On the subject of Peter Jackson, is there anyone else who feels that, in hindsight, the LOTR trilogy was maybe not quite as great as it could have been? I mean, I'm not going to say it sucked or anything ridiculous like that, it was well made, and had competent acting etc., but overall it left me feeling a bit empty. The first movie was great - no doubt about it. There were fewer characters/factions so the plot was more tightly focused on their development and personal experiences. There were fewer ridiculously huge battle scenes and correspondingly less CG work. And overall, the script felt a lot tighter than the other two movies, especially the last one.
Overall, while I enjoyed the movies, I would question some of the following: - the character acting/development: maybe not bad, but the actors weren't given much to work with at times - the script to the last movie: too scattered, trying to cram everything in without ever really coming together neatly in a form palatable for a movie - the pacing: considering what was cut, there were some ridiculously ponderous bits and other parts where whole swathes of the book were glossed over in a couple of seconds - the feeling that, by the end, Jackson is just telling someone elses story rather than presenting us with a piece of work in its own right. This combined with decisions to reduce Saruman's role and symbolism hurt the broader themes of the trilogy for me.
I wonder if, perhaps in desperation after what Lucas (*hiss* *hiss* tool of the devil!) and the Warchowskis heaved out this past few years we were all just so damn relieved that the LOTR movies didn't totally blow that we all got a bit carried away?
Thoughts? Flames?
PS
I still expect the Hobbit would rock - based on the above, I think it would be much better suited to Jackson's directing style, with more opportunity for strong character work and humour that is actually meant to be there.
With all due respect, I felt that Gollum, while good, was still not perfect. You could blatantly tell that it was a CG effect at times - mainly the way it moved, but in certan shots the details looked a bit artificial to me, too. Jackson, while better than (for instance) Lucas, should also learn to hide his CGI characters in the scenery a little better - sometimes a teaspoon full, artfully placed, is worth so much more than a big shovel load right in your face.
There were various other places in LOTR where you could clearly see how animated things were. A couple of scenes with Legolas, and the scene where Gandalf leads the fellowship through the giant underground hall come to mind.
I agree, Spector is waaaay off if he thinks that that is why PC gamers are pissed at him. Either he knows but doesn't want to talk about it, or Ion Storm has some SERIOUS vertical communication problems.
Problems in DX2 that were bigger than the menu issue:
- PERFORMANCE: I have seen it chug on a high end system with a Radeon 9800XT, mainly due to poor default configuration - Radeon support: deals with manufacturers are bs - Bugmaggedon: so many bits from the XBox version polluting the PC version it's a wonder it works at all... there are even bits of X-Box specific code in the config files - Tiny levels: level sizes were chopped down to what would fit in an XBox's memory, which is pretty much nothing by PC standards when you consider most newer PCs have 512+ megs of RAM. As a result there are very few big open spaces in the game and it feels totally claustophobic. - Lack of plot cohesion: So there are these factions, and you like, ally with one and the others hate you. Oh, and it's all kinda post apocalyptic and stuff. Great story, jerks. - Combat model: No headshots, crappy weapon power (apparently shooting someone with a sniper rifle is more effective if they don't *know* you're going to shoot them), universal ammo type (what the FUCK), no big open areas to fight in - No skill system... no points, no experience, nuttin. This means it is no longer really an RPG, just a shoot 'em up. And not a very good one.
I could go on but I'm choking up with rage here... please god let Carmack deliver us from mediocrity.
Poster was joking (sort of), but I am so damn sick of this attitude. Hey, guess what, people from other cultures actually read/post on this website too! Isn't it amazing?
Every time this comes up I am stunned by the ability of a small minority of Americans to criticise/make fun of/be surprised by other people's ways of speaking. Memo to those people: English is a language that actually developed for hundreds of years in another country, strangely named 'England.' Even more incredible, it continues to be used and developed in this far-off land as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean and about a jillion other places too. It may also shock you to learn that, to most of the rest of what we like to call the 'English speaking' world, your adaptation/degeneration of the language we use and love is alarming, amusing and altogether rustic in character. American English is to English English what southern Texas swamp-drawl is to a north-easterner. You are the Cletuses of the world.
Now shut up and mingle with the other cultures, dammit. Y'all.
Actually, if you try looking in a decent dictionary (preferable non-american), petrol is actually a word in it's own right, not an abbreviation of petroleum. It is in fact an abbreviation, but of a French phrase, 'essence de petrole', which is what you would call 'gasoline.'
