Your "facts" are a mixture of questionable assertions, questionable conclusions and downright ignorant mistakes.
Its audio was trumped by machines such as the Apple IIgs (16 channel wavetable) and the Atari ST (best MIDI software and capabilities.)
Don't know much about the Apple IIGS' audio, but it sounds interesting (no pun intended) (*)
But the Atari ST? Please. The ST became popular for music because it had MIDI ports built-in. (**) Credit to Atari for their foresight, but nothing that the Amiga couldn't do with a dirt-cheap add-on interface. The sound from an expensive synth attached to an Atari ST sounded better than the Amiga's built-in sound? No shit!
Especially ironic given the Amiga's built-in sound *was* damned impressive for the time (***), whereas the ST's own sound chip was an off-the-shelf 3-channel square-wave job dating back to the 8-bit era that was exceptionally poor in comparison.
Its graphics were again trumped by machines like the Apple IIgs (4096 simultaneous colors.)
You're showing your blatant ignorance here.
The Amiga was well-known for its 4096 colour HAM mode.. Pixel constraints limited its usefulness for animation and games, but it was impressive for static graphics.
The Apple IIGS's graphics look good, but are- as far as I can see- essentially 16-colour (320 x 200) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with hardware support for palette switching. The Amiga's copper co-processour could comfortably perform the same trick in its regular (non-HAM) flexible 32-colour (320 x 200) (****) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with the same or greater flexibility.
The nintendo had better animation capabilities than the Amiga, and they both came out the same year (1985.)
Are you seriously claiming that the original 8-bit NES was more powerful than the Amiga? Mind you, given your apparent ignorance of the Amiga's 4096 colour graphics capability, I wouldn't put too much store in your judgement on this matter.
(*) If I had time, I'd be interested in how the "wavetable" synthesis performed versus the Amiga's "real" 4-channel, 8-bit sound, but I do admit the Apple II seems like it ought to be impressive by the standards of the time.
(**) And possibly because the ST was more affordable early on, until the Amiga 500 came out and its price fell.
(***) Maybe the Apple IIGS was as well, doesn't mean they weren't both impressive.
(****) Actually, there was a "64-colour" mode, but the second 32 colours were "half-brite" versions of the first 32, so I don't really count that.
hey look, i'm standing on your lawn with hundreds of millions of other global millennials and we cherish the thought of forcing you to accept our grammar and "incorrect" forms of activism for the rest of your fragile and worthless existence. Lulz.
Might happen, but I wouldn't bet my life savings on it. For every permanent addition to the language, there's a fad that dies the death when its time is up.
"Groovy" was a cool, popular word during the flower power era. *No-one* uses it now, except as a tongue-in-cheek invocation of the era it's inexorably tied to.
More recent example- remember 13375p34k? Pretty common a few years back. When was the last time you heard anyone use it seriously, or even tongue-in-cheek?
As for "FAIL", the way it's generally used self-consciously by bandwagon jumpers smacks of a fad. I think "LOL" will be around longer because it's common and used as instinctively as inhaling air by every mouth-breathing cretin out there.
Ironically, though it's a variant of the latter, "Lulz" is more self-conscious, more subculturey, less mainstream, and IMHO more likely to be representative of an era. It's likely to be dismissed by Anonymous' younger siblings when the former grow up and the latter take their place and want their own subcultural words.
My guess is that if you're using "FAIL" and "Lulz" in 20 years time, you'll be seen as a sad, boring out-of-touch guy living in the past.
Okay, my apologies, I assumed it was in the context of Apple rationalising killing of the floppy in the iMac, and on re-reading I see that's not what you were discussing. That said, thumb drives' true ascendancy was at the point they started getting really cheap.
It occurs to me that you're right, people don't "exchange" pen drives as such (though they might loan them with the intention of being returned once the recipient had copied the files). But I don't use CDRs or DVDRs that much either- most small to medium files can be shared over the Internet, e.g. by email- or I can borrow a pen drive. Though they still remain an option, e.g. I gave my brother a CDRW with some photos and videos on it because it was a quick, easy and cheap way to give him some large files without having to worry about getting it back.
Don't forget USB thumb drives. It just so happens that around the same time Apple started killing floppies in their machines, generic plug and play USB thumb drives started to come available for PCs.
