I don't know what world you were living in where PSX succeeded early. IIRC, it launched with Ridge Racer and Toshinden. It took two years for it to have 34 titles. There was so much competition back then, people just held on to their SNES and Genesis', not knowing whether to bet on PSX, Saturn, Jaguar, 3DO, CD-I, CD32, or wait for N64..
The PSX dragged along with lackluster titles, terrible loading times, and people were ready to write it off until a little something called Final Fantasy VII saved it.
Luckily for sony, 3DO, Saturn, Jaguar and CDI all sucked worse than it did, and they got a good couple years head start on the N64. If Nintendo had N64 ready when PSX launched, I doubt Sony would be where they are today.
A big kick in the nuts was it's port of Mortal Kombat III, which would be arcade-perfect. It was taking a couple minutes to load each round. The SNES started outselling it.
Of course, once you know how to use the device it isn't that bad.
It just costs too much. They charge more for N-Gage games than for GBA games, and most are of a lesser quality. Now it has to face off against PSP and DS.
They need to relabel it as a cell-phone that plays games, and sell it at the Verizon store, not EB or GameStop. If they insist on marketing it as a console, they have to square off against Sony and Nintendo, and will get their balls handed to them.
I actually do hope they pull it out. Competition in the gaming market is good, we need more than one or two handheld platforms.
Instead of selling it as a gaming system that can make phone calls, they need to market it as a cell phone that can play games, of a higher quality than other cells.
There's just no way in the world it can compete against DS and PSP, at least not on the merits of a gaming console.
We all knew the N-Gage was an experiment that was doomed to fail.
It did, however, plant the seeds of "convergence" in peoples minds. Why carry a cellphone, gameboy, and PDA, if there was one device that could replace all three.
The fact is though, it's nearly impossible to introduce a new gaming platform. The developer mindshare is so important. Noone buys a platform with no games. It took Sony a long time to get a decent enough library for the PSX to make it a contender. It's similarly taken MSFT a long time to line up some really good titles for the XBox.
Nokia never really had a chance. Looks like they're sticking to their guns, though. If they're smart, they'll start making a whole line of n-gage compatible phones (since we know the games can be played on non n-gages), at a whole range of prices. B/W vs Color displays, etc..
That or, they should really look into something like integrating an existing platform, ie; GBA, DS or PSP, into a cellphone. The games are already there for it.
They make some pretty cool stuff, as far as educational toys for kids go. I know my kids love the little PDA-style "cramming" device.
The schools are missing out on this stuff. The whole point is that teachers can put content up on the web (this weeks spelling words, for example), and the kids can download and practice with the toy.
Though, they only teach PC language and consumerism these days. Apparently the only thing kids need to know is how to open their wallet.
No, if you claim to be a specific Ronald Fitch, and you aren't, that's identity theft.
If I call up Domino's and say "I'm Jim Magoo at 100 main st and I wan't 1000 anchovy pizzas please", that's identity theft.
If I call a potential employer and say "I'm Jim Magoo and I have an interview tomorrow, I just wanted to let you know that I don't wear any underwear and am totally into hot HR guys", that's ID theft.
Neither the summary or the article really explain what's goin on here.
I wan't to see this cartoon. I mean, it can't be any less funny than Penny Arcade.
It becomes identify theft when you claim to be a specific Ronald Fitch, whom you are not.
If my name happened to be Rob Malda, and I stood on the hilltops shouting "I'm Rob Malda and I like to touch little boys!", it's not ID theft.
If I was shouting "I'm Rob Malda - founder of slashdot.org and assistant marketing director for Apple - and I like to touch little boys!", a line has been crossed. Because now, I'm pretending to be someone I'm not.
People need some basic writing training. What happened? He sent an email cartoon? To who? Himself? What does that have to do with him using the other guys name as his email address?
What's at stake in this case, and what does it have to do with privacy? It sounds like simple defamation.
Your eyes can't focus on higher spectrum lights up in the blue/violet range as easily as they can in the reds, or even greens. So this is a natural phenomena. Blue text tends to get "fuzzier" at a shorter distance, etc. Heck, try it yourself with some words written in blue, green, and red, and see how far away each can be read from.
