From TFA - However, the plan also continued to attract broader opposition, with the US once again understood to have lodged its opposition to the idea. This time, ICANN also faced opposition from an unspecified number of other governments. Although not having the veto power of the US, a government advisory committee set up to respond to Icann proposals said "several" of its members were against the idea.
The Australian government has already spoken out publicly against an internet porn address, while a report in New Zealand claimed that Iran was also opposed.
So it's not only the big bad US this time. It's simply a dumb idea, that is why it was killed. There is no neo-con conspiracy supported by less than half the american citizens to keep the rest of the world down. It's simply a dumb idea getting what it deserves.
I don't care who has control of the DNS, I trust my government as poorly as I trust yours, and slightly more than I trust "democracy".
Because you're exactly right, it makes for a good rallying point for the non-technical or at least the non-clueful. It SOUNDS good right? "All porn in.xxx!", and then saying some conservative christian group stood against it makes it sound like some reactionary American group is holding up progress. Americans are the only Christians of course, we all know Christ was born in Cleveland and the Pope lives in Albequerque.
In fact it's a dumb idea and that's why it's not going anywhere.
It's better or worse than that, I'm not sure which. To get seats in the house a pirate party member would have to win his local jurisdiction by majority vote. For the senate, the state he represents. I'd say it's probably easier to get a seat in the house if you represent the right county (like say: areas in San Jose, Austin, Redmond, etc.). On the other hand Pirate Party members may get 5% of the votes nationwide but still get no seats if the votes are not sufficiently localized.
Yes, it is an american forum, but all the american girls think we have cooties. We're trying to get some hawt chix0r east of us. You know, where they think nerds are cool. According to many JRPGs, far eastern girls like pink and ponies!
Well, maybe slashdot shouldn't have hired the writer of Grandia 3 to do marketing.
So that's almost the problem right there. How is the self-esteem of someone else any of our concern?
If I go to a doctor and say "Doctor, I don't fit in, I feel bad, I think of suicide a lot", that's the time to listen to advice about not locking yourself up, maybe even time to get checked in somewhere. Clearly you're indicating that you want a change. Similarly, someone who shuts himself out so much that he can't hold a job or can't do his schoolwork has a problem that requires external intervention. Mom and dad have to step in and get help.
Kids who don't go outside or hang with their friends are not necessarily in trouble, even if they have low self-esteem, even if they are at times unhappy. If they're holding up their grades, and filling their responsibilities to themselves, then what's wrong? These stories annoy me because they serve to reinforce a belief that there is a certain correct way of life, involving constant interaction with peers, and those who do not partake are somehow inadequate. Then we make surveys about the self-esteem of the people affected. There's no wonder to me. A large group of organized people insults a smaller and disorganized group of people, then asks "How do you feel about that?". Hmm.
Based on the unfortunate, unnatural, totally contrived need to function in "society". Basically, there is not enough land available for us to live free and ignore our peers, so we have to work in such a way as to not burden them (even if we don't want their help, even if we don't want to help or hurt them).
Some people think humans are pack animals, that we must not only be part of the hunt, but also do what the other wolves do.
I'm not sure what's wrong with being reclusive. Spending all your time in a room looking for porn is probably no better or worse than sitting in front of the tube all day watching sports, although it may cause more chafing. It's really only bad if it gets to the point where grades & work start sliding. Otherwise it's just a way to pass the time.
No one has yet proven to that there is a meaning or purpose of life, hence my own opinion is no behavior is bad until it causes you to become a burden on society. If someone can hold a job and keep his responsibilities (or, if he's a minor, is on his way to doing so), then I don't see the problem. Hanging out with people, getting crushes on (or getting crushed BY) girls, etc. is fun for some and painful for others.
I'm not sure if exposure to sex has any relationship on acquisition of it. I saw my first nudie magazine at 8, along with half my block that discovered the discarded pile of them. I don't think we were jumpstarted into puberty, nor did we try to jump the girls that were with us. Now I might agree with you that some of the sex portrayed in porno is maybe not the kinds of values we want our kids brought up with, but that's a separate discussion and probably not related to porn so much as general child rearing.
