Awesome... I never thought of calling myself part of a "domestic nerd base". It's like I'm a bacterium, bringing health to colon of American business. Helping the bottom line, as it were.
Re:Finally a voice of reason
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You're not a digital music producer. Noise-filtering operations that took me five hours in 1998 take me five minutes in 2004... I benefit directly from a faster HD, a faster internal bus, a faster CPU,... and with the adoption of the USB and Firewire bus, I am able to locate a workstation case thirty feet away in a closet, allowing more people to work with less noise. (A well-shielded 30 foot analog monitor cable can actually go the distance, too!) That, to me, has been the really big deal in the past six years -- USB / Firewire.
Actually what I think the poster meant was, "The differences between individial people are far greater, and far more important, than any generalized differences between men and women."
>>The strawman that you use: The "weapon that could destroy every person in the country including the wielder", >> if it existed today, would most likely be in the possession of the Federal Government... >>and that would have horrified them even more, I am certain.
>
>Calling out the "straw man" is always an easy way to avoid arguments you don't like.
No, (and this is something you have yet to learn), calling out "strawman" is an easy way to avoid an argument that DOES NOT LOGICALLY FOLLOW, in that it is off-topic, or based on an essentially UNRELATED PREMISE. You pull that sort of thing all the time, and now I'm convinced that you don't even know you're doing it.
>>= straw man crap > >I have better things to do than listen to this. If you have no argument, >I've won,
Way to turn the tables, bonehead.
>PCs are obviously better than Macs in so many ways,
Same straw man shit. This is not what we were discussing.
>>Machine code is not a language. > >Then you know far less than you purport. If it's not a language, >pray tell me, how was I able to do my second year EET project in it?
Pffft! You didn't encounter it until college? Loser. >:)
>>You're living in fantasy land if you think you sell even a >tenth as many of those as Adobe has sold copies of Photoshop. > >Hmmm, let's see. If I (a small computer shop) were able to sell even > 1/100th of the amount of cards as Adobe sells copies of photoshop, that > would make me right.
At CONSERVATIVE estimate, Adobe sells two million copies of Photoshop every year, including educational discounts and volume licensing. Over the lifespan of the product, including upgrades, Adobe has sold over 20 million copies. And none of this includes the TENS OF MILLIONS of pirated copies created and/or sold every year.
, comma, you IGNORANT HICK.
Taking the lowest possible figure from this set, two million, that would mean that your dinky little shop would have to sell twenty thousand cards a year, or 80 cards every single business day of the year.
You lose, pal.
>>Those are not statistics. My hat remains uneaten. > >I took statistics classes. If you don't think that's a statistic, fuck >off. You're just not right.
Whether or not you took "statistics classes" is irrelevant. Those aren't statistics.
>>Which does not, by the way, encompass a niche-market such as PCI-card >>signal decoders. > >Let's see: > >3 satellite stores in my city. > >1 DTP shop.
Mmmyep. That's a niche alright. was re: hick. You have no idea how big the rest of the world is, do you.
>Cool, by that definition, your mac is fully commodore 64 compatible
= straw man crap
>>'Within the confines of their own language' does not apply > >That's interesting, I never knew Macs could run x86 code. >That's cool. You've educated me.
= straw man crap
>>Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim. > >Ho hum, It's tedious quoting other users own words. >Surprised you couldn't remember them being you said >them today:
(blah blah) Correct, that's exactly what I said. Now here's what you claimed I said:
>Just like with a Mac, according to you, you can >do anything I'd do on a PC (I doubt that very >much, but hey, for the sake of argument I'll >pretend you're right)
Once again: Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim.
>>Are you talking CPUs, or languages, here, when you say "translation"? >>Must be CPUs? > >Perhaps you don't program. Let me explain how a computer runs: > >Machine code is executed to perform various operations on the computer. >Every CPU has it's own code (called a 'language')...
Moron. Machine code is not a language. C and C++ are languages. Machine code is machine code, and is what languages -- even assembly language, which is essentially just machine code made more human-readable -- are COMPILED INTO. I knew this back in the 80's when I wrote an assembly language compiler in BASIC on an Apple II+. Get your definitions straight.