But thanks for the lecture all the same. IMHO 'gas' is *extremely* misleading, especially as there are cars that run on fuel that is 'gas' in the sense of 'not solid or liquid.' What do you call that stuff? What do you do if you want to talk about helium or hydrogen? The American way seems a lot more confusing to me.
This just in... America is not the linguistic centre of the universe. President Bush is said to be "shocked and saddened" by today's news...
Welcome to the world of the 'English' language, where words can have... gasp... multiple meanings, and where words can also be DERIVED from other words without having the same meaning. Why not look in a wider range of sources, dictionary.com is good for this. Petrol is not an abbreviation, jerkface. Boot does not only mean 'a thing that covers your foot' or in your case 'a thing that should interact with your rear end rapidly as a result of your knee jerk AmericInglish generalisations (with an 's' in 'generalisations).
petrol
n : a volatile flammable mixture of hydrocarbons (hexane and heptane and octane etc.) derived from petroleum; used mainly as a fuel in internal-combustion engines
boot
3. A place at the side of a coach, where attendants rode; also, a low outside place before and behind the body of the coach. [Obs.]
4. A place for baggage at either end of an old-fashioned stagecoach.
Yes, yes, of course you're right. I only hate iPod because I'm insane, not because I had a poor user experience with it. I never, for example, used it for a few days and decided it didn't meet my needs. No sir, I just want to tear down Apple because... Apple killed my parents. Or something. Well, at least now I am 'big' enough to admit that iPod is the only and best music solution for everyone on the planet. Case closed.
Whereas you, apparently, enjoy the ego boost of thinking you're elite for defending a poor little corporation from the evils of fickle users like me who actually demand products that work as advertised.
I know restocking fees are real. I simply think Apple should wear the cost of a return if they can't print accurate information in their advertising material. I did read the specs. The spec sheet they gave me stated "Battery life: 8 hours," with no disclaimer that this meant "8 hours playing 1kbps mono static in one continuous track with the volume set to zero." First time out in the real world, it was dead withing 5 1/2 hours.
Don't even bother to give me any of this bs about how I should be wary of advertisers claims: I know I should be wary, and they should be wary of me. If they give misleading information, I am not just going to bend over and take it whilst praising Apple's design aesthetic. If you lived in the 'real world', you wouldn't have hundreds of dollars to flush down the toilet on things that don't work properly.
Well, each to his own I suppose. For me, battery life is paramount. For you, having an insane selection. For me, I like listening to whole albums only and rarely if ever listen to anything on shuffle. You, I take it, enjoy the random airplay of the iPod on shuffle mode. We're both winners.
I must dispute your figures, though.
1. 10-12 hours is about 1/3 the play time I get on my MD player from a charge of an AA battery
2. In 10 hours I would have to change discs about 5 times with non-LP MDs, or 3 times with LP-MDs (including putting the first disc in), not 'ten times or so'
3. LP Minidiscs are encoded with ATRAC-3 at about 132kbps. Although nothing is ever definitive with audio, some tests have found that ATRAC-3 at about 70kbps is roughly equivalent to 128kbps MP3 for music reproduction.
It's great that you can lower your expectations to meet the performance of a product. You must be a very easy person to satisfy -
Problem: new car only achieves speed 30 mp/h despite advertised maximum of 140 Response: of course it won't go the advertised speed unless you plan your routes to only go downhill and arrange to move house to sequentially lower altitudes to avoid ever going uphill... duh!
Problem: doctors at hospital failed to stitch up chest cavity after heart transplant Response: lie perfectly still on your back and never move a muscle, always being grateful for the magical gift of life
Problem: person on./ has different opinion to you Response: side with staff in Apple store based on 0 personal knowledge of particular store. Digitally edit photographs to show self being married to Steve Jobs by mayor of San Francisco
Problem: iPod only plays for 15 minutes unless playlist for next 25 years is pre-programmed in at time of manufacture Response: [you] lose control over what you listen to in order to compensate for design issues; criticise those who do not wish to listen to a 10,000 song playlist in pre-determined order as 'indecisive' [me] return iPod and use my MD player. Criticise Apple for not making a device that meets my expectations (or the performance of a generation 1 iPod for that matter).
Ok... to work, 1 hour. At work, 7.5 hours. From work, 1 hour. Bam, already over the limit.
