It was not Steyn who said that Muslims are "breeding like mosquitoes," it was a Muslim -- and he said it in order to celebrate what he believes to be the inevitable demographic triumph of Islam. Steyn just quoted him. Apparently you find accurate quotation to be offensive speech?
Moreover, those who claimed to be offended by Steyn's writings did not ask to "offer a rebuttal," they asked for -- or rather demanded -- near-total control over an issue of the magazine, including what would appear on the cover.
These facts are easily discovered by people who don't mind having their opinions contaminated by reality.
A lot of odd and mistaken comments in one post. . . .
(borderline illegal) price fixing? Here's some news: one company can't be guilty of "price fixing," only two or more companies who conspire to keep prices for a given product artificially inflated. A single company like Apple can charge you two thousand bucks for the little plastic feet on the PowerBook if they want to. No law against being stupid. If a single company charges too much for a product, people don't buy it. That's not "price fixing," that's the free market.
And the whole complaint about Apple restricting access to parts? That's called "quality control." How many times do we have to see these same old posts arguing that "Apple could increase their market share if they did x y and z" -- x y and z usually requiring Apple to do all the stuff that Microsoft has done to make their products ubiquitous. But Steve Jobs is a control freak more than a power freak (Bill Gates being the reverse) and only wants ubiquity on his terms -- as he has made clear on hundreds of occasions over the years. Control means controlling design, distribution, and repair, and keeping hardware and software locked together. Otherwise you get the chaos of the Wintel world, and Jobs would obviously rather have 3% of the market than endure such chaos. Again, he has made this as clear as possible -- so why do we keep getting these posts arguing (as though it's a bright new idea) that Apple can increase its market share by doing, you know, x y and z?
My OPINION, however, is that Apple deserve to get screwed over because this new device looks as good and has better functionality than the Shuffle. Plus it is refreshing to see that you don't have to have the Godly powers of Steve Jobs in your fingertips to produce the same hardware at the same (or lower, presumably) price.
I guess I would want to withhold judgment about its functionality. The fact that it looks exactly like the iPod Shuffle doesn't mean that it will work in precisely the same way. For instance, three rapid clicks of the play/pause button on the Shuffle returns you to the beginning of your playlist: will the rip-off work the same way? Also, what sort of battery life will it have? Sound quality? Will the FM receiver really work? We don't know any of these things. In terms of real functionality, this may bear as much resemblance to the iPod Shuffle as those ten-buck "Rolexes" you can buy in Times Square have to the real thing.
As for lawsuits: when I first saw the LuxPro design and ads, I figured that they were going to sell the thing only in countries where they are safe from lawsuits. Surely they won't try to sell them in the U.S., U.K., Australia, or N.Z.?
After having struggled through Krowne's turgid prose, I discern that he is making two points:
1) The Wikipedia is a "success" because lots of people use it, and the only way you can say that's not a success is by claiming that people are dumb.
2) The Wikipedia makes up for the overall low quality of its entries by its vast "coverage."
If this is the best defense someone can come up with, the Wikipedia is seriously screwed.
Response to point 1: People ARE dumb, by and large, or at least ignorant, and they are also lazy. People use Wikipedia because it's easy, and because they don't know that not everything you read on the Internet is true. By Krowne's logic, Macdonald's is the best restaurant in the world.
Response to point 2: This amounts to admitting that the Wikipedia contains inaccurate information, but that's okay because it has LOTS of inaccurate information. E.g., all my buckets have holes in them, but because I have so many buckets I must also be collecting lots of rainwater.
It may be possible to make a good case for the Wikipedia, but Krowne sure hasn't done it.
The chief reason MS dropped IE for the Mac was that Apple developed Safari. But that posed no danger to Apple because of the open format of the Web. When Apple developed Keynote that was a little ballsier, because directly competing with PowerPoint risked pissing off the Great Eye. Going the next step and directly competing with Word could piss It off even more, which could lead to an end to development of Office for the Mac, which would be VERY bad news for Apple. In light of all that, it's interesting to note that Pages is an indirect attack on the dominance of Word. It picks up a few features of Word that ordinary users (especially teachers and students) need that TextEdit doesn't have -- page numbering, footnotes, columns -- but not too many of the things that make Word useful in business -- Track Changes, etc. Instead, Pages adds a lot of desktop publishing features that would be great for people who don't do enough desktop publishing to warrant buying something like InDesign or Quark. With Pages, Apple pisses off several companies a little bit rather than One Big One a lot.
Open the SimpleText document in TextEdit, choose "Make Plain Text" from the Format menu, and then save it (TextEdit will add the.txt suffix for you). Works for me!
I share Suffering Bastard's ambivalence. BBEdit is a great tool for an incredibly wide range of text-editing tasks, and does it all while being very faithful to Apple's HI guidelines. What I like best about BBEdit is that it doesn't get in your way, or try to make decisions for you (which is what I hate about Dreamweaver and the other WYSIWYG apps), but has readily available all kinds of assistance if you decide you need it. As someone else on this thread said, it somehow makes text-editing and coding fun. Hard to explain.
BUT: Bare Bones' pricing is getting WAY out of line (not only with BBEdit but also with Mailsmith, a very cool app that isn't making a lot of headway in a field crowded with cheaper or free alternatives), and it's hard to see how they're going to be competitive in the long run. I hope they figure out how to strike the right balance, because they're a great company and they make uniquely useful products.
