No, the hardcore gamer is any one of us who have spent significant time during their formative years writing their own games in 1k of RAM using a machine's BASIC and then proceeded to play that game for a good 24 hours straight, because to switch off the machine is to lose it all and require keying it all in again from scratch (as was the way when I was little and had no tape recorder to save programs to)!!!
Not until you've experienced that can you begin to call yourself a hardcore gamer - and even WITH that experience I bow to those who came before - the ones who had to DESIGN AND BUILD their own machines in order to proceed to the programming level...;P
This is probably Sony pulling a clever viral marketing ploy. They know that piracy breeds popularity in a product - if you can get copies of games, you'll buy the console (and ultimately most people will still buy a certain number of games rather than pirate everything, so you still make sales despite losing a margin of profit)... witness the original PS. They know that if people can copy HD DVD, then the masses could well flock that way and consumer feet will decide the format winner. Thus, they feed rumours out into the wild that BD+ is unbeatable and throw down the gauntlet, secretly hoping that it WILL be cracked so that they can reap the rewards of once again having a piratable system. After all, if the challenge is there, then there's always likely to be somebody who will take it up and have a go. If nobody bothers trying, then it can also be held by Sony as a reason for studios to choose BluRay for their content because it's 'so secure'. It's win-win for them.
The number of people who can be bothered pirating media and/or chipping their player device is negligible compared to the overall sales figures for that platform once it gets established, but it's the early adopters who may help to set it in stone as a usable platform in the first place, and if those people are so orientated they may well recommend it to others because it CAN be freed from DRM... Sony would then just have to sit back and count the takings. It's a gamble, but that's business I guess!
Many many areas of science were born from Christians, I could go on. It's time for the non-fringe religious to step up and reclaim it.
Also I think you'll find that many areas of science were born from people with blonde hair. Also some of those people drank wine. There were most likely a good many of them who walked more than a mile a day. So what does Christianity have to do with their scientific work?;)
hehehehe... I think it's sarcasm you silly modders;)
I remember buying my first Mac... and then some years later Windows appeared, and it's been years behind ever since!:D
I'm not a cultist, but have used Macs since before Windows existed. Never had a reason to be a 'dozer and probably never will. Sure, we're in a market where Windows has a share 30 times that of the Mac, but despite that market share Windows users are still less productive in the workplace using the same software than their Mac-using counterparts for most tasks.
At work we do actually have a single WinPC and from personal experience I find it MUCH faster to use Photoshop (same version) on a 12 year old 350MHz Blue & White G3 machine running OS 9 than on a 1 or 2 year old hyper-beast XP-driven Pentium 4 (3.4 GHz) with everything maxed out as much as we could at the time of buying. General file-management is faster on the Mac, screen refresh rates also, despite it only having a measly 16Mb ATI RagePro 128 compared to the 256Mb card in the PC. This can't be down to hardware (the maths just don't add up), so there's only one thing holding back the awesome power of the PC, and it's not me as the user (having spent much time over the years acquainting myself sufficiently with Windows to enable phone-support for customers who don't know how to use their own machines properly), so it HAS to be the software. Again, it's not specific vendors of applications running on top of the OS (I know Adobe particularly spend time optimising their apps for the platform's architecture - hence Photoshop is a good bench test across platforms/processors), so it leads me to think it's Windows slowing things down.
That's just what M$ don't get - ease of use and productivity are EVERYTHING!
Have you noticed that Wired's 'NEW' logo uses an almost monospaced font (ie: the kind used on old manual typewriters aka 'Courier' - where every character was the same width, hence the lowercase i with very large serifs to take up the space effectively)? Only the W is of a different width, but they've balanced it by using a slab-serif I and then balanced the useage of that amongst the sans-serif face by also including a slab-serif E so that it doesn't stand out in your subconcious.
Such is the way of kerning... it's not mathematical at all, it's all in the 'feeling'. It's a purely aesthetic exercise and as has been quite rightly pointed out in the comments, a font that is perfectly kerned at 12pt becomes odd-looking when scaled up to a display size (even scaling to something like 120pt would show it) - hence some type families including a 'display' version specifically kerned for use at larger sizes.
