Do you think they're equally sick? Because as far as I can see one group aren't actually harming anyone.
Dubious argumentative technique. He didn't say that they were, and it doesn't justify "celebrating the death of innocent children", which may not "harm" anyone in itself, but demonstrates an underlying sociopathic mentality that probably goes further.
Or perhaps not, if the latter group are the type of weasels who only spout off distasteful bullshit like this behind the security of a keyboard and Internet connection.
Call me sensitive, but the whole case stopped being less "funny" and more tragic when it turned out he'd killed his three-year-old daughter.
This was at Score:5 (Funny) when I started this comment, and it seems to have gone down abruptly to 2. Guess I'm not the only one who thought this. Still, who were the insensitive fucks who modded this shit up in the first place?
USB sticks aren't really suitable for permanent archive anyway; I heard somewhere that the data on them could be expected to last around ten years.
but they are too simple for their machines
If their machines are so much smarter than ours, then they'll likely be smart enough to be able to figure out how to read them. This just smacks of the usual half-baked "OMG! Digital media will mean the late-20th/early-21st century will be an informational black hole." Bollocks it will; we're collecting exponentially increasing amounts of information, and even if 99.9% of it disappears, we'll still leave behind vastly more remnants than we did from previous ages. And (this is aimed at those naysayers in general) they *will* be able to read JPGs, for fuck's sake!
They took an OK script and tacked on a happy ending...
Oh no... that "happy ending" bit was in the disappointing sequel.
I mean, the first book was quite entertaining. Good solid entertainment with some supernatural stuff mixed in. It must have done quite well, because someone decided to do a sequel- but in the tradition of Hollywood, it was a major letdown. Too much pandering to human-interest and feelings, and not enough action (bloody focus groups, maybe they got complaints about the sex and violence in the first one). And you can bet there was some guy in a meeting saying "You know, the first Bible did pretty well, considering... but it lacked a central character the audience could follow the story with. We could do even better if we put that in the sequel".
And then they renamed and retconned the original Bible and pretended that the two together were meant to be considered a single work all along.
Some people didn't like that and don't consider the sequel to be canon. You wouldn't believe the amount of arguments that caused!
There's nothing inherently wrong with a brown player. Personally, I'm kind of fed up of the over-smooth "Web 2.0" interface and design style that Apple use- it was cool a few years back, but it's just been overdone IMHO.
Brown could be made to work and look different, especially if it was done in conjunction with some fresh design... problem is, it would take people with Apple's level of design skills to pull it off, not bloody Microsoft!
I starting writing a very intelligent reply to this twice, but since I'm using Windows ME still at work (no choice), I ended up with a blue screen of death each time before I could hit submit.. not really a surprise, it happens at least a dozen times each day. I have to think there's at least a bit of truth to the mac commercials or they wouldn't be so damn funny.
You have my sympathy, but it's hardly fair to judge Windows by the long-obsolete Windows ME. Well, not unless you're comparing it against a pre-OS-X Mac, and even then the comparison would be an academic rehash of the battle of yesterday's OSs.
How long were MP3s being traded illegally before the RIAA started [..] Let's see, when I start collecting MP3s it was around 1996, I'm sure it was earlier for some.
The fact that you and/or a small amount of assorted geeks were exchanging MP3s doesn't constitute a mainstream movement, and it's unreasonable to start the clock ticking there.
If you want to argue that the labels should have been aware of the implications of MP3 back then, perhaps they had considered them, but regardless, to expect a multimillion dollar industry to fundamentally reorganised itself on the basis of a possible future risk from something most people hadn't heard of is unreasonable. Hindsight is an amazing thing, if course. Plus, they *had* considered the dangers of digital/digitised music in general back when Philips and Sony were trying to get support for the CD.
Then Napster arrived after 5 or 6 years
*That* is when you get to release the stopwatch. That's the point one could reasonably claim that MP3 gained non-geek, mainstream popularity and the implications started becoming clearer and more concrete.
I'm not disagreeing entirely with your assertions about the music industry being sluggish- just pointing out that using 1996 as an implied start date is unreasonable.
Also bear in mind that the Electron itself was a much older machine- it came out circa 1983. It was a much cut-down (but far less expensive) home-oriented version of the 8-bit BBC Micro, which was a very popular computer in British schools throughout the 1980s.
