The prevailing view of pirates (the nautical kind), overwhelmingly, is that they're 'cool'. When was the last time you saw a movie advertised with pirates portrayed as vicious, brutal murdering sons-of-bitches? Now when was the last time you saw them portrayed as cheerful, happy-go-lucky scalawags who only preyed upon the unjust?
Feh. If you ask me, calling illegal copying 'piracy' in this day and age is whitewashing it.
There was almost certainly a cost rationalisation behind the decision to drop FireWire support from the iPod, but it's also worth remembering that USB 2.0 is probably more appropriate than FireWire in the iPod too.
Sadly, firewire has significantly more power, so it charges iPods significantly faster. (Well, my third gen iPod, I guess it's possibly that's no longer true.) This is presumably why the new iPods still allow you to charge via firewire even though they don't allow you to sync, but that's not as much help if you want to do both.
The USB2 spec irritates me no end. Just a wee bit too little power to run an external hard drive off of. How many damn Dell laptop motherboards have we fried that way? At least six. Could they release a new spec, USB2.1? Of course? Do they care? No.
It was meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek. Glad you liked it and saw it that way!
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek? When someone's tongue is so firmly in cheek that two thirds of his audience can't understand what he's saying ('mhrfrm rfmmf rmmf!'), I'd have to say that would be more than 'somewhat' tongue-in-cheek.
I'd say that would be so tongue-in-cheek that you're in danger of popping your own eyeball out every time you try to pronounce an 'L'.
It's subtle, I'll allow that, but remember: always consult the nearest Brit before responding to something that sounds a little bit too stupid to be true. It probably is.
I'm not sure 'subtle' is the right word. I am not quite sure what the right word is, but some useful candidates include:
ineffective
amateurish
pointless
heavyhanded
garbage
Or some fun synthetic word that translates literally to 'a waste of electrons'.
The company I work for is considering switching to MacBooks running Windows for its sales staff.
We prize reliability and availability, and after going with Dell for a while (lousy and unreliable, but with a decent order-to-delivery time), Lenovo (moderately reliable, and takes anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months to deliver), HP (the one we ordered to test died within a week though that was presumably a fluke... but anyway, they don't have a model we like) we are getting really frustrated. The MacBooks, once the initial flaws are fully ironed out, might well be the way to go: the similar (business-class) models from the other manufacturers cost about the same as the MacBook Pro (we're paying between $2000 and $2500 per machine) and, at least at the moment, have worse performance.
The main issue standing in the way of this is... the head of sales. Who thinks I've suggested it just to be cute.
Some companies don't care if you have good writing skills, but no business will complain if your skills are higher than they want.
Although, in my experience, they will often start asking you to edit company literature, web sites, white papers, and every-damn-thing else under the sun. In addition to your normal job.
Be careful who you show your talent to. And never, never, never say 'you know, you're really not supposed to put a comma there' unless you want to keep saying it often
Glib, and gleeful. And right for you. And a bit, sorry to say it, self-centered, because you assume that something that would work for you would work for anyone. There are people who are comfortable doing this sort of thing and people who aren't. And if you aren't, you're not going to succeed at it. And of course, the possibility of doing this sort of thing depends on not too many other people doing it.
Make your own damned job. It's the American way. Start your own business, hang a shingle, make some sales, do some cold calls. It hurts at first, contracts don't come with a 401k. But, pretty soon, you get the whole customer-relations thing figured out. Then, not too horribly long after that, you get the whole tax/accountant/bank thing figured out.
If you're lucky. And you're cut out for that kind of thing. And you're lucky. And you're not in a market that's oversaturated with people who can do what you can do. And you're happy to work fifteen hour days, seven days a week, at the beginning at least, because that's what it's going to take to satisfy some of your more demanding customers. And you have enough money to get you through the first year. And you don't accidentally alienate your first employer though not doing something they assume you will know to do, because you're not experienced. (Pleading inexperience doesn't work; they only want people who are experienced.) And you don't get a company that signs a contract and then doesn't pay you for eight months after you finish the job, when you can't really afford the time and money to sue the hell out of them. And you don't get companies that make you give them a cost up front and then continually add features while you're working. (I lost two clients that way, because I told them I wasn't going to put in extra work that wasn't in my contract for no extra money, and they said, 'Well, then, I'll find someone who will.')