Typography... it's all in the whitespace y'know;)
"The simple fact is that Windows has over 90% of the OS market, "...except that's not the case. OS X has an install base that's about 15% share of all users.
The figures you're quoting are taken from overall computer sales, not numbers of users. Mac users usually upgrade or buy new machines less often than Windows users which leads to this skewed picture of just HOW dominant Windows is. Then when you take into account the fact that not everybody running a PeeCee is a slave to Windows, but many have now made the decision to switch to Linux your figures are even further out. Add to that the fact that not everybody uses either a Mac or PC and that there are massive communities of people running VERY OLD hardware out there and would never dream of switching (C64, Amiga etc etc etc) - they're all online and none of them can run IE. Your argument is starting to fall apart here...;)
I'd guess that a better guesstimate of the total number of Windows market share (in terms of numbers of home users) would be more like 75% than 90%. If you look at it that way (in other words, in a more realistic way), you can see just how many potential customers your business can turn off simply because they chose to use an alternative platform and/or OS.
I don't use any Windows machines at home - and none of my family/friends do either. At work I use a room full of Macs and a hadnful of Linux PC's, and we have a single Windows-based PC which isn't allowed online at all... and I know I'm far from alone in this scenario as more and more people vote with their feet in the browser and OS markets. A truly forward-thinking company would be working to make their web business compliant with everybody to maximise their bottom line.
So if you HAVE to have WMP installed to download Hollywood movies, thus requiring IE, then how are Apple ever going to offer downloadable movie content through iTunes?
Mac users for one can't view WMP content which uses DRM. M$ have chosen to exclude them from this through pulling out of support for the platform. Flip4Mac WILL playback WMP movie files, but not DRM restricted ones.
DRM is just an excuse being used by M$ to force users onto their OS/Player/Browser, end of story.
Firefox isn't the only browser affected by this annoying IE dependency.
If you're running OS X you don't HAVE a choice of using IE. Well... I suppose you could use IE5 if you still have an old copy, but generally you'll then be told your browser is out of date and you have to update to the latest version!!??!!??
Not too long ago, when looking at the visitor logs for my site IE would always be the most widely used browser, but these days it's more often than not the 2nd most used, and sometimes even gets knocked to 3rd place behind Firefox (usually in the Number 1 slot now) and Safari (showing a growing number of OS X users out there).
Another annoying trend - and this goes hand-in-hand with this problem, is Windows MediaSlayer files being used containing DRM which Flip4Mac can't handle. Some high-profile sites are using WM content with DRM enabled which locks out ALL non-Windows users... totally against the whole ethos of the web really.
Lord knows what will happen when M$ release their version of a Flash-like app. Most likely they'll not develop a plug-in for anything other than IE on Windows, further trying to FORCE users onto their OS to view what should be platform-independent content.
Taken from a post in the forum on MediaLens :
Tim Ball was captioned as the University of Winnipeg. In fact he left in 1996 since when he has run political campaigns through two organisations he helped found: the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and the Friends of Science which, according to their websites aim to run "a proactive grassroots campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol"; and "encourage and assist the Canadian Federal Government to re-evaluate the Kyoto Protocol".
He appeared on a Channel 4 documentary last week in an attempt to debunk climate-change theories. The roll-call for interviewees becomes very enlightening when you start to look at their backgrounds and sources of funding (coupled with the past agenda of the documentary maker himself) and the way the sole climatologist was taken out of context through cunning editing. If there was genuinely a case for the contrary, then this kind of trickery is unnecessary, so just what IS the deal here!?
More here...
I'm sorry, but if the iPhone makes synching to my Mac as simple as standing within a certain radius of it, gives me more functionality that my current phone has, ties it's features together in an intuitive way AND some, then this would be my preferred device. It's built-in Bluetooth makes adding a full size keyboard possible if required, or a foldable one for portability.
It's a classic Apple piece of kit. The User Interface is everything... especially in the gadget world, and this has a UI to die for.
So you can't run iChat out-of-the-box, but if this device is running OS X, then there's no reason why iChat wouldn't actually run on it anyway. If you're in a WiFi hotspot you're sorted.
I'm looking forward to seeing 3rd part developers writing apps for the iPhone, and building iPhone-specific versions of existing ones.
