Well, the iTunes Music Store Japan should open by year's end, according to Apple (who tirelessly rebuff the Nihon Keizai Shinbun's claims of it being set to open earlier).
However, the iTMS is blatantly designed around post-1960s recorded popular music. The Album-Artist-Title paradigm and 30-second previews are meaningless for much else. The "what it sounds like first" side isn't really catered for concerning jazz, classical (European and non-European), or even new-age music, where you get a random 30-s bit, sometimes mostly silence, of a fifteen-minute track. That, and the fact that anything not recorded in English seems to go straight to the "World Music" genre category.
Letting people see films like "The Matrix Revolutions" before paying for a cinema ticket would be a disaster for the industry: those people might talk about the film. And once enough people who haven't paid [yet] learn about the magnitude of the impending disappointment, how can the producers make any money?
(Note. "Official" critics are different: if they're honest and pan it, they'll be ignored as elitists; if they like it, all is good.)
Because you can't possibly be that incapable of recognising satire when in your natural state, can you?, or that the actual topic of the parent post was the typical Windowsite reaction to Mac OS updates, the wideness of their Weltanschauung, and its relation to certain categories of news souces (extensible to the mainstream microcomputing press). Not mindless Apple-bashing, although the rest of the comments page holds vast quantities of it for our entertainment.
I suppose we already knew that Jonathan Swift was ahead of our time.
Hmmm... But now, any browser not implementing the title attribute and misreading alt tags is stuck in the nineties, reversing this silly de-facto-standards argument.
Not everyone on this planet is part of the wired generation, but the young South Koreans deserting their record stores are (practically by definition).
I don't know. I personally think it takes courage to clean off a dead base, and start anew, just as it took to change Nautilus to spatial navigation.
That aside, Evolution and OpenOffice are not even part of GNOME (at least by 2.6), nor was abiword. Concerning OpenOffice at the least, mentioning it in this context is absurd.
I'll take an environment with clear human interface guidelines, an elegant line, and a determination to do things in what they consider to be the Right Way over one with flashy buttons, millions of features and a commercial-consistent evolution any day.
For GNOME's thought-out interface design and commitment, I'm ready to overlook occasional upgrade pains (and I've had them), some changes I dislike (eg the new file selector, superior in many ways and inferior in some), and an outdated language (yes, I know QT is C++). I don't ask anyone else to do so, and I don't see why I myself should not.
Quite, but the dropped package isn't the only way to have GNOME on Slackware, and he is one person, even though he represents one distro. I don't dispute his right to hate maintaining GNOME (obviously justified) or even to dislike the environment (taste), I'm just thinking that this does not indicate a "shift" towards KDE or even away from GNOME.
As for the vendor-split over environments, that seems indeed to be the case already: SuSE have been KDE-centric for years, and RedHat conversely.
I thought this rejoicing had something suspicious to it...
More seriously, this whole thing sounds sensationalist to me... RedHat adopting a community model with Fedora, and one fed-up maintainer for a redundant Slackware package do not a mass defection maketh. The HP bit might be worrisome, but.
Most of all, I fail to see how one environment 'getting the upper hand' can possibly be construed as a Good Thing. Nobody serious clamors for less operating systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils. And GNOME is definitely the more professional and efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective, of the large Free desktop environments.
"Let's start with the apparent fact that Microsoft still cannot grasp the idea that Linux is not made by a single company or corporation."
That's not quite it. MS know full well what Linux is and how it is developed. They also know that if they can convince the non-tech world that it's just another corporate actor, they can fight on their own ground. For them to survive, they need to maintain the market lock-in which is their only selling point, but convince regulatory authorities that they're just another OS company, facing loads of competition from others just like it: Sun, "Linux".
This aggressively stupid (and effective) attitude is probably part of what makes the EC consider "Linux" as a competitor needing legal protection from the monopolistic main player. This is useful, because it helps everyone move closer to interoperation, but idiotic. The competitors are Sun, RedHat, Novell, Apple... That many of them sell GNU/Linux distributions is beside the point.
The ideal situation would be for the EC regulators to rule that it is unfair for MS to force proprietary standards on pre-existing markets. A solution to that might be: force Microsoft to bundle an (as much as possible) feature-equivalent open-standard program for every non-essential program they ship that uses a proprietary format. eg, XviD and OGG codecs with WMP, compliant JScript in addition to ActiveX, optional Gabber in MSN, PostScript production from MSOffice, public specs for SMB/CIFS, or even a "use W3C standards" checkbox in IE...
