the business model is fucked up. Price the DOS-box accordingly, and separate the games from the hardware. This is like giving mobile phones away for 10 cents and then bringing in the money on charges... totally fucked up as a long term business strategy.
I bought a relatively expensive home theater system to watch DVD:s. Now, if they had sold this system for a bargain and then would have tied it to DVD sales for 50 bucks a title, I would never had considered buying DVD:s in the first place.
Likewise, I have no game console, because the games prices are outrageous, which of course spurs pirating (unlike the DVD market, where prices are not unreasonable; the talk on piracy there is Valenti baloney).
If anything is hurting M$, it is their own greed. Selling an expensive DOS-box plus fifty cheap games would benefit both Microsoft and the customer much more than selling an inexpensive DOS-box, ten expensive games and thirty pirated games.
Furthermore, if there was no such licensing hassle, it would be a god damn big plus if the DOS-box could play PlayStation games! It would kill off PS, because DOS-box hardware is newer and better.
Chimera is promising, but it really only has one advantage over Mozilla, and that is Cocoa. Mozilla currently does a tremendously poor job of rendering type other than Lamerican ASCII. Most of Unicode looks like shit in Mozilla because they have failed to implement ATSUI, whereas Chimera uses ATSUI by default (being a Cocoa app). Add an eth or a thorn in code, and it looks like shit (rendered with another font), and this also goes for virtually all of the characters in Latin-Extended and other Unicode blocks.
Mozilla also has a cosmetic problem in that it looks like a fucking WIN-DOS app with that damn ugly default theme of theirs ("Modern", although it looks like MS-DOS to me).
This aside, Mac OS X users deserve not to wait another three years for Chimera 1.0. Mozilla is here, now, and it is the best, all in all. Mac OS X users can go to bugzilla and advocate for 1) clean and full ATSUI support; 2) Services support (needn't be Cocoa for that); and 3) Pinstripe and Mozilla bundled as default themes.
Btw, why the fuck do you advocate for Chimera while at the same time being a proponent for the non-Cocoa app Thoth!? Halime is a Cocoa news app that beats the shit out of anything in the field, especially for those of us who mix languages all the time.
Very probable in the high end line. Because that would essentially make a non-refutable Wintel killer. It's about prestige more than anything else. Why blow the competitive advantage the MP road will offer with really good processors?
A dual 970 system with OS X Miaumiau 10.7... the only reason left for hard core Lunix users to complain would be the one-button mouse.
The fact that the networking makes Windows XP look like it's from the 80's DOES NOT MATTER!
That's funny. So when my Jagwire equipped boxen, connected to a cable modem and a hub, communicate with each other -- thru the ISP! -- at 56k modem speed or less, this means that the competetition does even worse?
Yes, you become annoyed whenever you hear someone misuse the "grammer". However, what you learn is a completely written language, whereas natural languages are foremost spoken. All languages, including Latin, have begun as spoken languages, and the written version is just modeled on the spoken one. The written langauge has much less tolerance for mistakes than the spoken version, since you cannot use gestures, tones and interactive stuff (direct questions!) when communicating in writing.
I have the same neurotic symptoms that you do, but they have somewhat faded since i started learning Putonghua, which is the opposite of Latin (no inflections, no tempus, no sexus but very heavy reliance on word placement). Our Romance languages can handle this continuing "degradation", and what is considered bad grammar today is just normal tomorrow. It has always been so, and it is just evolution.
Learning Latin is not going to directly help anybody in any career. It is not true that scientists need Latin, and neither is it true that learning Latin helps learning other languages (because the many years you studied Latin could have been used actually studying those other langauges...).
Knowing Latin was crucial in Europe in the middle ages, just as English is somewhat crucial today for those who plan to go abroad. Just more so, especially if one wanted to be a priest or another scholar. After the birth of national states, when national languages were being used in favor of Latin, Latin was still essential for those who planned on an academic career. Latin has been required for higher education into the 1900s in some places. Latin was also used as a neutral language in diplomatic circles, until French overtook that role in the 1700s.
Because of all this, Latin has been used as a social tool, as a means to to differentiate the commons from the elite. But the commons could also use Latin as a springboard to higher social status, for instance by having access to education, becoming a doctor or whatever. There is no such social benefits with learning Latin today, or at least they are minimal.