Wrong- it wasn't until five or more years after the original iMac that thumb drives started getting cheap and ubiquitous enough for them to be a realistic floppy replacement.
As I said in my other comment, the fact that (a) Apple only included a CD-ROM in the original iMac, and (b) Everyone rushed out and bought an external floppy drive for theirs rather proves that Apple were premature.
CD-ROMs were already well adopted by the time floppies came along
To be fair, this statement- which I was going to dismiss as absolute drivel- was apparently a mistake by the author who got them the wrong way around. But I'm still somewhat disturbed by the fact that the parent comment containing something so totally wrong got modded up to 5.:-O
Perhaps this was because the mods assumed it *was* so obviously a mistake that the intended meaning of obvious- but never underestimate the number of clueless people out there.:-/
Cheap CD-R drives and the ability in basically every BIOS to boot directly from a CD completely killed any advantage the floppy had. Apple's decision to stop putting floppy drives in their computers was a response to the already-obvious obsolescence of the technology.
Not quite. The iMac came out in mid-1998, at which point the majority of new PCs still included CD-ROM drives- presumably because CD burners were still too expensive to be a no-brainer inclusion. (*)
The fact that Apple included a CD-ROM rather than a writer on that original iMac itself really proves the point!
It also negates your claimed rationale, unless Apple were seriously expecting everyone to buy an *external* CD writer. Actually, from what I remember, the one peripheral everyone seemed to have for the iMac was.... an external floppy drive!. Enough said.
Granted, CD writers *did* fall in price not long after that (around the turn of the millennium), and the writing may have been on the wall at the time of the iMac's release. But Apple still jumped the gun if that was their reason, because the original iMac had *no* built in read-write drive, floppy *or* CD.
(*) I remember this because I bought my first Wintel PC about 4 months before and had spent hours poring over specs. One or two systems with DVD (-ROM) drives were hovering on the edge of my budget, but I definitely don't recall CD writers being an option.
So in that sense it's probably true that if game developers made 2 hour games (or more realistically, something that takes about 8 - 10 hours) for 30 bucks a pop I'd be playing more games than I do now
Sorry, are you really saying that you'd be happy to buy a game that worked out at $15 an hour?
Frankly, I read the summary talking about games taking 10 hours as if that was a long time, and I'm thinking "WTF?!"
Granted, I'm not that much into games these days, and the ones I do play are quick, easy-to-pick up, casual ones. But if I wanted to play the type of game that was effectively "play once to the end" and whose playtime it made sense to measure in hours with the implication it was intended to be completed (e.g. Pacman *wouldn't* be that type of game), I would consider 10 hours to be short!
Is this what gamers want nowadays, or is it a result of game companies' obsession with playing wannabe Hollywood (*) and thus having to generate content to fill every sodding hour of a game, rather than designing it more cleverly to be a dynamic, open-ended experience?
(*) The games industry is still under the impression that this is a sign of growing up, maturity, seriousness, blah blah. Actually, it's the opposite- a sign of adolescent immaturity in the industry, wanting to be like an older art form and tying it down with stupid, pre-created storylines as a result, just like the early cinema being compared to the theatre.
When the industry stops comparing itself to Hollywood, is comfortable with its *own* conventions, etc... *that* is when it will have grown up.
I find it risible when games companies show off their crappy pre-rendered sequences with mannequin like uncanny-valley figures and gush about emotional depth and story like they're creating a film. News guys- your plastic attempts at film noir (or whatever) would get laughed off the screen if presented as a "real" film.
Did you notice how fast VHS tapes disappeared? They technically still work, but they've been so completely replaced by DVDs and BluRay disks that you only see them at yard sales anymore.
They hung on longer for actually recording material. Sure, part of the reason they died is that more convenient and/or higher-quality technologies came along, but one other obvious reason is that there are virtually no video recorders that work with digital TV transmissions. Analogue TV signals have either been switched off in many countries, or are due to be so quite soon.
You *can* get video recorders to work with an external set-top box, but it's a PITA. I didn't record much with my VCR/digibox combo, because it was a hassle to set the two timers separately. Less technical people probably wouldn't even bother with the hassle at all, even if they could figure it out.