Obviously, there is little or no chance of this happening, and in the mean time, it's probably faster for non-Windows users to wait for MS to alienate enough customers for MS-compatibility to become less important- that'd be a long time, but this, WinXP Crippled Edition, viruses, and the festival of incompatibility called 'Longhorn' rekindle hope:-)
...but they'll probably be blasted out of the market as soon as a company like Sony gets their own version out. Because frankly, it's going to be a question of features, not sunglass brand reputation.
Then again, I don't seem to be the only one to find these insanely ugly.
Well, the Open Source model is definitely not adapted to that kind of development, being geared more towards long, gradual fine-tuning of software which will be in use already from the alpha / beta stage onwards. That of course favours re-implementations of other, established games, because they have clear specifications, and there's no time pressure - people who still want to play a good Civilisation clone could hardly care less about how dated its graphics are, compared to balanced, involving gameplay.
Cutting-edge artistic effects are naturally not in the same category, if you want to compete with companies throwing enormous amounts of money and man-hours at intensive development of engines, and with legions of professionally trained artists. And ask any amateur game developer about how hard it is to find artists willing to work on their free time...
Which isn't to say it can't be done: French company Nevrax http://www.nevrax.org/ developed the NeL engine for their MMORPG Ryzom, and have released it as GPL. And the game certainly does look impressive, but the game and art remain proprietary (and mono-platform). Again, open-source seems to be favoured for infrastructure and technical projects.
With the added bonus of having a 1024 screen and fitting in any bag or even pocket.
By the look of things, that kind of system should be obtainable within a few years, maybe from Sharp. The Sony sublaptops, though a bit big, look extremely viable too.
Re:contemporary use of religious language in produ
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
I think the point is exactly that those are terms with no links to consumerism (on the contrary). Who'd buy a product called 'consume,' 'product,' or 'shallowness'? Calling them Zen or Karma, as well as being retro-NewAge-cool and having Ks and Zs, gives the consumer the impression that he's buying something that will put him above the boring materialism of every day. It's stupid, but it works because we all are.
Terms like Zen or Nirvana have been so abused in the last decade or two that I'm personally blasé - I don't make any link between these blatant (and certainly ignorant) misuses and the original sense of the word, so it remains intact for serious discussion. Since when have most marketing people had any respect for anything besides money, anyway?
Good Heavens. All your definitions agree with the one I cited (with the exception of the one referring to the alternate meaning related to a system governed by an emperor).
Imperialism englobes extension of cultural, social, economical, and military influence. You still haven't defined your personal 'true Imperialism'. And your abuse of the word liberal in its neo-conservative 'newspeak' sense is telling.
At least the other readers probably understood your misuse of the term, which is all that matters.
Right, as for the pollution issue: well, yeah. Again, the little 'energy-saving' and other stickers add to the price, and let's not wonder why products are (hardly) never manufactured in our countries anymore, where there are environment-protection and workers' rights laws (well, I speak for my own here). But whatever the side effects of mass production are, blame the buyer, not the maker. He'll only manufacture stuff that sells.
I've used one, and picture and interface both sucked. Horribly. (The speakers I tried it with did too, so I don't know about the sound.) The good thing is, when these appear, it pressures the 'real' manufacturers to lower their prices, which is a good thing. But in hardware, you still get what you pay for.
Sums it up, really. By the way, not everyone wants to innovate. Look at DELL, all they do is look at the competition and deliver the same cheaper. Dell says it himself in an interview (if you can survive the fawning interviewer, berk): they look at the market and decide what's worth making in high volume, low cost. And judging from a quick google search, that seems to be equated with genius by marketroids and their journalists.
I still don't understand why this made the front page on/., but anyway, bummer about your G5.
But China's protocols are enforced by a power-abusing government, and aren't used by a majority of people in China anyway. The news post itself says it's only been tested in Shanghai for now. Your post contradicts itself.
not every nation that seeks to exercise political or economic power abroad is Imperialist.
the Oxford (Compact) English Dictionary disagrees with you.
imperialist n. [...] 2 a policy of acquiring dependent territories or of extending a country's influence through trade, diplomacy etc.