Instead, the reward is a personal one, of achievement, a mental kick of mastering something pretty difficult, and having established connections with the past, for two thousand years of history. It is meaningful to converse privately with the old Roman scholars and philosophers, and it gives satisfaction knowing those citations and quotations some people throw to show off.
Latin is a key to understanding much of European history and the development of European languages (English has borrowed heavily from Latin), but it is not essential in any career but linguistic ones. Look at it as a value-added piece of knowledge that may give some (social) bonus here and there.
Ah yah! You miss the point. Completely. Educational facilities are supposed to be at the forefront of things, not a copy of the real world. Therefore, they should not teach the techniques of 1996 or today, but of tomorrow. And tomorrow we will, believe it or not, use mature software that can deal with standards across the board. At one point, when corporate interests say so, the boat will turn, and the students of today should be prepared for that very moment. Learning 1996ish HTML can be done at home in a few hours. We don't need to waste university resources for that.
I am again stressing the university attitudes when the web was in its infancy, when the first servers were installed and the students became the first to get involved in web design. This was a few years before it all spread to the masses. The colleges of today should be equally at the forefront, preparing students for what will come, not for what is.
I recently signed up for a bunch of smaller classes at a newer and smaller Swedish college. They are 100% M$ and only give "support" for "WS_FTP" and such things.
The labs are all equipped with WIN-DOS, with a rare exception for the film editing classes, where classy Mac computers are used (and the executives also use TiBooks on WiFi).
The teacher (not a professor) in the graphics class is praising his M$ certification, but I wish he could get a more relevant Adobe certification instead. He doesn't even use Adobe, but has opted for Corel instead. In the real world, where I have been for a while before returning to school, the combination WIN-DOS + Corel PhotoPaint does not exist. The labs don't have Photoshop or Illustrator, so it's gotta be a money issue.
The web classes have a similar approach. They teach outdated 1996ish table-based and pixel-based HTML for Exploiter and Netscape 4.x, and don't give a fuck about standards and more legitimate web techniques. The WIN-DOS labs have Internet Exploiter 5 and Netscape Communicator 4.79. Mozilla is not known, and they really don't care about the Mozilla-based Netscape 7.
Now, at larger and more traditional educational institutions, Sun boxen and Macs are used to a much higher degree. When the web was born circa 1993, the sysadmins at a technical educational facility quickly installed NCSA Mosaic and set up a web server. This is more in line what I would expect from educational institutions, being ahead and being more advanced than what they require at a small company office...
Fortunately, they still do have a more Unix and Mac oriented view at those larger and traditional facilities, but I fear that they too will be swamped into the black M$ hole one of these days.
You can use Disney characters in your creative work without infringing on copyright. Disney's interpretation of Snowwhite is present in Shrek, for instance. But it doesn't make or break the film, so it isn't an infringement.
Any comedian can also use the voice of Donald Duck without infringing on anyone's rights. Parodies and humorous interpretations in general cannot be a copyright infringement, and the only reason such cases surface every now and then is because of big business and its hords of lawyers scaring people off.
Copyright does indeed entitle you to making dervative works. That is why Windows is not a copyright infringement of Mac OS (because it has substantial differences). That is why Bentley is not a copyright infringement of Rolls-Royce. That is why Macslash is not a copyright infringement of Slashdot. That is why PAL is not a copyright infringement of NTSC. That is why VHS is not a copyright infringement of Betamax. That is why there are different types of cars, sound systems, furniture, bottles, chewing gums, soda pops, and so on. It must be so, unless we want a stale and static society where nothing ever gets invented and improved.
The only criterion for copyright is that the copyright is not a plain rip-off, that it adds something unique to the derivative, that someone is not trying to profit on someone else's labor. In the case with Arne Anka, that duck takes the same shape as Donald Duck but targets an adult audience (and can therefore not infringe on Disney's potential revenues -- that is, it is not a copyright infringement).
If I translate a book, I retain the copyright of the translation, although I didn't contribute to the story. What is copyrighted is the creativity going into wording the translation appropriately. It isn't a pure rip-off, but an adaptation. The publisher/author still retains the copyright on the story, but copyright on the whole is expanded.
