All of the PC's that I've bought in the past 4 years or so I just plugged in and they worked. I've played with OS X and still don't really understand how it's going to help me get work done quicker or easier.
Short answer: maybe it won't.
I use Win XP and OS X. A decade of using Windoze products has given me a kind of survival instinct, if you will, for navigating their treacherous UIs. I can fly on Windoze. It's just ingrained pattern recognition.
But I prefer OS X, even if, after two years, I'm still not as fast on it. I prefer it for the simple reason that it looks and feels more intelligent; that goes a long way in reducing distraction. And it's not all surface aesthetics: file organization is easier to accomplish with the OS X Finder than the messy, if serviceable, Windoze Explorer.
Speed isn't everything. The experience of using OS X is a relief after years in the Microsoft world.
Actually your wrong Apple has a lot of clout. As it is the record labels tried and failed to renegotiate the.99 a track deal and Apple flat out said no. Your also wrong in think its a 50% marketshare (its actualy around 70% accourding to soundscan.)
Much as I enjoy iTMS, it will all be over for Apple tomorrow if the music industry finds another, more attractive suitor. And remember, love is blind.
Apple's market share is as a distributor. The position of a distributor is wholly dependent on a supplier, without whom there is no business. Unfortunately for Apple, the reverse is not true. Online music distributors, in fact, are a dime a dozen, with more coming onboard all the time.
Will the music biz desert Apple? Not immediately; not while the going is good at iTMS. But the DRM battle could go against Apple, which might find itself being compelled to adopt a competitors' technology or lose contracts with major labels. Remember: holding 50-70% of market share is nothing when the big meanie in pinstripes can easily take his music and go elsewhere.
Ballmer and Gates may be lagging behind in the music distribution business, but they intend to take it over. How they'll do that is going to be interesting--not to say revolting--to watch.
First, what distinguishes the music distro biz from other markets Microsoft dominates? For one thing, it has arrived too late in the game to buy up innovation for rebranding under the Microsoft line. Secondly, it has been outflanked by Apple both on the hardware and software front, and Apple has already colonized the Windows platform with its iTunes store.
So Redmond is fighting a battle not only as the underdog--an unfamiliar position--but also knowing that it cannot compete in terms of image. And in lifestyle marketing such as music, image is everything. Apple is cool; Microsoft is dorkville. What to do?
Fight dirty, of course! Ballmer's opening salvo isn't aimed at consumers, who prefer Apple and cannot likely be wooed any time soon to the crappy Windows Media Player. He's aiming at the music industry in an attempt to divide it from Apple, with whom it has only agreed to a short term deal. Ballmer and Microsoft have concluded that they will compete by attempting to sully Apple's good name in the eyes of the all-important labels.
Will it work? Sure, quite a few iPods probably are loaded with copyright violations, but the music industry already knows that. It doesn't think the files produced by the orgy of trading in the past decade have simply disappeared. But it does want to stop that orgy, through lawsuits, criminal prosecution and DRM. Apple's best defense against Ballmer's slander is its own DRM and continued profitability for the labels, which it is providing at only the slimmest margins for itself.
But this war is just starting. And between Microsoft and the music labels there is an apocalyptic level of greed, so don't rule out victory for the piggies yet.
I download songs and if I enjoy the music, I will go out and buy the cd or buy CDs that are on sale for really good prices. To me its just a morale issue.
Oh, you can be sure that downloading has raised the morale of a lot of people.;-)
Everyone conveniently forgets that when we let Saddam off the hook in '91, one of the conditions was that he would have to prove that he had no weapons.
At some point, we had to say "enough" to his gamesmanship, and make good on the resolutions to do something about it.
Just because it looks like he was screwing with us instead of building weapons doesn't mean the casus bella was wrong. The ball was in Saddam's court.
During and after the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein paid a terrible price for having trusted right wing American leaders. Whereas they happily used him during the lengthy and atrocious Iran-Iraq war, now they demonized him for the very qualities that had made the desert rat so appealing to their schemes only a decade earlier: mercilessness, territorial ambition, a dependable appetite for slaughter.
The gamesmanship of which you speak--is he building WMDs, isn't he?--was answered in two ways. First, Saddam was bombed routinely for a decade. Second, he was subjected to crippling sanctions. I say "he," employing the euphemism offered by Washington, but outside of true believers like Madeleine Albright and the doorman outside the American Enterprise Institute, it was understood that the bombs fell on, and the sanctions starved and poisoned, innocent civilians. Half a million dead children later, bombs and sanctions created the world's most valuable ghetto.