And the sorriest thing is, you only get a chance to run into those problems at all if you're lucky, or at least not unlucky.
It's really the smugness and superiority that drive me nuts. 'It was right for me, obviously it's right for everyone!' I've tried it. It's hard, it's nasty, and it's not a situation that fits every personality type. I made it okay for a couple of years, but I was delighted to return to a job where I was working 40 hours a week for decent pay and had health insurance that couldn't be cancelled (three times) for no reason other than a single, low-cost, low-mantenance health problem. I like to have a social life that doesn't require me to choose between it and sleep on any given day. I like to have coworkers to interact with, and to ask when I have a problem, and to go out to lunch with. And God, do I hate billing.
Perhaps this is the business model of the future: work 15 hours a day every day with no health insurance and no guarantee that you'll actually be paid before you starve to death or else you won't have a job at all. If it is, I will probably live through it for as long as I decide it's worth living through. But don't try to sell it to me as some kind of goddamned paradise because I know what hell looks like.
It must be scary to hear it, but the truth is that people do NOT want the Gilded Age (of 2 class society) to happen again no matter how it is done.
I wish I were as sure of that as you are. People on the low end of the income scale sure seem to want the taxes on the highest 1% of earners in the US to be lower, if not nonexistent, just based on the one in four hundred thousand chance that they will end up among them.
The most hated tax in the US today is the estate tax, a tax that over 95% of the country will never even feel, and which only impacts people who are basically trying to maintain a landed gentry in the United States.
Maybe later we can have a discussion about Kyoto and how some of the largest polluters in the world were exempted from the treaty, thus removing any real environmental benefit while hampering U.S. economic interests.
Yap yap yap. The United States is the #1 emitter of greenhouse gasses. 5 years ago, when Kyoto was actually a going concern, we were bigger than #2 and #3 combined, and bigger than everyone from #11 on down to the last one. Adjusted for population, which in all fairness one should probably do if you're comparing the US to China, we are still the largest by a truly ridiculous ratio.
If the United States were killing, say, 1 million people a year, and China were killing 600,000 people a year, and India were killing 200,000 people a year, and there were a treaty floated that would force the United States to 'cut down' to only 400,000 people a year, I would support it even if it didn't force China or India to cut down. Even if it were a little inconvenient for the US to stop killing people.
Clearly, though, poisoning the planet and destroying fragile ecosystems and potentially causing the destruction of the homes of tens or hundreds of millions of people, social upheaval, etc, cannot reasonably be compared to that, right?
However, I would have rather lived in Pinochet's Chile than Castro's Cuba, Mao's China, or the USSR. In a free-market economy, people are free to voluntarily trade. People are free to make their own economic decisions without the state or "the community" dictating what they should do with their money.
And this is what just plain drives me nuts about today's 'libertarians'. Look at what you're saying there. Somehow, all of a sudden, the most important thing about choosing a society is what people are able to do with money. Property is more important than people. And anything that maximizes the 'freedom of the market' (whatever that means, given the tendency of a market-based economy to create economic slavery) is, ipso facto, good. It's a religion, because nobody even does a very good job of saying why a free market capitalist who puts people to death on a daily basis is somehow better than a socialist leader who doesn't. But they just are, because a free market is more important than people.
Once again, I despise socialism and communism. It saddens me to even think that people virtually want us to become slaves to collectivism forever.
I'm not a big fan of collectivism either, in its most absolute forms. However, the freer the market, the less opportunity the people with no money have to ever gain money, and the more they come to resemble slaves. (In a truly free market, without copyrights and patents, any invention made by someone without the money to market and defend it himself instantly is coopted by the organization to take advantage of it.) So now you have a choice: slavery to collectivism, or slavery to capital. The latter is often preferred by the people with capital (who tend to be Republicans and libertarians, in this country). The former isn't really preferred by anyone, which is why it's never really been tried. (The USSR, Cuba, etc are all authoritarian/aristocratic states, that are only capitalist in the lower rungs of society.) It would seem to be to be appropriate to find a happy medium where there isn't anyone who is enslaved.