Disney would like to own the concept of a duck forever, but it ain't so. Not yet anyway, and certainly not in the rest of the world. The US may have a fling with fascism currently, but hopefully all will be fine eventually when some serious dudes in politics realize the consequences.
As for me, I am happily living in a country where a minister of the government was cleared from charges of giving a friend a CD with a ripped mp3 collection...
Disney had a rich culture of stories to draw from and reinterpret. They are trying to prevent the next generation of storytellers and media producers from doing to them what they did to earlier content creators.
What stops you from making your own interpretation of any Grimm, Andersen, Carrol or even Disney story? Want to interpret the interpretation of the interpretation of Snowwhite? Please go ahead, but please draw your own fucking 24 pictures per second of animation. The idea of Snowwhite, and any interpretation thereof, is forever free as long as you put your own labor into the presentation, and as long as it isn't a genuine ripoff.
Arne Anka (Arne Duck) [http://www.lysator.liu.se/~mosh/arne_eng.html] is an interpretation of Donald Duck as a Slashdot geek or something, and it is a perfectly legal interpretation, despite the resemblance with the real duck. It so happened [http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/~erikt/comics/arneAnka.h tml] that when Disney complained, Arne was supplied with another bill, but later attached a loose bill to regain his initial Donald-like features... Disney gave up.
Just seven weeks late... and those security updates are the only updates coming (all of which fuck around with MY preferences). IE 5 for the Mac is getting very old and is way surpassed by Mozilla now. I don't use it anymore. R.I.P.
Do you expect a professional news organization to adopt the posture of a place like/. and use innuendo, bias, sarcasm, unsupported assertions and unverified claims to support their own agenda? The BBC report is a straight news piece containing not a single word of BBC opinion.
The trend is very clear when you watch their program "Click Online" on BBC World. They are extremely windows-centric and Microsoft friendly. Once in a while, they have a compensationary report on Mac or Linux, but they are in general not very comprehensive.
Once, they had an all-out death match between Mac and Wintel, where they compared working in Photoshop on XP and X. The only problem is that there was no Photoshop for X at that time. Did they use a beta, then? Nope. They used Photoshop in the Classic environment... (although they didn't menton this)
"innuendo, bias, sarcasm, unsupported assertions and unverified claims" are exactly what they use on Click Online, more or less all the time. Just recently they put an old chap doing some video editing on a Wintel box, explaining concepts like "digital hub", "Firewire" and such. Now, where have I heard that before?
... that if you are not guilty of anything, it's not going to matter to you if the po-lice installs a few cameras in yer house.
After all, you are not pursuing any criminable activity within your own walls, are ya!?
I'd say, that if you _do_ mind being watched by an innocent camera, you behave suspiciously, and are probably guilty of a crime. After all, people who have nothing to hide usually cooperate with us.
If you do not want to cooperate with us, we will just assume that you in your house run a brothel, manufacture alcoholic beverages, grow marijuana, rip-mix-burn intellectual property protected material, commit sodomy, engage in adultery, prepare for polygami, manufacture Anthrax, communicate on ham radio with suspected terrorists and overthrowers of state, download lewd material on the internet, develop open source Communist applications, and showing anti-patriot emotions posting to unconventional and unorthodox bulletin board systems.
You, sir, are a threat to our free Christian nation, as given to us by God! You have the right to remain silence, be beaten to death in jail, be transferred to Guantanama Bay for unlimited time, be executed in our humane criminable system even if later DNA tests will prove you're less guilty than we first assumed. Everything you say can and will be recorded and used against you, anywhere, anytime, anyhow.
Specifically, MS leaves out certain functionality for 'strategic' reasons that essentially leave the Mac platform lacking in certain specific areas.
How is it 'strategic' leaving out Unicode support in Office X (Entourage excluded)? Anyone developing for Mac OS X had better leave that old MacRoman crap behind as quickly as possible.
Fine, there might be a few secretaries around that would need something bloated like Office X to write their ASCII letters, but they would be much better off with Wintel boxen anyway, as those are designed for that very purpose.
For the rest of us, Microsoft has not one single piece of software to offer that hasn't one or several vastly superior competitors. Microsoft isn't needed on the Mac platform. Everytime people say that Apple depends on the presence of Microsoft, I am stunned. How do they assert this statement? It is obvisously false.