Or instead you can build China's industrial base by sending western R&D and manufacturing over, in effect teaching them how to build their OWN reliable super computers, while increasing your friends margins and ensuring a comfy retirement. I'm not sure whats worse, giving them weapons or teaching them how to build them more effectively. Either way, heading back on topic, these are living examples of people who, if we all followed their lead, would lead to a collapse of society.
The next time I'm arrested for stealing, lying and circumventing the law, I'm going to blame it on CSPAN, which I watch obsessively. While I may get a slap on the wrist and time served, I do wish my victims well in their civil suit against CSPAN for it's contribution to my anti-social behavior.
I like my PSP, it's great on a plane or when i'm stuck somewhere I don't want to be and do not wish to pay attention. (Ex.: Almost any social gathering I'm suckered in to).
Features that are nice: great display, good sound, movie-video, kick-ass joystick, wireless
Design decisions that detract from the product: UMD format, Expensive Games, no USB storage (WTF!?!)
The system could have been good if Sony had let engineers design this product instead of marketing executives. Sell the thing with a hard drive and let users iTunes their games/video onto the thing. Who wants to carry catridges around anyway?
The number of quests post 35 I've found to be horribly dissapointing. There aren't that many in general, and they don't generally give enough xp to level you up without some grinding thrown in. The 40s were the worst, I have 3 alts stuck at ~40 because I can't generate the mental stamina required to go through that again. All attention is on the raid game at 60. Level 1-35 however there were so many quests you simply could not do all of them without many going grey. That was fun, excellent replay.
I'm disappointed. I'm sure if I ever can tolerate the grinding to get from 51 to 60 I'll be amused for a while at the raids, but I've done that already in EQ. I left that game without looking back because of how WoW was from 1-35. I'm pretty sure if WoW doesn't shape up it'll be the same over again.
Actually that's exactly the point. That's why Alienware remains a small company when compared with Dell, HP or Lenovo. Small enough for one of them to buy it. The extra bucks they charge are for support, some of the testing they did, and warranties. In fact their hardware costs are surely lower than yours, but not so much as to be able to offset the overhead.
When YOU build a PC, you don't have any of those concerns. You just hook it up, cross fingers and usually it works more or less OK. There's usually a "personality", but these are things we're willing to accept as enthusiasts.
I understand where you are coming from, that's why I build my own too. But the fact is that it's not an easy business to make money on. It's not just the cost of slapping the components together and stuffing it in a box, for profit companies have additional concerns. For me, I do not want support, I am willing to risk systems integration bugs, mfg warranties are good enough for me. I'm better off alone. Companies that can be sued do not have this luxury.
The problem with building your own PC is that it's expensive.
First, you don't get economy of scale. This is hugely important in consumer electronics. The more a company can buy of a widget, the cheaper each widget costs. It's not like a 10% off thing, it can be like a 50% off thing if your volumes are high enough. Related to this, Dell, HP, Lenovo have enormous power to drive component prices down. Their number 1 weapon is competitors for any given product. If a customer says "Give me X", they lose that benefit, prices go up. Go to a car dealership, price out a car. Then go to another, and say 'beat this price'. Works great, you can get a honda for under dealer invoice if you try hard. Same principle. In this respect Apple is different, it is more willing (not TOTALLY willing, just more willing) to lock in to one vendor it really likes and designs around it. This is why they're more expensive, even with x86 architectures.
Second, you can't support it cheaply. You cannot take any random combinations of components and have a guarantee (that you'll bet your business on) that it'll be supported. The only way to give guarantees is to build it, test it, find the bugs, and design them out. That is extremely expensive to do for every combination. This is, in fact, why Apple works the way it works. They only give you a small number of options, support a small number of drivers, and tell you "this is your product". They can support that 100%, do something they haven't tested and you're on your own. It's also why they are probably the most reliable machines: they made their job very easy. Even the big three PC makers can't do that.