[Most] Waterstones [..] only sell the latest romance novel or Jordan autobiography and shite like that rather than a useful range of maths/science/computing books.
I wouldn't say my local one is quite that bad, but they *are* almost worthless for computing and IT books. The selection is generally scant and to be honest if I needed a computer book, I wouldn't even bother taking the 5 minutes I need to walk there from my work, because it's very unlikely they'd have anything approaching what I needed, even when I was happy to pay the full RRP (which one can assume they will charge).
To be honest, I think it's a combination of computer books going out of date quite quickly, that the people who buy such books are more likely to do so online and that computer books in general don't (AFAIK) sell as well these days. They seemed to just throw in the towel and only have a token selection there (used to have a decent selection in that area about 10 years back)
So, with poetic justice, Amazon beat Borders et al. at their own game, but at least I find Amazon better to deal with.
This reminds me of what happened when the British Woolworths chain (originally a part of the famous American parent until the 1980s) went bankrupt a couple of years back.
Everyone got nostalgic about it, and waxed about its 100-year history and place in British culture. But fewer noted that its original early success was as a "big" chain discount retailer that many claimed drove small local merchants out of business (does this sound familiar? It's not new!)
To some extent (IMHO) Woolies was driven out of business by larger out-of-town stores that were able to out-compete it at its own "sell everything" game and at cheaper prices. In other words, it was partly made irrelevant and driven out of business by the same ruthless forces that had led to its original success.
Well, that and crappy management, like selling off their stores, then leasing them back (something that cost them in the end.) But... live by the sword, die by the sword.
Oh, that's very fascinating to me... I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual, but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time.
Angus and Robertson bought the [Australian] Borders in an act of corporate hubris. Then the accumulated debts of Borders took down the whole thing.
The UK Borders operation- which had also been sold off by the parent company- went bankrupt too, about 18 months ago.
BTW, I was pretty soured on Borders when I learned that the (original US parent) company had been actively involved in union busting and the like, and always felt slightly dirty when I went in to one of their shops.
This was before the UK operation was sold off; actually, I didn't realise they'd been sold off in 2007 until they went bankrupt. They had a local store where I'm living currently, but it was in a retail park *just* far enough away from the main city centre- and less friendly for those of us on foot- that I'd never been there. I finally visited that park when visiting another shop doing Christmas shopping, figured I should check out their closing down sale, and found out it had closed less than a week previously!
I bought a nano "i-pod" some years ago, i- as in internet when ironically its probably the only piece of consumer end-user electronics apple sold that decade without a web browser.
Sure, but remember the "i" prefix originated (as far as Apple were concerned) with the original iMac, not the iPad. The former was Apple's "comeback" product and culturally prominent at the time (remember the late-90s translucent coloured plastic fad it sparked). In that case it *did* supposedly stand for "Internet".
I'm assuming that the name "iPod" was then chosen to piggyback on the success and name recognition of the iMac, regardless of whether the "i" was relevant. The fact that the iPod was even more successful than the iMac makes it easy to forget that it didn't originate Apple's iNaming scheme(!)
He or She does all possible things with another He or She all at once. If you really like what you see, don't blink because it will be something different by the time your eyelids open back up.
You mean like a pornographic version of that Doctor Who episode with the scary statues?
How many do really assoicate particular music with porn, at all?
Seriously?! Ask almost anyone to do stereotype "porn" music and they'll do something like Bow chicka wow wow or some similar representation.
Personally, I hardly ever watch porn with the sound up (as much because of the obvious and hence pointless and distracting dubbed soundtracks as any music), but I'm still aware of this.
They've even done Lynx/Axe deodorant commercials based around that trope. What rock have you been living under since... er, since you were born?!
Unlikely. The original Apple logo was an elaborate drawing of Newton sitting under an apple tree. That evolved into just the apple symbol (white, then rainbow-colored, then white again).
Besides which, rainbow-coloured stripes were a very common design motif in the 1970s. Even Activision (who were founded at the end of the decade) had rainbow stripes in the original version of their logo! The gay rights movement may have felt it somewhat appropriate, but they weren't the only people using it at the time, and I doubt that was the primary connotation when Apple first chose the rainbow logo.
