And in digging up that link I discovered the tantek hack is apparently valid CSS, which rather undermines my original point! Still, see AvoidingHacks if you like the train of thought anyway.
See "box within a box" at the CSS-wiki discuss page on the box model - as that page notes it's not without it's own drawbacks ("The only issue is that this is done within the HTML markup, rather than the CSS. Many people consider this to be bad practice, because years down the road, when a hack is finally cleaned from your code, a CSS hack is quickly removed, while markup hacks are scattered hither and yon. Plus it complicates the HTML, structurally speaking.") but I personally consider that a lesser of two evils.
Wow, I wasn't expecting +5 interesting for that comment. I thought it was off-the-cuff and not-particularly-interesting anecdote about an ugly hack I did of no likely use for anybody but myself. Hehe.
I follow the standards and still have it looking decent in IE. I never use "IE hacks" (as in deliberately malformed statements or comments), and I never use browser detection (both are basically a bit retarded imho) -- but I can still get the pages to look OK in IE, served exactly the same (validated) CSS.
There are just a few caveats:
Be prepared to abandon hope of absolute pixel-level control over everything. Seriously, if you want that, go into print design, that's not how the web works.
(Sometimes this one works as an OR to the above point...) Fix the box model by adding an extra non-semantic div. Simple as that. Voila, no more broken box model, but no invalid CSS full of Tantek hacks either. I don't know why more webdesigners are so against this. Banging on about favouring standards, yet they'd rather deliberately break (invalidate) their own CSS than add a single non-semantic wrapper div? I never quite grasped that. The broken IE box model is responsible for the vast majority of places where pixel-accurate control breaks down between IE and, well, the rest. Of course, it doesn't help fix your 3-pixel jog (for example), but it certainly cuts out the biggest offenders.
Be prepared to lose a few bells and whistles - for example, no:hover pseudoclass on arbitrary elements. So you can't have table cells that change color as you mouseover. This is pure candy though, so I'm prepared to "not support" IE in this regard. The overall layout/style is exactly the same, so it's not like I'm making IE degrade to "plain, unformatted hypertext" as you suggest - just they miss a few tiny "cherry on top" effects.
(Again this is a bit of an OR to the previous point) - use javascript. For example, get the effect of arbitrary:hover by using suckerfish javascript techniques.
And before anybody asks, yes, I do maintain public-facing web pages for a large organisation.
Admittedly our main website is horrible non-standards HTML4 with patchy use of hack-filled CSS, but I didnt design it, and I can't fix it because even when I enter valid markup, our lousy CMS (built firmly on the MS stack with the MS toolchain, just to feed your prejudices) will bodge it up for me. Grrr.
But the new microsites I design are 100% standards compliant and they look 99% the same in IE or Moz/etc. My management wouldn't have it any other way.
When I give people this link in response to CSS queries, I'm fond of adding "if you can't answer your CSS question within three clicks of that page, your question has no answer (or you chose the wrong three clicks)".
I actually did something fairly similar with my phpbb installation.
I noticed that bots were signing up but not actually posting, (I donno, maybe they were meant to post but that part of the script broke -- either way, they never posted, but it annoyed me having them there.) They were just there, with links to sites selling vicodin/viagra/etc. Which annoyed me somewhat, but one time a child porn link showed up which was really the straw that broke the camels back, and I decided to stop it. I noticed that 99% of the sites were *.ru so I altered the reg form to throw an error if it detected a *.ru domain in the website field. Then I just started getting non *.ru domains instead, so I just thought, fine, fuck it.... Now if anybody signs up with ANY website in the website field, it throws an error, and has a message along these lines:
I notice you have a website listed. To prevent spam bots signing up to link their websites, this has been disabled on registration. If you are not a spam bot, just complete your sign up with no website, you will be able to add it back in by editing your details once you have registered
Since then, no spam bots. w00t. Of course, that forum only gets a handful of signups per year, so I don't really care if it inconveniences people slightly, it's primarily intended as a "private"ish (real life friends) forum anyway.
I occasionally design animated gif web banners and I've emailed them to clients for approval from Outlook to Outlook, and they've shown up (animated) just fine. Last time was all of a couple of months ago.
That's Outlook 2000 (I think). I know 2003 removed automatic display of images, perhaps that's what you're thinking of, but at any rate that's all images, animated or otherwise.
I've co-produced my band's last 3 cds, working on the fourth now, and it's not exactly easy.