Remember those "BlueBlocker" sunglasses? They really do let you see sharper and clearer, because they block out the blue, and your eyes have an easier time focusing.
Of course, creating blue light by way of a semiconductor goes beyond just blinging up your PC. BluRay and HD-DVD technology is a direct result of this invention.
If you put the gaming market aside, it is a very competitive desktop OS
Sure, if you ignore the fact that it can't play games, legally playback or author DVDs, or DRM'd songs from iTunes w/o ugly WINE kludges..
The problem is, those are big reasons people buy a computer for the home.
When I say "the desktop" I'm not thinking of an office full of cubicles where some guy is just doing data entry all day, I'm thinking of home use, and computers designed for non-technical users.
If all you do is read e-mail and write letters, it's fine. But most people these days expect their computer to do more.
People see Mac and Windows users plugging the firewire cable from their digicam into their computer, and then author and burn a DVD-R that plays in their set-top box, and they want to be able to do the same thing.
And don't try to tell me about how easy it is to author DVDs under linux, because you'd be lying, and TurboLinux is still, AFAIK, the only distro that can legally play a DVD.
I've been using linux forever, practically since the day Linus announced it. But the way I see it, the gap between it and commercial desktop OS's is widening, not narrowing.
Well, I do RTFA. Believe me, communicating with linux zealots is the absolute last act out of desperation.
I've only appealed to the community twice. Once with CUPS/Samba, trying to get just *anything* to print on a "100% Supported" HP Deskjet. I eventually got it to print, and on the network, but everything was cropped, the drivers seemed to have no notion of margins at all. Meh. Three weeks of my spare time I fought with that, then I just installed an old copy of Win98 on an old P166 I had, and called that my "print server".
The second was trying to get Samba working as a PDC with an LDAP backend. So far as I can tell, despite all the talk of such things, I'm the only person in the universe who has done this. Eventually I figured it out for myself.
Both times that I tried to talk intelligently with some linux folk (I didn't just barge in and start shouting questions), I was just insulted and called a "n00b". Which was pretty retarded, because I don't know two many n00bs interested in a Samba PDC with a secure (TLS) LDAP backend because they want a single sign-on solution in their home.
For anyone interested, the whole thing wound up being the fact that SleepyCat DB likes to just all of a sudden randomly become corrupt. Even if you never write to it, and only read. One day it'll just get corrupt. You have to monkey around with some cache settings to get it to stay stable, and by monkey around, I mean there is (was) no information or hints as to what the right values would be. Trial and error.
A third time I was trying to get XBox Media Center to browse my Samba shares, and got nothing but grief and retarded answers like "It cant work with domain security blah blah". It works just fine with domain security, you just need to know how to set it up. And no, I won't tell you how. I had to spend a few hours figuring it out myself, so RTFA n00b.
Maintainance contracts aren't a good example, since they're often transferable with ownership of the device.
For example, I have service contracts on my furnace, hot water heater, and AC unit. If I sell the house, the contracts automatically transfer to the new owner. If I die, my next of kin (my wife) inherits them along with the furnace.
The difference is that the contract is tied to a physical item.
I've been through the whole will and division of estate thing. It's not cool at all.
Linux suffers from a serious "last mile" problem. There are tons of coders willing to write more code for fame and glory, but noone is willing to sit and do all the usability testing, all the polishing, etc. Because that's tiring, boring, thankless work.
Apple or MSFT can simply instruct their employees to do it. They have an incentive to do all the boring gruntwork that turns a bunch of lines of code into a good user experience: a paycheck.
For example, I installed KDE a few weeks ago, and there's a lot of good stuff there. But the way it set all the menus up out of the box was, frankly, moronic. There didn't seem to be any sense to it, it was completely unintuitive. Some items were repeated in just about every sub menu, others were impossible to find. The various dialogs and configurators and menus were anywhere from ugly to confusing to downright useless.
Some person, or group of people, need to sit and decide where to place menu items, how to lay out the forms, basically polish the GUI until it's on the level of OSX or Windows, out of the box.