Fire for the iPhone would be much more useful than iChat anyway - use ALL your IM clients in one;)
I wouldn't be surprised if one of Apple's revelations when Leopard comes out is that you can build your own apps for the iPhone with a new built-in feature, much like their previewed widget-building software. Basic building blocks to get the layman into designing his own user experience so to speak.
Who knows?
Also, consider that Apple have dropped the iSight as a separate device and decided you have to have one. Could it be that something in their next OS release will require it? Like recognising gestures? - it's already in the iPhone's touchscreen - no more mouse for general file management? That'd be nice...
To be honest, I have both M$Office and NeoOffice (the OS X development of OpenOffice) running under OS X and apart from the +initial+ launch following installation, NeoOffice is faster every time. It's also MUCH faster if you consider that it's the entire office suite in one package - if I had to work on a Word file, then an Excel spreadsheet, then a Powerpoint presentation traditionally it would have meant opening 3 separate apps, but with NeoOffice it's all under the one roof. Also opening/saving time differences are +very+ negligible... and if anything, NeoOffice is slightly quicker.
All that being said, it's not as simple as M$ suggest. In fact, you can pick up a new PC these days for less money than it costs to buy M$Office. So in theory you could upgrade to a faster machine and run OpenOffice for less money than buying Microsloths shite, with the added bonus of a speed boost for everything else you do as well!!!
So, the 'switch' campaign didn't work?
Let's just say that in 20 years of Mac use I've switched my share of 'dozers to the light side of the force. I may have switched a handful prior to OS X (probably only just more than I could count on one hand), but since the original iMac and especially since OS X's release I've switched a good 20-30 people.
If you consider the millions of long-standing users like me out there, and each (macevangelists as we are) are quite often switching people personally, then that's a hell of a success rate for OS X. It actually seems to sell itself 99% to the average 'dozer, and quite often that 1% extra push is easily supplied by an existing Mac user. After all, the most successful sales method is recommendation. If you want to buy a new product, but know nothing about it, you ask someone you know who HAS one - if they recommend it and even show you how to use it, you're much more likely to go for it. It's very much like the 'Keeping up with the Jones's' phenomenon - you can see it working with things like Ebay's feedback scoring.
Remember the golden sales pitch, "the main difference is in the emphasis - Mac OS, It just works!!!. Windows, it juuust works." hehe.
I caught a PCWorld salesman actually trying to talk a customer OUT of buying a Mac one time - he was telling the customer that he'd not be compatible with the rest of the world, that you can't get any software for the Mac and other such nonsense - until I stepped in and corrected him (much to the delight of his junior assistant, who it seems was on my side!!). I'm guessing it was all down to personal commissions (probably higher margins on a Sony Vaio than a Powerbook), but when the salesman tried to tell the guy that he couldn't open Word files on a Mac I HAD to do something about it... the customer was suitably impressed that he could use OpenOffice for free thus not needing to buy complete suites of new software in the switch - I even gave him my card and told him to call me if he got stuck. I received one call from him about a month later to tell me he'd bought a Mac, never had a problem and been able to sort out any minor issues himself.
The youngest Mac user I've so far met was 3 years old. Unable to fully read, yet able to use MacOS, simply because the dock makes it possible for her to know what she's doing without the need for text - conversely, she was unable to use Windows, because it's start menu relies too heavily on text and she couldn't "see the pictures (icons) properly". Strike up another plus point for Macs in education!;)
Dvorak, he's just a bullsh*t artist - always has been, always will be. He wants desperately to switch himself, but he's scared to admit it for fear of "I told you so" coming from a gazillion Mac users. heh!
I suppose the real fix (other than unchecking an option in prefs) is just simply to stop double-clicking files to open them.
Personally I've always been of the drag n drop school of working. I wanna open a JPEG? I drag n drop onto the relevant app, because there's a real chance that I'll be wanting to open it into Photoshop rather than Preview... either that or right-click and 'Open with...'. If it aint a JPEG you'll find out soon enough - and relatively safely.
Simple enough protection from socially engineered shell scripts for now.