Sadly, that's not the direction the USA has been moving in of late.
The machines are fine, although the ultra-light notebooks use the same kind of hard drives that iPods do, which means they are ridiculously slow compared to a rational computer. And of course they don't tell you that before you buy them. However, if you stuff a gig and a half of RAM into them they're acceptable, as ultra-light notebooks go.
Our problem with them is that their supply line sucks. Our orders have been filled in two weeks, occasionally, but most often it takes a month and sometimes three. If they weren't the only company that offers a couple of features that we need, we'd have dumped them like a hot potato after the first order. As it is, we just suck it up. But I must say, compared to Dells and HPs, we've had very few problems with the ones that have been delivered. In fact, we've had one hard drive failure and no DOAs, out of the thirty or so machines we've had for the last six months. Compared to our experiences with Dell or my experiences with HP in my last job, that's almost laughably negligible.
It's worth noting that, while Patrick Moore was indeed a significant part of the start of Greenpeace, he's basically been in the pocket of industry for ages. He's run a salmon farm and called claims that they pollute 'hogwash'. (They do, in fact, pollute.) He's been a front man for the lumber company involved in the deforestation of much of Canada for a long time. He was instrumental in persuading the Pew Charitable Trust not to 'waste its money' on funding environmental groups.
He's the one who said "We found that the Amazon rainforest is more than 90 percent intact." Which is, of course, total bunk. He's basically a greenwasher now... someone who you hire who tells you how to make your industry look more green without actually changing your practices, or whom you hire to do damage control when your industry has just been exposed as a gross polluter, or in some cases even when your industry is about to get much worse and you don't want any flack from it.
Moore's clients have included: B.C. Hazardous Waste Management Corporation BHP Minerals (Canada) Ltd. (To claim that dumping mine tailings in a river is not harmful.) National Association of Forest Industries (heavy loggers) Westcoast Energy and BC Gas (to play down global warming concerns)
And exactly how much tax revenue will Wal-Mart be providing the community? Ever try the math? That 125000 at 8.5% tax rate is only 1.47 million in sales. If you think a Wal-Mart super center only has 1.47 million in sales in a year then you have a lot to learn.
Um. The sales taxes are, in fact, leeched out of other retail stores. I mean, really, do you assume that people just aren't buying anything until happy Mr. Wal Mart comes along and spontaneously generates cash? The reason that communities give Wal Mart enormous amounts of cash in order to locate there is because they know that if they don't, it will locate in the next community over, and then they will lose up to 50% of their local businesses (Google Nowata, Oklahoma) and that sales tax revenue won't be offset by anything at all. So really, it's basically a protection racket: 'Give us $50 million over the next ten years [yes, places have paid that much] or else we'll locate fifty feet west of the city line and you won't have a budget at all in ten years.'
But hey, that's the capitalist way, right? And it must be good because it's capitalism!
When I (ever-so-briefly) worked there during my return to college, they didn't offer it to me. And the vast majority of people who work for Wal Mart are people like I was (stock monkeys, register monkeys, etc). They didn't mention it to me at all.
Then, recently, some documents came out that showed Wal Mart's strategy on health care: finding ways of getting employees to sign up for Medicaid, including making the company health care plans even worse (and less available and less visible) than they currently are. Instructing employees in filing for Medicaid. And firing people who are overweight or otherwise prone to be unhealthy.
They apparently started trying to clean up their act after those things were released, and started playing up a new health care option around October of last year. I say 'apparently' because, lo and behold, there were some more documents leaked talking about how they were fighting all this negative publicity: throwing X amount of money at a publicity campaign that says that 'Wal Mart is actually your friend!'
I can't decide which one is sadder, a +5 Insightful or all the angry responses.
Jim, you fool, you forgot the tipoff that it was supposed to be funny, without which only 4% of Slashdot recognizes humor. Remember the acceptable signs: a smilie (deprecated), the phrase 'in Soviet Russia' tacked onto the beginning (deprecated), or '6 - PROFIT!' tacked onto the end (deprecated.)
Really? I downloaded OpenRPG onto my Mac and spent about half an hour trying to get it to run before giving it up as a bad job. I mean, that may be cross-platform awfulness, I admit; perhaps it's just as insane to run on Windows as it is on the Mac.