I mean, at work I generally can't listen to 7.5 hours straight (those annoying co-workers won't leave me be for that long), but if I stop and start the thing accordingly I reduce the life to around 5-6 hours.
Plus, I don't WANT to recharge the goddamn thing, ok? I want to charge it like my phone, maybe once every 4-5 days, not every single night.
Plus, what about: - long bus/train trips - flying places (I do this a lot, often more than 7 hours in a flight) - going away from civilisation etc. etc. etc.
I guess I would challenge the 'portable' aspect of the iPod as a 'portable music solution.' As an external HD music player it rocks.
Adelaide. No, they fed me some absolute BS about a restocking fee or whatever, just so that they didn't have to look like they were giving in to me (i.e., make it look like I'm just an annoying person who changed his mind, not a customer with a legitimate complaint). So they knocked about $80 off the refund. I have since cost Apple several thousand dollars personally by advising technologically non-savvy people who ask my advice against buying Apple products. I know of at least 2 instances where this has been a determining factor in buying decisions. Ah, revenge. It's a shame, I kinda like Apple, too.
Nonetheless, if they make claims that are false, that is misleading and deceptive conduct in Australia, where I live. When I set my MD to play non-stop on a full charge and timed it it didn't even make the advertised battery life, it was short by nearly an hour.
Just because advertisers DO lie doesn't mean they SHOULD lie.
Yes, have second thoughts! I'm not proposing that iPods stink or anything of the sort, but if you are like me, i.e. serious about listening to a lot of music rather than looking at a shiny white thing, then iPod may not be the ideal solution. I am on the move a lot, and for me an average of 6 hours playback was just never going to cut it.
With NetMD, using Sony's (admittedly pretty shite) software you can easily transfer MP3s onto minidiscs in no time. The program takes your MP3, converts it into a (seperate) MD-formatted audio file, then copies it via USB to the MD player. By ripping and maintaining your own MP3s outside the Sony software managing your music is pretty straightforward.
Minidisc uses ATRAC, see here: http://www.minidisc.org/aes_atrac.html
Well, with a NetMD minidisc recorder it takes a few minutes to transfer whatever you want onto a minidisc. I can live with that. Furthermore, it will play for around 30 hours on an AA battery, so if you take half an hour to organise a few LP MDs you're set for days of music.
So after 8 hours you can sit there and have warm fuzzy thoughts about all that music you would be able to listen to if the fucking battery hadn't gone flat again?
Before you bleat about how you can charge it through your computer while you listen using firewire, you're talking about an external hard drive there chief. If you want 200 gigs there are plenty of options that don't involve you funding Steve J's next designer turtleneck.
Yeah, that way you can funnel your hard earned cash to Apple AND their buddies at Belkin in order to get the product you paid a huge amount of money for working properly.
More like 4-7 hours on the third generation iPod if you skip tracks frequently and don't listen in a continuous block.
Which is why I returned mine. Apple were forced to acknowledge that their claims about battery life may have been misleading when I showed them the Australian Trade Practices Act sections about misleading and deceptive conduct.
My 2 cents: buy a minidisc player. Better battery life, physically tougher, smaller. What's the point of having 10,000 songs if you can only listen to 7 hours worth in a sitting?
Oh man, I loved that game. I was just thinking the other day that there aren't enough cool gimmicks like the moving seat in afterburner any more. I mean, it doesn't look that great now, but AB had cool graphics, a great sense of speed and a funky rotating cockpit... what more could you want!
It is possible, despite how it may seem. I cracked it eventually, after reading lots of on-line walkthroughs etc. and just playing and playing and playing. At a guess it would have taken me 50+ tries. I hate that fucking level!
I mean, it is significant if there is another genuine alternative to Windows, isn't it?
From Apple's point of view this is not necessarily great news, and suggests that Linux uptake is accelerating substantially faster than Apple uptake. Presumably a large number of people who choose Linux do so out of the same spirit of rebellion that has traditionally drawn people to Apple, thereby reducing the appeal of shelling out for a G5 when you can get a very nice x86 architecture machine running Linux for much less cash.
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On the subject of Peter Jackson, is there anyone else who feels that, in hindsight, the LOTR trilogy was maybe not quite as great as it could have been? I mean, I'm not going to say it sucked or anything ridiculous like that, it was well made, and had competent acting etc., but overall it left me feeling a bit empty. The first movie was great - no doubt about it. There were fewer characters/factions so the plot was more tightly focused on their development and personal experiences. There were fewer ridiculously huge battle scenes and correspondingly less CG work. And overall, the script felt a lot tighter than the other two movies, especially the last one.