It's like how people associate chucka-wucka guitar basslines with porn- because porn first rose to prominence during the 70s when that was a relatively common musical style (albeit one that suited porn quite well). Had it arrived in the 1980s, it's likely we'd associate synthesisers with porn instead.
I was going to say something similar, though not necessarily complaining, simply observing that this US situation wasn't reflective of the rest of the world.
But what I *am* interested in is why Macs seem to be proportionately more popular in the US than elsewhere. Is it simply that people in the US tend to have more disposable income? Is it because Apple target the US anyway (self-perpetuating their most successful market to some extent)?
No, he didn't- no-one who "quotes" that has ever come up with a citation for where he actually said it.
(And if the first half *itself* was a joke- as opposed to a setup- then don't pull a "whoosh" on me, because it's certainly not clear that you intended it that way).
Well, science journalism. So, tentative results from an animal trial using a compound that happens to be found in some wines (mostly red, but not all red and in some whites), cocoa, and peanuts leads to a headline about drinking in space? Really?
Well, it's from the same "science" and "learning" channel that brought you American Chopper and Hot Rod.
Anyway, wait till this story hits the mainstream press a couple more steps down the line, it'll be turned into another "drinking red wine is good for you!" story. Then people will half-remember the bits they want to remember and a month later they'll be using this as some excuse to get totally shitfaced because they vaguely remembered something about Smirnoff Ice being good for you, and the more the better, etc.
Not entirely joking- there were stories in the UK press about how *very* high quality bitter chocolate (i.e. so much damn cocoa solids there literally wasn't room to pack them full of fat and sugar anyway) was supposedly good for you if you ate like *one square* a day. It was already blatantly an excuse for a "chocolate is good for you" story, telling people what they want to hear, and I was damn sure that people would remember it as "it's okay to eat a 200g bar of sodding Cadbury's Dairy Milk because it's good for you".
Sure enough, some time later, one of my work colleagues had a bog-standard chocolate bar and was telling me how chocolate was good for you. So, yeah.
it just requires the company's directors to take a strong high-road stance in the face of the temptation of greed you get operating in a democracy. ("do whatever it takes, be it illegal or immoral, to maximize profit")
"Democracy" is *not* a synonym for laissez-faire free-market capitalism, regardless of how many people (Americans primarily, it seems) believe otherwise.
Either this sort of thing is very common, there's something happening that makes it common just now (aside from the fact it's summer, else we'd be hearing about it every year), or it's pure coincidence.
So it will be as much like the original as the "I, Robot" movie was like Asimov's stories.
What a waste of time. I'll skip this one...
Er... are you serious? I think it was implicit to anyone the reason the film would have little to do with the original game was... that the plot of the original game was virtually nonexistent anyway! Yes, Hollywood is notorious for dicking about with stuff, but in this case the joke would be trying to make a "film" using this as the plot:-
A group of earth-invading aliens moves in lockstep formation attempting to shoot lone ship on ground that's trying in turn to blast *them* from behind some shields. Plot twist- occasional bonus ship appears at top of screen. Er, that's it.
Even Michael Bay might struggle to stretch that to two hours of sound and fury.
In the late 1990's, early 2000's portable minidisc players/recorders were incredibly popular in Japan and Europe.
I wouldn't go so far as to say they were "incredibly" popular in the UK (i.e. Europe). They were still *nowhere* near as big as traditional cassettes nor CDs at their peak- but they definitely did seem to enjoy a noticeable boost of success around that time. What I didn't get was why MiniDisc suddenly became moderately popular here at the turn of the millennium, several years after the format had originally come out and apparently done nothing.
Two possible reasons- one, they reduced the price to the point where it became affordable to students and young people(?); two, I heard that they started a commercial push around that time. Don't know which, if either, is correct.
At any rate, after that brief flush of success, they seem to have disappeared, replaced by the rise of cheap MP3 players. They were never really around long enough to become established. I suspect they lasted longer in Japan because they were more popular there in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Its audio was trumped by machines such as the Apple IIgs (16 channel wavetable) and the Atari ST (best MIDI software and capabilities.)
Don't know much about the Apple IIGS' audio, but it sounds interesting (no pun intended) (*)
But the Atari ST? Please. The ST became popular for music because it had MIDI ports built-in. (**) Credit to Atari for their foresight, but nothing that the Amiga couldn't do with a dirt-cheap add-on interface. The sound from an expensive synth attached to an Atari ST sounded better than the Amiga's built-in sound? No shit!