On the one hand you have a very good point: our previous cds have been 1) terribly produced, 2) quite badly produced, 3) nearly professional sounding but still not quite there if you're into music production yourself and listen with a careful, analytical ear. But despite this, "no one complained about the quality", as you say. So in that regard I will agree with you, the wider listening public care less about pristine production and engineering values than you might think.
On the other hand I'm not sure I can agree with your implication that capturing the sound of music to disc is an easy job that can be done well by untrained amateurs. In some ways choral stuff is easy, so I can understand why you would think that. Vocals are one of the easiest things to record, just get a half decent condensor mic and an input channel, and from there it's pretty much all down to the singer. Say, a R0de mic and a focusrite voice channel, you're looking at maybe £500, no big deal, and while Nashville engineers or gearslutz.com types would be grimacing at the idea of r0des and focusrite's being considered professional, the truth is they'll do you a damn good job that normal people wouldn't object to at all. With choirs, you probably already perform in a suitable acoustic space such a church, so you stick a couple of room mics up and it's all gravy.
Rock bands tend to be a bit harder though. Drum kits are wayyyyyyy more difficult to record than vocals, by and large. Most bands dont have a good acoustic space to record drum kits, so you're looking at studio time. Then, unless you're good enough to capture a perfect kit sound with a single room mic (unlikely), you're going to need a whole set of mics for the close micing. And then - oh look, now our stereo-input input channel and stereo-input ADCs on our soundcard aren't sufficient, we need an audio interface with large amounts of I/O. Loads more money there. Electric guitars aren't easy either, because amp stacks produce frequencies beyond what CDs and prosumer recording gear captures, the guitarists "huge" sound swiftly sounds tiny and ridiculous once it's "inside the box". And so on and so on...
Of course here I've been talking about rock/indie/punk sorta bands because they're the commonest type, but frankly when it comes to our band I WISH we were a four piece drums/bass/guitar/vocal line-up. Because we have sax, trumpet, flute, electric violin, percussion as well as the above, all of which require their own mic techniques to capture the best sound. And then you've got the nightmare of mixing so many elements together, so that nothing clashes or masks other elements, compressing everything appropriately so that you don't waste the entire dynamic range of CD or MP3 audio, and so on...
All in all we've spent over 6 years learning this stuff and we're still only getting to the point where our next CD will hopefully be within 90% of the quality a professional team of engineers and producers could achieve. So, yeah, we saved money on paying those engineers and producers, but we also spent 6 years of our life obsessing over this stuff and tens of thousands of pounds on our joint collection of mixing desks, microphones, multicore, input stages, DAW software, DSP units and so on.
Most bands dont want to spend that much money and time because they don't care, they're songwriters, not producers. So for most bands, GP comment was completely correct. If you want a record that sounds anything like a professional record, and not the usual "drum kit sounds like flicking a piece of paper in a tin can, vocalist inaudible underneath the guitars" syndrome that comes with low-budget, local-studio demo cd recording, then yes you will be paying money for a real producer.
I find that interesting, considering I like Homesite quite a lot (finally persuaded to use it instead of vanilla wordpad) and think Dreamweaver is a bloated piece of crap.
I might have been interested in checking this out if it supported php (by which I mean, syntax highlighting), but from what I gather it doesn't, so nevermind.
Fair play mate, I see now from another post that actually you were right, he did get more votes than Hungary's population, you were right on that, you just remembered the wrong number.
As it happens I looked up the population of Hungary with wikipedia *chuckle*
Well, I look after my unsigned band's myspace profile. (For those who hate myspace, we also have a website but I'm slightly loath to link there from a place like slashdot as it's a bit of an embarrassment;) That site is several years old and in bad need of an overhaul - I've nearly but not quite finished the brand new shiny xhtml/css version... honest...)
Anyway, last time myspace came up here, I posted this comment which earned myself a +5, several agreeing replies, and even a couple of CD sales for the band. So I thought I would pitch in here.
Firstly, this isn't exactly new, as other posters have mentioned bands can already get their music sold on sites like CDBaby. However I don't think you should underestimate the likely impact that comes from conveniently having something all-in-one-place. Because ultimately people are lazy!
If you have a myspace profile with some tunes in your player, then some text underneath saying "if you want to buy full quality MP3s of the tunes..." then a link through to any other website, I would bet that only a tiny % of profile viewers bother to do so. If on the other hand you have little "buy" icons on the myspace music player itself I would imagine the "conversion rate" to be much higher.