Unfortunately, the Electron wasn't a success; apparently this is because they had manufacturing problems and were unable to meet the demand when the machine came out- and by the time they'd got them fixed everyone else had bought other machines and the moment had passed.
That's nice, and I agree with you that Amazon is better than Ebay for both buying and selling. EBay have been a bunch of greedy, nickel-and-diming, laurels-resting monopolistic tossers for a long time now, which is why I rarely use them.
Even so, if your comment was intended as a rebuttal/counter-example to the GP's point (which seemed to be the intent), it's wrong.
The effect of your individual choice is negligible on the scale of Ebay's millions of users, and unless you have good evidence that it's part of a pattern of disgruntled users, it has zero statistical significance.
Even here, when discussing major companies/websites/etc, the self-reinforcing opinion of Slashdotters appears to sometimes blind them to the fact that they (even as a whole) are typically *not* as representative of the customer base as they'd like to think.
given that my forgery was printed on normal paper, it was certainly not very convincing. The clerk at the grocery store accepted it (the 50 kr side) as payment until I stopped and told him to look once more.
Depending on where you live, that could be a very stupid idea, joke or not, regardless of whether you tell the person straight off. There's always going to be some kneejerk idiot who wants to shop you anyway (either they won't care that you told them, or they'll interpret it as you trying to get off the hook when you realised you'd done something stupid, or whatever) and a prosecution that will distort the situation and paint it as badly as possible so that you get 40 years under anti-forgery laws (reduced to 25 with plea-bargaining).
I'm glad to hear that, I never really liked her with the beard.
Re:C# isn't a language...
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 1
If you use a $ as an S in Microsoft, its flamebait. You've ventured outside the realm of reasonable debate. The fact that the original poster also calls it "goo" also indicates his preference to start a conversation not based on objective, or even subjective facts. It is in a word: flamebait.
Except that the person I was replying (and referring) to wasn't the one who did those things; that was the top-level OP.
Re:C# isn't a language...
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 1
I also respect no language that does away with pointers.
Don't Java and C# still feature pointers implicitly via their referential handling of objects?
Re:C# isn't a language...
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 1
So? Linux is a blatant copy of some other *nix.
Open Source software factories
(Side point, but what are these "Open Source software factories" that you speak of? I'd have said that- whatever you think of open source- its development model is generally far less factory-like than that of commercial software firms).
are constantly churning out copies of commercial software.
What's your point?
My point was that it wasn't unreasonable to argue that C# could be considered an improvement upon Java.
I then went on to explain why indeed this probably *would* be the case given the circumstances of C#'s birth. Credit to MS for the improvements, but it shouldn't be read that MS are better than Sun (or whatever) solely because they improved upon their work.
And get off your high horse- though they've done a lot, I wouldn't give Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman the credit for inventing Unix and its descendants either.
Re:C# isn't a language...
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's M$ goo. It's a "we lost our J++ lawsuit so we gonna rewrap our crap" thingy..
Except it came out better this time.
Flamebait? One could argue not. Admittedly my experience with C# is very limited, but the first time I used it about five years ago, it struck me as as blatant a copy of Java someone could make without getting sued... but without the baggage and with a few nice improvements.
MS don't deserve *too* much credit for this, since (unlike Sun) they were able to benefit from five or six years of someone else's experience when creating their language, but with the ability to start with a clean slate and no backwards-compatibility baggage.
(Java inevitably accumulated a fair number of dead ends and improved reinventions of the same functionality over the years.)
Would agree. in the UK we have had Freeview boxes for a couple of years. Started out at £50 and can now be got for about £16. No matter which brand or price you get they do not seem to last for longer than a year.
Actually, Freeview has been around for much longer- over five years, to be precise. IIRC the boxes started out at around the £100 mark, and quickly fell- I got my set-top box in early 2004 for around £60.
Mine stopped working recently- not because of a component failure, but because Freeview made a minor change to how the channel list was handled and some old boxes didn't have enough memory.
The German film makers during the silent era made some pretty amazing films, it's surprising how good they were at conveying mood with just poor footage and a piano in most cases.
What? You mean Giorgio Moroder's synthpop soundtrack wasn't on the original version? I'm shocked, SHOCKED!
My wife is a substitute teacher, and got a Facebook profile and added her nieces and nephews as friends. And now she knows to within a few days the exact time that one of them lost her virginity. How on EARTH she expected to keep that information from her family, while simultaneously allowing access to everyone who wanted to be her "friend" is beyond me, but I do know that she wanted it kept secret - her profile page was sanitized shortly after my wife joined.