Finally, the market wants cheap and wants supported. Yes there are niche customers who know what components they want, but not many do. Those that do don't always know what technical problems may exist beneath the hood. Memory timing problems (not CAS latency but setup, hold, duty cycle, DQS, etc.) are probably the #1 issue on motherboards, you can take the superstar motherboard and the superstar memory company and they may not work together, even though both claim to support some standard. Worse, they may appear to work together but be subtly corrupting your filesystem. There are all kinds of deeply concerning electrical problems that may exist. This happens throughout the system. No one tests their component level products to the level they should be tested. Sad, but true.
There are plenty of companies that will let you build your own box, but they'll necessarily always be small, and always attract an audience that is more patient with bugs. Personally, in spite of every problem I know of that can go wrong in a computer, I still build my own. I knowingly invite this problem because I'm willing to risk the bugs (and pay for them, if need be) for the performance. Most people do not, much like most people do not buy exotic sports cars.
Proprietary is a funny word. I'd use it on Apple, since their system is closed, anyone who wnats to work in it must go through Apple. I'm not sure it applies in your example. PERC cards are an example of a card Dell supports because it either built them in house, or spec'd them for use in their servers. They can support it from the ground up. It's proprietary in that its Dell branded, may or may not have been made in-house at Dell, but it's still a PCI/PCI-X/PCIe card. You ought to be able to replace it with an equivalent function card, although you won't be supported.
You would not call a nVidia GPU based card proprietary when made by Asus or Gigabyte, I'm not sure how it's any more proprietary if its made by Dell. Asus or Gigabyte don't "rebrand" their video cards, they are independent designs using the nVidia chipset. Similarly all the big PC manufacturers design many of their components in house, outsource some, offshore others, but rarely do their own chipsets (IBM may be the only one that does). Doing your own boards does give you tremendous control of costs, hence the reason you see this happen. It doesn't mean they're using "cheap components" so much as they are negotiating component cost down by playing vendors off on each other.
I guess I'm not one of those people, I wouldn't say fortunate people, for whom I could do work on an Apple. CAD tools are almost exclusively Windows or Linux. Games are almost exclusively Windows.
The argument is sound: overpriced hardware with a horrible OS. Put a currently good os (MacOS X) on commodity hardware, and now you have something I'm willing to endure poor software support for.
I don't own a mac. This was someone elses problem I was dealing with used as an example of how you can take an easy to use OS like MacOS or Windows and go horribly wrong, then add the complexity of maintaining linux (one doesn't maintain Windows, for example, one uses it like they use a rental car).
Anyhow, unrelated, there are lots of good reasons to run your own website, including using any apps you want and not having to trust your content to someone else. One example are repeater tools to help get past corporate firewalls, VERY useful if your IT department has an aggressive web filter and blocks all outgoing ports but web-related. Another are various notepad tools (I use wiki's), irc clients, etc. all geared towards myself alone.
I could say the opposite. Microsoft is nicer than Apple because it doesn't make hardware at all, letting the customer benefit from the free market on at least that one set of products.
Linux is losing because it's not for joe-sixpack and that's really all there is to say about it. It's not easy, if you think it is ("Just use Ubuntu!"), think about this scenario I found myself facing this weekend:
"I wanted a web presence, so I installed apache on my Mac. Someone said I needed to to use my external IP address, so I went to whatismyipaddress.com and put that in my mac. It still didn't work and now I can't use the internet. I brought it to the guy at the mac store, and he hooked his mac to my mac and he couldn't see it either. He gave me an RMA number."
Imagine this set of people, one of which is supposed to be a somewhat trained person (I'd assume) with a linux machine. Do you think he'd be able to handle./configure./make all and deal with potential library conflicts, or the current flamewar between his distro owner and some library maker over what the correct license terms should be? Not a chance, sometimes it's hard for people who really know what they're doing. MacOS or Windows are the closest the world is going to get to brainless OS.
Linux is a great OS, and if we as the computer intellegencia can ensure that it is easy for companies to develop platform independent software, it will live on the way it should be: free. Part of that is going to be playing Apple & Windows against each other, and removing restrictions on the MacOS.