In that regard this is a very interesting development. Part of my shiny new band website will be an integrated shopping cart for MP3s (I'll be using Cubecart unless anybody replies to this post telling me about something better), so we can sell them ourselves. However I wouldn't rule out simultaenously offering them for sale on Myspace, as it is my belief that website visitors and myspace visitors are generally two relatively separate demographics.
The one thing that concerns me, and means I won't be rushing into this immediately, is this comment. A fair point - there's already something of a storm around the myspace "EULA" for music, which basically says "all your base are belong to us". Read literally, it suggests that they could, for example, use your music in a major 20th Century Fox movie soundtrack without even asking your permission let alone paying you a penny (er, cent). On the other hand, you can read it as being boilerplate and just the minimum needed to make sure they're not breaking the law by spreading your tune across their server farm, and of course in practice they wouldn't use it on Fox's TV or movies because they only have a crappy 128kbps version.... But, call me cynical, I'm not one to give Murdoch any blind trust or benefit of the doubt.
What actually happened is they gave their music away on good old fashioned CDs at their gigs. So yet again, the #1 way of independent bands getting successful turns out to be "doing gigs". Plus ca change;-)
People (especially teenagers) tend to get fanboy/girl-ish about things which lots of other people are fanboy/girl-ish about. It's all about peer groups and whatnot. Example: how many guys are there who are better looking than Justin Timberlake? How many who can sing better? How many who are both? I would suggest hundreds/thousands/millions. But teenage girls arent screaming in their millions for Very Handsome, Excellent Singer but Totally Unheard of Joe Schmoe from Buttfuck, Idaho; and even if one teenage girl runs across his profile they won't start screaming and pinning his posters to the wall, because there's no wider group to share this with.
Unfortunately the teenage generation often struggle to buy things on the internet (because they can't get credit cards) and/or don't buy things even when they can because they're {technologically capable/morally relaxed/etc} enough to download it for free.
Personally I think OP was correct - it's bloody hard to give your music away, never mind persuade people to stump up money for it.
Re:What about the Colbert effect?
on
More Wiki Than Ever
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
He overwhelmed an online vote in some European country to name a bridge after him (he got something like 2 million votes, which was significantly more than the population of said country)
I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess you're American? I mean, wtf, "some European country"? It was Hungary, which has a population of about 10 million, and last time I checked 2 million wasn't significantly more than 10 million.
I'm sorry, what? Where did I mention anything about the CLI?
What, apart from linking to the Stephenson essay about the command line, describing it as agreeing with your stance, you mean?
And saying the GUI hides the system in metaphor implies you prefer direct access to "the system" with a GUI.... meaning... what? Well, unless you intend people to use "the system" by using little electromagnetic tweezers to flip bits inside the hardware I think assuming you meant the CLI was a fair guess.
Anyway your entire rant was completely misplaced.
I get really tired of people suggesting ways to program computers "without doing any coding".
Grandparent didn't say he wanted to program computers without doing any coding. He said he wanted an OS which loaded appropriate stuff according to his changing needs without doing any coding. Yeah, I'll agree completely that if you want to program a computer, then STFU and code. Little draggy-droppy things as some sort of replacement for coding is a bit ridiculous. But unless you consider all computer use to be "programming" a computer, then surely you can accept there is a vast swathe of things the computer should be able to do without writing code.
Bad form to reply to myself, but I realised I forgot something I meant to say.
Basically, there are things to justifiably bash MS for. Biggest on my horizon is the creeping DRM, which may well be the factor that does eventually persuade me to bother switching to Linux. So, focus on those genuine issues, and you might persuade people. But come out with nonsense, like suggesting Windows has made no improvement between v3.0 and XP, and it just undermines your credibility.
Actually, I did try, thank you very much: I spent about a week on it IIRC. I also asked for help on the interwebs, although I didn't get anything more helpful than "RTFM n00b" type remarks. Well, anyway, after a week of not getting beyond a command prompt, I gave up. What, should I have given it two weeks?
FWIW, it was Slackware, and whatever the latest version was in about 98. I await the "well try a n00b distro like Ubuntu" - well, sorry, I can't be bothered any more. I use Ubuntu a bit at work, and it's very nice, but at home I'm passed caring because XP does the job for me. Back in 98 I found it fun to use my computer pretty much for the sake of using my computer, which is why I wanted to try Linux, but now I just want to use some apps and get things done, and Windows suits me just fine in that regard.