And this includes two reasons why Facebook could soon be jumping the shark if it hasn't already.
Firstly, the inherent problem with social networking sites of managing your different groups of friends and keeping them separate (assuming you know how to do so) gets to be more hassle than it's worth as (a) your groups of friends and (b) the amount of people using social networking in general grow. (This wasn't my idea, but the person who came up with it pinpointed the "more hassle than it's worth" saturation point as the reason for CB radio's downfall).
Secondly, the "everyone's using it including your [from a kids/teenage point of view] parents' generation" factor is going to rob it of most of its coolness. Not that this guarantees its downfall; it does depend on how large a factor coolness vs. social usefulness plays however (and how willing people are to switch).
Remember 13375p34k? Used to be everywhere on the net? I realised recently that I'd barely seen any of it in the past couple of years- not since around the time that newspapers started printing guides explaining those strange words your children type.
I remember hearing all those commercials that you could name a star after someone. I was actually dumb enough to do it for a girlfriend. When we got the "chart" the star was.... made up! They actually put a black dot from a magic marker on it.
Black? That sounds suspiciously like she didn't get a star named after her, she got a black hole instead.
The people at the registry told me that this was because they heard your girlfriend was an oversized groupie who had a reputation for sucking stars and anything else in the vicinity...
No, my "hater" comment has two functions. First, it identifies an otherwise unsubstantiated criticism towards something that can only be desicribed as an purposeful lie..i.e. 'hater'.
Your assumption that the guy was malicious as opposed to just wrong was what I attacked.
This is clearly evident by the the guy is straight-up lying.
Or wrong.
Second, I have teenaged kids...so sue me.
Problem is that your tone *did* make you come over as an adolescent-minded fanboy.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think they're equally sick? Because as far as I can see one group aren't actually harming anyone.
Dubious argumentative technique. He didn't say that they were, and it doesn't justify "celebrating the death of innocent children", which may not "harm" anyone in itself, but demonstrates an underlying sociopathic mentality that probably goes further.
Or perhaps not, if the latter group are the type of weasels who only spout off distasteful bullshit like this behind the security of a keyboard and Internet connection.
spam kills
Call me sensitive, but the whole case stopped being less "funny" and more tragic when it turned out he'd killed his three-year-old daughter.
This was at Score:5 (Funny) when I started this comment, and it seems to have gone down abruptly to 2. Guess I'm not the only one who thought this. Still, who were the insensitive fucks who modded this shit up in the first place?
Probably the same vermin who make eugenically-moralising comments like this one. Sick, nasty fucks.
or few USB sticks
USB sticks aren't really suitable for permanent archive anyway; I heard somewhere that the data on them could be expected to last around ten years.
but they are too simple for their machines
If their machines are so much smarter than ours, then they'll likely be smart enough to be able to figure out how to read them. This just smacks of the usual half-baked "OMG! Digital media will mean the late-20th/early-21st century will be an informational black hole." Bollocks it will; we're collecting exponentially increasing amounts of information, and even if 99.9% of it disappears, we'll still leave behind vastly more remnants than we did from previous ages. And (this is aimed at those naysayers in general) they *will* be able to read JPGs, for fuck's sake!
They took an OK script and tacked on a happy ending...
Oh no... that "happy ending" bit was in the disappointing sequel.
I mean, the first book was quite entertaining. Good solid entertainment with some supernatural stuff mixed in. It must have done quite well, because someone decided to do a sequel- but in the tradition of Hollywood, it was a major letdown. Too much pandering to human-interest and feelings, and not enough action (bloody focus groups, maybe they got complaints about the sex and violence in the first one). And you can bet there was some guy in a meeting saying "You know, the first Bible did pretty well, considering... but it lacked a central character the audience could follow the story with. We could do even better if we put that in the sequel".
And then they renamed and retconned the original Bible and pretended that the two together were meant to be considered a single work all along.
Some people didn't like that and don't consider the sequel to be canon. You wouldn't believe the amount of arguments that caused!
There's nothing inherently wrong with a brown player. Personally, I'm kind of fed up of the over-smooth "Web 2.0" interface and design style that Apple use- it was cool a few years back, but it's just been overdone IMHO.
Brown could be made to work and look different, especially if it was done in conjunction with some fresh design... problem is, it would take people with Apple's level of design skills to pull it off, not bloody Microsoft!