Microsoft Macintosh software is not of 'fairly decent quality'. It is crap. Open up Office X and see how it will 'Optimize Font Menu Performance' for a few minutes (proprietary API that is not needed). It is very slow, very bloated, and very un-mac (OS X)-like.
Likewise, open up IE and see how it will overwrite your general internet prefs with garbage, change the home page and a lot of other intrusions. PoS.
Oh, shut up. Free your mind and don't let Micros~ limit your design, because that is exactly what they want.
I have come to the conclusion that I have to use PNG, unless I want to be constrained to one single color on all pages or have multiple copies of every recurring image. PNG rocks.
It is far worse with MNG. I can't think of any single app that can handle it or even convert GIF to MNG on the Mac.
15MB of email storage, forwarding and POP/IMAP access: $40+
Home page creation and hosting: $60
Focken anti-virus software? For a Mac!? This is surely a joke?
Do I need 100 MB online storage? Nope. Especially not if it is gonna be bandwidth limited in a ridiculous way, as it is now.
Email storage is fine, but currently Apple filters my mail, and I have no way of knowing what the filters look like. Will this be the same with.Mock?
Online backup?? Get the fuck out of here!
Homepage creation? Does anybody actually use the current home page creator? Just upload your stuff via WebDAV and bypass the ads...
Sorry, Steve, but you are a fucking moron. You just blew it big time. We all know you are a rich dude with airplanes for bonus, but most Mac people cannot in any way justify a fucking $99 a year.
For those who can afford it, it is a really shitty deal anyway. iTools is cools, but since it is free it doesn't have advanced stuff like perl, SSI, shell scripting, log analysis and so on, like most hosting services offer. Fuck, the iTools server isn't even configured properly! It seems like.Mock will not have *any* of these relevant tools, but instead some windowsy calendar, "seamless" (=painfully slow) integration with the FInder instead of fast FTP and so on. Who needs that shit?
Blech... gotta puke. This hurts so fucking bad in my Mac heart...
Because MPEG is just another codec, although an open standard. MPEG plays fine in several media players, but it won't play without a media player (= decoder application or hardware decoder).
Besides, the actual *file format* for containing MPEG-4 streams happens to be the Quicktime 4 file format. This means MPEG-4 content is always native in Quicktime, whereas the "Div X" (MPEG-4 video stream with layer III audio in an AVI container) is like having DVD stuff on a CD. Close but no cigar.
Slashdot Mirror
the business model is fucked up. Price the DOS-box accordingly, and separate the games from the hardware. This is like giving mobile phones away for 10 cents and then bringing in the money on charges... totally fucked up as a long term business strategy. I bought a relatively expensive home theater system to watch DVD:s. Now, if they had sold this system for a bargain and then would have tied it to DVD sales for 50 bucks a title, I would never had considered buying DVD:s in the first place. Likewise, I have no game console, because the games prices are outrageous, which of course spurs pirating (unlike the DVD market, where prices are not unreasonable; the talk on piracy there is Valenti baloney). If anything is hurting M$, it is their own greed. Selling an expensive DOS-box plus fifty cheap games would benefit both Microsoft and the customer much more than selling an inexpensive DOS-box, ten expensive games and thirty pirated games. Furthermore, if there was no such licensing hassle, it would be a god damn big plus if the DOS-box could play PlayStation games! It would kill off PS, because DOS-box hardware is newer and better.
Chimera is promising, but it really only has one advantage over Mozilla, and that is Cocoa. Mozilla currently does a tremendously poor job of rendering type other than Lamerican ASCII. Most of Unicode looks like shit in Mozilla because they have failed to implement ATSUI, whereas Chimera uses ATSUI by default (being a Cocoa app). Add an eth or a thorn in code, and it looks like shit (rendered with another font), and this also goes for virtually all of the characters in Latin-Extended and other Unicode blocks.
Mozilla also has a cosmetic problem in that it looks like a fucking WIN-DOS app with that damn ugly default theme of theirs ("Modern", although it looks like MS-DOS to me).
This aside, Mac OS X users deserve not to wait another three years for Chimera 1.0. Mozilla is here, now, and it is the best, all in all. Mac OS X users can go to bugzilla and advocate for 1) clean and full ATSUI support; 2) Services support (needn't be Cocoa for that); and 3) Pinstripe and Mozilla bundled as default themes.
