Isn't that noise? Or margin of error? Or sumthin' like that?
Looks like much ado about nothing, to me, just like a headline stating that IE's market share dropped.3% in a month. Actually, looks more like "Computerworld Has Slow News Day, Posts Stupid Article."
Are you kidding? I will finally be able to use Word, with check-spelling-as-you-type on, and not have a lag between pressing the key and the character appearing on the screen!
The iPod was never sold on their specs or capabilities, ever. I have never seen an iPod add that mentioned anything other than the size of the iPod (space and actual size) and that it played video.
Actually, that showed that Apple gave people the features they really wanted, and not the features overly-techy nerds decided they should want.
Here is where the gulf between Slashdot/Nerd culture and wider culture is most easily seen. Technofetishists see their computers and associated technology as an end unto itself: the fact that you got Beryl running on an unsupported video card, or that your mp3 player has two features no other one has, is enough to make it interesting. Most people in wider culture--the people you need to make a product a real hit--don't care about the technology in and of itself. They care about what the tech can do for them. So the fact that the iPod was and is relatively small and lightweight is a huge selling point. It easily fits into the pockets of a pair of jeans. I remember a lot of the early commentary on the iPod, a lot of which started with,"well, my mp3 player is only 25% larger than the iPod. .."
Although I have no insider knowledge, I will bet a month's Manhattan rent that Apple did a lot of research as to which features people really wanted in their portable devices before making the iPod. I'm sure they still do this. This is the reason they're so successful in the mp3 arena. It's not because of the usual Slashdot reasons, which usually boil down to 'people are dumb sheep and will buy whatever you tell them to.' It's because they sell a device which is simple to use and simple to understand.
The OSS community actually needs more thinking like this. The question shouldn't be, "why is Linux so cool?" The question should be, "how does Linux make my life easier than other operating systems?"
It didn't create the addiction. It merely handed the power back to the studios, who had for years been unable to produce much of anything that people wanted to see.
1) Most sci-fi is mediocre. This isn't a slam on the genre, as most of everything is mediocre: movies, books, records, etc. Thing is, we tend to remember the small handful of good movies which come out every year and forget about the thousands of them which ranged from sort of okay to downright awful. And it was always this way. Take a look back at the number of quality of films released in Hollywood's "Golden Era" and you will see the vast majority were B and C grade westerns/gangster films/romantic comedies and the like. We remember Casablance, but not the hundreds of awful movies released in 1942.
Walk into your local book store and cruise the sci-fi aisle. You will find some great stuff. You will also find a lot of crap.
2) is related to 1): there exists an audience of people who will go and see any POS just because it's science fiction. Once again, this isn't a slam on sci-fi fans. There also exist people who will go see anything because it's an action film, or a romance, or a thriller and so on. However, IMO, a lot of the sci-fi television and movies I see seem to have no redeeming value other than the fact they they are sci-fi. I never understood how people could enjoy Stargate or the new Star Trek series. Remove the gloss of sci-fi from them and judge them by the standards of drama--character, character development, dialogue and plot--and they're downright awful, one-dimensional characters meoldramaing their way around the universe spouting technobabble. The only thing they have going for them is spaceships, explosions and aliens.
All that said, there's an even bigger issue: we're arguing about something which is inherently subjective. Who's to say what's good sci-fi and what's bad sci-fi? I think that Deep Space 9 was so unceasingly awful as to be parody. I also know there are people here who found the show fantastic. This leaves us with two options. One, the people who think DS9 is great are idiots who should be beaten until they change their minds or, two, that there's no way we're ever going to agree on what's good and what's bad, because appreciation of art is entirely subjective.
Lucas does suck, tho. THX-1138 was great. Everything else he's done by himself sucks ass.
Forward:Soon, Americans Will Lack The Need To Move
Need? More like ability: this is obviously the next evolutionary step for our species. Why do we need these legs anyway? All they do is make me need to buy pants!
I've had a similar experience. Got a photo printer for Christmas which, of course, didn't include the A-to-B USB cable. I figured I check out the Best Buy which just opened near me: $33 for a fucking USB cable. So I checked out Radio Shack: $32 for the same cable. On impulse, I checked out Home Depot: $9. They have a whole aisle of cheaply-priced cables, including USB, Firewire, Cat 5, and Cat 6. I'm never going to Best Buy again.