Saddam was "screwing with us," yes, but he paid the price in being pauperized and miniaturized--a ghost of the asshole he had been when Donald Rumsfeld still paid house calls. And so he would have remained, a tinpot dictator with only his inglorious memories to keep him company, without the least hope of becoming the James Bond-style mastermind that cackled in the fantasies of neocons and neoliberals alike, had it not been for the world-historical miscalculation of our invasion. We were lied to. We invaded because of lies--lies told by one set of politicians and eagerly swallowed by another. And now we are fucked, with nothing to show for our dead sons and our tattered honor. And this folly will haunt us across the decades.
I obtained a free comp subscription to PC Gamer and, a few issues later, have tried to find a way to make them stop sending it to me. It's unreadable.
One of the most depressing aspects is seeing young would-be journalists turned into little press release spinners and hype polishers. This is a kind of prostitution for corporations, and its crappy effects go beyond obscuring the difference between good games and bad games. As Elvis Costello sings, "There's a bright future / For all you professional liars."
The short answer is: every laptop manufacturer has QA problems. Spend time at Resellerratings.com, on Usenet, and on various complaint sites, and sample the horror stories for yourself.
The longer answer, vis-a-vis Apple, is that it has been less than forthcoming initially about its hardware problems over the past 2-3 years. But ultimately it has bowed to consumer pressure, and, in most if not all cases, done right by its customers. You ask about how Apple resolves such problems. It is worth pointing out that the threat of a class action suit over the iBook fiasco included a substantial amount of testimony from users who said they were charged, given the run-around, or otherwise told "tough luck" until Apple belatedly admitted its fault.
Speaking as the owner of an iBook from one of the troubled generations, I have been critical of Apple's pace and attitude toward acknowledging problems, yet I remain a satisfied user of its equipment and haven't ruled out further purchases. All I can say is be a realist about these things; nothing's perfect, including Apple.
Criticism may or may not indicate envy, Max, but that's all beside the point. The film has its flaws. It's not necessary to make one's own film to see them; in fact, someone with a good eye who points them out may help other filmmakers avoid the same or simply do better. That's one of the benefits of constructive criticism, as opposed to mere ranting.
My problem with the film, which actually struck me as quite technically accomplished, was its trite sentimentality. It's just unwatchable as a narrative: the syrupy music, all the goo-goo mother-baby stuff, all those lingering gazes and heart-tugging smiles and the itsy-bitsy eyelash-batting. Good bloody lord!!! I had to fast forward, in order not to suffer a whopping violation of Zhe's Rule of Chick Flick Endurance: one minute of wistful gazing at babies is all a man should be required to sit through in a film of any length. I'm glad you were transported to your special place. Me, I needed a shot of whiskey.
And this is a problem that can't be ignored. Art demands to be seen, understood, even judged, first and foremost, as art--not as mere technical accomplishment. If you, for instance, code AI that can autonomously produce Barry Manilow music, that will be a rather serious, er, accomplishment. But as much as you might want it to write the songs that make the whole world sing, don't get bent out of shape if we'd rather not.
Two things I like about Bush Wars by Minnesota journalist Steve Perry:
1) He doesn't update very often. Most blogs suffer from blogarrhea. Bloggers, listen up: less is more. Chirping away with everyone else in the blogosphere not only leads to repetition and throwaway quality. It also helps shape a kind of consensus thought that is, well, a large part of what makes establishment media so dull. Think a little more, write a little less.
2) Need heterodoxy? Apply here. Perry is clever, witty, leftwing, and, even as the editor of the largest weekly paper in the land of Wellstone, unafraid to give hell to the Democrats.
(Note: no personal connection, just calling it as I see it.)
I would assume that they could easily put this technology into a browser.
Exactly, and not merely could--likely would. Their history of tracking searches as well as sniffing Gmail suggests as much. But it's social context that determines how technology is used. Google is a demographic vacuum cleaner that, in the pre-9/11 era, merely looked as suspicious as the next corporate hunger to collect and market identity. Yet in an era of omnipresent government snooping, Google shows omens, if still faint, of becoming a totalitarian tool.