Btw, why the fuck do you advocate for Chimera while at the same time being a proponent for the non-Cocoa app Thoth!? Halime is a Cocoa news app that beats the shit out of anything in the field, especially for those of us who mix languages all the time.
Death to MacRoman.
Very probable in the high end line. Because that would essentially make a non-refutable Wintel killer. It's about prestige more than anything else. Why blow the competitive advantage the MP road will offer with really good processors?
A dual 970 system with OS X Miaumiau 10.7... the only reason left for hard core Lunix users to complain would be the one-button mouse.
That's funny. So when my Jagwire equipped boxen, connected to a cable modem and a hub, communicate with each other -- thru the ISP! -- at 56k modem speed or less, this means that the competetition does even worse?
Yes, you become annoyed whenever you hear someone misuse the "grammer". However, what you learn is a completely written language, whereas natural languages are foremost spoken. All languages, including Latin, have begun as spoken languages, and the written version is just modeled on the spoken one. The written langauge has much less tolerance for mistakes than the spoken version, since you cannot use gestures, tones and interactive stuff (direct questions!) when communicating in writing.
I have the same neurotic symptoms that you do, but they have somewhat faded since i started learning Putonghua, which is the opposite of Latin (no inflections, no tempus, no sexus but very heavy reliance on word placement). Our Romance languages can handle this continuing "degradation", and what is considered bad grammar today is just normal tomorrow. It has always been so, and it is just evolution.
Learning Latin is not going to directly help anybody in any career. It is not true that scientists need Latin, and neither is it true that learning Latin helps learning other languages (because the many years you studied Latin could have been used actually studying those other langauges...).
Knowing Latin was crucial in Europe in the middle ages, just as English is somewhat crucial today for those who plan to go abroad. Just more so, especially if one wanted to be a priest or another scholar. After the birth of national states, when national languages were being used in favor of Latin, Latin was still essential for those who planned on an academic career. Latin has been required for higher education into the 1900s in some places. Latin was also used as a neutral language in diplomatic circles, until French overtook that role in the 1700s.
Because of all this, Latin has been used as a social tool, as a means to to differentiate the commons from the elite. But the commons could also use Latin as a springboard to higher social status, for instance by having access to education, becoming a doctor or whatever. There is no such social benefits with learning Latin today, or at least they are minimal.
Instead, the reward is a personal one, of achievement, a mental kick of mastering something pretty difficult, and having established connections with the past, for two thousand years of history. It is meaningful to converse privately with the old Roman scholars and philosophers, and it gives satisfaction knowing those citations and quotations some people throw to show off.
Latin is a key to understanding much of European history and the development of European languages (English has borrowed heavily from Latin), but it is not essential in any career but linguistic ones. Look at it as a value-added piece of knowledge that may give some (social) bonus here and there.
Ah yah! You miss the point. Completely. Educational facilities are supposed to be at the forefront of things, not a copy of the real world. Therefore, they should not teach the techniques of 1996 or today, but of tomorrow. And tomorrow we will, believe it or not, use mature software that can deal with standards across the board. At one point, when corporate interests say so, the boat will turn, and the students of today should be prepared for that very moment. Learning 1996ish HTML can be done at home in a few hours. We don't need to waste university resources for that.
I am again stressing the university attitudes when the web was in its infancy, when the first servers were installed and the students became the first to get involved in web design. This was a few years before it all spread to the masses. The colleges of today should be equally at the forefront, preparing students for what will come, not for what is.
I recently signed up for a bunch of smaller classes at a newer and smaller Swedish college. They are 100% M$ and only give "support" for "WS_FTP" and such things.
The labs are all equipped with WIN-DOS, with a rare exception for the film editing classes, where classy Mac computers are used (and the executives also use TiBooks on WiFi).
The teacher (not a professor) in the graphics class is praising his M$ certification, but I wish he could get a more relevant Adobe certification instead. He doesn't even use Adobe, but has opted for Corel instead. In the real world, where I have been for a while before returning to school, the combination WIN-DOS + Corel PhotoPaint does not exist. The labs don't have Photoshop or Illustrator, so it's gotta be a money issue.