If your personal definition of "imperialism" differs from that of most people, they cannot be held responsible.
Aside from that, I for one agree on the American-bashing moratorium, though I fully believe we of the 'rest of the world' have a right to gripe about any and all decisions of the elected American government that affect others than just their population (refusing the Kyoto protocol, protectionism, invasion wars, funding terrorism, weakening the UN, refusing to be held accountable for possible* war crimes, &c.).
As such, though your argument that there's been enough of it is entirely valid, but in many respects, your government (which in a prefect democracy we'd hold you accountable for) is and should be a matter of worldwide complaint.:-)
Right, that's all for today on the off-topic side.
--- *: the word 'possible' was included solely for motives of diplomatical politeness.
For a developer, 'portable' does not mean binary-portable exclusively. Java, your judgment ('[...] suck everywhere') of which is purely your own, is not a valid example to generalise from.
OpenOffice, Mozilla, GNU Emacs, and many others all run on multiple, sometimes very different platforms. And an MS VisualC++ team says that it can't be done? Of course this elicits skepticism!
What are you arguing against? I don't use Apple software either, for the same reason. But they have yet to claim that Platform-independence is impossible anyway.
What I enjoy about Mozilla Firefox is its ability to run on any platform I might choose to run - or be coerced into running.
The reasons given (that it should be managed by 'system software,' whatever that is) leave open to discussion the question of whether this really is but a flimsy attempt to rationalise MS lock-in practices...
Your children could relate the speed they use everyday to what they'd see on traffic signs when they drive abroad, study in physics at school, or read anywhere.
It would cost a few millions probably, but you could take that out of the military budget any day. Or levy a sensible fuel tax, which would fund that multiple times.
Anyway, I'm not trying to tell your government what to do, just promoting the shamelessly extremist agenda of reason in a perhaps misguidedly humorous way...
True. And indeed, the advantages could be duplicated by any other system similarly constructed rationally from the ground up to be entirely self-consistent.
But another, significant advantage of A? paper sizes is their widespread use in just about every part of the world where the Latin alphabet is used, and a fair lot of others.
Also I am selfish and want my word-processors, printer drivers, and postscript-using programs to always have metric standard sizes as the default. ^-^
[troll]I mean, is the US-modified Imperial System even an ISO standard?[/troll]
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the iTunes Music Store Japan should open by year's end, according to Apple (who tirelessly rebuff the Nihon Keizai Shinbun's claims of it being set to open earlier).
However, the iTMS is blatantly designed around post-1960s recorded popular music. The Album-Artist-Title paradigm and 30-second previews are meaningless for much else. The "what it sounds like first" side isn't really catered for concerning jazz, classical (European and non-European), or even new-age music, where you get a random 30-s bit, sometimes mostly silence, of a fifteen-minute track. That, and the fact that anything not recorded in English seems to go straight to the "World Music" genre category.
Letting people see films like "The Matrix Revolutions" before paying for a cinema ticket would be a disaster for the industry: those people might talk about the film. And once enough people who haven't paid [yet] learn about the magnitude of the impending disappointment, how can the producers make any money?
(Note. "Official" critics are different: if they're honest and pan it, they'll be ignored as elitists; if they like it, all is good.)
Whatever you are smoking, we want some of it.
Because you can't possibly be that incapable of recognising satire when in your natural state, can you?, or that the actual topic of the parent post was the typical Windowsite reaction to Mac OS updates, the wideness of their Weltanschauung, and its relation to certain categories of news souces (extensible to the mainstream microcomputing press). Not mindless Apple-bashing, although the rest of the comments page holds vast quantities of it for our entertainment.
I suppose we already knew that Jonathan Swift was ahead of our time.
Hmmm... But now, any browser not implementing the title attribute and misreading alt tags is stuck in the nineties, reversing this silly de-facto-standards argument.
Not everyone on this planet is part of the wired generation, but the young South Koreans deserting their record stores are (practically by definition).
I don't know. I personally think it takes courage to clean off a dead base, and start anew, just as it took to change Nautilus to spatial navigation.
That aside, Evolution and OpenOffice are not even part of GNOME (at least by 2.6), nor was abiword. Concerning OpenOffice at the least, mentioning it in this context is absurd.