Former presidential aide and press secretary Bill Moyers spent the 1960s helping Lyndon Johnson sugarcoat the Vietnam war for public consumption. It was, by any measure, including obviously his own, a shameful performance--one surely as corrosive to truth as that which he excoriates today in right wing corporate journalism.
Since that time Moyers has demonstrated, through his PBS work specifically, a desire to see more clearly and chart more honestly the nature and exercise of American power. And he has come to understand, better than he did as a willing flunkie in his youth, what costs are paid when our journalism is left in the care of corporations.
He laments the backlash in our present reactionary period. "Journalists who try to tell these (critical) stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged, and dismissed," he writes. True, however it's hardly a new phenomenon. Things have not simply gone sour since 9/11 or since Rupert Murdoch's ascension. Reading corporate US journalism from the 1960s is little different to reading the current product today: both are bland, dependent on elites for their least utterance, concerned foremost with selling a product, careful not to offend, sure to look the other way when their masters might be embarrassed. (The 60s and 70s also saw a burst in critical journalism that sometimes--as in the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon Papers or Watergate--reached the mainstream, but what survives of that vigor is now mainly to be found in the alternative press. Blogging is a hopeful sign, little more.)
Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life; well, Moyers has had one. He quit the browbeating game and went on to become critical, passionate, and curious about our world. Today the dire shape of the Republic may well be as due to malfeasors in office as to yes-men and yes-women in journalism, but we cannot say that people like Moyers haven't been there to show us how to do it all better.
Obviously, you price to individual markets. When, however, the nation and its neighbors belong to a single market and you flout this fact, you'll piss off consumers--particularly the ones who are awake.
Nothing unusual in corporations trying to twist the market. No, what's striking in recent years is the weird, voluntary surrender of market fundamentalists to the corporation. We joke about fanboys--always eager to see the glory of their brand in its every fart or blunder. But we may have to worry more about this species. Sacrificing your own economic interest for someone else's profit is your own foolish affair; when you wish to foist the same upon society, though, you've become a virus.
Since the 19th century, consumers in capitalist societies have understood that the game is fixed, and tends toward abusive extremes the further it travels from sane regulation. Movements against trusts, price-fixing, tying, and other arrangements curbed (during episodes of vigilance) mafia-like behavior. It's a pity to see today's stooge eager to travel backwards.
Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
It was, er, a buncha years ago today
Sgt. Jobbie had to go and pay
For jacking names from Apple Corp
Now he's bent over like a Mapplethorpe
So may I recommend that you
Dump your stock while you can!
Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band!
We're Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band
Sure, we may have thought of Apple second
We're Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band
But the bill's higher than we reckoned!
iPods are very profitable,
They've kept us in turtlenecks.
You're such a lovely installed base
We'd hate to charge you more for things
But now we'll have to charge you more!
I don't really want to kiss and tell!
But hell I really might as well!
Yoko Ono comes from outer space,
And Ringo's nose has been replaced!
So let me recommend to you
Never listen to another Beatles song!
Just Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band!
Yes, even the delusions are well-armed in NASCAR 'Murrica.
Nimoy: "The ideas that propelled it have run dry"
on
Should Star Trek Die?
·
· Score: 1
But, Leonard, so have the conscience and the spirit of the culture.
Trek was the evocation of Roddenberry's liberalism. And liberalism--well, we know what has been done to that.
Successive Trek spin-offs have moved further and further away from his ideology, populated by little more than cardboard cut-outs interchangeable with any other sf series.
In an era of right wing xenophobia and hostility to the basic values of the Trek universe, who wants the franchise to be a mirror to the sickness of FOX News and JAG? Its only hope for renewal is to carry a torch again--to become an antidote to the era of Bush as it once was to its own deeply polarized and miserable era. And good luck getting that on 21st century American TV.
The War on Terror needs to be fought, maybe differently than it has been, but in terms of the US, things are going pretty well.
Tell it to the thousands and thousands of family members of US soldiers slain, or mutilated, or crippled, or driven insane or to suicide in Iraq.
Whether or not we agree on the aims of the supposed "war on terror," there is a calculus of suffering that demands better from human beings than you have managed in your callowness. These soldiers give up their lives, arms, legs, eyes and balls, while you sit behind a keyboard and aver that it's all "going pretty well." Try to see beyond the frontiers of your own hide.
Whether you like it or not, though, the vast majority of people, especially gamers, have no problem with Windows being preinstalled.