Who's going to do that for free? Whoever does will get absolutely no credit, and will probably just get a lot of static and disrespect from geeks and coders who wouldn't appreciate any effort that doesn't result in new lines of code. Noone's exactly lining up to spend all of their spare time getting cussed out by a bunch of coders.
Linux just isn't a consumer-grade desktop OS, and I doubt it ever will be.
We take it for granted that using a mouse is trivial, but it really isn't.
I remember my first mouse, I bought it for my C64 to use with GEOS. I was so used to moving the cursor around with a joystick, that the mouse was hard to get used to. I'd always seem to move it with my finger when I tried to click, and end up missing.
It's a skill like swimming, riding a bike, or driving a car. It's second nature once you know how, but it can be daunting at first - especially someone who's never used a computer, they tend to be a little scared of them, especially these days where every other story on the news is about internet rapists or having all your money stolen through the computer, etc..
3. You RTFA, to find out it's a decade old and deals mainly with Bus mice that don't exist anymore. There's a section on Serial mice, which doesn't help because yours is USB.
4. Return to forum, where you are told "USB mice are only for gay MS astroturfers like you!! Why don't you go have sex with Bill Gates you stupid fag!"
5. Say "fuck it" and just use the USB to PS/2 adaptor because USB support for linux still sucks.
Honestly, I've never gotten an answer to any question on any linux forum or IRC channel. The self-titled "linux gurus" frankly don't know all that much. When it comes to linux, if your shit doesn't work out-of-the-box, you're on your own for the most part.
Go read the CUPS documentation, which is basically a longwinded, insulting "Don't you dare ask us any questions we're too important" treatise.
Linux will never conquer the desktop. It's a poor platform for a desktop OS, plain and simple, and the efforts to turn it into a good desktop OS are too splintered and half-assed. KDE and Gnome change directions every other week it seems. There's little consistency, few truly standard and accepted APIs, etc, etc..
The way I see the future of linux, outside of the server room that is, would be in embedded and purpose-built distros.
Look where linux is commercially successful: TiVo, Zaurus, a plethora of PDA's and phones and such. I see linux evolving into task-based distros that do one thing, and do it well. Like MythTV or a distro just for a console-like gaming device, etc.
Each little distro can then focus on the hardware it's designed for, and the task it's meant to do, rather than trying to cram every OSS project under the sun onto 6 DVD's and calling it a "Windows Killer".
Gentoo and Debian will always be around for the geek community, but Joe Sixpack's exposure to it will probably be in the form of a TiVo or MythTV or Zaurus, or an Archos media player, something along those lines.
Yeah, well, the first VCR I bought (a Sony) came with an videocassette titled "How to set up and enjoy your new VCR!"
We (my company) bought a CD-burner back when they were an expensive novelty. It had an external SCSI interface, and was single-speed, and the drivers that came with it were on.... You guessed it, CD.
The ScreenSavers sucked. Why? They spent too much time dwelling on OSX and powerbooks and other Apple stuff. Which, of course, is why slashdotters were so in love with it. The more I watched it, the more it became about Macs and Linux.
Which is fine for slashdotters, but lets face it, the show was focusing on about 0.00025% of the audience. The whole channel was the same way.
There's just wasn't enough there. Stuff was too dumbed down for a geek like me to watch, it seemed very "Sesame Street", with like 15 minute segments on what USB is and how to plug the cables in. And there was nothing to attract people with no interest in computers.
G4 sucks just as bad, but at least it has an audience with the 14-30 year old "X-TREME GAMER LAN PARTY DOOD" set.
The whole channel reminds me of a spoken word version of the old Nintendo Power magazine, every show they have is basically an infomercial to sell shitty games.
It's typical "gaming" journalism where they try to portray Army Men: Sarge's Hero's as some great achievement on par with Doom 3 or Half Life 2.
It's all just an excuse to make me pay more for "basic cable". I wish I could choose not to pay for G4, BET, ONE, Lifetime, CMT, Golf Channel, Food Network, Speed Channel, and that mexican channel I call "Channel Ocho" a la the Simpsons.