It is only monopolistic if you have the dominant OS and release your system ONLY for that OS. Apple have got around this, and got themselves into the position they have through the dual-platform nature of iTunes/iPod.
I'm not sure about schools now, but thinking back to my time at school, evolution wasn't actually taught in any of the sciences.
However, creationism WAS taught... in Religious Education classes. Along with all the other dogma from the major ''world' religions. This is probably the best system.
The major issue I see is not with the subject matter, but rather the belief structure behind proponents of creationism. ID/Creation exponents want to push their beliefs (not ideas, beliefs!!!) onto ALL children, but those beliefs are founded in (generally) Christianity. Given that there are 6 recognised 'world' religions, this gives a bias to one (well, to be honest, Islam teaches the same thing, so two) particular religions and suggests that they have more merit than the others. This is NOT a scientific method, as it fails to test the belief structures of the competing religions.
Let's not kid ourselves here, it's got nothing to do with scientific theories or origin of the species, it's just a portion of the earth's population trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us... and nothing else.
The idea that aetheists believe everything is random isn't true. Many aetheists believe in evolution, but not as a random chance, more a result of the very defined laws of physics that you mentioned.
Not true... one fairly contemporary case of observable evolution was in the population of St Kilder. They lived isolated from the mainland and the community intermarried for many generations. The main constituent of St Kildans' diet was birds eggs which they gathered from the nest of birds on the surrounding sea cliffs.
The easiest way to climb down the slippy rock faces was barefoot and over the generations the people of this little island grew longer toes which made gripping the rock with their feet easier.
Another possible example of observable ongoing evolution may be in the way that our immune systems develop new antibodies to cope with related evolutions in our biggest predator, the virus.
"God must have existed outside of any reality and we have come into existence in the reality created by God." - also, if God exists outside of time and is not affected by it, then how can God have creatED... to have created means that at some point one has to cease creatING, which demonstrates God being tied by the constraints of time. Also, God (in the bible) sets people tests - yet God, existing outside of time and thus already knowwing the outcome of these tests sets such tests as a pointless exercise. Maybe God was just bored... or maybe God wasn't as clever as he thought he was..?
"Now for Evolution, it's a valid theory but it only works on living thing" - eh??? how do you know?
Perhaps the fact that we're all driving around in cars powered by dead dinosaurs is proof that evolution continues AFTER death. When something changes form over time it has evolved.
You DID evolve from a monkey, whether dirty or not. Fact!
There's no such thing as an educated Xtian. Once you become educated you cease to be a true Xtian, as being Xtian involves purposely dumbing yourself down - ID being my case in point.
If Xtians had had their way over the centuries they'd have supressed countless scientific discoveries and we'd still think leeches were a fantastical cure-all.
If they teach this dogshit in schools alongside theories of evolution then they're going to have to teach FSMism as well - after all, there's just as much (if not MORE) evidence to back up the theories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as there is to back up the belief-structure of the Xtian cult.
Precisely!! 20 years of Mac use under my belt and NEVER HAD A SINGLE VIRUS!!!!
Nobody's 100% secure, and one day a virus will come, but for the time being I'd still rather be living in the false Nirvana of OS X than the daily Hell of 'doze!!
Indeed... I've read enough Pilger to know this truth - and I can only see one direction we in the UK are heading in. Towards a dictatorship. Maybe it won't be Blair, but he's definitely acting more and more like a dictator and it worries me that we've lost a lot of liberties and the general populous lives under the threat of brutal suppression by the government.
Remember : governement is not ruler. They are civil servants, they are servile not us... without us they are nothing, but without them we go on as normal!
One major problem with that is that you can easily make plates thst correspond to the car's make/model. For instance if you stole a red Ford Escort, all you'd have to do would be to look out for another red Ford Escort (which isn't stolen or reported as such), make up some plates with that car's Reg number and hey presto you've beaten the system... and the owner of that other car will face some tricky explaining if they happen not to have left home at the time the stolen car was used. I don't see how this can be used to prove 'guilt' beyond reasonable doubt UNLESS there is a record of the 2 copies of the number plate at exactly the same time in two different places, and even then how do you prove which of the two cars the actual owner was driving and which the thief was driving.