Anyway you're (all) missing my point, which wasn't to bash Linux exactly, but just to that this "OMG ROFL Winblowz Sux0rz!" attitude is really not +5 funny because it's quite obviously wrong. You guys saw 98 bluescreen seven years ago. That's great. But I failed to get X to load seven years ago. Now, when I come along and offer that silly (and admittedly completely trivial one-data-point) anecdote, you're falling over yourselves to dismiss it. (With cheap personal attacks on my level of computer competence no less. No, I'm not "learning the computer", I've been programming since I was 6.) But when you come along and harp on the same old judgements based on 7 year old Windows, it's +5 moderation all the way.
That was my essential point. Not a "this OS is better than yours" thing - just saying ungrounded MS-bashing as a quick route to popularity around here is pretty lame.
Like you say - both Windows and Linux are decent OSes these days. Why is that? Because both have come a long way since 1998, or, to get back to where we started - since 1991.
:sigh: oh well, keep it up.
Over here on XP I've had no crashes in 5 years and support for all the software and hardware I actually want to use. Whereas linux... well, it wouldn't even load X at any resolution, which makes it pretty comprehensively unusable as far as I'm concerned.
Er. Windows 3.1 (arguably the first usable version) didn't come out til 1992. So I'd say it HAS come quite a long way in the last 15 years. Still, enjoy your cheap laugh:)
Rather apt in this case I think, considering your examples are obviously words which were not "real" everyday words and then got trademarked, but invented trademarks which BECAME everyday words.
The only thing more bizarre than you not realising that, is apparently 2-3 other slashdot users not realising it either.
Still wrong I'm afraid - AIDS isn't exactly a disease. It's a syndrome: Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome.
I'm no expert but my understanding is this basically means your immune system is kaput. Hence nobody really dies from AIDS, per se - they die from pneumonia or flu or any other number of (normally non-lethal) diseases, because their immune system cannot fight them off.
Er, never been to India then? Or even bothered to read about it properly? Yes, there are dirt poor third world "areas" (geographically and demographically). There are also skyscrapers, technology firms, middle class, nouveau riche, etc. I don't have a source to back up the parent's exact statistic, nor the time to find one right now, but it is at least feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
And in digging up that link I discovered the tantek hack is apparently valid CSS, which rather undermines my original point! Still, see AvoidingHacks if you like the train of thought anyway.
See "box within a box" at the CSS-wiki discuss page on the box model - as that page notes it's not without it's own drawbacks ("The only issue is that this is done within the HTML markup, rather than the CSS. Many people consider this to be bad practice, because years down the road, when a hack is finally cleaned from your code, a CSS hack is quickly removed, while markup hacks are scattered hither and yon. Plus it complicates the HTML, structurally speaking.") but I personally consider that a lesser of two evils.
I applaud this post.
Wow, I wasn't expecting +5 interesting for that comment. I thought it was off-the-cuff and not-particularly-interesting anecdote about an ugly hack I did of no likely use for anybody but myself. Hehe.
I follow the standards and still have it looking decent in IE. I never use "IE hacks" (as in deliberately malformed statements or comments), and I never use browser detection (both are basically a bit retarded imho) -- but I can still get the pages to look OK in IE, served exactly the same (validated) CSS.
There are just a few caveats:
- Be prepared to abandon hope of absolute pixel-level control over everything. Seriously, if you want that, go into print design, that's not how the web works.
- (Sometimes this one works as an OR to the above point...) Fix the box model by adding an extra non-semantic div. Simple as that. Voila, no more broken box model, but no invalid CSS full of Tantek hacks either. I don't know why more webdesigners are so against this. Banging on about favouring standards, yet they'd rather deliberately break (invalidate) their own CSS than add a single non-semantic wrapper div? I never quite grasped that. The broken IE box model is responsible for the vast majority of places where pixel-accurate control breaks down between IE and, well, the rest. Of course, it doesn't help fix your 3-pixel jog (for example), but it certainly cuts out the biggest offenders.
- Be prepared to lose a few bells and whistles - for example, no
:hover pseudoclass on arbitrary elements. So you can't have table cells that change color as you mouseover. This is pure candy though, so I'm prepared to "not support" IE in this regard. The overall layout/style is exactly the same, so it's not like I'm making IE degrade to "plain, unformatted hypertext" as you suggest - just they miss a few tiny "cherry on top" effects.