> It's what I sell, it's what I use. And that's the same reverse argument I > use about the Mac: Show me 1% of users that think the ability to use > photoshop is a minor concern to using their computer. The numbers will > be about equal
You're living in fantasy land if you think you sell even a tenth as many of those as Adobe has sold copies of Photoshop.
> (you'd be surprised how many people want these cards -- I've sold 1 per 2 > computers I've sold -- I can't even keep the damn things in stock they > fly off the shelves that fast!).
Blah blah blah this whole paragraph is based on the straw man argument you just stated, and in fact has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Remember? I did not EVEN MENTION the relative costs of a Mac or a PC. You brought it up, you claimed I was disputing it, and then you proferred support for it. I've had nothing to do with the whole side-track. You act as if you're proving something to me - frankly I'm not interested in the relative cost of one computer component or another, as it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which I should probably remind you, is the compatibility level of Macs and PCs in real-world uses.... Which does not, by the way, encompass a niche-market such as PCI-card signal decoders.
> The XBOX makes an excellent media center, I don't want my PS2 games > ruined by kids at the shop, and, more importantly, I install modchips > for a living.
Ahhh, I see, so you're a bit of a pirate? Let's see if I can get you in trouble with a few phone calls and some research then.
>People who don't speak english can do anything
>someone who can speak english can do, within the
>confines of their own language.
That is precisely why this is a false analogy. 'Within the confines of their own language' does not apply, when the issue is one of 'comminicating with 95% of others', for in the case of communication between a Mac, a PC, and a Linux box, the "languages" are the same. Hence my list: Same websites, java apps, perl scripts, word documents, CDs, DVDs, network shares, domains, USB devices, wireless ethernet, televisions and monitors, and wall sockets. It's not that they're equivalent within confines, they are in fact the same protocols.
A batter analogy would be that, no matter where you buy your shoes, you're still able to walk on 95% of the same sidewalks.
>Just like with a Mac, according to you, you can
>do anything I'd do on a PC (I doubt that very
>much, but hey, for the sake of argument I'll
>pretend you're right)
Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim. But I'll go along with you:
>except you can't run anything I would run. You
>can run translations of the apps, but that's as
>close as it gets.
Are you talking CPUs, or languages, here, when you say "translation"? Must be CPUs?
>That's just like someone who speaks French can
>say any English word translated into French, but
>it still isn't English, is it?
Leveraging the false analogy, see above.
>Interesting. Can I record DVB-S signals on a Mac
>yet? That's the main use of my PC at the moment.
You had to dig pretty deep to come up with that, didn't you? Show me statistics that indicate that this is a major - or even minor - concern for ONE PERCENT of computer users the world over, and I'll eat my hat.
> Oh, and I need to be able to run all the various
> Xbox and PS2 modchip tools also. I can do that
> with a Mac also?
Now why would you be wanting to run those? >:)
>I guess, last but not least, I can buy a Mac for
>$459.99 CDN new including the OS, right? Because
>if I could, that'd be cool -- I might actually
>try one then.
*yawn* And if I could get a 700 series BMW for ten bucks, that'd be great too. Straw man again. That must be the only trick you know?
Well, given that "the real police" are already having trouble tracking down traders of kiddie pr0n online, why would I want to dilute their efforts ten -thousand-fold by having them inviestigate and arrest, say, a ten-year-old girl who copies a CD in her parent's new-fangled boombox?
False analogy. My Mac powerbook goes to the same websites, runs the same java apps, runs the same Perl scripts, reads the same word documents, plays the same music, burns the same CDs and DVDs, writes to the same network shares, authenticates with the same domains, plays the same movies, views the same pictures, uses the same USB devices, uses the same wireless and ethernet standards, can hook up to the same televisions and stereos, and plugs into the same wall sockets as any other laptop.
Speaking of international uses, it even has better Unicode support -- two clicks and I can be typing in Hebrew, for example.
Your basis for comparison is ten years out of date, at least.
To whoever wrote this: Thank you. Shepd has been a complete ass to me since I replied to one of his comments a week ago, and I'm glad to see he's got enemies.
I've been an "Adept PC" user, in any real sense of the word, for at least ten years, and I'll tell you what "we" really want. We want to pop online two days before a product comes out, type "(product name) warez" into google, and get directed to "Doctor Ph43r's 1337 Pr0n and W4R3Z Page", a site created by a fifteen-year-old somewhere in northern Europe, and download a 5k patch utility that will turn our demo version into the full version for free.