Hopefully with all the new digital delivery methods (phone, fiber, coax, satellite), the suits will get their heads out of their asses and realize that they'd make more money by charging a small flat rate per channel I want, rather than these crappy bundles.
Face it. Noone watched TechTV. It was a dismal failure.
The content was too watered down for a geek, I just couldn't sit and watch ScreenSavers since most of the info they'd give was pretty much remedial to me. (Coming up next! We'll show you how to change the background color of your desktop!)
As far as non-geeks who don't really care about Tech, well, why would they watch TechTV?
The only thing they had going for them was the anime, but then Cartoon Network beat them at their own game with the Adult Swim and Miguzi programming blocks.
For the record, G4 is even worse. I can't believe anyone watches that shit.
I swear they just create these bullshit cable channels so they (the cable co) can justify yearly rate hikes.
Hooray, now I get the Golf channel, two Black channels (BET and ONE), two Womens channels (Lifetime and WET), G4, the Food network, CMT. I'm not black and don't want to watch Good Times reruns, I'm not a woman, I don't cook or listen to country music.
I can't wait for real digital delivery to happen, I predict schemes where I just pay some fee per channel I want (a couple of bucks a month).
Slashdot Mirror
Shut the fuck up.
Obviously a 13 year old wasn't working at Apple, in any capacity in which he'd have access to their trade secrets.
This kid didn't commit any offenses against Apple. He's being sued because of what his readers/informers said.
Apple are as ignorant, greedy, and willing to manipulate the courts as any other corporation.
HEY! Let's announce Apple secrets on Slashdot, and put an end to this nonsense once and for all.
I don't know what world you were living in where PSX succeeded early. IIRC, it launched with Ridge Racer and Toshinden. It took two years for it to have 34 titles. There was so much competition back then, people just held on to their SNES and Genesis', not knowing whether to bet on PSX, Saturn, Jaguar, 3DO, CD-I, CD32, or wait for N64..
The PSX dragged along with lackluster titles, terrible loading times, and people were ready to write it off until a little something called Final Fantasy VII saved it.
Luckily for sony, 3DO, Saturn, Jaguar and CDI all sucked worse than it did, and they got a good couple years head start on the N64. If Nintendo had N64 ready when PSX launched, I doubt Sony would be where they are today.
A big kick in the nuts was it's port of Mortal Kombat III, which would be arcade-perfect. It was taking a couple minutes to load each round. The SNES started outselling it.
The game is Pandemonium!
Of course, once you know how to use the device it isn't that bad.
It just costs too much. They charge more for N-Gage games than for GBA games, and most are of a lesser quality. Now it has to face off against PSP and DS.
They need to relabel it as a cell-phone that plays games, and sell it at the Verizon store, not EB or GameStop. If they insist on marketing it as a console, they have to square off against Sony and Nintendo, and will get their balls handed to them.
I actually do hope they pull it out. Competition in the gaming market is good, we need more than one or two handheld platforms.
N-Gage's problem is marketing, IMO.
Instead of selling it as a gaming system that can make phone calls, they need to market it as a cell phone that can play games, of a higher quality than other cells.
There's just no way in the world it can compete against DS and PSP, at least not on the merits of a gaming console.
We all knew the N-Gage was an experiment that was doomed to fail.
It did, however, plant the seeds of "convergence" in peoples minds. Why carry a cellphone, gameboy, and PDA, if there was one device that could replace all three.
The fact is though, it's nearly impossible to introduce a new gaming platform. The developer mindshare is so important. Noone buys a platform with no games. It took Sony a long time to get a decent enough library for the PSX to make it a contender. It's similarly taken MSFT a long time to line up some really good titles for the XBox.
Nokia never really had a chance. Looks like they're sticking to their guns, though. If they're smart, they'll start making a whole line of n-gage compatible phones (since we know the games can be played on non n-gages), at a whole range of prices. B/W vs Color displays, etc..
That or, they should really look into something like integrating an existing platform, ie; GBA, DS or PSP, into a cellphone. The games are already there for it.
They make some pretty cool stuff, as far as educational toys for kids go. I know my kids love the little PDA-style "cramming" device.