Whether he likes it or not? Knowing the buggy and insecure nature of Windows, what sensible person would be happy with what you describe?
Judging from social history, consumerism isn't exactly a very dependable measure of intelligence. The vast majority simply buy what's put in front of them without question. When you add illegal monopoly control of the marketplace to that equation, you get a generation of consumers who have been raised on the craptastic experience of Windows--and it's all they know.
Yes, Molyneux's gimmick is a throwback to one of the oldest storytelling conventions: characters are condemned to wear their moral selves on their sleeves.
Today that hackneyed convention lives on in countless genre pieces, comic books, and indeed much of the output of Hollywood and TV, even if modern people have come to see that the real face of evil may look as shiny, plump and friendly as the face of, say, an Enron CEO or a leader who lies to his nation. In this way, our imaginative fictions too often fail us by repackaging our tribal prejudices as villains. Typically in modern life it is the devil who looks and sounds normal--a paragon of the banality of evil--that one must fear, not some dark-skinned and different-looking Other!
Slashdot Mirror
Short answer: maybe it won't.
I use Win XP and OS X. A decade of using Windoze products has given me a kind of survival instinct, if you will, for navigating their treacherous UIs. I can fly on Windoze. It's just ingrained pattern recognition.
But I prefer OS X, even if, after two years, I'm still not as fast on it. I prefer it for the simple reason that it looks and feels more intelligent; that goes a long way in reducing distraction. And it's not all surface aesthetics: file organization is easier to accomplish with the OS X Finder than the messy, if serviceable, Windoze Explorer.
Speed isn't everything. The experience of using OS X is a relief after years in the Microsoft world.
Finding models for the people shouldn't be too hard. What about backgrounds/sets?
2. Inordinate amount of time spent visiting rumor sites to find out when emulation will be sped up.
3. Funny, this beige computer case clashes with the drapes; I never noticed that before...
Much as I enjoy iTMS, it will all be over for Apple tomorrow if the music industry finds another, more attractive suitor. And remember, love is blind.
Apple's market share is as a distributor. The position of a distributor is wholly dependent on a supplier, without whom there is no business. Unfortunately for Apple, the reverse is not true. Online music distributors, in fact, are a dime a dozen, with more coming onboard all the time.
Will the music biz desert Apple? Not immediately; not while the going is good at iTMS. But the DRM battle could go against Apple, which might find itself being compelled to adopt a competitors' technology or lose contracts with major labels. Remember: holding 50-70% of market share is nothing when the big meanie in pinstripes can easily take his music and go elsewhere.
Ballmer and Gates may be lagging behind in the music distribution business, but they intend to take it over. How they'll do that is going to be interesting--not to say revolting--to watch.
First, what distinguishes the music distro biz from other markets Microsoft dominates? For one thing, it has arrived too late in the game to buy up innovation for rebranding under the Microsoft line. Secondly, it has been outflanked by Apple both on the hardware and software front, and Apple has already colonized the Windows platform with its iTunes store.
So Redmond is fighting a battle not only as the underdog--an unfamiliar position--but also knowing that it cannot compete in terms of image. And in lifestyle marketing such as music, image is everything. Apple is cool; Microsoft is dorkville. What to do?
Fight dirty, of course! Ballmer's opening salvo isn't aimed at consumers, who prefer Apple and cannot likely be wooed any time soon to the crappy Windows Media Player. He's aiming at the music industry in an attempt to divide it from Apple, with whom it has only agreed to a short term deal. Ballmer and Microsoft have concluded that they will compete by attempting to sully Apple's good name in the eyes of the all-important labels.
Will it work? Sure, quite a few iPods probably are loaded with copyright violations, but the music industry already knows that. It doesn't think the files produced by the orgy of trading in the past decade have simply disappeared. But it does want to stop that orgy, through lawsuits, criminal prosecution and DRM. Apple's best defense against Ballmer's slander is its own DRM and continued profitability for the labels, which it is providing at only the slimmest margins for itself.
But this war is just starting. And between Microsoft and the music labels there is an apocalyptic level of greed, so don't rule out victory for the piggies yet.
Oh, you can be sure that downloading has raised the morale of a lot of people. ;-)
The gamesmanship of which you speak--is he building WMDs, isn't he?--was answered in two ways. First, Saddam was bombed routinely for a decade. Second, he was subjected to crippling sanctions. I say "he," employing the euphemism offered by Washington, but outside of true believers like Madeleine Albright and the doorman outside the American Enterprise Institute, it was understood that the bombs fell on, and the sanctions starved and poisoned, innocent civilians. Half a million dead children later, bombs and sanctions created the world's most valuable ghetto.