THAT is the "freedom" that so-called "Adept" PC users want, and expect. If the Mac community had an army of script kiddies that large, they would be expecting the same thing.
And this is why I predict that, shortly after the iTunes store opens for Windows, it's all going downhill for Apple's DRM. Some 1337 Krew in a basement somewhere is going to write a 5k Windows utility that will strip the DRM out of a file - turning an m4p into an m4a - and we'll all find it in Google - and the honeymoon will be OVER.
Master of the straw-man argument, you are, judging by your other comments.
'Negative sales tax' is an irrelevant misunderstanding of the argument at hand. There is a difference between investing in something and buying it. Go get a dictionary, and then form a proper response to the above comment.
Why is there always at least one haughty poster who, TEN PAGES DOWN in a list of interesting and relevant replies, seems to think it's appropriate to write, "Nothing new here, move on." ?
I reiterate: No one here forced you to hit "read more".
I do believe your logical chain above is rendered entirely worthless by this bad link:
"As a result, being wealthy is less desirable"
The rich do not got rich just so they can save society. They get rich so that they can ignore most of it.
Regarding proprietary formats, etc -- there's a simple rule to remember here, I think.
The more programmable your portable device is, the less likely you are to be screwed. Programmable as in, the end-user can write and load code into it that will alter it's behavior. If a consumer wants to find a device that's a good investment, this is practically all the information he needs.
That, and perhaps access to a few local geeks who will hack the device, in the event of a corporate meltdown.
Now here's the question: How can we keep each other informed of the real programmability of a shiny new device we may see in Circuit City? Is there a yardstick, or a website, or a consortium, or a forum out there -- that measures the hack-ability of new gear?
(Or should we all just chuck everything out and buy really good laptops instead? I've had one for a year now and it's replaced my desktop PC, my PDA, my television, my DVD player, my stereo, my Playstation, my Nintendo 64, my bookshelf, and my mixer... and obsoleted my CD burner, monitor, keyboard, remote controls, maps, slide projector, darkroom, modem, zipdrive, tape deck, cookbooks, and alarm clock. Mostly due to it's immense programmability.)
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome ... I never thought of calling myself part of a "domestic nerd base". It's like I'm a bacterium, bringing health to colon of American business. Helping the bottom line, as it were.
You're not a digital music producer. Noise-filtering operations that took me five hours in 1998 take me five minutes in 2004 ... I benefit directly from a faster HD, a faster internal bus, a faster CPU, ... and with the adoption of the USB and Firewire bus, I am able to locate a workstation case thirty feet away in a closet, allowing more people to work with less noise. (A well-shielded 30 foot analog monitor cable can actually go the distance, too!) That, to me, has been the really big deal in the past six years -- USB / Firewire.
WHAT??!?? That's it Joe, I've heard enough! You're FIRED!!!
I think Scrooge McDuck said it best, when he said: "Work smarter, not harder." :)
Actually what I think the poster meant was, "The differences between individial people are far greater, and far more important, than any generalized differences between men and women."
Here's to us clever people!
Compiled these from my own dealings with nefarious characters while buying and selling Apple laptops.
I can even do it myself. Observe!
I can even do it myself. Observe!
>> if it existed today, would most likely be in the possession of the Federal Government...
>>and that would have horrified them even more, I am certain.
>
>Calling out the "straw man" is always an easy way to avoid arguments you don't like.
No, (and this is something you have yet to learn), calling out "strawman" is an easy way to avoid an argument that DOES NOT LOGICALLY FOLLOW, in that it is off-topic, or based on an essentially UNRELATED PREMISE. You pull that sort of thing all the time, and now I'm convinced that you don't even know you're doing it.
>>= straw man crap
>
>I have better things to do than listen to this. If you have no argument, >I've won,
Way to turn the tables, bonehead.
>PCs are obviously better than Macs in so many ways,
Same straw man shit. This is not what we were discussing.
>>Machine code is not a language.
>
>Then you know far less than you purport. If it's not a language,
>pray tell me, how was I able to do my second year EET project in it?