Especially ironic given the Amiga's built-in sound *was* damned impressive for the time (***), whereas the ST's own sound chip was an off-the-shelf 3-channel square-wave job dating back to the 8-bit era that was exceptionally poor in comparison.
Its graphics were again trumped by machines like the Apple IIgs (4096 simultaneous colors.)
You're showing your blatant ignorance here.
The Amiga was well-known for its 4096 colour HAM mode.. Pixel constraints limited its usefulness for animation and games, but it was impressive for static graphics.
The Apple IIGS's graphics look good, but are- as far as I can see- essentially 16-colour (320 x 200) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with hardware support for palette switching. The Amiga's copper co-processour could comfortably perform the same trick in its regular (non-HAM) flexible 32-colour (320 x 200) (****) and 4-colour (640 x 200) modes with the same or greater flexibility.
The nintendo had better animation capabilities than the Amiga, and they both came out the same year (1985.)
Are you seriously claiming that the original 8-bit NES was more powerful than the Amiga? Mind you, given your apparent ignorance of the Amiga's 4096 colour graphics capability, I wouldn't put too much store in your judgement on this matter.
(*) If I had time, I'd be interested in how the "wavetable" synthesis performed versus the Amiga's "real" 4-channel, 8-bit sound, but I do admit the Apple II seems like it ought to be impressive by the standards of the time.
(**) And possibly because the ST was more affordable early on, until the Amiga 500 came out and its price fell.
(***) Maybe the Apple IIGS was as well, doesn't mean they weren't both impressive.
(****) Actually, there was a "64-colour" mode, but the second 32 colours were "half-brite" versions of the first 32, so I don't really count that.
hey look, i'm standing on your lawn with hundreds of millions of other global millennials and we cherish the thought of forcing you to accept our grammar and "incorrect" forms of activism for the rest of your fragile and worthless existence. Lulz.
Might happen, but I wouldn't bet my life savings on it. For every permanent addition to the language, there's a fad that dies the death when its time is up.
"Groovy" was a cool, popular word during the flower power era. *No-one* uses it now, except as a tongue-in-cheek invocation of the era it's inexorably tied to.
More recent example- remember 13375p34k? Pretty common a few years back. When was the last time you heard anyone use it seriously, or even tongue-in-cheek?
As for "FAIL", the way it's generally used self-consciously by bandwagon jumpers smacks of a fad. I think "LOL" will be around longer because it's common and used as instinctively as inhaling air by every mouth-breathing cretin out there.
Ironically, though it's a variant of the latter, "Lulz" is more self-conscious, more subculturey, less mainstream, and IMHO more likely to be representative of an era. It's likely to be dismissed by Anonymous' younger siblings when the former grow up and the latter take their place and want their own subcultural words.
My guess is that if you're using "FAIL" and "Lulz" in 20 years time, you'll be seen as a sad, boring out-of-touch guy living in the past.
Okay, my apologies, I assumed it was in the context of Apple rationalising killing of the floppy in the iMac, and on re-reading I see that's not what you were discussing. That said, thumb drives' true ascendancy was at the point they started getting really cheap.
It occurs to me that you're right, people don't "exchange" pen drives as such (though they might loan them with the intention of being returned once the recipient had copied the files). But I don't use CDRs or DVDRs that much either- most small to medium files can be shared over the Internet, e.g. by email- or I can borrow a pen drive. Though they still remain an option, e.g. I gave my brother a CDRW with some photos and videos on it because it was a quick, easy and cheap way to give him some large files without having to worry about getting it back.
Don't forget USB thumb drives. It just so happens that around the same time Apple started killing floppies in their machines, generic plug and play USB thumb drives started to come available for PCs.
Wrong- it wasn't until five or more years after the original iMac that thumb drives started getting cheap and ubiquitous enough for them to be a realistic floppy replacement.
Even CD-RW drives weren't cheap enough at the time of the iMac's launch to be commonplace.
As I said in my other comment, the fact that (a) Apple only included a CD-ROM in the original iMac, and (b) Everyone rushed out and bought an external floppy drive for theirs rather proves that Apple were premature.