The schools are missing out on this stuff. The whole point is that teachers can put content up on the web (this weeks spelling words, for example), and the kids can download and practice with the toy.
Though, they only teach PC language and consumerism these days. Apparently the only thing kids need to know is how to open their wallet.
That's what your T1 line is.
No, this isn't starting a telco. This is setting up a PBX for your office, large or small. Timothy just doesn't grok the difference.
No, if you claim to be a specific Ronald Fitch, and you aren't, that's identity theft.
If I call up Domino's and say "I'm Jim Magoo at 100 main st and I wan't 1000 anchovy pizzas please", that's identity theft.
If I call a potential employer and say "I'm Jim Magoo and I have an interview tomorrow, I just wanted to let you know that I don't wear any underwear and am totally into hot HR guys", that's ID theft.
Neither the summary or the article really explain what's goin on here.
I wan't to see this cartoon. I mean, it can't be any less funny than Penny Arcade.
It becomes identify theft when you claim to be a specific Ronald Fitch, whom you are not.
If my name happened to be Rob Malda, and I stood on the hilltops shouting "I'm Rob Malda and I like to touch little boys!", it's not ID theft.
If I was shouting "I'm Rob Malda - founder of slashdot.org and assistant marketing director for Apple - and I like to touch little boys!", a line has been crossed. Because now, I'm pretending to be someone I'm not.
People need some basic writing training. What happened? He sent an email cartoon? To who? Himself? What does that have to do with him using the other guys name as his email address?
What's at stake in this case, and what does it have to do with privacy? It sounds like simple defamation.
That summary just sucks.
Your eyes can't focus on higher spectrum lights up in the blue/violet range as easily as they can in the reds, or even greens. So this is a natural phenomena. Blue text tends to get "fuzzier" at a shorter distance, etc. Heck, try it yourself with some words written in blue, green, and red, and see how far away each can be read from.
Remember those "BlueBlocker" sunglasses? They really do let you see sharper and clearer, because they block out the blue, and your eyes have an easier time focusing.
Of course, creating blue light by way of a semiconductor goes beyond just blinging up your PC. BluRay and HD-DVD technology is a direct result of this invention.
If you put the gaming market aside, it is a very competitive desktop OS
Sure, if you ignore the fact that it can't play games, legally playback or author DVDs, or DRM'd songs from iTunes w/o ugly WINE kludges..
The problem is, those are big reasons people buy a computer for the home.
When I say "the desktop" I'm not thinking of an office full of cubicles where some guy is just doing data entry all day, I'm thinking of home use, and computers designed for non-technical users.
If all you do is read e-mail and write letters, it's fine. But most people these days expect their computer to do more.
People see Mac and Windows users plugging the firewire cable from their digicam into their computer, and then author and burn a DVD-R that plays in their set-top box, and they want to be able to do the same thing.
And don't try to tell me about how easy it is to author DVDs under linux, because you'd be lying, and TurboLinux is still, AFAIK, the only distro that can legally play a DVD.
I've been using linux forever, practically since the day Linus announced it. But the way I see it, the gap between it and commercial desktop OS's is widening, not narrowing.
Well, I do RTFA. Believe me, communicating with linux zealots is the absolute last act out of desperation.
I've only appealed to the community twice. Once with CUPS/Samba, trying to get just *anything* to print on a "100% Supported" HP Deskjet. I eventually got it to print, and on the network, but everything was cropped, the drivers seemed to have no notion of margins at all. Meh. Three weeks of my spare time I fought with that, then I just installed an old copy of Win98 on an old P166 I had, and called that my "print server".
The second was trying to get Samba working as a PDC with an LDAP backend. So far as I can tell, despite all the talk of such things, I'm the only person in the universe who has done this. Eventually I figured it out for myself.
Both times that I tried to talk intelligently with some linux folk (I didn't just barge in and start shouting questions), I was just insulted and called a "n00b". Which was pretty retarded, because I don't know two many n00bs interested in a Samba PDC with a secure (TLS) LDAP backend because they want a single sign-on solution in their home.