I starting writing a very intelligent reply to this twice, but since I'm using Windows ME still at work (no choice), I ended up with a blue screen of death each time before I could hit submit.. not really a surprise, it happens at least a dozen times each day. I have to think there's at least a bit of truth to the mac commercials or they wouldn't be so damn funny.
You have my sympathy, but it's hardly fair to judge Windows by the long-obsolete Windows ME. Well, not unless you're comparing it against a pre-OS-X Mac, and even then the comparison would be an academic rehash of the battle of yesterday's OSs.
How long were MP3s being traded illegally before the RIAA started [..] Let's see, when I start collecting MP3s it was around 1996, I'm sure it was earlier for some.
The fact that you and/or a small amount of assorted geeks were exchanging MP3s doesn't constitute a mainstream movement, and it's unreasonable to start the clock ticking there.
If you want to argue that the labels should have been aware of the implications of MP3 back then, perhaps they had considered them, but regardless, to expect a multimillion dollar industry to fundamentally reorganised itself on the basis of a possible future risk from something most people hadn't heard of is unreasonable. Hindsight is an amazing thing, if course. Plus, they *had* considered the dangers of digital/digitised music in general back when Philips and Sony were trying to get support for the CD.
Then Napster arrived after 5 or 6 years
*That* is when you get to release the stopwatch. That's the point one could reasonably claim that MP3 gained non-geek, mainstream popularity and the implications started becoming clearer and more concrete.
I'm not disagreeing entirely with your assertions about the music industry being sluggish- just pointing out that using 1996 as an implied start date is unreasonable.
Also bear in mind that the Electron itself was a much older machine- it came out circa 1983. It was a much cut-down (but far less expensive) home-oriented version of the 8-bit BBC Micro, which was a very popular computer in British schools throughout the 1980s.
Unfortunately, the Electron wasn't a success; apparently this is because they had manufacturing problems and were unable to meet the demand when the machine came out- and by the time they'd got them fixed everyone else had bought other machines and the moment had passed.
Anyone have an over/under on how many Pentium FPU jokes there will be?
Exactly 24.9999998999997...
:-P
Sorry, but you walked into that one
That's nice, and I agree with you that Amazon is better than Ebay for both buying and selling. EBay have been a bunch of greedy, nickel-and-diming, laurels-resting monopolistic tossers for a long time now, which is why I rarely use them.
Even so, if your comment was intended as a rebuttal/counter-example to the GP's point (which seemed to be the intent), it's wrong.
The effect of your individual choice is negligible on the scale of Ebay's millions of users, and unless you have good evidence that it's part of a pattern of disgruntled users, it has zero statistical significance.
Even here, when discussing major companies/websites/etc, the self-reinforcing opinion of Slashdotters appears to sometimes blind them to the fact that they (even as a whole) are typically *not* as representative of the customer base as they'd like to think.
given that my forgery was printed on normal paper, it was certainly not very convincing. The clerk at the grocery store accepted it (the 50 kr side) as payment until I stopped and told him to look once more.
Depending on where you live, that could be a very stupid idea, joke or not, regardless of whether you tell the person straight off. There's always going to be some kneejerk idiot who wants to shop you anyway (either they won't care that you told them, or they'll interpret it as you trying to get off the hook when you realised you'd done something stupid, or whatever) and a prosecution that will distort the situation and paint it as badly as possible so that you get 40 years under anti-forgery laws (reduced to 25 with plea-bargaining).
Natalie Portman shaves again
I'm glad to hear that, I never really liked her with the beard.
If you use a $ as an S in Microsoft, its flamebait. You've ventured outside the realm of reasonable debate. The fact that the original poster also calls it "goo" also indicates his preference to start a conversation not based on objective, or even subjective facts. It is in a word: flamebait.
Except that the person I was replying (and referring) to wasn't the one who did those things; that was the top-level OP.
I also respect no language that does away with pointers.
Don't Java and C# still feature pointers implicitly via their referential handling of objects?
So? Linux is a blatant copy of some other *nix.
Open Source software factories
(Side point, but what are these "Open Source software factories" that you speak of? I'd have said that- whatever you think of open source- its development model is generally far less factory-like than that of commercial software firms).
are constantly churning out copies of commercial software.
What's your point?
My point was that it wasn't unreasonable to argue that C# could be considered an improvement upon Java.