Last week I had the latest Illustrator lock up solid on a dual 2 GHz G5 with 1.5 gigs of RAM, running 10.4.8. I wasn't even doing anything that complicated and Illustrator just froze when trying to open a file.
It was dead, Jim.
I am currently using ID on a 135ish page document and missing the speed with which Quark zips through long documents.
Although I'm not quite as down on Adobe as you are, I agree that their quality has been on a steady downhill slide ever since the original guys sold out and the marketers took over. Illustrator is the only program I've run into which can lock OS X up solid.
That aside, there's only one company which produces crappier code than Adobe, and that's Microsoft. I look forward to the steaming pile of shit Microsoft will shovel into all those boxes marked "Expression" in the same way I look forward to someone running down a hallway, headed towards a banana peel.
If you're a college kid with empty pockets I'm sure the MacBook is fine. If you want to do real work, you need a MacBook Pro
That's a stupid thing to say. I can do "real work" on my seven year old Pismo: it runs the latest versions of Quark/Photoshop and friends just fine. No, it doesn't run them as quickly as my G5, but they work with all functionality. I'm sure they work even better on a MacBook.
I'm thinking about getting a MacBook because it will give me a good, Intel-powered laptop for about $1,000. My G5 (or the Mar Pro which will eventually replace it) is my main machine, so I don't need to fork over $2,000+ for another heavyweight machine. I need something I can do basic stuff with when I travel, and which can do they heavyweight stuff in a pinch.
What is amazing to me is that Jobs/Apple have a near monopoly on digital music downloads/player
Apple does not have a monopoly on digital music players. From Wikipedia:
In economics, a monopoly (from the Latin word monopolium - Greek language monos, one + polein, to sell) is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a product or service. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods.
Apple is not the only provider of digital music players. There is no lack of competition in the marketplace for digital music players. Apple has the majority of the market because more people want to own iPods than any other music player. There is no conspiracy and no monopoly.
I personally don't think removing DRM would have any effect on iPod sales, as most people I know have bought little to no music from the iTMS. I think I've bought four albums from them.
What it comes down to is: There is nothing wrong with Linux. We just don't have a killer office suite, or a killer server based productivity suite. End of story.
But this is something wrong with Linux. I'm not bashing on Linux here: I run it on my laptop at home and enjoy screwing around with it. But the problem with your statement is that it takes only the technical side into account. Technically speaking there may be nothing wrong with Linux. But from a BUSINESS perspective, the lack of a killer office suite is a huge, huge problem.
Although there is a lot of talk about TCO and such with Linux versus OS X versus Windows, it's only part of the story. Corporations, especially the large corporations which lie behind Microsoft's market share dominance, have money to burn, so it Windows costs them x more bucks per user per year, it isn't a huge issue. What they need, however, is an office suite which can make read and use the millions of documents they have on hand and the millions they need to produce We all know what office suite that is. This problem isn't unique to Linux. If MS Office for OS X disappeared overnight it would be a disaster for Apple.
Part of the problem of getting Linux accepted into wider circles is the habit of arguing on technical merit alone.
Other peeves? Integrating energy saving w/ the screen saver, for instance; if I've configured the Finder to disable the screen saver when I stick the mouse in one corner of the screen, I don't want the system to turn off the monitor or go into sleep mode, either. Another minor screen saver peeve is that once it trips, no matter how quickly I get back to the machine, I have to unlock it with my password. XP gives me a few seconds before locking up the machine.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here, as the three things you mention can be controlled independently of one another.
They transfer their kinetic energy to whatever poor sumbitch they happen to hit?
My dad worked on a similar weapon for the DoD in the late 80s and early 90s. Since it's a kinetic weapon the projectile as such doesn't matter much. It's basically just a hunk of solid metal aerodynamic enough not to miss the target.
And the seven people who watch it will enjoy the hell out of it.
If you want your movie to go into even a wide artistic release--say, art houses in all of the major cities in the U.S.--you are going to need to deal with the mainstream distribution system. You are going to need a print of your film from which to make dupes (art theaters do not use digital projectors because of the loss of quality), you will need to pay something like DuArt in NYC to make the film dupes, you will need agreements with the theaters to show the film, you will have to get the film to the theaters, etc. So, while you can link to your film on your website, you film will not be seen by more than a handful of people. There is simply no other system in place at the moment to get your film into theaters. Period. End of sentence.
Now, you could do a DVD-only release and get the thing out that way, but that's a different thread.