CD-ROMs were already well adopted by the time floppies came along
To be fair, this statement- which I was going to dismiss as absolute drivel- was apparently a mistake by the author who got them the wrong way around. But I'm still somewhat disturbed by the fact that the parent comment containing something so totally wrong got modded up to 5. :-O
:-/
Perhaps this was because the mods assumed it *was* so obviously a mistake that the intended meaning of obvious- but never underestimate the number of clueless people out there.
Cheap CD-R drives and the ability in basically every BIOS to boot directly from a CD completely killed any advantage the floppy had. Apple's decision to stop putting floppy drives in their computers was a response to the already-obvious obsolescence of the technology.
Not quite. The iMac came out in mid-1998, at which point the majority of new PCs still included CD-ROM drives- presumably because CD burners were still too expensive to be a no-brainer inclusion. (*)
The fact that Apple included a CD-ROM rather than a writer on that original iMac itself really proves the point!
It also negates your claimed rationale, unless Apple were seriously expecting everyone to buy an *external* CD writer. Actually, from what I remember, the one peripheral everyone seemed to have for the iMac was.... an external floppy drive!. Enough said.
Granted, CD writers *did* fall in price not long after that (around the turn of the millennium), and the writing may have been on the wall at the time of the iMac's release. But Apple still jumped the gun if that was their reason, because the original iMac had *no* built in read-write drive, floppy *or* CD.
(*) I remember this because I bought my first Wintel PC about 4 months before and had spent hours poring over specs. One or two systems with DVD (-ROM) drives were hovering on the edge of my budget, but I definitely don't recall CD writers being an option.
So in that sense it's probably true that if game developers made 2 hour games (or more realistically, something that takes about 8 - 10 hours) for 30 bucks a pop I'd be playing more games than I do now
Sorry, are you really saying that you'd be happy to buy a game that worked out at $15 an hour?
Frankly, I read the summary talking about games taking 10 hours as if that was a long time, and I'm thinking "WTF?!"
Granted, I'm not that much into games these days, and the ones I do play are quick, easy-to-pick up, casual ones. But if I wanted to play the type of game that was effectively "play once to the end" and whose playtime it made sense to measure in hours with the implication it was intended to be completed (e.g. Pacman *wouldn't* be that type of game), I would consider 10 hours to be short!
Is this what gamers want nowadays, or is it a result of game companies' obsession with playing wannabe Hollywood (*) and thus having to generate content to fill every sodding hour of a game, rather than designing it more cleverly to be a dynamic, open-ended experience?
(*) The games industry is still under the impression that this is a sign of growing up, maturity, seriousness, blah blah. Actually, it's the opposite- a sign of adolescent immaturity in the industry, wanting to be like an older art form and tying it down with stupid, pre-created storylines as a result, just like the early cinema being compared to the theatre.
When the industry stops comparing itself to Hollywood, is comfortable with its *own* conventions, etc... *that* is when it will have grown up.
I find it risible when games companies show off their crappy pre-rendered sequences with mannequin like uncanny-valley figures and gush about emotional depth and story like they're creating a film. News guys- your plastic attempts at film noir (or whatever) would get laughed off the screen if presented as a "real" film.
Did you notice how fast VHS tapes disappeared? They technically still work, but they've been so completely replaced by DVDs and BluRay disks that you only see them at yard sales anymore.
They hung on longer for actually recording material. Sure, part of the reason they died is that more convenient and/or higher-quality technologies came along, but one other obvious reason is that there are virtually no video recorders that work with digital TV transmissions. Analogue TV signals have either been switched off in many countries, or are due to be so quite soon.
You *can* get video recorders to work with an external set-top box, but it's a PITA. I didn't record much with my VCR/digibox combo, because it was a hassle to set the two timers separately. Less technical people probably wouldn't even bother with the hassle at all, even if they could figure it out.
[Most] Waterstones [..] only sell the latest romance novel or Jordan autobiography and shite like that rather than a useful range of maths/science/computing books.
I wouldn't say my local one is quite that bad, but they *are* almost worthless for computing and IT books. The selection is generally scant and to be honest if I needed a computer book, I wouldn't even bother taking the 5 minutes I need to walk there from my work, because it's very unlikely they'd have anything approaching what I needed, even when I was happy to pay the full RRP (which one can assume they will charge).