Overall, while I enjoyed the movies, I would question some of the following:
- the character acting/development: maybe not bad, but the actors weren't given much to work with at times
- the script to the last movie: too scattered, trying to cram everything in without ever really coming together neatly in a form palatable for a movie
- the pacing: considering what was cut, there were some ridiculously ponderous bits and other parts where whole swathes of the book were glossed over in a couple of seconds
- the feeling that, by the end, Jackson is just telling someone elses story rather than presenting us with a piece of work in its own right. This combined with decisions to reduce Saruman's role and symbolism hurt the broader themes of the trilogy for me.
I wonder if, perhaps in desperation after what Lucas (*hiss* *hiss* tool of the devil!) and the Warchowskis heaved out this past few years we were all just so damn relieved that the LOTR movies didn't totally blow that we all got a bit carried away?
Thoughts? Flames?
PS
I still expect the Hobbit would rock - based on the above, I think it would be much better suited to Jackson's directing style, with more opportunity for strong character work and humour that is actually meant to be there.
With all due respect, I felt that Gollum, while good, was still not perfect. You could blatantly tell that it was a CG effect at times - mainly the way it moved, but in certan shots the details looked a bit artificial to me, too. Jackson, while better than (for instance) Lucas, should also learn to hide his CGI characters in the scenery a little better - sometimes a teaspoon full, artfully placed, is worth so much more than a big shovel load right in your face.
There were various other places in LOTR where you could clearly see how animated things were. A couple of scenes with Legolas, and the scene where Gandalf leads the fellowship through the giant underground hall come to mind.
I agree, Spector is waaaay off if he thinks that that is why PC gamers are pissed at him. Either he knows but doesn't want to talk about it, or Ion Storm has some SERIOUS vertical communication problems.
Problems in DX2 that were bigger than the menu issue:
- PERFORMANCE: I have seen it chug on a high end system with a Radeon 9800XT, mainly due to poor default configuration
- Radeon support: deals with manufacturers are bs
- Bugmaggedon: so many bits from the XBox version polluting the PC version it's a wonder it works at all... there are even bits of X-Box specific code in the config files
- Tiny levels: level sizes were chopped down to what would fit in an XBox's memory, which is pretty much nothing by PC standards when you consider most newer PCs have 512+ megs of RAM. As a result there are very few big open spaces in the game and it feels totally claustophobic.
- Lack of plot cohesion: So there are these factions, and you like, ally with one and the others hate you. Oh, and it's all kinda post apocalyptic and stuff. Great story, jerks.
- Combat model: No headshots, crappy weapon power (apparently shooting someone with a sniper rifle is more effective if they don't *know* you're going to shoot them), universal ammo type (what the FUCK), no big open areas to fight in
- No skill system... no points, no experience, nuttin. This means it is no longer really an RPG, just a shoot 'em up. And not a very good one.
I could go on but I'm choking up with rage here... please god let Carmack deliver us from mediocrity.
Poster was joking (sort of), but I am so damn sick of this attitude. Hey, guess what, people from other cultures actually read/post on this website too! Isn't it amazing?
Every time this comes up I am stunned by the ability of a small minority of Americans to criticise/make fun of/be surprised by other people's ways of speaking. Memo to those people: English is a language that actually developed for hundreds of years in another country, strangely named 'England.' Even more incredible, it continues to be used and developed in this far-off land as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean and about a jillion other places too. It may also shock you to learn that, to most of the rest of what we like to call the 'English speaking' world, your adaptation/degeneration of the language we use and love is alarming, amusing and altogether rustic in character. American English is to English English what southern Texas swamp-drawl is to a north-easterner. You are the Cletuses of the world.
Now shut up and mingle with the other cultures, dammit. Y'all.
Actually, if you try looking in a decent dictionary (preferable non-american), petrol is actually a word in it's own right, not an abbreviation of petroleum. It is in fact an abbreviation, but of a French phrase, 'essence de petrole', which is what you would call 'gasoline.'
But thanks for the lecture all the same. IMHO 'gas' is *extremely* misleading, especially as there are cars that run on fuel that is 'gas' in the sense of 'not solid or liquid.' What do you call that stuff? What do you do if you want to talk about helium or hydrogen? The American way seems a lot more confusing to me.