Is there anything stopping you today from producing your own hit movie and releasing it without DRM?
Other than having $1,000,000 (almost nothing in Hollywood terms) and no access to the distribution stream needed to get a movie into theatres? Not at all. . .
I'm not actually disagreeing with you, only pointing out what I see as a fallacy in your argument. Making the actual movie, assuming one has money, talent and time, is not actually the hard part. The hard part is getting the movie into theatres around the country so that people can see it. So, while technology has massively lowered the barriers to entry for making the actual film, the system which exists to distribute movies is still a closed and difficult system. That will probably change some day, but at the moment there is not really other system in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that noise? Or margin of error? Or sumthin' like that? Looks like much ado about nothing, to me, just like a headline stating that IE's market share dropped .3% in a month. Actually, looks more like "Computerworld Has Slow News Day, Posts Stupid Article."
Are you kidding? I will finally be able to use Word, with check-spelling-as-you-type on, and not have a lag between pressing the key and the character appearing on the screen!
Well said.
Actually, that showed that Apple gave people the features they really wanted, and not the features overly-techy nerds decided they should want.
Here is where the gulf between Slashdot/Nerd culture and wider culture is most easily seen. Technofetishists see their computers and associated technology as an end unto itself: the fact that you got Beryl running on an unsupported video card, or that your mp3 player has two features no other one has, is enough to make it interesting. Most people in wider culture--the people you need to make a product a real hit--don't care about the technology in and of itself. They care about what the tech can do for them. So the fact that the iPod was and is relatively small and lightweight is a huge selling point. It easily fits into the pockets of a pair of jeans. I remember a lot of the early commentary on the iPod, a lot of which started with ,"well, my mp3 player is only 25% larger than the iPod. . ."
Although I have no insider knowledge, I will bet a month's Manhattan rent that Apple did a lot of research as to which features people really wanted in their portable devices before making the iPod. I'm sure they still do this. This is the reason they're so successful in the mp3 arena. It's not because of the usual Slashdot reasons, which usually boil down to 'people are dumb sheep and will buy whatever you tell them to.' It's because they sell a device which is simple to use and simple to understand.
The OSS community actually needs more thinking like this. The question shouldn't be, "why is Linux so cool?" The question should be, "how does Linux make my life easier than other operating systems?"
I've been looking for something to complement by gold-plated Hummer.
Because people will go see movies, even if most suck, because that's all there is to see.
It didn't create the addiction. It merely handed the power back to the studios, who had for years been unable to produce much of anything that people wanted to see.
1) Most sci-fi is mediocre. This isn't a slam on the genre, as most of everything is mediocre: movies, books, records, etc. Thing is, we tend to remember the small handful of good movies which come out every year and forget about the thousands of them which ranged from sort of okay to downright awful. And it was always this way. Take a look back at the number of quality of films released in Hollywood's "Golden Era" and you will see the vast majority were B and C grade westerns/gangster films/romantic comedies and the like. We remember Casablance, but not the hundreds of awful movies released in 1942.
Walk into your local book store and cruise the sci-fi aisle. You will find some great stuff. You will also find a lot of crap.
2) is related to 1): there exists an audience of people who will go and see any POS just because it's science fiction. Once again, this isn't a slam on sci-fi fans. There also exist people who will go see anything because it's an action film, or a romance, or a thriller and so on. However, IMO, a lot of the sci-fi television and movies I see seem to have no redeeming value other than the fact they they are sci-fi. I never understood how people could enjoy Stargate or the new Star Trek series. Remove the gloss of sci-fi from them and judge them by the standards of drama--character, character development, dialogue and plot--and they're downright awful, one-dimensional characters meoldramaing their way around the universe spouting technobabble. The only thing they have going for them is spaceships, explosions and aliens.
All that said, there's an even bigger issue: we're arguing about something which is inherently subjective. Who's to say what's good sci-fi and what's bad sci-fi? I think that Deep Space 9 was so unceasingly awful as to be parody. I also know there are people here who found the show fantastic. This leaves us with two options. One, the people who think DS9 is great are idiots who should be beaten until they change their minds or, two, that there's no way we're ever going to agree on what's good and what's bad, because appreciation of art is entirely subjective.
Lucas does suck, tho. THX-1138 was great. Everything else he's done by himself sucks ass.
Apparently the Windows machine in question had its power cable knocked out by the cleaning crew about six months ago. . .