Oh, but I forget, in this country we no longer need to prove guilt... now a defendant has to prove innocence and is presumed guilty until he/she can do so!!! Bloody Police state... I think it's time for some civil disobedience again hehe
Slashdot Mirror
No, the hardcore gamer is any one of us who have spent significant time during their formative years writing their own games in 1k of RAM using a machine's BASIC and then proceeded to play that game for a good 24 hours straight, because to switch off the machine is to lose it all and require keying it all in again from scratch (as was the way when I was little and had no tape recorder to save programs to)!!! Not until you've experienced that can you begin to call yourself a hardcore gamer - and even WITH that experience I bow to those who came before - the ones who had to DESIGN AND BUILD their own machines in order to proceed to the programming level... ;P
This is probably Sony pulling a clever viral marketing ploy. They know that piracy breeds popularity in a product - if you can get copies of games, you'll buy the console (and ultimately most people will still buy a certain number of games rather than pirate everything, so you still make sales despite losing a margin of profit)... witness the original PS. They know that if people can copy HD DVD, then the masses could well flock that way and consumer feet will decide the format winner. Thus, they feed rumours out into the wild that BD+ is unbeatable and throw down the gauntlet, secretly hoping that it WILL be cracked so that they can reap the rewards of once again having a piratable system. After all, if the challenge is there, then there's always likely to be somebody who will take it up and have a go. If nobody bothers trying, then it can also be held by Sony as a reason for studios to choose BluRay for their content because it's 'so secure'. It's win-win for them. The number of people who can be bothered pirating media and/or chipping their player device is negligible compared to the overall sales figures for that platform once it gets established, but it's the early adopters who may help to set it in stone as a usable platform in the first place, and if those people are so orientated they may well recommend it to others because it CAN be freed from DRM... Sony would then just have to sit back and count the takings. It's a gamble, but that's business I guess!
hehehehe... I think it's sarcasm you silly modders ;)
I remember buying my first Mac... and then some years later Windows appeared, and it's been years behind ever since! :D
I'm not a cultist, but have used Macs since before Windows existed. Never had a reason to be a 'dozer and probably never will. Sure, we're in a market where Windows has a share 30 times that of the Mac, but despite that market share Windows users are still less productive in the workplace using the same software than their Mac-using counterparts for most tasks.
At work we do actually have a single WinPC and from personal experience I find it MUCH faster to use Photoshop (same version) on a 12 year old 350MHz Blue & White G3 machine running OS 9 than on a 1 or 2 year old hyper-beast XP-driven Pentium 4 (3.4 GHz) with everything maxed out as much as we could at the time of buying. General file-management is faster on the Mac, screen refresh rates also, despite it only having a measly 16Mb ATI RagePro 128 compared to the 256Mb card in the PC. This can't be down to hardware (the maths just don't add up), so there's only one thing holding back the awesome power of the PC, and it's not me as the user (having spent much time over the years acquainting myself sufficiently with Windows to enable phone-support for customers who don't know how to use their own machines properly), so it HAS to be the software. Again, it's not specific vendors of applications running on top of the OS (I know Adobe particularly spend time optimising their apps for the platform's architecture - hence Photoshop is a good bench test across platforms/processors), so it leads me to think it's Windows slowing things down.
That's just what M$ don't get - ease of use and productivity are EVERYTHING!
Have you noticed that Wired's 'NEW' logo uses an almost monospaced font (ie: the kind used on old manual typewriters aka 'Courier' - where every character was the same width, hence the lowercase i with very large serifs to take up the space effectively)? Only the W is of a different width, but they've balanced it by using a slab-serif I and then balanced the useage of that amongst the sans-serif face by also including a slab-serif E so that it doesn't stand out in your subconcious. Such is the way of kerning... it's not mathematical at all, it's all in the 'feeling'. It's a purely aesthetic exercise and as has been quite rightly pointed out in the comments, a font that is perfectly kerned at 12pt becomes odd-looking when scaled up to a display size (even scaling to something like 120pt would show it) - hence some type families including a 'display' version specifically kerned for use at larger sizes. Typography... it's all in the whitespace y'know ;)
"The simple fact is that Windows has over 90% of the OS market, " ...except that's not the case. OS X has an install base that's about 15% share of all users.