This just in... America is not the linguistic centre of the universe. President Bush is said to be "shocked and saddened" by today's news...
Welcome to the world of the 'English' language, where words can have... gasp... multiple meanings, and where words can also be DERIVED from other words without having the same meaning. Why not look in a wider range of sources, dictionary.com is good for this. Petrol is not an abbreviation, jerkface. Boot does not only mean 'a thing that covers your foot' or in your case 'a thing that should interact with your rear end rapidly as a result of your knee jerk AmericInglish generalisations (with an 's' in 'generalisations).
petrol
n : a volatile flammable mixture of hydrocarbons (hexane and heptane and octane etc.) derived from petroleum; used mainly as a fuel in internal-combustion engines
boot
3. A place at the side of a coach, where attendants rode; also, a low outside place before and behind the body of the coach. [Obs.]
4. A place for baggage at either end of an old-fashioned stagecoach.
Yes, yes, of course you're right. I only hate iPod because I'm insane, not because I had a poor user experience with it. I never, for example, used it for a few days and decided it didn't meet my needs. No sir, I just want to tear down Apple because... Apple killed my parents. Or something. Well, at least now I am 'big' enough to admit that iPod is the only and best music solution for everyone on the planet. Case closed.
Whereas you, apparently, enjoy the ego boost of thinking you're elite for defending a poor little corporation from the evils of fickle users like me who actually demand products that work as advertised.
I know restocking fees are real. I simply think Apple should wear the cost of a return if they can't print accurate information in their advertising material. I did read the specs. The spec sheet they gave me stated "Battery life: 8 hours," with no disclaimer that this meant "8 hours playing 1kbps mono static in one continuous track with the volume set to zero." First time out in the real world, it was dead withing 5 1/2 hours.
Don't even bother to give me any of this bs about how I should be wary of advertisers claims: I know I should be wary, and they should be wary of me. If they give misleading information, I am not just going to bend over and take it whilst praising Apple's design aesthetic. If you lived in the 'real world', you wouldn't have hundreds of dollars to flush down the toilet on things that don't work properly.
Well, each to his own I suppose. For me, battery life is paramount. For you, having an insane selection. For me, I like listening to whole albums only and rarely if ever listen to anything on shuffle. You, I take it, enjoy the random airplay of the iPod on shuffle mode. We're both winners.
I must dispute your figures, though.
1. 10-12 hours is about 1/3 the play time I get on my MD player from a charge of an AA battery
2. In 10 hours I would have to change discs about 5 times with non-LP MDs, or 3 times with LP-MDs (including putting the first disc in), not 'ten times or so'
3. LP Minidiscs are encoded with ATRAC-3 at about 132kbps. Although nothing is ever definitive with audio, some tests have found that ATRAC-3 at about 70kbps is roughly equivalent to 128kbps MP3 for music reproduction.
It's great that you can lower your expectations to meet the performance of a product. You must be a very easy person to satisfy -
./ has different opinion to you
Problem: new car only achieves speed 30 mp/h despite advertised maximum of 140
Response: of course it won't go the advertised speed unless you plan your routes to only go downhill and arrange to move house to sequentially lower altitudes to avoid ever going uphill... duh!
Problem: doctors at hospital failed to stitch up chest cavity after heart transplant
Response: lie perfectly still on your back and never move a muscle, always being grateful for the magical gift of life
Problem: person on
Response: side with staff in Apple store based on 0 personal knowledge of particular store. Digitally edit photographs to show self being married to Steve Jobs by mayor of San Francisco
Problem: iPod only plays for 15 minutes unless playlist for next 25 years is pre-programmed in at time of manufacture
Response: [you] lose control over what you listen to in order to compensate for design issues; criticise those who do not wish to listen to a 10,000 song playlist in pre-determined order as 'indecisive' [me] return iPod and use my MD player. Criticise Apple for not making a device that meets my expectations (or the performance of a generation 1 iPod for that matter).
Ok... to work, 1 hour. At work, 7.5 hours. From work, 1 hour. Bam, already over the limit.
I mean, at work I generally can't listen to 7.5 hours straight (those annoying co-workers won't leave me be for that long), but if I stop and start the thing accordingly I reduce the life to around 5-6 hours.
