respect, if you believe I'm doing that they you've totally missed my original point. I'm not talking about lowest price, I am talking about value for money.
I think anyone can at least go buy some top shelf toilet paper and enjoy the luxury of not sandpapering your ass off.
Yes, and you'll be pleased to know that I do the same thing myself. But at the same time, if it suddenly becomes fashionable to buy green toilet paper, I shall still go on buying an appropriately soft toilet paper at the best price without giving a damn as to what colour it is.
Maybe you don't care how nice something looks. Maybe you don't care to know all the technical details, or engineering behind what you buy. Some people do care, and they pay the premium. So what?
Yes, I care how something pleases my eye but probably less so than it's technical specification. But what I don't give a damn about is buying something purely because I want to show it off to everyone else. I have enough faith in my own decision making process to not need reassurance or bolstering from others.
Those are extreme examples... Apple is clearly much more accessible to a wider audience.
And your point is what?
As I said previously, a big thing about owning an Apple is the fact that you become a member of an elitist club. That is part of the reason why some of the money you pay goes into the design of the item and the clearly viewable Apple logo on it.
Yes, I'm sure Apple has done a much better job of component quality control than your average Chinese PC component builder - but if I asked you to permanently remove or hide the Apple logo on your device, would you do so? No, of course not. Therefore the logo is important to you, not *just* the technical specification.
Be careful here. Do brand name clothes exist because Walmart sells $10 jeans?
I'm in the UK so I'll take "Walmart" to mean "general superma
Hub? Mine's that old, it's still got a 9-pin serial D connector!
It would create a paradox.
By travelling to an alien star system at faster than the speed of light, we would be going back in time.
Thus, when the friendly aliens arrived in orbit round the Earth with their big flying saucer full of nice, free technology to give to their new human friends, they would actually be doing so before we'd sent the ship out to ask them for it.
And you know what we *humans* are like! There'd be one smartass somewhere who'd wonder what the hell that flying saucer was doing in Earth orbit and pronptly nuke the shit out of it.
At my age, mine's suffering from increased attenuation due to conductor degradation, high signal to noise ratio & the image goes all fuzzy when I wiggle it.
If you were to make a measurement on units sold, the number of Dells sold in the world would far exceed the number of Macs sold, bearing in mind Dell produces server-quality PCs as well as desktops & notebooks.
Plus the reality of the situation is that the average price of a Dell computer is a lot less than the average price of a Mac and I also suspect that due to the nature of the competition in the PC marketplace, there is nowhere near the same profit margin on a Dell PC than there is on a Mac.
Also bear in mind that Apple also sells phones and music players whereas Dell just sells computers - so it's not really comparing "like-for-like".
Though I do accept that Michael Dell's Apple comment will go down in history alongside Bill Gates' "640K is enough for anyone" comment.
Besides which, you like Oolite so I quite like you.
Does USB 3.0 assist in the more rapid delivery of porn to my PC?
If the answer is "Yes", then please continue with your announcement.
I drank the Kool-Aid and shaved my head because MAC was doing what the Linux people were hoping that Linux would do: provide an alternative to Windows that actually worked.
What UTTER UTTER drivel!
Tell me something - why would a "Linux" person be using Linux on the basis that it did not do at least some of the things he/she needed it to do? This may shock you to know but an operating system is a *tool* meaning that helps you get stuff done as easily possible.
I am a Linux person and a Windows person. Yes, I'd dearly love for one or the other to be capable of doing everything I want to do with a computer but I'm happy with second best - namely both of them doing all that I need to do without my once ever having to consider the merest notion of buying anything by Apple. And all that after at least a quarter of a century working and playing with computers.
Sorry, my friend, but you even write like what the rest of here believes a stereotypical Apple-worshipping fanboi to be - to top it all off for us, how about ending your posts with "Welllll, the sixties were such a blurrrrr, man!"
Sorry, remind me. When was the last time people queued up outside a Dell stockist for 24 hours in anticipation of getting hold of getting the very latest Dell laptop?
You fail to consider the fact that because most of we "great unwashed" consider a computer as a tool to do a certain job without any great regard for brand loyalty, this creates the perfect environment for Mr Jobs and Apple to appeal to a certain small proportion of the populace who need computers that are also fashion accessories and allow them to become part of an elitist little club.
Look in *ANY* marketplace and you will see precisely the same thing - Rolls Royce amongst car manufacturers, Gucci amongst shoe manufacturers, etc. etc. In *ALL* cases, those items are about showing off the brand and the logo first, price is secondary and they exist because most people just buy the common, cheaper stuff.