The web classes have a similar approach. They teach outdated 1996ish table-based and pixel-based HTML for Exploiter and Netscape 4.x, and don't give a fuck about standards and more legitimate web techniques. The WIN-DOS labs have Internet Exploiter 5 and Netscape Communicator 4.79. Mozilla is not known, and they really don't care about the Mozilla-based Netscape 7.
Now, at larger and more traditional educational institutions, Sun boxen and Macs are used to a much higher degree. When the web was born circa 1993, the sysadmins at a technical educational facility quickly installed NCSA Mosaic and set up a web server. This is more in line what I would expect from educational institutions, being ahead and being more advanced than what they require at a small company office...
Fortunately, they still do have a more Unix and Mac oriented view at those larger and traditional facilities, but I fear that they too will be swamped into the black M$ hole one of these days.
You can use Disney characters in your creative work without infringing on copyright. Disney's interpretation of Snowwhite is present in Shrek, for instance. But it doesn't make or break the film, so it isn't an infringement.
Any comedian can also use the voice of Donald Duck without infringing on anyone's rights. Parodies and humorous interpretations in general cannot be a copyright infringement, and the only reason such cases surface every now and then is because of big business and its hords of lawyers scaring people off.
Copyright does indeed entitle you to making dervative works. That is why Windows is not a copyright infringement of Mac OS (because it has substantial differences). That is why Bentley is not a copyright infringement of Rolls-Royce. That is why Macslash is not a copyright infringement of Slashdot. That is why PAL is not a copyright infringement of NTSC. That is why VHS is not a copyright infringement of Betamax. That is why there are different types of cars, sound systems, furniture, bottles, chewing gums, soda pops, and so on. It must be so, unless we want a stale and static society where nothing ever gets invented and improved.
The only criterion for copyright is that the copyright is not a plain rip-off, that it adds something unique to the derivative, that someone is not trying to profit on someone else's labor. In the case with Arne Anka, that duck takes the same shape as Donald Duck but targets an adult audience (and can therefore not infringe on Disney's potential revenues -- that is, it is not a copyright infringement).
If I translate a book, I retain the copyright of the translation, although I didn't contribute to the story. What is copyrighted is the creativity going into wording the translation appropriately. It isn't a pure rip-off, but an adaptation. The publisher/author still retains the copyright on the story, but copyright on the whole is expanded.
Disney would like to own the concept of a duck forever, but it ain't so. Not yet anyway, and certainly not in the rest of the world. The US may have a fling with fascism currently, but hopefully all will be fine eventually when some serious dudes in politics realize the consequences.
As for me, I am happily living in a country where a minister of the government was cleared from charges of giving a friend a CD with a ripped mp3 collection...
What stops you from making your own interpretation of any Grimm, Andersen, Carrol or even Disney story? Want to interpret the interpretation of the interpretation of Snowwhite? Please go ahead, but please draw your own fucking 24 pictures per second of animation. The idea of Snowwhite, and any interpretation thereof, is forever free as long as you put your own labor into the presentation, and as long as it isn't a genuine ripoff.
Arne Anka (Arne Duck) [http://www.lysator.liu.se/~mosh/arne_eng.html] is an interpretation of Donald Duck as a Slashdot geek or something, and it is a perfectly legal interpretation, despite the resemblance with the real duck. It so happened [http://lcg-www.uia.ac.be/~erikt/comics/arneAnka.h tml] that when Disney complained, Arne was supplied with another bill, but later attached a loose bill to regain his initial Donald-like features... Disney gave up.
Just seven weeks late... and those security updates are the only updates coming (all of which fuck around with MY preferences). IE 5 for the Mac is getting very old and is way surpassed by Mozilla now. I don't use it anymore. R.I.P.
Applied Engineering Botany
The trend is very clear when you watch their program "Click Online" on BBC World. They are extremely windows-centric and Microsoft friendly. Once in a while, they have a compensationary report on Mac or Linux, but they are in general not very comprehensive.
Once, they had an all-out death match between Mac and Wintel, where they compared working in Photoshop on XP and X. The only problem is that there was no Photoshop for X at that time. Did they use a beta, then? Nope. They used Photoshop in the Classic environment... (although they didn't menton this)
"innuendo, bias, sarcasm, unsupported assertions and unverified claims" are exactly what they use on Click Online, more or less all the time. Just recently they put an old chap doing some video editing on a Wintel box, explaining concepts like "digital hub", "Firewire" and such. Now, where have I heard that before?