Plus, I don't WANT to recharge the goddamn thing, ok? I want to charge it like my phone, maybe once every 4-5 days, not every single night.
Plus, what about:
- long bus/train trips
- flying places (I do this a lot, often more than 7 hours in a flight)
- going away from civilisation
etc. etc. etc.
I guess I would challenge the 'portable' aspect of the iPod as a 'portable music solution.' As an external HD music player it rocks.
Adelaide. No, they fed me some absolute BS about a restocking fee or whatever, just so that they didn't have to look like they were giving in to me (i.e., make it look like I'm just an annoying person who changed his mind, not a customer with a legitimate complaint). So they knocked about $80 off the refund. I have since cost Apple several thousand dollars personally by advising technologically non-savvy people who ask my advice against buying Apple products. I know of at least 2 instances where this has been a determining factor in buying decisions. Ah, revenge. It's a shame, I kinda like Apple, too.
Nonetheless, if they make claims that are false, that is misleading and deceptive conduct in Australia, where I live. When I set my MD to play non-stop on a full charge and timed it it didn't even make the advertised battery life, it was short by nearly an hour.
Just because advertisers DO lie doesn't mean they SHOULD lie.
I wholeheartedly agree. Is anyone aware of any work being done to get freeware software for MD happening?
Yes, have second thoughts! I'm not proposing that iPods stink or anything of the sort, but if you are like me, i.e. serious about listening to a lot of music rather than looking at a shiny white thing, then iPod may not be the ideal solution. I am on the move a lot, and for me an average of 6 hours playback was just never going to cut it.
With NetMD, using Sony's (admittedly pretty shite) software you can easily transfer MP3s onto minidiscs in no time. The program takes your MP3, converts it into a (seperate) MD-formatted audio file, then copies it via USB to the MD player. By ripping and maintaining your own MP3s outside the Sony software managing your music is pretty straightforward.
Minidisc uses ATRAC, see here: http://www.minidisc.org/aes_atrac.html
Well, with a NetMD minidisc recorder it takes a few minutes to transfer whatever you want onto a minidisc. I can live with that. Furthermore, it will play for around 30 hours on an AA battery, so if you take half an hour to organise a few LP MDs you're set for days of music.
So after 8 hours you can sit there and have warm fuzzy thoughts about all that music you would be able to listen to if the fucking battery hadn't gone flat again?
Before you bleat about how you can charge it through your computer while you listen using firewire, you're talking about an external hard drive there chief. If you want 200 gigs there are plenty of options that don't involve you funding Steve J's next designer turtleneck.
Yeah, that way you can funnel your hard earned cash to Apple AND their buddies at Belkin in order to get the product you paid a huge amount of money for working properly.
More like 4-7 hours on the third generation iPod if you skip tracks frequently and don't listen in a continuous block.
Which is why I returned mine. Apple were forced to acknowledge that their claims about battery life may have been misleading when I showed them the Australian Trade Practices Act sections about misleading and deceptive conduct.
My 2 cents: buy a minidisc player. Better battery life, physically tougher, smaller. What's the point of having 10,000 songs if you can only listen to 7 hours worth in a sitting?
Oh man, I loved that game. I was just thinking the other day that there aren't enough cool gimmicks like the moving seat in afterburner any more. I mean, it doesn't look that great now, but AB had cool graphics, a great sense of speed and a funky rotating cockpit... what more could you want!
Just because you got an Aibo...
Um... the Ghost in the Shell sequel has been known about for quite some time now.... am I missing something here? Not really news, is it?
Nonetheless, it looks completely awesome, the trailer alone has some of the coolest 2D/3D hybrid animation I've seen.
It is possible, despite how it may seem. I cracked it eventually, after reading lots of on-line walkthroughs etc. and just playing and playing and playing. At a guess it would have taken me 50+ tries. I hate that fucking level!
I mean, it is significant if there is another genuine alternative to Windows, isn't it?
From Apple's point of view this is not necessarily great news, and suggests that Linux uptake is accelerating substantially faster than Apple uptake. Presumably a large number of people who choose Linux do so out of the same spirit of rebellion that has traditionally drawn people to Apple, thereby reducing the appeal of shelling out for a G5 when you can get a very nice x86 architecture machine running Linux for much less cash.
Apple users have total freedom to choose their OS... I mean, how many people get an Apple and say "hey, I'll get a new Mac, I think I'll run Windows"?