Apple's very existence *DEPENDS* on the fact that HP, Dell and Lenovo are selling the computers that MOST people buy...
Neither Microsoft nor Apple do this. You are perfectly free to use open source applications and open file formats on their operating systems.
So why aren't the specifications to the Office document formats and iTunes published openly then?
Both Microsoft and Apple only do this to keep in with the content providers.
Yes, so their products can be counted on as DRM delivery platforms for those providers.
Nobody does that from the perspective of the person who can't get his work done because of the bug. It's a fact of life in any software that is developed according to a proper methodology.
What about the unfixed holes in Safari & DNS that, as you rightly say, don't stop me doing my work but may allow that work to be tampered with or stolen by persons unknown?
What do you mean by "overpriced"? The fact that neither Apple nor Microsoft seem to have any problems finding buyers for their products tells us that they are not overpriced.
Just how many copies of Vista does Microsoft shift as shrinkwrapped boxes from the shelves of computer stores? How many people have actually paid full price for an iPhone rather than getting it discounted within a mobile contract? Why are Nokia and Motorola still healthily selling millions of phones if the iPhone is that great a seller?
Apple products are marketed as "exclusive" to appeal to a bunch of people who need to feel part of an exclusive club - that means they are priced higher to sell less and meet with what Apple can manufacture in time. And no, please don't quote the "enforced scarcities" of iPods that happened a few years ago - that was just about clever marketing.
I have no idea why you should care. The fact is that you obviously do care because you have bothered to read this thread and bothered to make a post on it.
I am making an observation as to how fickle a lot of people are. Why should anyone give a toss what size a company is? The majority of consumers concern themselves with meaningless twaddle - all that matters is that whatever you bought was good value for money or not, nothing more.
I disagree.
The primary function of DRM is not to stop piracy, it's to extort more money out of the people who buy the stuff legally in order to counterbalance perceived money loss through piracy and make the fat shareholders even fatter. That's why pirates are as bad as the corporations because they create the justifications for DRM usage.
Let's face it, if there were no pirates, the only case for DRM from the corporations would be "we are putting in place new copy protection mechanisms so that rather than owning the stuff we've sold you, we're now going to rent it to you."
It's exactly the same as for banks and credit card companies. They're not interested in stopping fraud because to do so would take a huge amount of money putting the appropriate systems in place - rather they're just interested in making sure that fraud doesn't exceed the level they predicted it would be as, in that instance, they've covered the fraud loss by what they've put in place as additional charges to the legal customers.
To corporations, all that matters is that everything adds up on the end of financial year balance sheet, that's all.
Much as I love the Valve games, to me Steam is the "best of a bad bunch" and given the choice of having Steam installed *OR* buying the game legally and using a CD/DVD crack so I don't have to put the disk in the drive every time, I would always choose the latter.
I do quite a bit of LAN party gaming with friends & I don't think it's an unreasonable request to expect a games publisher to let me run a LAN party with one legal copy of a game without hindering me. Okay, limit me to 8 players per copy & only let the game owner connect to online game servers with a single key, I can live with that.
When I tried to do LAN gaming with Steam games, I did eventually get it to work of a fashion but I found part of the answer of how to do it on the general Internet and the other part hidden deep within the bowels of Steam's own FAQ. Sure, they want everyone to buy a copy of every game but they're also not doing that good a job supporting existing users if that type of information is obfuscated.
Even then, I've found LAN gaming with Steam (by putting it in Offline mode) to be flaky at best - if you get it to work then the LAN gameplay is fine from then on but getting that initial connectivity between clients & server can be a headache.
So no, Steam isn't as bad as many people make it out to be but I certainly wouldn't sing its praises from the rooftops. I give great kudos to Stardock and Galactic Civilizations 2 - install the game, register it online once then put the DVD back in it's box to gather dust.
These days, I view people who copy games (or other media) as being as evil as the games/media companies they're ripping off as well as being weak-minded.
I'm in my 40s and I've done more than my share of copying stuff, right from the days of the ZX Spectrum, through the Commodore to the PC. Maybe it's an age thing but about 6 or 7 years ago, I came to the realization that I had horded a mass of copied games and music that, ultimately, I spent more time cataloguing, archiving and burning disks for friends & family (I never ever sold any of the copied stuff that I amassed) than I did actually playing or listening to the stuff myself. I also understood that because I could download the stuff so easily, it actually had little or no value to me & couldn't therefore see any further justification in downloading any more of it. So I threw away just about all of the CDRs I'd burnt and erased my hard drives.