For anyone interested, the whole thing wound up being the fact that SleepyCat DB likes to just all of a sudden randomly become corrupt. Even if you never write to it, and only read. One day it'll just get corrupt. You have to monkey around with some cache settings to get it to stay stable, and by monkey around, I mean there is (was) no information or hints as to what the right values would be. Trial and error.
A third time I was trying to get XBox Media Center to browse my Samba shares, and got nothing but grief and retarded answers like "It cant work with domain security blah blah". It works just fine with domain security, you just need to know how to set it up. And no, I won't tell you how. I had to spend a few hours figuring it out myself, so RTFA n00b.
Maintainance contracts aren't a good example, since they're often transferable with ownership of the device.
For example, I have service contracts on my furnace, hot water heater, and AC unit. If I sell the house, the contracts automatically transfer to the new owner. If I die, my next of kin (my wife) inherits them along with the furnace.
The difference is that the contract is tied to a physical item.
I've been through the whole will and division of estate thing. It's not cool at all.
A court awarded this guy 200 million, though he's lucky to even see 8.
They could have easily tied it up in litigation ad infinitum, since a corporation will generally outlive a human being.
That's a rot of sushi and tentacar cartoons.
Arr for inventing the Brue RED.
Linux suffers from a serious "last mile" problem. There are tons of coders willing to write more code for fame and glory, but noone is willing to sit and do all the usability testing, all the polishing, etc. Because that's tiring, boring, thankless work.
Apple or MSFT can simply instruct their employees to do it. They have an incentive to do all the boring gruntwork that turns a bunch of lines of code into a good user experience: a paycheck.
For example, I installed KDE a few weeks ago, and there's a lot of good stuff there. But the way it set all the menus up out of the box was, frankly, moronic. There didn't seem to be any sense to it, it was completely unintuitive. Some items were repeated in just about every sub menu, others were impossible to find. The various dialogs and configurators and menus were anywhere from ugly to confusing to downright useless.
Some person, or group of people, need to sit and decide where to place menu items, how to lay out the forms, basically polish the GUI until it's on the level of OSX or Windows, out of the box.
Who's going to do that for free? Whoever does will get absolutely no credit, and will probably just get a lot of static and disrespect from geeks and coders who wouldn't appreciate any effort that doesn't result in new lines of code. Noone's exactly lining up to spend all of their spare time getting cussed out by a bunch of coders.
Linux just isn't a consumer-grade desktop OS, and I doubt it ever will be.
We take it for granted that using a mouse is trivial, but it really isn't.
I remember my first mouse, I bought it for my C64 to use with GEOS. I was so used to moving the cursor around with a joystick, that the mouse was hard to get used to. I'd always seem to move it with my finger when I tried to click, and end up missing.
It's a skill like swimming, riding a bike, or driving a car. It's second nature once you know how, but it can be daunting at first - especially someone who's never used a computer, they tend to be a little scared of them, especially these days where every other story on the news is about internet rapists or having all your money stolen through the computer, etc..
1. Go ask in a linux forum
2. Get told RTFA YOU FUCKIN N00B! U R TEH SUCK!
3. You RTFA, to find out it's a decade old and deals mainly with Bus mice that don't exist anymore. There's a section on Serial mice, which doesn't help because yours is USB.
4. Return to forum, where you are told "USB mice are only for gay MS astroturfers like you!! Why don't you go have sex with Bill Gates you stupid fag!"
5. Say "fuck it" and just use the USB to PS/2 adaptor because USB support for linux still sucks.
Honestly, I've never gotten an answer to any question on any linux forum or IRC channel. The self-titled "linux gurus" frankly don't know all that much. When it comes to linux, if your shit doesn't work out-of-the-box, you're on your own for the most part.
Go read the CUPS documentation, which is basically a longwinded, insulting "Don't you dare ask us any questions we're too important" treatise.
Windows XP has drivers for Audigy, Audigy 2 and the entire Live series built in.
You sat for an hour installing Creative's little media player bundle of dogshit, which isn't needed at all.