The figures you're quoting are taken from overall computer sales, not numbers of users. Mac users usually upgrade or buy new machines less often than Windows users which leads to this skewed picture of just HOW dominant Windows is. Then when you take into account the fact that not everybody running a PeeCee is a slave to Windows, but many have now made the decision to switch to Linux your figures are even further out. Add to that the fact that not everybody uses either a Mac or PC and that there are massive communities of people running VERY OLD hardware out there and would never dream of switching (C64, Amiga etc etc etc) - they're all online and none of them can run IE. Your argument is starting to fall apart here... ;)
I'd guess that a better guesstimate of the total number of Windows market share (in terms of numbers of home users) would be more like 75% than 90%. If you look at it that way (in other words, in a more realistic way), you can see just how many potential customers your business can turn off simply because they chose to use an alternative platform and/or OS.
I don't use any Windows machines at home - and none of my family/friends do either. At work I use a room full of Macs and a hadnful of Linux PC's, and we have a single Windows-based PC which isn't allowed online at all... and I know I'm far from alone in this scenario as more and more people vote with their feet in the browser and OS markets. A truly forward-thinking company would be working to make their web business compliant with everybody to maximise their bottom line.
So if you HAVE to have WMP installed to download Hollywood movies, thus requiring IE, then how are Apple ever going to offer downloadable movie content through iTunes? Mac users for one can't view WMP content which uses DRM. M$ have chosen to exclude them from this through pulling out of support for the platform. Flip4Mac WILL playback WMP movie files, but not DRM restricted ones. DRM is just an excuse being used by M$ to force users onto their OS/Player/Browser, end of story.
Firefox isn't the only browser affected by this annoying IE dependency.
If you're running OS X you don't HAVE a choice of using IE. Well... I suppose you could use IE5 if you still have an old copy, but generally you'll then be told your browser is out of date and you have to update to the latest version!!??!!??
Not too long ago, when looking at the visitor logs for my site IE would always be the most widely used browser, but these days it's more often than not the 2nd most used, and sometimes even gets knocked to 3rd place behind Firefox (usually in the Number 1 slot now) and Safari (showing a growing number of OS X users out there).
Another annoying trend - and this goes hand-in-hand with this problem, is Windows MediaSlayer files being used containing DRM which Flip4Mac can't handle. Some high-profile sites are using WM content with DRM enabled which locks out ALL non-Windows users... totally against the whole ethos of the web really.
Lord knows what will happen when M$ release their version of a Flash-like app. Most likely they'll not develop a plug-in for anything other than IE on Windows, further trying to FORCE users onto their OS to view what should be platform-independent content.
Taken from a post in the forum on MediaLens : Tim Ball was captioned as the University of Winnipeg. In fact he left in 1996 since when he has run political campaigns through two organisations he helped found: the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and the Friends of Science which, according to their websites aim to run "a proactive grassroots campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol"; and "encourage and assist the Canadian Federal Government to re-evaluate the Kyoto Protocol". He appeared on a Channel 4 documentary last week in an attempt to debunk climate-change theories. The roll-call for interviewees becomes very enlightening when you start to look at their backgrounds and sources of funding (coupled with the past agenda of the documentary maker himself) and the way the sole climatologist was taken out of context through cunning editing. If there was genuinely a case for the contrary, then this kind of trickery is unnecessary, so just what IS the deal here!? More here...
I'm sorry, but if the iPhone makes synching to my Mac as simple as standing within a certain radius of it, gives me more functionality that my current phone has, ties it's features together in an intuitive way AND some, then this would be my preferred device. It's built-in Bluetooth makes adding a full size keyboard possible if required, or a foldable one for portability. It's a classic Apple piece of kit. The User Interface is everything... especially in the gadget world, and this has a UI to die for. So you can't run iChat out-of-the-box, but if this device is running OS X, then there's no reason why iChat wouldn't actually run on it anyway. If you're in a WiFi hotspot you're sorted. I'm looking forward to seeing 3rd part developers writing apps for the iPhone, and building iPhone-specific versions of existing ones. Fire for the iPhone would be much more useful than iChat anyway - use ALL your IM clients in one ;)
I wouldn't be surprised if one of Apple's revelations when Leopard comes out is that you can build your own apps for the iPhone with a new built-in feature, much like their previewed widget-building software. Basic building blocks to get the layman into designing his own user experience so to speak.