- (Again this is a bit of an OR to the previous point) - use javascript. For example, get the effect of arbitrary
:hover by using suckerfish javascript techniques.
And before anybody asks, yes, I do maintain public-facing web pages for a large organisation.Admittedly our main website is horrible non-standards HTML4 with patchy use of hack-filled CSS, but I didnt design it, and I can't fix it because even when I enter valid markup, our lousy CMS (built firmly on the MS stack with the MS toolchain, just to feed your prejudices) will bodge it up for me. Grrr.
But the new microsites I design are 100% standards compliant and they look 99% the same in IE or Moz/etc. My management wouldn't have it any other way.
Obviously I can't argue with the spec as being definitive in theory, but in practice I find this the best manual:
http://dezwozhere.com/links.html
When I give people this link in response to CSS queries, I'm fond of adding "if you can't answer your CSS question within three clicks of that page, your question has no answer (or you chose the wrong three clicks)".
I noticed that bots were signing up but not actually posting, (I donno, maybe they were meant to post but that part of the script broke -- either way, they never posted, but it annoyed me having them there.) They were just there, with links to sites selling vicodin/viagra/etc. Which annoyed me somewhat, but one time a child porn link showed up which was really the straw that broke the camels back, and I decided to stop it. I noticed that 99% of the sites were *.ru so I altered the reg form to throw an error if it detected a *.ru domain in the website field. Then I just started getting non *.ru domains instead, so I just thought, fine, fuck it.... Now if anybody signs up with ANY website in the website field, it throws an error, and has a message along these lines: Since then, no spam bots. w00t. Of course, that forum only gets a handful of signups per year, so I don't really care if it inconveniences people slightly, it's primarily intended as a "private"ish (real life friends) forum anyway.
Er, are you sure?
I occasionally design animated gif web banners and I've emailed them to clients for approval from Outlook to Outlook, and they've shown up (animated) just fine. Last time was all of a couple of months ago.
That's Outlook 2000 (I think). I know 2003 removed automatic display of images, perhaps that's what you're thinking of, but at any rate that's all images, animated or otherwise.
How is this better than an image spacer? Elements have padding and margin properties, use them!
Hmm, yes and no.
I've co-produced my band's last 3 cds, working on the fourth now, and it's not exactly easy.
On the one hand you have a very good point: our previous cds have been 1) terribly produced, 2) quite badly produced, 3) nearly professional sounding but still not quite there if you're into music production yourself and listen with a careful, analytical ear. But despite this, "no one complained about the quality", as you say. So in that regard I will agree with you, the wider listening public care less about pristine production and engineering values than you might think.
On the other hand I'm not sure I can agree with your implication that capturing the sound of music to disc is an easy job that can be done well by untrained amateurs. In some ways choral stuff is easy, so I can understand why you would think that. Vocals are one of the easiest things to record, just get a half decent condensor mic and an input channel, and from there it's pretty much all down to the singer. Say, a R0de mic and a focusrite voice channel, you're looking at maybe £500, no big deal, and while Nashville engineers or gearslutz.com types would be grimacing at the idea of r0des and focusrite's being considered professional, the truth is they'll do you a damn good job that normal people wouldn't object to at all. With choirs, you probably already perform in a suitable acoustic space such a church, so you stick a couple of room mics up and it's all gravy.
Rock bands tend to be a bit harder though. Drum kits are wayyyyyyy more difficult to record than vocals, by and large. Most bands dont have a good acoustic space to record drum kits, so you're looking at studio time. Then, unless you're good enough to capture a perfect kit sound with a single room mic (unlikely), you're going to need a whole set of mics for the close micing. And then - oh look, now our stereo-input input channel and stereo-input ADCs on our soundcard aren't sufficient, we need an audio interface with large amounts of I/O. Loads more money there. Electric guitars aren't easy either, because amp stacks produce frequencies beyond what CDs and prosumer recording gear captures, the guitarists "huge" sound swiftly sounds tiny and ridiculous once it's "inside the box". And so on and so on...
Of course here I've been talking about rock/indie/punk sorta bands because they're the commonest type, but frankly when it comes to our band I WISH we were a four piece drums/bass/guitar/vocal line-up. Because we have sax, trumpet, flute, electric violin, percussion as well as the above, all of which require their own mic techniques to capture the best sound. And then you've got the nightmare of mixing so many elements together, so that nothing clashes or masks other elements, compressing everything appropriately so that you don't waste the entire dynamic range of CD or MP3 audio, and so on...