I then went on to explain why indeed this probably *would* be the case given the circumstances of C#'s birth. Credit to MS for the improvements, but it shouldn't be read that MS are better than Sun (or whatever) solely because they improved upon their work.
And get off your high horse- though they've done a lot, I wouldn't give Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman the credit for inventing Unix and its descendants either.
It's M$ goo. It's a "we lost our J++ lawsuit so we gonna rewrap our crap" thingy..
Except it came out better this time.
Flamebait? One could argue not. Admittedly my experience with C# is very limited, but the first time I used it about five years ago, it struck me as as blatant a copy of Java someone could make without getting sued... but without the baggage and with a few nice improvements.
MS don't deserve *too* much credit for this, since (unlike Sun) they were able to benefit from five or six years of someone else's experience when creating their language, but with the ability to start with a clean slate and no backwards-compatibility baggage.
(Java inevitably accumulated a fair number of dead ends and improved reinventions of the same functionality over the years.)
Would agree. in the UK we have had Freeview boxes for a couple of years. Started out at £50 and can now be got for about £16. No matter which brand or price you get they do not seem to last for longer than a year.
Actually, Freeview has been around for much longer- over five years, to be precise. IIRC the boxes started out at around the £100 mark, and quickly fell- I got my set-top box in early 2004 for around £60.
Mine stopped working recently- not because of a component failure, but because Freeview made a minor change to how the channel list was handled and some old boxes didn't have enough memory.
The German film makers during the silent era made some pretty amazing films, it's surprising how good they were at conveying mood with just poor footage and a piano in most cases.
What? You mean Giorgio Moroder's synthpop soundtrack wasn't on the original version? I'm shocked, SHOCKED!
God gets mod points? We're screeeewed!
Yeah; he's the only person who can mod something up to +6 or down to -2 ("Heretical").
My wife is a substitute teacher, and got a Facebook profile and added her nieces and nephews as friends. And now she knows to within a few days the exact time that one of them lost her virginity. How on EARTH she expected to keep that information from her family, while simultaneously allowing access to everyone who wanted to be her "friend" is beyond me, but I do know that she wanted it kept secret - her profile page was sanitized shortly after my wife joined.
And this includes two reasons why Facebook could soon be jumping the shark if it hasn't already.
Firstly, the inherent problem with social networking sites of managing your different groups of friends and keeping them separate (assuming you know how to do so) gets to be more hassle than it's worth as (a) your groups of friends and (b) the amount of people using social networking in general grow. (This wasn't my idea, but the person who came up with it pinpointed the "more hassle than it's worth" saturation point as the reason for CB radio's downfall).
Secondly, the "everyone's using it including your [from a kids/teenage point of view] parents' generation" factor is going to rob it of most of its coolness. Not that this guarantees its downfall; it does depend on how large a factor coolness vs. social usefulness plays however (and how willing people are to switch).
Remember 13375p34k? Used to be everywhere on the net? I realised recently that I'd barely seen any of it in the past couple of years- not since around the time that newspapers started printing guides explaining those strange words your children type.
Coincidence? Hmm...
I remember hearing all those commercials that you could name a star after someone. I was actually dumb enough to do it for a girlfriend. When we got the "chart" the star was.... made up! They actually put a black dot from a magic marker on it.
Black? That sounds suspiciously like she didn't get a star named after her, she got a black hole instead.
The people at the registry told me that this was because they heard your girlfriend was an oversized groupie who had a reputation for sucking stars and anything else in the vicinity...
oh, THOSE kinds of stars. Never mind.
If you adopted her, wouldn't that make what you're thinking incest anyway? Ewwwww....
If DELL had the mindshare going that Apple systems have they would be selling the product mark ups for the same as Apple.
I'm sure they would! And of course Apple will charge more if they can get away with it- just as any other company would!
The point being made by the article is that Apple are charging more for very similar upgrades and service.
Everyone talking about "market demand" missed that this was the point!
...matter of fact, it makes my Flash crawl!
No, my "hater" comment has two functions. First, it identifies an otherwise unsubstantiated criticism towards something that can only be desicribed as an purposeful lie..i.e. 'hater'.
Your assumption that the guy was malicious as opposed to just wrong was what I attacked.
This is clearly evident by the the guy is straight-up lying.
Or wrong.
Second, I have teenaged kids...so sue me.
Problem is that your tone *did* make you come over as an adolescent-minded fanboy.