Most of these are prepay markets, mostly in asia, south america and africa.
Personally I think pre-pay is great for all markets, but I'm sure cell companies and uncle sam disagree. The former to keep service from being fungible, the latter because pre-pay is anonymous and untraceable. Both of these are probably in the consumers best interest.
Why is it when it comes time to explain why Apple should be allowed to be closed and proprietary, the best defense anyone chooses is "They're a company and they need to make money". Almost every PC maker has made a fortune on the PC. There are no secrets about it (except modern video card registers, thank you Microsoft, and we hate you for it). In fact those companies made more money, faster than Apple. Profitability is not an excuse for closed systems. I hate Microsoft, but they can't add many features to their OS that Apple already has in OS X due to anti-trust issues. It is wrong to hurt MS to help Apple, period. Both must be open or die.
All they need to do is make their unburdened OS available for a reasonable price, with the restriction that we do not get customer support, and that is it. Apple can do this cost effectively. Again, why is it that DRM is Bad-Bad-Bad, except when Apple does it? Their reasons are not pure, not pro-consumer, nothing more than a desire to save a hardware business that cannot survive in a competitive market.
If enough people like their OS, as I predict they will, you will find Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. all providing their own support for it, paying Apple for bugfixes and enhancements, much like they're doing for Linux. XP on a Mac is really just as worthless as an unsupported OS X on a PC. The difference is that volume is behind the PC, that 1% who does unusual things represents far more people and far more dollars. Enough to make real change happen.
So it had no nudity and no foul language (or none that bothered me). It did show sex, I believe one girl and two guys, several times. I'm not really sure anyone could make an argument that it was appropriate for prime time. It wasn't the healthy, happy kind of sex everyone needs twice daily, either.
I guess I don't see any reason this belonged on prime time TV. It really had no value and nothing redeeming. It seemed like a desperate plea for ratings and backfired. Put the show on 2 hours later, and I'd agree with you.
The best is still booting OSX on a white box. It may not be legal, and it may not suit the Mac addict crowd, but it's the only way to get their best product (OS X) on a reasonably open and competitive platform (the PC).
All they're doing is taking a really awful OS and making it work on an anti-competitive system. That's really not good for anyone, except Apple.
First, movies and television were often scoffed at by snobs for lowering the IQ of {America, The World, The Universe, etc.} A Movie critic arguing that games are dumb or "not art" (intending the same meaning) is not a shocking departure from the norm.
Second, how many movies are art? Very few, fewer in reality than in the minds of those who made them for certain.
Third, who cares? Unless you are trying to get in some university liberal arts curriculum, whether games fall under "art" or "entertainment" is purely academic. As long as any of the above entertains me, I'm interested. Art for art's sake has never appealed to my sense of functional technology. If it doesn't entertain me, I won't pay for it, and I won't go out of my way to see it. Worthless is a word that comes to mind.
In terms of what time will view of any of these things, we just don't know. Movies aren't even old enough to achieve immortal status. How many people have seen "the classics" of movies? Probably only the older crowd (when they were first run), film students or movie buffs. Video games are in a more difficult position of sometimes being positively inaccessible due to technological means, in addition to only being 30 years old.
Finally, do games matter? Do sports matter? Does gambling matter? Does drinking till you puke followed by casual sex matter? Yes, obviously. A sufficient number of people feel games are so powerful that people kill over them (not just video games, remember the Dungeons & Dragons nonsense?) They're in the media, a lot of money is spent on them. They matter. Will they matter in 100 years? It's hard to imagine there won't be video games then. Will they be the same games? Probably not in their original 8-bit NES implementation. However, is Romeo and Juliet a brand new work, or a from-scratch-rewrite of older books, the oldest of which I have read dates back to ancient greece?
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA - However, the plan also continued to attract broader opposition, with the US once again understood to have lodged its opposition to the idea. This time, ICANN also faced opposition from an unspecified number of other governments. Although not having the veto power of the US, a government advisory committee set up to respond to Icann proposals said "several" of its members were against the idea.