... that if you are not guilty of anything, it's not going to matter to you if the po-lice installs a few cameras in yer house.
After all, you are not pursuing any criminable activity within your own walls, are ya!?
I'd say, that if you _do_ mind being watched by an innocent camera, you behave suspiciously, and are probably guilty of a crime. After all, people who have nothing to hide usually cooperate with us.
If you do not want to cooperate with us, we will just assume that you in your house run a brothel, manufacture alcoholic beverages, grow marijuana, rip-mix-burn intellectual property protected material, commit sodomy, engage in adultery, prepare for polygami, manufacture Anthrax, communicate on ham radio with suspected terrorists and overthrowers of state, download lewd material on the internet, develop open source Communist applications, and showing anti-patriot emotions posting to unconventional and unorthodox bulletin board systems.
You, sir, are a threat to our free Christian nation, as given to us by God! You have the right to remain silence, be beaten to death in jail, be transferred to Guantanama Bay for unlimited time, be executed in our humane criminable system even if later DNA tests will prove you're less guilty than we first assumed. Everything you say can and will be recorded and used against you, anywhere, anytime, anyhow.
How is it 'strategic' leaving out Unicode support in Office X (Entourage excluded)? Anyone developing for Mac OS X had better leave that old MacRoman crap behind as quickly as possible.
Fine, there might be a few secretaries around that would need something bloated like Office X to write their ASCII letters, but they would be much better off with Wintel boxen anyway, as those are designed for that very purpose.
For the rest of us, Microsoft has not one single piece of software to offer that hasn't one or several vastly superior competitors. Microsoft isn't needed on the Mac platform. Everytime people say that Apple depends on the presence of Microsoft, I am stunned. How do they assert this statement? It is obvisously false.
Microsoft Macintosh software is not of 'fairly decent quality'. It is crap. Open up Office X and see how it will 'Optimize Font Menu Performance' for a few minutes (proprietary API that is not needed). It is very slow, very bloated, and very un-mac (OS X)-like.
Likewise, open up IE and see how it will overwrite your general internet prefs with garbage, change the home page and a lot of other intrusions. PoS.
Oh, shut up. Free your mind and don't let Micros~ limit your design, because that is exactly what they want.
I have come to the conclusion that I have to use PNG, unless I want to be constrained to one single color on all pages or have multiple copies of every recurring image. PNG rocks.
It is far worse with MNG. I can't think of any single app that can handle it or even convert GIF to MNG on the Mac.
Focken anti-virus software? For a Mac!? This is surely a joke?
Do I need 100 MB online storage? Nope. Especially not if it is gonna be bandwidth limited in a ridiculous way, as it is now.
Email storage is fine, but currently Apple filters my mail, and I have no way of knowing what the filters look like. Will this be the same with .Mock?
Online backup?? Get the fuck out of here!
Homepage creation? Does anybody actually use the current home page creator? Just upload your stuff via WebDAV and bypass the ads...
Sorry, Steve, but you are a fucking moron. You just blew it big time. We all know you are a rich dude with airplanes for bonus, but most Mac people cannot in any way justify a fucking $99 a year.
For those who can afford it, it is a really shitty deal anyway. iTools is cools, but since it is free it doesn't have advanced stuff like perl, SSI, shell scripting, log analysis and so on, like most hosting services offer. Fuck, the iTools server isn't even configured properly! It seems like .Mock will not have *any* of these relevant tools, but instead some windowsy calendar, "seamless" (=painfully slow) integration with the FInder instead of fast FTP and so on. Who needs that shit?
Blech... gotta puke. This hurts so fucking bad in my Mac heart...
Because MPEG is just another codec, although an open standard. MPEG plays fine in several media players, but it won't play without a media player (= decoder application or hardware decoder).
Besides, the actual *file format* for containing MPEG-4 streams happens to be the Quicktime 4 file format. This means MPEG-4 content is always native in Quicktime, whereas the "Div X" (MPEG-4 video stream with layer III audio in an AVI container) is like having DVD stuff on a CD. Close but no cigar.