All in all we've spent over 6 years learning this stuff and we're still only getting to the point where our next CD will hopefully be within 90% of the quality a professional team of engineers and producers could achieve. So, yeah, we saved money on paying those engineers and producers, but we also spent 6 years of our life obsessing over this stuff and tens of thousands of pounds on our joint collection of mixing desks, microphones, multicore, input stages, DAW software, DSP units and so on.
Most bands dont want to spend that much money and time because they don't care, they're songwriters, not producers. So for most bands, GP comment was completely correct. If you want a record that sounds anything like a professional record, and not the usual "drum kit sounds like flicking a piece of paper in a tin can, vocalist inaudible underneath the guitars" syndrome that comes with low-budget, local-studio demo cd recording, then yes you will be paying money for a real producer.
I find that interesting, considering I like Homesite quite a lot (finally persuaded to use it instead of vanilla wordpad) and think Dreamweaver is a bloated piece of crap.
I might have been interested in checking this out if it supported php (by which I mean, syntax highlighting), but from what I gather it doesn't, so nevermind.
Fair play mate, I see now from another post that actually you were right, he did get more votes than Hungary's population, you were right on that, you just remembered the wrong number.
As it happens I looked up the population of Hungary with wikipedia *chuckle*
Well, I look after my unsigned band's myspace profile. (For those who hate myspace, we also have a website but I'm slightly loath to link there from a place like slashdot as it's a bit of an embarrassment ;) That site is several years old and in bad need of an overhaul - I've nearly but not quite finished the brand new shiny xhtml/css version... honest...)
Anyway, last time myspace came up here, I posted this comment which earned myself a +5, several agreeing replies, and even a couple of CD sales for the band. So I thought I would pitch in here.
Firstly, this isn't exactly new, as other posters have mentioned bands can already get their music sold on sites like CDBaby. However I don't think you should underestimate the likely impact that comes from conveniently having something all-in-one-place. Because ultimately people are lazy!
If you have a myspace profile with some tunes in your player, then some text underneath saying "if you want to buy full quality MP3s of the tunes..." then a link through to any other website, I would bet that only a tiny % of profile viewers bother to do so. If on the other hand you have little "buy" icons on the myspace music player itself I would imagine the "conversion rate" to be much higher.
In that regard this is a very interesting development. Part of my shiny new band website will be an integrated shopping cart for MP3s (I'll be using Cubecart unless anybody replies to this post telling me about something better), so we can sell them ourselves. However I wouldn't rule out simultaenously offering them for sale on Myspace, as it is my belief that website visitors and myspace visitors are generally two relatively separate demographics.
The one thing that concerns me, and means I won't be rushing into this immediately, is this comment. A fair point - there's already something of a storm around the myspace "EULA" for music, which basically says "all your base are belong to us". Read literally, it suggests that they could, for example, use your music in a major 20th Century Fox movie soundtrack without even asking your permission let alone paying you a penny (er, cent). On the other hand, you can read it as being boilerplate and just the minimum needed to make sure they're not breaking the law by spreading your tune across their server farm, and of course in practice they wouldn't use it on Fox's TV or movies because they only have a crappy 128kbps version.... But, call me cynical, I'm not one to give Murdoch any blind trust or benefit of the doubt.
Yeah but the part myspace played in that success is 90% myth. The band hadn't even heard of the site until after they were signed and successful.
1 781879,00.html
;-)
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,
What actually happened is they gave their music away on good old fashioned CDs at their gigs. So yet again, the #1 way of independent bands getting successful turns out to be "doing gigs". Plus ca change
People (especially teenagers) tend to get fanboy/girl-ish about things which lots of other people are fanboy/girl-ish about. It's all about peer groups and whatnot. Example: how many guys are there who are better looking than Justin Timberlake? How many who can sing better? How many who are both? I would suggest hundreds/thousands/millions. But teenage girls arent screaming in their millions for Very Handsome, Excellent Singer but Totally Unheard of Joe Schmoe from Buttfuck, Idaho; and even if one teenage girl runs across his profile they won't start screaming and pinning his posters to the wall, because there's no wider group to share this with.
Unfortunately the teenage generation often struggle to buy things on the internet (because they can't get credit cards) and/or don't buy things even when they can because they're {technologically capable/morally relaxed/etc} enough to download it for free.