The Australian government has already spoken out publicly against an internet porn address, while a report in New Zealand claimed that Iran was also opposed.
So it's not only the big bad US this time. It's simply a dumb idea, that is why it was killed. There is no neo-con conspiracy supported by less than half the american citizens to keep the rest of the world down. It's simply a dumb idea getting what it deserves.
I don't care who has control of the DNS, I trust my government as poorly as I trust yours, and slightly more than I trust "democracy".
Because you're exactly right, it makes for a good rallying point for the non-technical or at least the non-clueful. It SOUNDS good right? "All porn in .xxx!", and then saying some conservative christian group stood against it makes it sound like some reactionary American group is holding up progress. Americans are the only Christians of course, we all know Christ was born in Cleveland and the Pope lives in Albequerque.
In fact it's a dumb idea and that's why it's not going anywhere.
It's better or worse than that, I'm not sure which. To get seats in the house a pirate party member would have to win his local jurisdiction by majority vote. For the senate, the state he represents. I'd say it's probably easier to get a seat in the house if you represent the right county (like say: areas in San Jose, Austin, Redmond, etc.). On the other hand Pirate Party members may get 5% of the votes nationwide but still get no seats if the votes are not sufficiently localized.
Incorrect. Nothing is fooltron proof.
Yes, it is an american forum, but all the american girls think we have cooties. We're trying to get some hawt chix0r east of us. You know, where they think nerds are cool. According to many JRPGs, far eastern girls like pink and ponies!
Well, maybe slashdot shouldn't have hired the writer of Grandia 3 to do marketing.
So that's almost the problem right there. How is the self-esteem of someone else any of our concern?
If I go to a doctor and say "Doctor, I don't fit in, I feel bad, I think of suicide a lot", that's the time to listen to advice about not locking yourself up, maybe even time to get checked in somewhere. Clearly you're indicating that you want a change. Similarly, someone who shuts himself out so much that he can't hold a job or can't do his schoolwork has a problem that requires external intervention. Mom and dad have to step in and get help.
Kids who don't go outside or hang with their friends are not necessarily in trouble, even if they have low self-esteem, even if they are at times unhappy. If they're holding up their grades, and filling their responsibilities to themselves, then what's wrong? These stories annoy me because they serve to reinforce a belief that there is a certain correct way of life, involving constant interaction with peers, and those who do not partake are somehow inadequate. Then we make surveys about the self-esteem of the people affected. There's no wonder to me. A large group of organized people insults a smaller and disorganized group of people, then asks "How do you feel about that?". Hmm.
Based on the unfortunate, unnatural, totally contrived need to function in "society". Basically, there is not enough land available for us to live free and ignore our peers, so we have to work in such a way as to not burden them (even if we don't want their help, even if we don't want to help or hurt them).
Some people think humans are pack animals, that we must not only be part of the hunt, but also do what the other wolves do.
I'm not sure what's wrong with being reclusive. Spending all your time in a room looking for porn is probably no better or worse than sitting in front of the tube all day watching sports, although it may cause more chafing. It's really only bad if it gets to the point where grades & work start sliding. Otherwise it's just a way to pass the time.
No one has yet proven to that there is a meaning or purpose of life, hence my own opinion is no behavior is bad until it causes you to become a burden on society. If someone can hold a job and keep his responsibilities (or, if he's a minor, is on his way to doing so), then I don't see the problem. Hanging out with people, getting crushes on (or getting crushed BY) girls, etc. is fun for some and painful for others.
I'm not sure if exposure to sex has any relationship on acquisition of it. I saw my first nudie magazine at 8, along with half my block that discovered the discarded pile of them. I don't think we were jumpstarted into puberty, nor did we try to jump the girls that were with us. Now I might agree with you that some of the sex portrayed in porno is maybe not the kinds of values we want our kids brought up with, but that's a separate discussion and probably not related to porn so much as general child rearing.