To be honest, I think it's a combination of computer books going out of date quite quickly, that the people who buy such books are more likely to do so online and that computer books in general don't (AFAIK) sell as well these days. They seemed to just throw in the towel and only have a token selection there (used to have a decent selection in that area about 10 years back)
So, with poetic justice, Amazon beat Borders et al. at their own game, but at least I find Amazon better to deal with.
This reminds me of what happened when the British Woolworths chain (originally a part of the famous American parent until the 1980s) went bankrupt a couple of years back.
Everyone got nostalgic about it, and waxed about its 100-year history and place in British culture. But fewer noted that its original early success was as a "big" chain discount retailer that many claimed drove small local merchants out of business (does this sound familiar? It's not new!)
To some extent (IMHO) Woolies was driven out of business by larger out-of-town stores that were able to out-compete it at its own "sell everything" game and at cheaper prices. In other words, it was partly made irrelevant and driven out of business by the same ruthless forces that had led to its original success.
Well, that and crappy management, like selling off their stores, then leasing them back (something that cost them in the end.) But... live by the sword, die by the sword.
Some say print is dead
Oh, that's very fascinating to me... I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual, but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time.
I also play racquetball.
Angus and Robertson bought the [Australian] Borders in an act of corporate hubris. Then the accumulated debts of Borders took down the whole thing.
The UK Borders operation- which had also been sold off by the parent company- went bankrupt too, about 18 months ago.
BTW, I was pretty soured on Borders when I learned that the (original US parent) company had been actively involved in union busting and the like, and always felt slightly dirty when I went in to one of their shops.
This was before the UK operation was sold off; actually, I didn't realise they'd been sold off in 2007 until they went bankrupt. They had a local store where I'm living currently, but it was in a retail park *just* far enough away from the main city centre- and less friendly for those of us on foot- that I'd never been there. I finally visited that park when visiting another shop doing Christmas shopping, figured I should check out their closing down sale, and found out it had closed less than a week previously!
I bought a nano "i-pod" some years ago, i- as in internet when ironically its probably the only piece of consumer end-user electronics apple sold that decade without a web browser.
Sure, but remember the "i" prefix originated (as far as Apple were concerned) with the original iMac, not the iPad. The former was Apple's "comeback" product and culturally prominent at the time (remember the late-90s translucent coloured plastic fad it sparked). In that case it *did* supposedly stand for "Internet".
I'm assuming that the name "iPod" was then chosen to piggyback on the success and name recognition of the iMac, regardless of whether the "i" was relevant. The fact that the iPod was even more successful than the iMac makes it easy to forget that it didn't originate Apple's iNaming scheme(!)
Quantum porn?
He or She does all possible things with another He or She all at once. If you really like what you see, don't blink because it will be something different by the time your eyelids open back up.
You mean like a pornographic version of that Doctor Who episode with the scary statues?
Porn has sound?!!
Yes, it's generally godawful cheesy and unconvincing dubbed crap, which is exactly *why* I normally make sure the sound is off when I watch porn. :-)
How many do really assoicate particular music with porn, at all?
Seriously?! Ask almost anyone to do stereotype "porn" music and they'll do something like Bow chicka wow wow or some similar representation.
Personally, I hardly ever watch porn with the sound up (as much because of the obvious and hence pointless and distracting dubbed soundtracks as any music), but I'm still aware of this.
They've even done Lynx/Axe deodorant commercials based around that trope. What rock have you been living under since... er, since you were born?!
Unlikely. The original Apple logo was an elaborate drawing of Newton sitting under an apple tree. That evolved into just the apple symbol (white, then rainbow-colored, then white again).
Besides which, rainbow-coloured stripes were a very common design motif in the 1970s. Even Activision (who were founded at the end of the decade) had rainbow stripes in the original version of their logo! The gay rights movement may have felt it somewhat appropriate, but they weren't the only people using it at the time, and I doubt that was the primary connotation when Apple first chose the rainbow logo.
It's like how people associate chucka-wucka guitar basslines with porn- because porn first rose to prominence during the 70s when that was a relatively common musical style (albeit one that suited porn quite well). Had it arrived in the 1980s, it's likely we'd associate synthesisers with porn instead.