Any installation instruction list that requires me to find the one 17x17 icon gif that is crashing the modified version of python that I was forced to install in step 7 and edit it down to a 16x16 gif in step fourteen is going beyond stupid to 'wow'.
Anyway, Cedega has some annoying flaws, but its MAIN flaw is that it gives developers a good excuse not to do a native Linux port. They may have heard of Cedega, and they assume that their game will be supported under it, so there is no reason to do a native port.
I'm not sure the two situations are parallel. I know there's a public perception that Linux-on-desktop people don't pay for software. (I'm not saying it's accurate. I have far too small a sample size to know. I only know three people who run Linux as their main environments at work, and only one of those doesn't have a Mac at home, these days.) Perhaps that has more to do with the lack of Linux game publishers?
When I worked at a software house, a while back, it decided to discontinue its Mac line, because 'the Mac is dying'. Projected cost for the Mac port, based on the costs of prior Mac ports: 5% of the dev costs of the Windows product. Projected profit? Around 20% of the profits from the Windows product. Reasons for ditching it? One: corporate infighting (the Windows team was headed by the VP of Dev, the Mac team by a manager under him. The Mac team developed on time and under budget, the Windows team never did. The VP was embarrassed.) Two: new upper management, which had recently taken over the company from the founders, were mostly stereotypical businessmen who thought of the Mac, when they thought of it at all, as something which no serious person would use, something for odd people who weren't their type of people, and consequently weren't anyone they wanted to sell their product to anyway.
I have seen this happen at another company as well, one much larger and better known (*cough*Adobe*cough*), but only vicariously. (The manager I talked to there, while interviewing for a job in 1997 or 1998, said, 'No, we're not hiring any more Mac programmers. I don't think we're going to be starting any new projects for the Mac, and I'm not even sure we'll be releasing any more new versions of Photoshop and so on after the next one. The higher-ups seem to feel that we should hasten Apple's demise as much as we can without actually burning down One Infinite Loop, because it's so much easier to develop for one platform than it is for two.' My favorite quote, though, was from the recruiter I talked to at a job fair, which led to that interview (for a sysadmin position). 'What? Why would we hire any more Mac programmers? Haven't you heard? Adobe now gets half its software sales from Windows versions!' Uh, yeah. And half from Mac. 'Well, we know they'll all just dump their Macs as soon as we stop producing Mac versions, so we don't have to worry about that.')
So no. The developers don't decide whether to make Linux versions based on doing the math. They do it based on personal prejudices, 'common wisdom' (Linux users don't pay for stuff!), and corporate infighting. In fact, I suspect that the companies that even do the math are in the distinct minority.
With regards to missing standard keys, could you be more specific? Are you referring to "Prt Scr," "Sys Rq," etc? Which keys are missing that are considered "standard"?
I don't know about his, buy my Apple keyboard appears to be missing the 'any' key.
Slashdot Mirror
The prevailing view of pirates (the nautical kind), overwhelmingly, is that they're 'cool'. When was the last time you saw a movie advertised with pirates portrayed as vicious, brutal murdering sons-of-bitches? Now when was the last time you saw them portrayed as cheerful, happy-go-lucky scalawags who only preyed upon the unjust?
Feh. If you ask me, calling illegal copying 'piracy' in this day and age is whitewashing it.
-fred
Sadly, firewire has significantly more power, so it charges iPods significantly faster. (Well, my third gen iPod, I guess it's possibly that's no longer true.) This is presumably why the new iPods still allow you to charge via firewire even though they don't allow you to sync, but that's not as much help if you want to do both.
The USB2 spec irritates me no end. Just a wee bit too little power to run an external hard drive off of. How many damn Dell laptop motherboards have we fried that way? At least six. Could they release a new spec, USB2.1? Of course? Do they care? No.
-fred
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek? When someone's tongue is so firmly in cheek that two thirds of his audience can't understand what he's saying ('mhrfrm rfmmf rmmf!'), I'd have to say that would be more than 'somewhat' tongue-in-cheek.
I'd say that would be so tongue-in-cheek that you're in danger of popping your own eyeball out every time you try to pronounce an 'L'.