Saddam was "screwing with us," yes, but he paid the price in being pauperized and miniaturized--a ghost of the asshole he had been when Donald Rumsfeld still paid house calls. And so he would have remained, a tinpot dictator with only his inglorious memories to keep him company, without the least hope of becoming the James Bond-style mastermind that cackled in the fantasies of neocons and neoliberals alike, had it not been for the world-historical miscalculation of our invasion. We were lied to. We invaded because of lies--lies told by one set of politicians and eagerly swallowed by another. And now we are fucked, with nothing to show for our dead sons and our tattered honor. And this folly will haunt us across the decades.
I obtained a free comp subscription to PC Gamer and, a few issues later, have tried to find a way to make them stop sending it to me. It's unreadable.
One of the most depressing aspects is seeing young would-be journalists turned into little press release spinners and hype polishers. This is a kind of prostitution for corporations, and its crappy effects go beyond obscuring the difference between good games and bad games. As Elvis Costello sings, "There's a bright future / For all you professional liars."
Can radio "time-shifting" become the new, er, "file sharing" in an age when music is under pressure to be, well, "paid for"? ;-)
The longer answer, vis-a-vis Apple, is that it has been less than forthcoming initially about its hardware problems over the past 2-3 years. But ultimately it has bowed to consumer pressure, and, in most if not all cases, done right by its customers. You ask about how Apple resolves such problems. It is worth pointing out that the threat of a class action suit over the iBook fiasco included a substantial amount of testimony from users who said they were charged, given the run-around, or otherwise told "tough luck" until Apple belatedly admitted its fault.
Speaking as the owner of an iBook from one of the troubled generations, I have been critical of Apple's pace and attitude toward acknowledging problems, yet I remain a satisfied user of its equipment and haven't ruled out further purchases. All I can say is be a realist about these things; nothing's perfect, including Apple.
My problem with the film, which actually struck me as quite technically accomplished, was its trite sentimentality. It's just unwatchable as a narrative: the syrupy music, all the goo-goo mother-baby stuff, all those lingering gazes and heart-tugging smiles and the itsy-bitsy eyelash-batting. Good bloody lord!!! I had to fast forward, in order not to suffer a whopping violation of Zhe's Rule of Chick Flick Endurance: one minute of wistful gazing at babies is all a man should be required to sit through in a film of any length. I'm glad you were transported to your special place. Me, I needed a shot of whiskey.
And this is a problem that can't be ignored. Art demands to be seen, understood, even judged, first and foremost, as art--not as mere technical accomplishment. If you, for instance, code AI that can autonomously produce Barry Manilow music, that will be a rather serious, er, accomplishment. But as much as you might want it to write the songs that make the whole world sing, don't get bent out of shape if we'd rather not.
What, so it ships with a Goatse screen saver now?
1) He doesn't update very often. Most blogs suffer from blogarrhea. Bloggers, listen up: less is more. Chirping away with everyone else in the blogosphere not only leads to repetition and throwaway quality. It also helps shape a kind of consensus thought that is, well, a large part of what makes establishment media so dull. Think a little more, write a little less.
2) Need heterodoxy? Apply here. Perry is clever, witty, leftwing, and, even as the editor of the largest weekly paper in the land of Wellstone, unafraid to give hell to the Democrats.
(Note: no personal connection, just calling it as I see it.)
Exactly, and not merely could--likely would. Their history of tracking searches as well as sniffing Gmail suggests as much. But it's social context that determines how technology is used. Google is a demographic vacuum cleaner that, in the pre-9/11 era, merely looked as suspicious as the next corporate hunger to collect and market identity. Yet in an era of omnipresent government snooping, Google shows omens, if still faint, of becoming a totalitarian tool.
Knew there was some explanation for Zell Miller.
Since that time Moyers has demonstrated, through his PBS work specifically, a desire to see more clearly and chart more honestly the nature and exercise of American power. And he has come to understand, better than he did as a willing flunkie in his youth, what costs are paid when our journalism is left in the care of corporations.