I was going to say something similar, though not necessarily complaining, simply observing that this US situation wasn't reflective of the rest of the world.
But what I *am* interested in is why Macs seem to be proportionately more popular in the US than elsewhere. Is it simply that people in the US tend to have more disposable income? Is it because Apple target the US anyway (self-perpetuating their most successful market to some extent)?
But he said 640k of ram would always be enough!
No, he didn't- no-one who "quotes" that has ever come up with a citation for where he actually said it.
(And if the first half *itself* was a joke- as opposed to a setup- then don't pull a "whoosh" on me, because it's certainly not clear that you intended it that way).
That's odd he's off the top of the list, maybe given special status or I'm following an impostor? Because he's still in my dbag circle
A circle for douchebaggery sounds like something Dante ought to have come up with.
Pretty sure Zuckerburg would belong there... (^_^)
Well, science journalism. So, tentative results from an animal trial using a compound that happens to be found in some wines (mostly red, but not all red and in some whites), cocoa, and peanuts leads to a headline about drinking in space? Really?
Well, it's from the same "science" and "learning" channel that brought you American Chopper and Hot Rod.
Anyway, wait till this story hits the mainstream press a couple more steps down the line, it'll be turned into another "drinking red wine is good for you!" story. Then people will half-remember the bits they want to remember and a month later they'll be using this as some excuse to get totally shitfaced because they vaguely remembered something about Smirnoff Ice being good for you, and the more the better, etc.
Not entirely joking- there were stories in the UK press about how *very* high quality bitter chocolate (i.e. so much damn cocoa solids there literally wasn't room to pack them full of fat and sugar anyway) was supposedly good for you if you ate like *one square* a day. It was already blatantly an excuse for a "chocolate is good for you" story, telling people what they want to hear, and I was damn sure that people would remember it as "it's okay to eat a 200g bar of sodding Cadbury's Dairy Milk because it's good for you".
Sure enough, some time later, one of my work colleagues had a bog-standard chocolate bar and was telling me how chocolate was good for you. So, yeah.
it just requires the company's directors to take a strong high-road stance in the face of the temptation of greed you get operating in a democracy. ("do whatever it takes, be it illegal or immoral, to maximize profit")
"Democracy" is *not* a synonym for laissez-faire free-market capitalism, regardless of how many people (Americans primarily, it seems) believe otherwise.
The Torness reactor was shut down on June 28th because jellyfish clogged the seawater inlet filters.
I was going to mention that until I noticed you already had, and while searching the BBC site for a story link, I also saw that an Israeli nuclear plant was threatened by jellyfish less than a week ago.
Either this sort of thing is very common, there's something happening that makes it common just now (aside from the fact it's summer, else we'd be hearing about it every year), or it's pure coincidence.
So it will be as much like the original as the "I, Robot" movie was like Asimov's stories. What a waste of time. I'll skip this one...
Er... are you serious? I think it was implicit to anyone the reason the film would have little to do with the original game was... that the plot of the original game was virtually nonexistent anyway! Yes, Hollywood is notorious for dicking about with stuff, but in this case the joke would be trying to make a "film" using this as the plot:-
A group of earth-invading aliens moves in lockstep formation attempting to shoot lone ship on ground that's trying in turn to blast *them* from behind some shields. Plot twist- occasional bonus ship appears at top of screen. Er, that's it.
Even Michael Bay might struggle to stretch that to two hours of sound and fury.
In the late 1990's, early 2000's portable minidisc players/recorders were incredibly popular in Japan and Europe.
I wouldn't go so far as to say they were "incredibly" popular in the UK (i.e. Europe). They were still *nowhere* near as big as traditional cassettes nor CDs at their peak- but they definitely did seem to enjoy a noticeable boost of success around that time. What I didn't get was why MiniDisc suddenly became moderately popular here at the turn of the millennium, several years after the format had originally come out and apparently done nothing.
Two possible reasons- one, they reduced the price to the point where it became affordable to students and young people(?); two, I heard that they started a commercial push around that time. Don't know which, if either, is correct.
At any rate, after that brief flush of success, they seem to have disappeared, replaced by the rise of cheap MP3 players. They were never really around long enough to become established. I suspect they lasted longer in Japan because they were more popular there in the first place.