-fred
I'm not sure 'subtle' is the right word. I am not quite sure what the right word is, but some useful candidates include:
Or some fun synthetic word that translates literally to 'a waste of electrons'.
-fred
The company I work for is considering switching to MacBooks running Windows for its sales staff.
We prize reliability and availability, and after going with Dell for a while (lousy and unreliable, but with a decent order-to-delivery time), Lenovo (moderately reliable, and takes anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months to deliver), HP (the one we ordered to test died within a week though that was presumably a fluke... but anyway, they don't have a model we like) we are getting really frustrated. The MacBooks, once the initial flaws are fully ironed out, might well be the way to go: the similar (business-class) models from the other manufacturers cost about the same as the MacBook Pro (we're paying between $2000 and $2500 per machine) and, at least at the moment, have worse performance.
The main issue standing in the way of this is... the head of sales. Who thinks I've suggested it just to be cute.
-fred
-fred
Mods on LSD. That's not insightful, and it's not even particularly funny if you have any idea what the term 'the editorial we' means.
-fred
Although, in my experience, they will often start asking you to edit company literature, web sites, white papers, and every-damn-thing else under the sun. In addition to your normal job.
Be careful who you show your talent to. And never, never, never say 'you know, you're really not supposed to put a comma there' unless you want to keep saying it often
-fred
Glib, and gleeful. And right for you. And a bit, sorry to say it, self-centered, because you assume that something that would work for you would work for anyone. There are people who are comfortable doing this sort of thing and people who aren't. And if you aren't, you're not going to succeed at it. And of course, the possibility of doing this sort of thing depends on not too many other people doing it.
If you're lucky. And you're cut out for that kind of thing. And you're lucky. And you're not in a market that's oversaturated with people who can do what you can do. And you're happy to work fifteen hour days, seven days a week, at the beginning at least, because that's what it's going to take to satisfy some of your more demanding customers. And you have enough money to get you through the first year. And you don't accidentally alienate your first employer though not doing something they assume you will know to do, because you're not experienced. (Pleading inexperience doesn't work; they only want people who are experienced.) And you don't get a company that signs a contract and then doesn't pay you for eight months after you finish the job, when you can't really afford the time and money to sue the hell out of them. And you don't get companies that make you give them a cost up front and then continually add features while you're working. (I lost two clients that way, because I told them I wasn't going to put in extra work that wasn't in my contract for no extra money, and they said, 'Well, then, I'll find someone who will.')
And the sorriest thing is, you only get a chance to run into those problems at all if you're lucky, or at least not unlucky.
It's really the smugness and superiority that drive me nuts. 'It was right for me, obviously it's right for everyone!' I've tried it. It's hard, it's nasty, and it's not a situation that fits every personality type. I made it okay for a couple of years, but I was delighted to return to a job where I was working 40 hours a week for decent pay and had health insurance that couldn't be cancelled (three times) for no reason other than a single, low-cost, low-mantenance health problem. I like to have a social life that doesn't require me to choose between it and sleep on any given day. I like to have coworkers to interact with, and to ask when I have a problem, and to go out to lunch with. And God, do I hate billing.
Perhaps this is the business model of the future: work 15 hours a day every day with no health insurance and no guarantee that you'll actually be paid before you starve to death or else you won't have a job at all. If it is, I will probably live through it for as long as I decide it's worth living through. But don't try to sell it to me as some kind of goddamned paradise because I know what hell looks like.
-fred
I wish I were as sure of that as you are. People on the low end of the income scale sure seem to want the taxes on the highest 1% of earners in the US to be lower, if not nonexistent, just based on the one in four hundred thousand chance that they will end up among them.
The most hated tax in the US today is the estate tax, a tax that over 95% of the country will never even feel, and which only impacts people who are basically trying to maintain a landed gentry in the United States.
-fred
Yap yap yap. The United States is the #1 emitter of greenhouse gasses. 5 years ago, when Kyoto was actually a going concern, we were bigger than #2 and #3 combined, and bigger than everyone from #11 on down to the last one. Adjusted for population, which in all fairness one should probably do if you're comparing the US to China, we are still the largest by a truly ridiculous ratio.