Personally I think OP was correct - it's bloody hard to give your music away, never mind persuade people to stump up money for it.
He overwhelmed an online vote in some European country to name a bridge after him (he got something like 2 million votes, which was significantly more than the population of said country)
I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess you're American? I mean, wtf, "some European country"? It was Hungary, which has a population of about 10 million, and last time I checked 2 million wasn't significantly more than 10 million.
I'm sorry, what? Where did I mention anything about the CLI?
What, apart from linking to the Stephenson essay about the command line, describing it as agreeing with your stance, you mean?
And saying the GUI hides the system in metaphor implies you prefer direct access to "the system" with a GUI.... meaning... what? Well, unless you intend people to use "the system" by using little electromagnetic tweezers to flip bits inside the hardware I think assuming you meant the CLI was a fair guess.
Anyway your entire rant was completely misplaced.
I get really tired of people suggesting ways to program computers "without doing any coding".
Grandparent didn't say he wanted to program computers without doing any coding. He said he wanted an OS which loaded appropriate stuff according to his changing needs without doing any coding. Yeah, I'll agree completely that if you want to program a computer, then STFU and code. Little draggy-droppy things as some sort of replacement for coding is a bit ridiculous. But unless you consider all computer use to be "programming" a computer, then surely you can accept there is a vast swathe of things the computer should be able to do without writing code.
Basically, there are things to justifiably bash MS for. Biggest on my horizon is the creeping DRM, which may well be the factor that does eventually persuade me to bother switching to Linux. So, focus on those genuine issues, and you might persuade people. But come out with nonsense, like suggesting Windows has made no improvement between v3.0 and XP, and it just undermines your credibility.
FWIW, it was Slackware, and whatever the latest version was in about 98. I await the "well try a n00b distro like Ubuntu" - well, sorry, I can't be bothered any more. I use Ubuntu a bit at work, and it's very nice, but at home I'm passed caring because XP does the job for me. Back in 98 I found it fun to use my computer pretty much for the sake of using my computer, which is why I wanted to try Linux, but now I just want to use some apps and get things done, and Windows suits me just fine in that regard.
Anyway you're (all) missing my point, which wasn't to bash Linux exactly, but just to that this "OMG ROFL Winblowz Sux0rz!" attitude is really not +5 funny because it's quite obviously wrong. You guys saw 98 bluescreen seven years ago. That's great. But I failed to get X to load seven years ago. Now, when I come along and offer that silly (and admittedly completely trivial one-data-point) anecdote, you're falling over yourselves to dismiss it. (With cheap personal attacks on my level of computer competence no less. No, I'm not "learning the computer", I've been programming since I was 6.) But when you come along and harp on the same old judgements based on 7 year old Windows, it's +5 moderation all the way.
That was my essential point. Not a "this OS is better than yours" thing - just saying ungrounded MS-bashing as a quick route to popularity around here is pretty lame.
Like you say - both Windows and Linux are decent OSes these days. Why is that? Because both have come a long way since 1998, or, to get back to where we started - since 1991.
:sigh: oh well, keep it up. Over here on XP I've had no crashes in 5 years and support for all the software and hardware I actually want to use. Whereas linux... well, it wouldn't even load X at any resolution, which makes it pretty comprehensively unusable as far as I'm concerned.
Er. Windows 3.1 (arguably the first usable version) didn't come out til 1992. So I'd say it HAS come quite a long way in the last 15 years. Still, enjoy your cheap laugh :)
As I read this, you are at +4.
Your sig: Too many posts hit +4.
Rather apt in this case I think, considering your examples are obviously words which were not "real" everyday words and then got trademarked, but invented trademarks which BECAME everyday words.
The only thing more bizarre than you not realising that, is apparently 2-3 other slashdot users not realising it either.
Still wrong I'm afraid - AIDS isn't exactly a disease. It's a syndrome: Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome.
I'm no expert but my understanding is this basically means your immune system is kaput. Hence nobody really dies from AIDS, per se - they die from pneumonia or flu or any other number of (normally non-lethal) diseases, because their immune system cannot fight them off.
Er, never been to India then? Or even bothered to read about it properly? Yes, there are dirt poor third world "areas" (geographically and demographically). There are also skyscrapers, technology firms, middle class, nouveau riche, etc. I don't have a source to back up the parent's exact statistic, nor the time to find one right now, but it is at least feasible.