Who knows?
Also, consider that Apple have dropped the iSight as a separate device and decided you have to have one. Could it be that something in their next OS release will require it? Like recognising gestures? - it's already in the iPhone's touchscreen - no more mouse for general file management? That'd be nice...
Retrospect - should do everything you're asking of it.
To be honest, I have both M$Office and NeoOffice (the OS X development of OpenOffice) running under OS X and apart from the +initial+ launch following installation, NeoOffice is faster every time. It's also MUCH faster if you consider that it's the entire office suite in one package - if I had to work on a Word file, then an Excel spreadsheet, then a Powerpoint presentation traditionally it would have meant opening 3 separate apps, but with NeoOffice it's all under the one roof. Also opening/saving time differences are +very+ negligible... and if anything, NeoOffice is slightly quicker.
All that being said, it's not as simple as M$ suggest. In fact, you can pick up a new PC these days for less money than it costs to buy M$Office. So in theory you could upgrade to a faster machine and run OpenOffice for less money than buying Microsloths shite, with the added bonus of a speed boost for everything else you do as well!!!
So, the 'switch' campaign didn't work? Let's just say that in 20 years of Mac use I've switched my share of 'dozers to the light side of the force. I may have switched a handful prior to OS X (probably only just more than I could count on one hand), but since the original iMac and especially since OS X's release I've switched a good 20-30 people. If you consider the millions of long-standing users like me out there, and each (macevangelists as we are) are quite often switching people personally, then that's a hell of a success rate for OS X. It actually seems to sell itself 99% to the average 'dozer, and quite often that 1% extra push is easily supplied by an existing Mac user. After all, the most successful sales method is recommendation. If you want to buy a new product, but know nothing about it, you ask someone you know who HAS one - if they recommend it and even show you how to use it, you're much more likely to go for it. It's very much like the 'Keeping up with the Jones's' phenomenon - you can see it working with things like Ebay's feedback scoring. Remember the golden sales pitch, "the main difference is in the emphasis - Mac OS, It just works!!!. Windows, it juuust works." hehe. I caught a PCWorld salesman actually trying to talk a customer OUT of buying a Mac one time - he was telling the customer that he'd not be compatible with the rest of the world, that you can't get any software for the Mac and other such nonsense - until I stepped in and corrected him (much to the delight of his junior assistant, who it seems was on my side!!). I'm guessing it was all down to personal commissions (probably higher margins on a Sony Vaio than a Powerbook), but when the salesman tried to tell the guy that he couldn't open Word files on a Mac I HAD to do something about it... the customer was suitably impressed that he could use OpenOffice for free thus not needing to buy complete suites of new software in the switch - I even gave him my card and told him to call me if he got stuck. I received one call from him about a month later to tell me he'd bought a Mac, never had a problem and been able to sort out any minor issues himself. The youngest Mac user I've so far met was 3 years old. Unable to fully read, yet able to use MacOS, simply because the dock makes it possible for her to know what she's doing without the need for text - conversely, she was unable to use Windows, because it's start menu relies too heavily on text and she couldn't "see the pictures (icons) properly". Strike up another plus point for Macs in education! ;)
Dvorak, he's just a bullsh*t artist - always has been, always will be. He wants desperately to switch himself, but he's scared to admit it for fear of "I told you so" coming from a gazillion Mac users. heh!
I suppose the real fix (other than unchecking an option in prefs) is just simply to stop double-clicking files to open them. Personally I've always been of the drag n drop school of working. I wanna open a JPEG? I drag n drop onto the relevant app, because there's a real chance that I'll be wanting to open it into Photoshop rather than Preview... either that or right-click and 'Open with...'. If it aint a JPEG you'll find out soon enough - and relatively safely. Simple enough protection from socially engineered shell scripts for now.
It is only monopolistic if you have the dominant OS and release your system ONLY for that OS. Apple have got around this, and got themselves into the position they have through the dual-platform nature of iTunes/iPod.