Forward: Soon, Americans Will Lack The Need To Move
Need? More like ability: this is obviously the next evolutionary step for our species. Why do we need these legs anyway? All they do is make me need to buy pants!
Back: Miller Light? In a fucking can?
Without Slashdot dupes.
I've had a similar experience. Got a photo printer for Christmas which, of course, didn't include the A-to-B USB cable. I figured I check out the Best Buy which just opened near me: $33 for a fucking USB cable. So I checked out Radio Shack: $32 for the same cable. On impulse, I checked out Home Depot: $9. They have a whole aisle of cheaply-priced cables, including USB, Firewire, Cat 5, and Cat 6. I'm never going to Best Buy again.
It was dead, Jim.
I am currently using ID on a 135ish page document and missing the speed with which Quark zips through long documents.
There's also people like me, for whom any computer purchase is a tax deduction, making the phone essentially free.
That aside, there's only one company which produces crappier code than Adobe, and that's Microsoft. I look forward to the steaming pile of shit Microsoft will shovel into all those boxes marked "Expression" in the same way I look forward to someone running down a hallway, headed towards a banana peel.
That's a stupid thing to say. I can do "real work" on my seven year old Pismo: it runs the latest versions of Quark/Photoshop and friends just fine. No, it doesn't run them as quickly as my G5, but they work with all functionality. I'm sure they work even better on a MacBook.
I'm thinking about getting a MacBook because it will give me a good, Intel-powered laptop for about $1,000. My G5 (or the Mar Pro which will eventually replace it) is my main machine, so I don't need to fork over $2,000+ for another heavyweight machine. I need something I can do basic stuff with when I travel, and which can do they heavyweight stuff in a pinch.
What will they think of next?
Apple does not have a monopoly on digital music players. From Wikipedia:
In economics, a monopoly (from the Latin word monopolium - Greek language monos, one + polein, to sell) is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a product or service. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods.
Apple is not the only provider of digital music players. There is no lack of competition in the marketplace for digital music players. Apple has the majority of the market because more people want to own iPods than any other music player. There is no conspiracy and no monopoly.
I personally don't think removing DRM would have any effect on iPod sales, as most people I know have bought little to no music from the iTMS. I think I've bought four albums from them.
Although there is a lot of talk about TCO and such with Linux versus OS X versus Windows, it's only part of the story. Corporations, especially the large corporations which lie behind Microsoft's market share dominance, have money to burn, so it Windows costs them x more bucks per user per year, it isn't a huge issue. What they need, however, is an office suite which can make read and use the millions of documents they have on hand and the millions they need to produce We all know what office suite that is. This problem isn't unique to Linux. If MS Office for OS X disappeared overnight it would be a disaster for Apple.
Part of the problem of getting Linux accepted into wider circles is the habit of arguing on technical merit alone.
Speaking for all Americans, I apologize.
I don't quite understand what you're saying here, as the three things you mention can be controlled independently of one another.
They transfer their kinetic energy to whatever poor sumbitch they happen to hit?
My dad worked on a similar weapon for the DoD in the late 80s and early 90s. Since it's a kinetic weapon the projectile as such doesn't matter much. It's basically just a hunk of solid metal aerodynamic enough not to miss the target.
If you want your movie to go into even a wide artistic release--say, art houses in all of the major cities in the U.S.--you are going to need to deal with the mainstream distribution system. You are going to need a print of your film from which to make dupes (art theaters do not use digital projectors because of the loss of quality), you will need to pay something like DuArt in NYC to make the film dupes, you will need agreements with the theaters to show the film, you will have to get the film to the theaters, etc. So, while you can link to your film on your website, you film will not be seen by more than a handful of people. There is simply no other system in place at the moment to get your film into theaters. Period. End of sentence.
Now, you could do a DVD-only release and get the thing out that way, but that's a different thread.
Other than having $1,000,000 (almost nothing in Hollywood terms) and no access to the distribution stream needed to get a movie into theatres? Not at all. . .
I'm not actually disagreeing with you, only pointing out what I see as a fallacy in your argument. Making the actual movie, assuming one has money, talent and time, is not actually the hard part. The hard part is getting the movie into theatres around the country so that people can see it. So, while technology has massively lowered the barriers to entry for making the actual film, the system which exists to distribute movies is still a closed and difficult system. That will probably change some day, but at the moment there is not really other system in place.