Pffft! You didn't encounter it until college? Loser. >:)
>>You're living in fantasy land if you think you sell even a
>tenth as many of those as Adobe has sold copies of Photoshop.
>
>Hmmm, let's see. If I (a small computer shop) were able to sell even
> 1/100th of the amount of cards as Adobe sells copies of photoshop, that
> would make me right.
At CONSERVATIVE estimate, Adobe sells two million copies of Photoshop every year, including educational discounts and volume licensing. Over the lifespan of the product, including upgrades, Adobe has sold over 20 million copies. And none of this includes the TENS OF MILLIONS of pirated copies created and/or sold every year.
, comma, you IGNORANT HICK.
Taking the lowest possible figure from this set, two million, that would mean that your dinky little shop would have to sell twenty thousand cards a year, or 80 cards every single business day of the year.
You lose, pal.
>>Those are not statistics. My hat remains uneaten.
>
>I took statistics classes. If you don't think that's a statistic, fuck >off. You're just not right.
Whether or not you took "statistics classes" is irrelevant. Those aren't statistics.
>>Which does not, by the way, encompass a niche-market such as PCI-card
>>signal decoders.
>
>Let's see:
>
>3 satellite stores in my city.
>
>1 DTP shop.
Mmmyep. That's a niche alright. was re: hick. You have no idea how big the rest of the world is, do you.
*yawn*
>Cool, by that definition, your mac is fully commodore 64 compatible
...
... Which does not, by the way, encompass a niche-market such as PCI-card signal decoders.
= straw man crap
>>'Within the confines of their own language' does not apply
>
>That's interesting, I never knew Macs could run x86 code. >That's cool. You've educated me.
= straw man crap
>>Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim.
>
>Ho hum, It's tedious quoting other users own words.
>Surprised you couldn't remember them being you said
>them today:
(blah blah)
Correct, that's exactly what I said.
Now here's what you claimed I said:
>Just like with a Mac, according to you, you can
>do anything I'd do on a PC (I doubt that very
>much, but hey, for the sake of argument I'll
>pretend you're right)
Once again:
Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim.
>>Are you talking CPUs, or languages, here, when you say "translation"?
>>Must be CPUs?
>
>Perhaps you don't program. Let me explain how a computer runs:
>
>Machine code is executed to perform various operations on the computer.
>Every CPU has it's own code (called a 'language')
Moron. Machine code is not a language. C and C++ are languages. Machine code is machine code, and is what languages -- even assembly language, which is essentially just machine code made more human-readable -- are COMPILED INTO. I knew this back in the 80's when I wrote an assembly language compiler in BASIC on an Apple II+. Get your definitions straight.
> It's what I sell, it's what I use. And that's the same reverse argument I
> use about the Mac: Show me 1% of users that think the ability to use
> photoshop is a minor concern to using their computer. The numbers will
> be about equal
You're living in fantasy land if you think you sell even a tenth as many of those as Adobe has sold copies of Photoshop.
> (you'd be surprised how many people want these cards -- I've sold 1 per 2
> computers I've sold -- I can't even keep the damn things in stock they
> fly off the shelves that fast!).
Those are not statistics. My hat remains uneaten.
>Specs:
> - 1.3 Ghz Duron CPU
> - 128 MB RAM
> - 40 GB HDD
Blah blah blah this whole paragraph is based on the straw man argument you just stated, and in fact has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Remember? I did not EVEN MENTION the relative costs of a Mac or a PC. You brought it up, you claimed I was disputing it, and then you proferred support for it. I've had nothing to do with the whole side-track. You act as if you're proving something to me - frankly I'm not interested in the relative cost of one computer component or another, as it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which I should probably remind you, is the compatibility level of Macs and PCs in real-world uses.
> The XBOX makes an excellent media center, I don't want my PS2 games
> ruined by kids at the shop, and, more importantly, I install modchips
> for a living.
Ahhh, I see, so you're a bit of a pirate? Let's see if I can get you in trouble with a few phone calls and some research then.
>someone who can speak english can do, within the
>confines of their own language.
That is precisely why this is a false analogy. 'Within the confines of their own language' does not apply, when the issue is one of 'comminicating with 95% of others', for in the case of communication between a Mac, a PC, and a Linux box, the "languages" are the same. Hence my list: Same websites, java apps, perl scripts, word documents, CDs, DVDs, network shares, domains, USB devices, wireless ethernet, televisions and monitors, and wall sockets. It's not that they're equivalent within confines, they are in fact the same protocols.