If the United States were killing, say, 1 million people a year, and China were killing 600,000 people a year, and India were killing 200,000 people a year, and there were a treaty floated that would force the United States to 'cut down' to only 400,000 people a year, I would support it even if it didn't force China or India to cut down. Even if it were a little inconvenient for the US to stop killing people.
Clearly, though, poisoning the planet and destroying fragile ecosystems and potentially causing the destruction of the homes of tens or hundreds of millions of people, social upheaval, etc, cannot reasonably be compared to that, right?
-fred
And this is what just plain drives me nuts about today's 'libertarians'. Look at what you're saying there. Somehow, all of a sudden, the most important thing about choosing a society is what people are able to do with money. Property is more important than people. And anything that maximizes the 'freedom of the market' (whatever that means, given the tendency of a market-based economy to create economic slavery) is, ipso facto, good. It's a religion, because nobody even does a very good job of saying why a free market capitalist who puts people to death on a daily basis is somehow better than a socialist leader who doesn't. But they just are, because a free market is more important than people.
I'm not a big fan of collectivism either, in its most absolute forms. However, the freer the market, the less opportunity the people with no money have to ever gain money, and the more they come to resemble slaves. (In a truly free market, without copyrights and patents, any invention made by someone without the money to market and defend it himself instantly is coopted by the organization to take advantage of it.) So now you have a choice: slavery to collectivism, or slavery to capital. The latter is often preferred by the people with capital (who tend to be Republicans and libertarians, in this country). The former isn't really preferred by anyone, which is why it's never really been tried. (The USSR, Cuba, etc are all authoritarian/aristocratic states, that are only capitalist in the lower rungs of society.) It would seem to be to be appropriate to find a happy medium where there isn't anyone who is enslaved.
Sadly, that's not the direction the USA has been moving in of late.
-fred
We switched to Lenovos last year.
The machines are fine, although the ultra-light notebooks use the same kind of hard drives that iPods do, which means they are ridiculously slow compared to a rational computer. And of course they don't tell you that before you buy them. However, if you stuff a gig and a half of RAM into them they're acceptable, as ultra-light notebooks go.
Our problem with them is that their supply line sucks. Our orders have been filled in two weeks, occasionally, but most often it takes a month and sometimes three. If they weren't the only company that offers a couple of features that we need, we'd have dumped them like a hot potato after the first order. As it is, we just suck it up. But I must say, compared to Dells and HPs, we've had very few problems with the ones that have been delivered. In fact, we've had one hard drive failure and no DOAs, out of the thirty or so machines we've had for the last six months. Compared to our experiences with Dell or my experiences with HP in my last job, that's almost laughably negligible.
-fred
It's worth noting that, while Patrick Moore was indeed a significant part of the start of Greenpeace, he's basically been in the pocket of industry for ages. He's run a salmon farm and called claims that they pollute 'hogwash'. (They do, in fact, pollute.) He's been a front man for the lumber company involved in the deforestation of much of Canada for a long time. He was instrumental in persuading the Pew Charitable Trust not to 'waste its money' on funding environmental groups.
k _Moore
He's the one who said "We found that the Amazon rainforest is more than 90 percent intact." Which is, of course, total bunk. He's basically a greenwasher now... someone who you hire who tells you how to make your industry look more green without actually changing your practices, or whom you hire to do damage control when your industry has just been exposed as a gross polluter, or in some cases even when your industry is about to get much worse and you don't want any flack from it.
Moore's clients have included:
B.C. Hazardous Waste Management Corporation
BHP Minerals (Canada) Ltd. (To claim that dumping mine tailings in a river is not harmful.)
National Association of Forest Industries (heavy loggers)
Westcoast Energy and BC Gas (to play down global warming concerns)
Some sources:
http://www.fanweb.org/patrick-moore/liar.html
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patric
My favorite quote:
Trees and wood are both good! A world without forests is as unthinkable as a day without wood.
Got wood?
-fred
So was I. There was more to the sentence than 'The developers don't decide.'
-fred
But hey, that's the capitalist way, right? And it must be good because it's capitalism!