At that point, I started listening to my legal music collection & playing some of the legal games I'd purchased in the past. There was a lot of stuff I no longer liked so, over a period of time, sold it off on eBay and used the proceeds to buy stuff I did want. I actually got a real buzz from finding the best & cheapest prices for games & CDs, read all the reviews that I could & for music, I'd still download an album from Usenet or BitTorrent just to play it through before deciding to buy it or not. In the end, and to this day still, I have a really treasured music & PC games collection, all of it legal.
The point I'm making is that I am by no means a saint but I have now got into this mindset where I don't consider anything as something I *must* have, or indeed, *must have there and then*. I'm very cynical of advertising, I try my best to ignore it, & even though I'm at an age and salary where I don't have any great financial worries, I set a monthly hard budget as to what I will allow myself to spend on entertainment for myself - consequently, I appreciate more the money I allow myself, I eke it out as much as I can & I just refuse to buy stuff unless I'm pretty sure that, to me, it's worth the price being asked for it.
For example, I'm a big fan of Unreal Tournament & was looking forward to playing UT 3 when it came out. But I simply will *not* pay anywhere near the standard £34.99 price for a PC game here in the UK. So I just waited, picked it up for £15 last week and I think for that price it's great value for money.
Think about it for a moment. When people queue up for 24 hours outside a store to buy the latest Harry Potter book or the latest iPhone, what message does this send to the corporations that produce all of that stuff? As far as I can work out, it sends only one - there are a whole heap of weak-minded people out there with a great big wedge of money that, by the power of marketing alone, can be manipulated into believing that they need something so bad, they'll stand in a line waiting for it and happily hand over their money as soon as they get to the front of the queue.
People need to calm down with the "I want it now" mentality. It's great living in a part of the world where we have lots of money to spend but if we part with the stuff so easily, why do all these corporations need to bother with making good quality stuff any more? Just churn out any old stuff and force people to want it through marketing - and that explains why today, in music, computer games & just about everywhere else, there is simply *SO MUCH CRAP* about.
And when there's so much crap about at so high prices, some people find their own justifications to pirate it rather than buying it, this gives the corporations the excuse they need to use copy protection and DRM as a basis for extorting more money out of the people who do buy the stuff, pisses the pirates off even more, etc. etc. *WHERE DOES IT END?*
People *NEED* to start developing some self-control. If something isn't worth the money, don't buy it and don't copy it. Then the corporations have no justifications for DRM, the only thing they can do is reduce prices, churn out better stuff or go out of business - it's that simple.
Microsoft is currently the biggest IT company there is & most people believe that they got their unfairly for the following reasons:
1. They lock in the customer to proprietary applications and file formats.
2. They are a big supporter of DRM.
3. They do not fix bugs in their software quickly enough.
4. Their products are overpriced.
But Apple is doing all of the above also. So why are they any different?
And, to be honest, why should I care how big a company is when I've never for one moment given even the slightest consideration to buying one of their products?
Credit where credit is due - I use Google stuff daily & Microsoft were big and bad enough to force me into a situation where I have to use some of their products...
That's as maybe, but just because Dick Van Dyke said "Gor blimee Mary Poppins" whilst dancing round a chimney brush, that didn't make him British like me either...
In all seriousness, the Germans I occasionally work with always seem very serious but are amongst the first to start laughing whenever someone else cracks a good joke.
It's just stereotyping humour - we British think you Germans have no sense of humour while you Germans think we eat nothing but "Fish and Chips"...
Mind you, you make the finest sausages in the world but we make the best beer.
It's a play on words. In the US, if you declare bankruptcy, you "file a Chapter 11".
Was it you I fragged on the edge of the bathtub with my "Betty"?
Is that the one-and-only time that you will be telling us this information.
Because if it is, then you have just issued a BOURNE ULTIMATUM!!! ...I'll get my coat.
It's been out a while but definitely worth the money.
Even "Linux Format" magazine here in the UK gave it 10/10 in a review a few months ago.
Hey! Now dohn yu eddurcaded city folk ferget us trailer-trash hicks down here in MarryMySisterVille, Utah!
Do they have jails in New Jersey?
It's just that as a British citizen who spent a week there some 10 years ago, it struck me that the inside of a New Jersey jail could only be nicer than the rest of New Jersey outside of it.
Ahem... 46 years and counting, just manually compiled and dropped in a new 2.6.26 kernel on my Linux server, now off to smash teenager butt on "World Of Padman".
Anyway, sonny, your music is rubbish!