Slashdot Mirror
It was not Steyn who said that Muslims are "breeding like mosquitoes," it was a Muslim -- and he said it in order to celebrate what he believes to be the inevitable demographic triumph of Islam. Steyn just quoted him. Apparently you find accurate quotation to be offensive speech? Moreover, those who claimed to be offended by Steyn's writings did not ask to "offer a rebuttal," they asked for -- or rather demanded -- near-total control over an issue of the magazine, including what would appear on the cover. These facts are easily discovered by people who don't mind having their opinions contaminated by reality.
A lot of odd and mistaken comments in one post. . . .
(borderline illegal) price fixing? Here's some news: one company can't be guilty of "price fixing," only two or more companies who conspire to keep prices for a given product artificially inflated. A single company like Apple can charge you two thousand bucks for the little plastic feet on the PowerBook if they want to. No law against being stupid. If a single company charges too much for a product, people don't buy it. That's not "price fixing," that's the free market.
And the whole complaint about Apple restricting access to parts? That's called "quality control." How many times do we have to see these same old posts arguing that "Apple could increase their market share if they did x y and z" -- x y and z usually requiring Apple to do all the stuff that Microsoft has done to make their products ubiquitous. But Steve Jobs is a control freak more than a power freak (Bill Gates being the reverse) and only wants ubiquity on his terms -- as he has made clear on hundreds of occasions over the years. Control means controlling design, distribution, and repair, and keeping hardware and software locked together. Otherwise you get the chaos of the Wintel world, and Jobs would obviously rather have 3% of the market than endure such chaos. Again, he has made this as clear as possible -- so why do we keep getting these posts arguing (as though it's a bright new idea) that Apple can increase its market share by doing, you know, x y and z?
My OPINION, however, is that Apple deserve to get screwed over because this new device looks as good and has better functionality than the Shuffle. Plus it is refreshing to see that you don't have to have the Godly powers of Steve Jobs in your fingertips to produce the same hardware at the same (or lower, presumably) price.
I guess I would want to withhold judgment about its functionality. The fact that it looks exactly like the iPod Shuffle doesn't mean that it will work in precisely the same way. For instance, three rapid clicks of the play/pause button on the Shuffle returns you to the beginning of your playlist: will the rip-off work the same way? Also, what sort of battery life will it have? Sound quality? Will the FM receiver really work? We don't know any of these things. In terms of real functionality, this may bear as much resemblance to the iPod Shuffle as those ten-buck "Rolexes" you can buy in Times Square have to the real thing.
As for lawsuits: when I first saw the LuxPro design and ads, I figured that they were going to sell the thing only in countries where they are safe from lawsuits. Surely they won't try to sell them in the U.S., U.K., Australia, or N.Z.?
After having struggled through Krowne's turgid prose, I discern that he is making two points:
1) The Wikipedia is a "success" because lots of people use it, and the only way you can say that's not a success is by claiming that people are dumb.
2) The Wikipedia makes up for the overall low quality of its entries by its vast "coverage."
If this is the best defense someone can come up with, the Wikipedia is seriously screwed.
Response to point 1: People ARE dumb, by and large, or at least ignorant, and they are also lazy. People use Wikipedia because it's easy, and because they don't know that not everything you read on the Internet is true. By Krowne's logic, Macdonald's is the best restaurant in the world.
Response to point 2: This amounts to admitting that the Wikipedia contains inaccurate information, but that's okay because it has LOTS of inaccurate information. E.g., all my buckets have holes in them, but because I have so many buckets I must also be collecting lots of rainwater.
It may be possible to make a good case for the Wikipedia, but Krowne sure hasn't done it.
The chief reason MS dropped IE for the Mac was that Apple developed Safari. But that posed no danger to Apple because of the open format of the Web. When Apple developed Keynote that was a little ballsier, because directly competing with PowerPoint risked pissing off the Great Eye. Going the next step and directly competing with Word could piss It off even more, which could lead to an end to development of Office for the Mac, which would be VERY bad news for Apple. In light of all that, it's interesting to note that Pages is an indirect attack on the dominance of Word. It picks up a few features of Word that ordinary users (especially teachers and students) need that TextEdit doesn't have -- page numbering, footnotes, columns -- but not too many of the things that make Word useful in business -- Track Changes, etc. Instead, Pages adds a lot of desktop publishing features that would be great for people who don't do enough desktop publishing to warrant buying something like InDesign or Quark. With Pages, Apple pisses off several companies a little bit rather than One Big One a lot.
Open the SimpleText document in TextEdit, choose "Make Plain Text" from the Format menu, and then save it (TextEdit will add the .txt suffix for you). Works for me!
OF COURSE TextEdit saves plain text files. Just set it to do so in the Preferences. RTF is default, but defaults CAN be changed. . . .
I share Suffering Bastard's ambivalence. BBEdit is a great tool for an incredibly wide range of text-editing tasks, and does it all while being very faithful to Apple's HI guidelines. What I like best about BBEdit is that it doesn't get in your way, or try to make decisions for you (which is what I hate about Dreamweaver and the other WYSIWYG apps), but has readily available all kinds of assistance if you decide you need it. As someone else on this thread said, it somehow makes text-editing and coding fun. Hard to explain.
BUT: Bare Bones' pricing is getting WAY out of line (not only with BBEdit but also with Mailsmith, a very cool app that isn't making a lot of headway in a field crowded with cheaper or free alternatives), and it's hard to see how they're going to be competitive in the long run. I hope they figure out how to strike the right balance, because they're a great company and they make uniquely useful products.