-fred
When I (ever-so-briefly) worked there during my return to college, they didn't offer it to me. And the vast majority of people who work for Wal Mart are people like I was (stock monkeys, register monkeys, etc). They didn't mention it to me at all.
Then, recently, some documents came out that showed Wal Mart's strategy on health care: finding ways of getting employees to sign up for Medicaid, including making the company health care plans even worse (and less available and less visible) than they currently are. Instructing employees in filing for Medicaid. And firing people who are overweight or otherwise prone to be unhealthy.
They apparently started trying to clean up their act after those things were released, and started playing up a new health care option around October of last year. I say 'apparently' because, lo and behold, there were some more documents leaked talking about how they were fighting all this negative publicity: throwing X amount of money at a publicity campaign that says that 'Wal Mart is actually your friend!'
There's your common misconception.
-fred
-fred
That was what we in the industry call 'a joke'.
-11 for being dumb as a doorknob. But +1 for using the world 'fucknut' properly in context.
-fred
Microsoft killed OS/2.
-fred
I can't decide which one is sadder, a +5 Insightful or all the angry responses.
Jim, you fool, you forgot the tipoff that it was supposed to be funny, without which only 4% of Slashdot recognizes humor. Remember the acceptable signs: a smilie (deprecated), the phrase 'in Soviet Russia' tacked onto the beginning (deprecated), or '6 - PROFIT!' tacked onto the end (deprecated.)
Uh oh. Quick! Someone come up with a new one!
-fred
Really? I downloaded OpenRPG onto my Mac and spent about half an hour trying to get it to run before giving it up as a bad job. I mean, that may be cross-platform awfulness, I admit; perhaps it's just as insane to run on Windows as it is on the Mac.
Any installation instruction list that requires me to find the one 17x17 icon gif that is crashing the modified version of python that I was forced to install in step 7 and edit it down to a 16x16 gif in step fourteen is going beyond stupid to 'wow'.
-fred
I'm not sure the two situations are parallel. I know there's a public perception that Linux-on-desktop people don't pay for software. (I'm not saying it's accurate. I have far too small a sample size to know. I only know three people who run Linux as their main environments at work, and only one of those doesn't have a Mac at home, these days.) Perhaps that has more to do with the lack of Linux game publishers?
-fred
When I worked at a software house, a while back, it decided to discontinue its Mac line, because 'the Mac is dying'. Projected cost for the Mac port, based on the costs of prior Mac ports: 5% of the dev costs of the Windows product. Projected profit? Around 20% of the profits from the Windows product. Reasons for ditching it? One: corporate infighting (the Windows team was headed by the VP of Dev, the Mac team by a manager under him. The Mac team developed on time and under budget, the Windows team never did. The VP was embarrassed.) Two: new upper management, which had recently taken over the company from the founders, were mostly stereotypical businessmen who thought of the Mac, when they thought of it at all, as something which no serious person would use, something for odd people who weren't their type of people, and consequently weren't anyone they wanted to sell their product to anyway.
I have seen this happen at another company as well, one much larger and better known (*cough*Adobe*cough*), but only vicariously. (The manager I talked to there, while interviewing for a job in 1997 or 1998, said, 'No, we're not hiring any more Mac programmers. I don't think we're going to be starting any new projects for the Mac, and I'm not even sure we'll be releasing any more new versions of Photoshop and so on after the next one. The higher-ups seem to feel that we should hasten Apple's demise as much as we can without actually burning down One Infinite Loop, because it's so much easier to develop for one platform than it is for two.' My favorite quote, though, was from the recruiter I talked to at a job fair, which led to that interview (for a sysadmin position). 'What? Why would we hire any more Mac programmers? Haven't you heard? Adobe now gets half its software sales from Windows versions!' Uh, yeah. And half from Mac. 'Well, we know they'll all just dump their Macs as soon as we stop producing Mac versions, so we don't have to worry about that.')
So no. The developers don't decide whether to make Linux versions based on doing the math. They do it based on personal prejudices, 'common wisdom' (Linux users don't pay for stuff!), and corporate infighting. In fact, I suspect that the companies that even do the math are in the distinct minority.
-fred
I don't know about his, buy my Apple keyboard appears to be missing the 'any' key.
-fred