Linux will never conquer the desktop. It's a poor platform for a desktop OS, plain and simple, and the efforts to turn it into a good desktop OS are too splintered and half-assed. KDE and Gnome change directions every other week it seems. There's little consistency, few truly standard and accepted APIs, etc, etc..
The way I see the future of linux, outside of the server room that is, would be in embedded and purpose-built distros.
Look where linux is commercially successful: TiVo, Zaurus, a plethora of PDA's and phones and such. I see linux evolving into task-based distros that do one thing, and do it well. Like MythTV or a distro just for a console-like gaming device, etc.
Each little distro can then focus on the hardware it's designed for, and the task it's meant to do, rather than trying to cram every OSS project under the sun onto 6 DVD's and calling it a "Windows Killer".
Gentoo and Debian will always be around for the geek community, but Joe Sixpack's exposure to it will probably be in the form of a TiVo or MythTV or Zaurus, or an Archos media player, something along those lines.
Yeah, well, the first VCR I bought (a Sony) came with an videocassette titled "How to set up and enjoy your new VCR!"
We (my company) bought a CD-burner back when they were an expensive novelty. It had an external SCSI interface, and was single-speed, and the drivers that came with it were on.... You guessed it, CD.
What're ya gonna do about it, nothing thats what.
For viewing videos, you recommend a book.
You probably recommend a knife at a gunfight, screen doors on submarines, and drinking your coffee from a spaghetti strainer.
Damn, but you're an idiot. You just can't get over the fact that someone likes what MSFT has done with this OS.
Why can we never discuss TECHNOLOGY anymore? I'm sick of moronic discussions and flamebait OSS philosopy vs Apple philosophy vs MS philosophy.
Anyone have anything to say about the technical merits, or lack thereof of XP Starter Edition?
TechTV sucked.
The ScreenSavers sucked. Why? They spent too much time dwelling on OSX and powerbooks and other Apple stuff. Which, of course, is why slashdotters were so in love with it. The more I watched it, the more it became about Macs and Linux.
Which is fine for slashdotters, but lets face it, the show was focusing on about 0.00025% of the audience. The whole channel was the same way.
There's just wasn't enough there. Stuff was too dumbed down for a geek like me to watch, it seemed very "Sesame Street", with like 15 minute segments on what USB is and how to plug the cables in. And there was nothing to attract people with no interest in computers.
G4 sucks just as bad, but at least it has an audience with the 14-30 year old "X-TREME GAMER LAN PARTY DOOD" set.
The whole channel reminds me of a spoken word version of the old Nintendo Power magazine, every show they have is basically an infomercial to sell shitty games.
It's typical "gaming" journalism where they try to portray Army Men: Sarge's Hero's as some great achievement on par with Doom 3 or Half Life 2.
It's all just an excuse to make me pay more for "basic cable". I wish I could choose not to pay for G4, BET, ONE, Lifetime, CMT, Golf Channel, Food Network, Speed Channel, and that mexican channel I call "Channel Ocho" a la the Simpsons.
Hopefully with all the new digital delivery methods (phone, fiber, coax, satellite), the suits will get their heads out of their asses and realize that they'd make more money by charging a small flat rate per channel I want, rather than these crappy bundles.
Face it. Noone watched TechTV. It was a dismal failure.
The content was too watered down for a geek, I just couldn't sit and watch ScreenSavers since most of the info they'd give was pretty much remedial to me. (Coming up next! We'll show you how to change the background color of your desktop!)
As far as non-geeks who don't really care about Tech, well, why would they watch TechTV?
The only thing they had going for them was the anime, but then Cartoon Network beat them at their own game with the Adult Swim and Miguzi programming blocks.
For the record, G4 is even worse. I can't believe anyone watches that shit.
I swear they just create these bullshit cable channels so they (the cable co) can justify yearly rate hikes.
Hooray, now I get the Golf channel, two Black channels (BET and ONE), two Womens channels (Lifetime and WET), G4, the Food network, CMT. I'm not black and don't want to watch Good Times reruns, I'm not a woman, I don't cook or listen to country music.
I can't wait for real digital delivery to happen, I predict schemes where I just pay some fee per channel I want (a couple of bucks a month).