Or instead you can build China's industrial base by sending western R&D and manufacturing over, in effect teaching them how to build their OWN reliable super computers, while increasing your friends margins and ensuring a comfy retirement. I'm not sure whats worse, giving them weapons or teaching them how to build them more effectively. Either way, heading back on topic, these are living examples of people who, if we all followed their lead, would lead to a collapse of society.
Fortunately, most of us have more sense.
The next time I'm arrested for stealing, lying and circumventing the law, I'm going to blame it on CSPAN, which I watch obsessively. While I may get a slap on the wrist and time served, I do wish my victims well in their civil suit against CSPAN for it's contribution to my anti-social behavior.
I like my PSP, it's great on a plane or when i'm stuck somewhere I don't want to be and do not wish to pay attention. (Ex.: Almost any social gathering I'm suckered in to). Features that are nice: great display, good sound, movie-video, kick-ass joystick, wireless Design decisions that detract from the product: UMD format, Expensive Games, no USB storage (WTF!?!) The system could have been good if Sony had let engineers design this product instead of marketing executives. Sell the thing with a hard drive and let users iTunes their games/video onto the thing. Who wants to carry catridges around anyway?
The number of quests post 35 I've found to be horribly dissapointing. There aren't that many in general, and they don't generally give enough xp to level you up without some grinding thrown in. The 40s were the worst, I have 3 alts stuck at ~40 because I can't generate the mental stamina required to go through that again. All attention is on the raid game at 60. Level 1-35 however there were so many quests you simply could not do all of them without many going grey. That was fun, excellent replay.
I'm disappointed. I'm sure if I ever can tolerate the grinding to get from 51 to 60 I'll be amused for a while at the raids, but I've done that already in EQ. I left that game without looking back because of how WoW was from 1-35. I'm pretty sure if WoW doesn't shape up it'll be the same over again.
I guess that explains why all the new content is so frighteningly like EverQuest, while levels 1-35 are the most fun I've ever had in a MMOG.
Actually that's exactly the point. That's why Alienware remains a small company when compared with Dell, HP or Lenovo. Small enough for one of them to buy it. The extra bucks they charge are for support, some of the testing they did, and warranties. In fact their hardware costs are surely lower than yours, but not so much as to be able to offset the overhead.
When YOU build a PC, you don't have any of those concerns. You just hook it up, cross fingers and usually it works more or less OK. There's usually a "personality", but these are things we're willing to accept as enthusiasts.
I understand where you are coming from, that's why I build my own too. But the fact is that it's not an easy business to make money on. It's not just the cost of slapping the components together and stuffing it in a box, for profit companies have additional concerns. For me, I do not want support, I am willing to risk systems integration bugs, mfg warranties are good enough for me. I'm better off alone. Companies that can be sued do not have this luxury.
The problem with building your own PC is that it's expensive.
First, you don't get economy of scale. This is hugely important in consumer electronics. The more a company can buy of a widget, the cheaper each widget costs. It's not like a 10% off thing, it can be like a 50% off thing if your volumes are high enough. Related to this, Dell, HP, Lenovo have enormous power to drive component prices down. Their number 1 weapon is competitors for any given product. If a customer says "Give me X", they lose that benefit, prices go up. Go to a car dealership, price out a car. Then go to another, and say 'beat this price'. Works great, you can get a honda for under dealer invoice if you try hard. Same principle. In this respect Apple is different, it is more willing (not TOTALLY willing, just more willing) to lock in to one vendor it really likes and designs around it. This is why they're more expensive, even with x86 architectures.
Second, you can't support it cheaply. You cannot take any random combinations of components and have a guarantee (that you'll bet your business on) that it'll be supported. The only way to give guarantees is to build it, test it, find the bugs, and design them out. That is extremely expensive to do for every combination. This is, in fact, why Apple works the way it works. They only give you a small number of options, support a small number of drivers, and tell you "this is your product". They can support that 100%, do something they haven't tested and you're on your own. It's also why they are probably the most reliable machines: they made their job very easy. Even the big three PC makers can't do that.