I'm not sure about schools now, but thinking back to my time at school, evolution wasn't actually taught in any of the sciences.
However, creationism WAS taught... in Religious Education classes. Along with all the other dogma from the major ''world' religions. This is probably the best system.
The major issue I see is not with the subject matter, but rather the belief structure behind proponents of creationism. ID/Creation exponents want to push their beliefs (not ideas, beliefs!!!) onto ALL children, but those beliefs are founded in (generally) Christianity. Given that there are 6 recognised 'world' religions, this gives a bias to one (well, to be honest, Islam teaches the same thing, so two) particular religions and suggests that they have more merit than the others. This is NOT a scientific method, as it fails to test the belief structures of the competing religions.
Let's not kid ourselves here, it's got nothing to do with scientific theories or origin of the species, it's just a portion of the earth's population trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us... and nothing else.
The idea that aetheists believe everything is random isn't true. Many aetheists believe in evolution, but not as a random chance, more a result of the very defined laws of physics that you mentioned.
Not true... one fairly contemporary case of observable evolution was in the population of St Kilder. They lived isolated from the mainland and the community intermarried for many generations. The main constituent of St Kildans' diet was birds eggs which they gathered from the nest of birds on the surrounding sea cliffs.
The easiest way to climb down the slippy rock faces was barefoot and over the generations the people of this little island grew longer toes which made gripping the rock with their feet easier.
Another possible example of observable ongoing evolution may be in the way that our immune systems develop new antibodies to cope with related evolutions in our biggest predator, the virus.
"God must have existed outside of any reality and we have come into existence in the reality created by God." - also, if God exists outside of time and is not affected by it, then how can God have creatED... to have created means that at some point one has to cease creatING, which demonstrates God being tied by the constraints of time. Also, God (in the bible) sets people tests - yet God, existing outside of time and thus already knowwing the outcome of these tests sets such tests as a pointless exercise. Maybe God was just bored... or maybe God wasn't as clever as he thought he was..?
"Now for Evolution, it's a valid theory but it only works on living thing" - eh??? how do you know? Perhaps the fact that we're all driving around in cars powered by dead dinosaurs is proof that evolution continues AFTER death. When something changes form over time it has evolved.
You DID evolve from a monkey, whether dirty or not. Fact! There's no such thing as an educated Xtian. Once you become educated you cease to be a true Xtian, as being Xtian involves purposely dumbing yourself down - ID being my case in point. If Xtians had had their way over the centuries they'd have supressed countless scientific discoveries and we'd still think leeches were a fantastical cure-all. If they teach this dogshit in schools alongside theories of evolution then they're going to have to teach FSMism as well - after all, there's just as much (if not MORE) evidence to back up the theories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as there is to back up the belief-structure of the Xtian cult.
Precisely!! 20 years of Mac use under my belt and NEVER HAD A SINGLE VIRUS!!!! Nobody's 100% secure, and one day a virus will come, but for the time being I'd still rather be living in the false Nirvana of OS X than the daily Hell of 'doze!!
Indeed... I've read enough Pilger to know this truth - and I can only see one direction we in the UK are heading in. Towards a dictatorship. Maybe it won't be Blair, but he's definitely acting more and more like a dictator and it worries me that we've lost a lot of liberties and the general populous lives under the threat of brutal suppression by the government. Remember : governement is not ruler. They are civil servants, they are servile not us... without us they are nothing, but without them we go on as normal!
One major problem with that is that you can easily make plates thst correspond to the car's make/model. For instance if you stole a red Ford Escort, all you'd have to do would be to look out for another red Ford Escort (which isn't stolen or reported as such), make up some plates with that car's Reg number and hey presto you've beaten the system... and the owner of that other car will face some tricky explaining if they happen not to have left home at the time the stolen car was used. I don't see how this can be used to prove 'guilt' beyond reasonable doubt UNLESS there is a record of the 2 copies of the number plate at exactly the same time in two different places, and even then how do you prove which of the two cars the actual owner was driving and which the thief was driving. Oh, but I forget, in this country we no longer need to prove guilt... now a defendant has to prove innocence and is presumed guilty until he/she can do so!!! Bloody Police state... I think it's time for some civil disobedience again hehe