I'll take an environment with clear human interface guidelines, an elegant line, and a determination to do things in what they consider to be the Right Way over one with flashy buttons, millions of features and a commercial-consistent evolution any day.
For GNOME's thought-out interface design and commitment, I'm ready to overlook occasional upgrade pains (and I've had them), some changes I dislike (eg the new file selector, superior in many ways and inferior in some), and an outdated language (yes, I know QT is C++). I don't ask anyone else to do so, and I don't see why I myself should not.
We don't need a grand unified desktop.
Quite, but the dropped package isn't the only way to have GNOME on Slackware, and he is one person, even though he represents one distro. I don't dispute his right to hate maintaining GNOME (obviously justified) or even to dislike the environment (taste), I'm just thinking that this does not indicate a "shift" towards KDE or even away from GNOME. As for the vendor-split over environments, that seems indeed to be the case already: SuSE have been KDE-centric for years, and RedHat conversely.
I thought this rejoicing had something suspicious to it...
More seriously, this whole thing sounds sensationalist to me... RedHat adopting a community model with Fedora, and one fed-up maintainer for a redundant Slackware package do not a mass defection maketh. The HP bit might be worrisome, but.
Most of all, I fail to see how one environment 'getting the upper hand' can possibly be construed as a Good Thing. Nobody serious clamors for less operating systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils. And GNOME is definitely the more professional and efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective, of the large Free desktop environments.
That's not quite it. MS know full well what Linux is and how it is developed. They also know that if they can convince the non-tech world that it's just another corporate actor, they can fight on their own ground. For them to survive, they need to maintain the market lock-in which is their only selling point, but convince regulatory authorities that they're just another OS company, facing loads of competition from others just like it: Sun, "Linux".
This aggressively stupid (and effective) attitude is probably part of what makes the EC consider "Linux" as a competitor needing legal protection from the monopolistic main player. This is useful, because it helps everyone move closer to interoperation, but idiotic. The competitors are Sun, RedHat, Novell, Apple... That many of them sell GNU/Linux distributions is beside the point.
The ideal situation would be for the EC regulators to rule that it is unfair for MS to force proprietary standards on pre-existing markets. A solution to that might be: force Microsoft to bundle an (as much as possible) feature-equivalent open-standard program for every non-essential program they ship that uses a proprietary format. eg, XviD and OGG codecs with WMP, compliant JScript in addition to ActiveX, optional Gabber in MSN, PostScript production from MSOffice, public specs for SMB/CIFS, or even a "use W3C standards" checkbox in IE...
Obviously, there is little or no chance of this happening, and in the mean time, it's probably faster for non-Windows users to wait for MS to alienate enough customers for MS-compatibility to become less important- that'd be a long time, but this, WinXP Crippled Edition, viruses, and the festival of incompatibility called 'Longhorn' rekindle hope :-)
umm... you can see the earplugs. And if you've seen the pictures, you'll agree it'd be hard not to attract attention with these glasses on ^^
...but they'll probably be blasted out of the market as soon as a company like Sony gets their own version out. Because frankly, it's going to be a question of features, not sunglass brand reputation.
Then again, I don't seem to be the only one to find these insanely ugly.
Well, the Open Source model is definitely not adapted to that kind of development, being geared more towards long, gradual fine-tuning of software which will be in use already from the alpha / beta stage onwards. That of course favours re-implementations of other, established games, because they have clear specifications, and there's no time pressure - people who still want to play a good Civilisation clone could hardly care less about how dated its graphics are, compared to balanced, involving gameplay.
Cutting-edge artistic effects are naturally not in the same category, if you want to compete with companies throwing enormous amounts of money and man-hours at intensive development of engines, and with legions of professionally trained artists. And ask any amateur game developer about how hard it is to find artists willing to work on their free time...
Which isn't to say it can't be done: French company Nevrax http://www.nevrax.org/ developed the NeL engine for their MMORPG Ryzom, and have released it as GPL. And the game certainly does look impressive, but the game and art remain proprietary (and mono-platform). Again, open-source seems to be favoured for infrastructure and technical projects.
Which means:
- Networking
- Web browser
- SSH client
- emacs
- music/video player(s)
With the added bonus of having a 1024 screen and fitting in any bag or even pocket.By the look of things, that kind of system should be obtainable within a few years, maybe from Sharp. The Sony sublaptops, though a bit big, look extremely viable too.