Finally, the market wants cheap and wants supported. Yes there are niche customers who know what components they want, but not many do. Those that do don't always know what technical problems may exist beneath the hood. Memory timing problems (not CAS latency but setup, hold, duty cycle, DQS, etc.) are probably the #1 issue on motherboards, you can take the superstar motherboard and the superstar memory company and they may not work together, even though both claim to support some standard. Worse, they may appear to work together but be subtly corrupting your filesystem. There are all kinds of deeply concerning electrical problems that may exist. This happens throughout the system. No one tests their component level products to the level they should be tested. Sad, but true.
There are plenty of companies that will let you build your own box, but they'll necessarily always be small, and always attract an audience that is more patient with bugs. Personally, in spite of every problem I know of that can go wrong in a computer, I still build my own. I knowingly invite this problem because I'm willing to risk the bugs (and pay for them, if need be) for the performance. Most people do not, much like most people do not buy exotic sports cars.
Proprietary is a funny word. I'd use it on Apple, since their system is closed, anyone who wnats to work in it must go through Apple. I'm not sure it applies in your example. PERC cards are an example of a card Dell supports because it either built them in house, or spec'd them for use in their servers. They can support it from the ground up. It's proprietary in that its Dell branded, may or may not have been made in-house at Dell, but it's still a PCI/PCI-X/PCIe card. You ought to be able to replace it with an equivalent function card, although you won't be supported.
You would not call a nVidia GPU based card proprietary when made by Asus or Gigabyte, I'm not sure how it's any more proprietary if its made by Dell. Asus or Gigabyte don't "rebrand" their video cards, they are independent designs using the nVidia chipset. Similarly all the big PC manufacturers design many of their components in house, outsource some, offshore others, but rarely do their own chipsets (IBM may be the only one that does). Doing your own boards does give you tremendous control of costs, hence the reason you see this happen. It doesn't mean they're using "cheap components" so much as they are negotiating component cost down by playing vendors off on each other.
I guess I'm not one of those people, I wouldn't say fortunate people, for whom I could do work on an Apple. CAD tools are almost exclusively Windows or Linux. Games are almost exclusively Windows.
The argument is sound: overpriced hardware with a horrible OS. Put a currently good os (MacOS X) on commodity hardware, and now you have something I'm willing to endure poor software support for.
I don't own a mac. This was someone elses problem I was dealing with used as an example of how you can take an easy to use OS like MacOS or Windows and go horribly wrong, then add the complexity of maintaining linux (one doesn't maintain Windows, for example, one uses it like they use a rental car).
Anyhow, unrelated, there are lots of good reasons to run your own website, including using any apps you want and not having to trust your content to someone else. One example are repeater tools to help get past corporate firewalls, VERY useful if your IT department has an aggressive web filter and blocks all outgoing ports but web-related. Another are various notepad tools (I use wiki's), irc clients, etc. all geared towards myself alone.
I could say the opposite. Microsoft is nicer than Apple because it doesn't make hardware at all, letting the customer benefit from the free market on at least that one set of products.
./configure ./make all and deal with potential library conflicts, or the current flamewar between his distro owner and some library maker over what the correct license terms should be? Not a chance, sometimes it's hard for people who really know what they're doing. MacOS or Windows are the closest the world is going to get to brainless OS.
Linux is losing because it's not for joe-sixpack and that's really all there is to say about it. It's not easy, if you think it is ("Just use Ubuntu!"), think about this scenario I found myself facing this weekend:
"I wanted a web presence, so I installed apache on my Mac. Someone said I needed to to use my external IP address, so I went to whatismyipaddress.com and put that in my mac. It still didn't work and now I can't use the internet. I brought it to the guy at the mac store, and he hooked his mac to my mac and he couldn't see it either. He gave me an RMA number."
Imagine this set of people, one of which is supposed to be a somewhat trained person (I'd assume) with a linux machine. Do you think he'd be able to handle
Linux is a great OS, and if we as the computer intellegencia can ensure that it is easy for companies to develop platform independent software, it will live on the way it should be: free. Part of that is going to be playing Apple & Windows against each other, and removing restrictions on the MacOS.