A batter analogy would be that, no matter where you buy your shoes, you're still able to walk on 95% of the same sidewalks.
>Just like with a Mac, according to you, you can
>do anything I'd do on a PC (I doubt that very
>much, but hey, for the sake of argument I'll
>pretend you're right)
Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim. But I'll go along with you:
>except you can't run anything I would run. You
>can run translations of the apps, but that's as
>close as it gets.
Are you talking CPUs, or languages, here, when you say "translation"? Must be CPUs?
>That's just like someone who speaks French can
>say any English word translated into French, but
>it still isn't English, is it?
Leveraging the false analogy, see above.
>Interesting. Can I record DVB-S signals on a Mac
>yet? That's the main use of my PC at the moment.
You had to dig pretty deep to come up with that, didn't you? Show me statistics that indicate that this is a major - or even minor - concern for ONE PERCENT of computer users the world over, and I'll eat my hat.
> Oh, and I need to be able to run all the various
> Xbox and PS2 modchip tools also. I can do that
> with a Mac also?
Now why would you be wanting to run those? >:)
>I guess, last but not least, I can buy a Mac for
>$459.99 CDN new including the OS, right? Because
>if I could, that'd be cool -- I might actually
>try one then.
*yawn* And if I could get a 700 series BMW for ten bucks, that'd be great too. Straw man again. That must be the only trick you know?
Well, given that "the real police" are already having trouble tracking down traders of kiddie pr0n online, why would I want to dilute their efforts ten -thousand-fold by having them inviestigate and arrest, say, a ten-year-old girl who copies a CD in her parent's new-fangled boombox?
Speaking of international uses, it even has better Unicode support -- two clicks and I can be typing in Hebrew, for example.
Your basis for comparison is ten years out of date, at least.
To whoever wrote this: Thank you. Shepd has been a complete ass to me since I replied to one of his comments a week ago, and I'm glad to see he's got enemies.
THAT is the "freedom" that so-called "Adept" PC users want, and expect. If the Mac community had an army of script kiddies that large, they would be expecting the same thing.
And this is why I predict that, shortly after the iTunes store opens for Windows, it's all going downhill for Apple's DRM. Some 1337 Krew in a basement somewhere is going to write a 5k Windows utility that will strip the DRM out of a file - turning an m4p into an m4a - and we'll all find it in Google - and the honeymoon will be OVER.
Duh? That is doesn't work!
Already been tried. On atheists.
"The fact you required a dictionary to look up "investing" shows you probably aren't worth discussing the issue with." was re: straw man
'Negative sales tax' is an irrelevant misunderstanding of the argument at hand. There is a difference between investing in something and buying it. Go get a dictionary, and then form a proper response to the above comment.
I reiterate: No one here forced you to hit "read more".
I do believe your logical chain above is rendered entirely worthless by this bad link: "As a result, being wealthy is less desirable" The rich do not got rich just so they can save society. They get rich so that they can ignore most of it.
"WHAT do Apple's programmers and designers have the Linux/GNOME programmers do not?"
A steady paycheck.
Regarding proprietary formats, etc -- there's a simple rule to remember here, I think.
The more programmable your portable device is, the less likely you are to be screwed. Programmable as in, the end-user can write and load code into it that will alter it's behavior. If a consumer wants to find a device that's a good investment, this is practically all the information he needs.
That, and perhaps access to a few local geeks who will hack the device, in the event of a corporate meltdown.
Now here's the question: How can we keep each other informed of the real programmability of a shiny new device we may see in Circuit City? Is there a yardstick, or a website, or a consortium, or a forum out there -- that measures the hack-ability of new gear?
(Or should we all just chuck everything out and buy really good laptops instead? I've had one for a year now and it's replaced my desktop PC, my PDA, my television, my DVD player, my stereo, my Playstation, my Nintendo 64, my bookshelf, and my mixer... and obsoleted my CD burner, monitor, keyboard, remote controls, maps, slide projector, darkroom, modem, zipdrive, tape deck, cookbooks, and alarm clock. Mostly due to it's immense programmability.)