I think the point is exactly that those are terms with no links to consumerism (on the contrary).
Who'd buy a product called 'consume,' 'product,' or 'shallowness'? Calling them Zen or Karma, as well as being retro-NewAge-cool and having Ks and Zs, gives the consumer the impression that he's buying something that will put him above the boring materialism of every day. It's stupid, but it works because we all are.
Terms like Zen or Nirvana have been so abused in the last decade or two that I'm personally blasé - I don't make any link between these blatant (and certainly ignorant) misuses and the original sense of the word, so it remains intact for serious discussion.
Since when have most marketing people had any respect for anything besides money, anyway?
(/off-topicness)
Good Heavens. All your definitions agree with the one I cited (with the exception of the one referring to the alternate meaning related to a system governed by an emperor).
Imperialism englobes extension of cultural, social, economical, and military influence. You still haven't defined your personal 'true Imperialism'. And your abuse of the word liberal in its neo-conservative 'newspeak' sense is telling.
At least the other readers probably understood your misuse of the term, which is all that matters.
Right, as for the pollution issue: well, yeah. Again, the little 'energy-saving' and other stickers add to the price, and let's not wonder why products are (hardly) never manufactured in our countries anymore, where there are environment-protection and workers' rights laws (well, I speak for my own here). But whatever the side effects of mass production are, blame the buyer, not the maker. He'll only manufacture stuff that sells.
I've used one, and picture and interface both sucked. Horribly. (The speakers I tried it with did too, so I don't know about the sound.)
The good thing is, when these appear, it pressures the 'real' manufacturers to lower their prices, which is a good thing. But in hardware, you still get what you pay for.
Sums it up, really. By the way, not everyone wants to innovate. Look at DELL, all they do is look at the competition and deliver the same cheaper. Dell says it himself in an interview (if you can survive the fawning interviewer, berk): they look at the market and decide what's worth making in high volume, low cost. And judging from a quick google search, that seems to be equated with genius by marketroids and their journalists.
/., but anyway, bummer about your G5.
I still don't understand why this made the front page on
But China's protocols are enforced by a power-abusing government, and aren't used by a majority of people in China anyway. The news post itself says it's only been tested in Shanghai for now. Your post contradicts itself.
Aside from that, I for one agree on the American-bashing moratorium, though I fully believe we of the 'rest of the world' have a right to gripe about any and all decisions of the elected American government that affect others than just their population (refusing the Kyoto protocol, protectionism, invasion wars, funding terrorism, weakening the UN, refusing to be held accountable for possible* war crimes, &c.).
As such, though your argument that there's been enough of it is entirely valid, but in many respects, your government (which in a prefect democracy we'd hold you accountable for) is and should be a matter of worldwide complaint.
Right, that's all for today on the off-topic side.
For a developer, 'portable' does not mean binary-portable exclusively. Java, your judgment ('[...] suck everywhere') of which is purely your own, is not a valid example to generalise from.
OpenOffice, Mozilla, GNU Emacs, and many others all run on multiple, sometimes very different platforms. And an MS VisualC++ team says that it can't be done? Of course this elicits skepticism!
What are you arguing against? I don't use Apple software either, for the same reason. But they have yet to claim that Platform-independence is impossible anyway.
What I enjoy about Mozilla Firefox is its ability to run on any platform I might choose to run - or be coerced into running.
Your children could relate the speed they use everyday to what they'd see on traffic signs when they drive abroad, study in physics at school, or read anywhere.
It would cost a few millions probably, but you could take that out of the military budget any day. Or levy a sensible fuel tax, which would fund that multiple times.
Anyway, I'm not trying to tell your government what to do, just promoting the shamelessly extremist agenda of reason in a perhaps misguidedly humorous way...
True. And indeed, the advantages could be duplicated by any other system similarly constructed rationally from the ground up to be entirely self-consistent.
But another, significant advantage of A? paper sizes is their widespread use in just about every part of the world where the Latin alphabet is used, and a fair lot of others.
Also I am selfish and want my word-processors, printer drivers, and postscript-using programs to always have metric standard sizes as the default. ^-^
[troll]I mean, is the US-modified Imperial System even an ISO standard?[/troll]