He laments the backlash in our present reactionary period. "Journalists who try to tell these (critical) stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged, and dismissed," he writes. True, however it's hardly a new phenomenon. Things have not simply gone sour since 9/11 or since Rupert Murdoch's ascension. Reading corporate US journalism from the 1960s is little different to reading the current product today: both are bland, dependent on elites for their least utterance, concerned foremost with selling a product, careful not to offend, sure to look the other way when their masters might be embarrassed. (The 60s and 70s also saw a burst in critical journalism that sometimes--as in the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon Papers or Watergate--reached the mainstream, but what survives of that vigor is now mainly to be found in the alternative press. Blogging is a hopeful sign, little more.)
Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life; well, Moyers has had one. He quit the browbeating game and went on to become critical, passionate, and curious about our world. Today the dire shape of the Republic may well be as due to malfeasors in office as to yes-men and yes-women in journalism, but we cannot say that people like Moyers haven't been there to show us how to do it all better.
Nothing unusual in corporations trying to twist the market. No, what's striking in recent years is the weird, voluntary surrender of market fundamentalists to the corporation. We joke about fanboys--always eager to see the glory of their brand in its every fart or blunder. But we may have to worry more about this species. Sacrificing your own economic interest for someone else's profit is your own foolish affair; when you wish to foist the same upon society, though, you've become a virus.
Since the 19th century, consumers in capitalist societies have understood that the game is fixed, and tends toward abusive extremes the further it travels from sane regulation. Movements against trusts, price-fixing, tying, and other arrangements curbed (during episodes of vigilance) mafia-like behavior. It's a pity to see today's stooge eager to travel backwards.
It was, er, a buncha years ago today
Sgt. Jobbie had to go and pay
For jacking names from Apple Corp
Now he's bent over like a Mapplethorpe
So may I recommend that you
Dump your stock while you can!
Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band!
We're Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band
Sure, we may have thought of Apple second
We're Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band
But the bill's higher than we reckoned!
iPods are very profitable,
They've kept us in turtlenecks.
You're such a lovely installed base
We'd hate to charge you more for things
But now we'll have to charge you more!
I don't really want to kiss and tell!
But hell I really might as well!
Yoko Ono comes from outer space,
And Ringo's nose has been replaced!
So let me recommend to you
Never listen to another Beatles song!
Just Sgt. Jobbie's Trademark Rip Off Band!
As every law school student learns, "The ignorance of one Slashdot poster is no defense."
Just because you are in the dark about the history of Apple Corp. doesn't mean the rest of mankind is.
Yes, even the delusions are well-armed in NASCAR 'Murrica.
Trek was the evocation of Roddenberry's liberalism. And liberalism--well, we know what has been done to that.
Successive Trek spin-offs have moved further and further away from his ideology, populated by little more than cardboard cut-outs interchangeable with any other sf series.
In an era of right wing xenophobia and hostility to the basic values of the Trek universe, who wants the franchise to be a mirror to the sickness of FOX News and JAG? Its only hope for renewal is to carry a torch again--to become an antidote to the era of Bush as it once was to its own deeply polarized and miserable era. And good luck getting that on 21st century American TV.
Tell it to the thousands and thousands of family members of US soldiers slain, or mutilated, or crippled, or driven insane or to suicide in Iraq.
Whether or not we agree on the aims of the supposed "war on terror," there is a calculus of suffering that demands better from human beings than you have managed in your callowness. These soldiers give up their lives, arms, legs, eyes and balls, while you sit behind a keyboard and aver that it's all "going pretty well." Try to see beyond the frontiers of your own hide.
Whether he likes it or not? Knowing the buggy and insecure nature of Windows, what sensible person would be happy with what you describe?
Judging from social history, consumerism isn't exactly a very dependable measure of intelligence. The vast majority simply buy what's put in front of them without question. When you add illegal monopoly control of the marketplace to that equation, you get a generation of consumers who have been raised on the craptastic experience of Windows--and it's all they know.
Today that hackneyed convention lives on in countless genre pieces, comic books, and indeed much of the output of Hollywood and TV, even if modern people have come to see that the real face of evil may look as shiny, plump and friendly as the face of, say, an Enron CEO or a leader who lies to his nation. In this way, our imaginative fictions too often fail us by repackaging our tribal prejudices as villains. Typically in modern life it is the devil who looks and sounds normal--a paragon of the banality of evil--that one must fear, not some dark-skinned and different-looking Other!
It's the "what have you" crowd that scares me.