Most of these are prepay markets, mostly in asia, south america and africa.
Personally I think pre-pay is great for all markets, but I'm sure cell companies and uncle sam disagree. The former to keep service from being fungible, the latter because pre-pay is anonymous and untraceable. Both of these are probably in the consumers best interest.
Why is it when it comes time to explain why Apple should be allowed to be closed and proprietary, the best defense anyone chooses is "They're a company and they need to make money". Almost every PC maker has made a fortune on the PC. There are no secrets about it (except modern video card registers, thank you Microsoft, and we hate you for it). In fact those companies made more money, faster than Apple. Profitability is not an excuse for closed systems. I hate Microsoft, but they can't add many features to their OS that Apple already has in OS X due to anti-trust issues. It is wrong to hurt MS to help Apple, period. Both must be open or die.
All they need to do is make their unburdened OS available for a reasonable price, with the restriction that we do not get customer support, and that is it. Apple can do this cost effectively. Again, why is it that DRM is Bad-Bad-Bad, except when Apple does it? Their reasons are not pure, not pro-consumer, nothing more than a desire to save a hardware business that cannot survive in a competitive market.
If enough people like their OS, as I predict they will, you will find Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. all providing their own support for it, paying Apple for bugfixes and enhancements, much like they're doing for Linux. XP on a Mac is really just as worthless as an unsupported OS X on a PC. The difference is that volume is behind the PC, that 1% who does unusual things represents far more people and far more dollars. Enough to make real change happen.
So it had no nudity and no foul language (or none that bothered me). It did show sex, I believe one girl and two guys, several times. I'm not really sure anyone could make an argument that it was appropriate for prime time. It wasn't the healthy, happy kind of sex everyone needs twice daily, either.
I guess I don't see any reason this belonged on prime time TV. It really had no value and nothing redeeming. It seemed like a desperate plea for ratings and backfired. Put the show on 2 hours later, and I'd agree with you.
The best is still booting OSX on a white box. It may not be legal, and it may not suit the Mac addict crowd, but it's the only way to get their best product (OS X) on a reasonably open and competitive platform (the PC).
All they're doing is taking a really awful OS and making it work on an anti-competitive system. That's really not good for anyone, except Apple.
You can use them against anyone but us. And uh, anyone else we don't want you dicking with.
This is a good reason not to offshore defense technology.
First, movies and television were often scoffed at by snobs for lowering the IQ of {America, The World, The Universe, etc.} A Movie critic arguing that games are dumb or "not art" (intending the same meaning) is not a shocking departure from the norm.
Second, how many movies are art? Very few, fewer in reality than in the minds of those who made them for certain.
Third, who cares? Unless you are trying to get in some university liberal arts curriculum, whether games fall under "art" or "entertainment" is purely academic. As long as any of the above entertains me, I'm interested. Art for art's sake has never appealed to my sense of functional technology. If it doesn't entertain me, I won't pay for it, and I won't go out of my way to see it. Worthless is a word that comes to mind.
In terms of what time will view of any of these things, we just don't know. Movies aren't even old enough to achieve immortal status. How many people have seen "the classics" of movies? Probably only the older crowd (when they were first run), film students or movie buffs. Video games are in a more difficult position of sometimes being positively inaccessible due to technological means, in addition to only being 30 years old.
Finally, do games matter? Do sports matter? Does gambling matter? Does drinking till you puke followed by casual sex matter? Yes, obviously. A sufficient number of people feel games are so powerful that people kill over them (not just video games, remember the Dungeons & Dragons nonsense?) They're in the media, a lot of money is spent on them. They matter. Will they matter in 100 years? It's hard to imagine there won't be video games then. Will they be the same games? Probably not in their original 8-bit NES implementation. However, is Romeo and Juliet a brand new work, or a from-scratch-rewrite of older books, the oldest of which I have read dates back to ancient greece?
Ah, but to be on the other side of the bullying! The glory! The Fame! The Naked Cheerleaders!
This is clearly a geek's game.