You're serious? Really? I don't know where your christian rock only record store is, but here in the rest of the world the War on Drugs has been a catastrophic failure, resulting in widespread increases in drug use since the eighties. Drug-related and gang-related violence is also up, particularly in urban areas. My guess is that the reason why your business is down is because you grab customers by their shirts and call them little shits; whether he was going to put it up on Limewire later or not you lost a customer, and possibly several others who saw you do it.
Your story is heart-wrenching, yes, but I'll tell one of my own. A few years ago I reduced my CD-buying to a minimum. Back in high school I spent at least half my paycheque every week on old and new CDs and vinyl and I worked as a deejay. I was good friends with the record store owner in my hometown, and I think that I was a good, regular customer. I could depend on him to always have what I was looking for and he could rely on me to be there every couple of days hunting down 7-inches and old 78s. My music collection achieved "ridiculous" proportions just before college.
Then something happened. The RIAA started suing people, and at first maybe it was justified; people were stealing music and there's no way to get around that. But at the same time, something wonderful was also happening and they were putting a stop to it. I was able to seek out rare and interesting bands I'd never have a chance to find out about if not for the internet, and I would go down the street to the record store and buy up their singles and LPs. Most of the people I knew at the time did the same thing. Then the RIAA started suing 13-year-olds, grandparents, single mothers, basically extorting thousands and thousands of dollars from people who really couldn't afford it at all. The fees for infringement became ridiculous and the targets of lawsuits got even more ridiculous and I just stopped buying. Nowadays I add as little money as possible to their coffers (and that means as little as possible to yours, too, buddy) because every dollar I give to the RIAA has a good chance of assisting in the suing of some grandmother out there who doesn't even own a computer.
So before you go around shooting your mouth off about how you're the victim, take a good look around and consider that you might be pointing your finger at the wrong villains here. You're losing your business, but we're all losing our popular culture and creativity at the expense of lining the pockets of RIAA lawyers.
My suspicion is that they would want to watch the dots to determine how to most efficiently move people through the airport or otherwise study their movements. Were this the case, however, the tags would be anonymous. Either way, it's a problem that is not most effectively solved by RFID tags.
Realistically, what is this going to do for any purpose whatsoever? It saddens me to know that air travel is going to be a fairly annoying if not downright humiliating process for a long time to come....
Ignoring the OEM issue for right now, how do you consolidate the notion of Microsoft as a "cut-rate competitor" now with the fact that their OS costs over three times as much as OS X (buying the software by itself, that is, and not with a new computer)? They also have not replicated (XP) a mature product (OS X, say 10.4), at least not on time (Vista).
Is this guy serious? The "primary" upgrade inducment is looks? I bet he doesn't have a girlfriend...
Absolutely! This is why I really don't think this will be a problem for *most* companies out there. People are saying that the Aero interface is the reason to upgrade, but why? Even if your machines require no new hardware at all, the price tag for Vista is a little too steep for just a flashy new UI. Of course he might be saying that because all of the features everyone got excited about initially have been nixed for one reason or another.
Stability and ease of deployment will get most companies on the proverbial Vista bandwagon, but with both "ease of deployment" and "stability" only time will tell. Those are hard things to gauge months after much less months before the release of any piece of software. The people who have been assuming that any machines critical to the functioning of a company are going to immediately upgrade I think are largely mistaken. Of course I work at a mac-only office so what do I know....
Advertising is a lot like a global conflict in some ways; there is constant escalation. One firm starts putting ads in games, on buses, on billboards at high school sporting events, inside trains, or in a viral stickering campaign and suddenly a dozen more brands want the same treatment. Brand recognition is just one of those things, and every time it seems like we've reached the minimum signal-to-noise ratio, agencies push things further and further.
Burger King has done crazy things over the past year or two to try to grow their brand, and I think that the very fact that we're discussing this shows they've at least been marginally successful. Their subservient chicken sparked off a short-lived internet sensation. Their bizarre if not creepy King, whether you like him or hate him or are genuinely deeply disturbed, at least encourages discussion of the brand, gets it on people's minds, gets people talking.
Honestly if you want advertising to go away, you can either just not look or you can pay close close attention; that way you know who's trying to manipulate you into doing what.
Kids have always been lazier and less interested in knowledge than privious generations. Evil currupting forces have always pulled them from the Straight and Narrow(TM).
I disagree. I think what happens is that the world continuously changes more and more rapidly, and each successive generation is more and more equipped to deal with that change. I have a lot of criticisms for my generation (I was born in the early 80s; please don't call me a "millennial", I hate that), and for the one coming right afterwards, but I can't really take myself that seriously. My parents probably felt that way about my generation.
If your appraisal of things were completely accurate, society would've dissolved into rampant chaotic stupidity hundreds of years ago. The percentage of the population interested in knowledge and doing something positive for themselves and humankind is largely constant; I think it's just that those people get less exposure in today's culture than they have previously.
I really think you're taking this way too personally. I used to work in IT at my university, first supporting students who actually brought their computers in, then supporting computers, faculty, and staff with their networking problems over the phone. EVERYBODY has problems and calls us. The very few 1337 folk who didn't were either people who actually knew what they were doing (read: extremely small minority composed almost entirely of my computer science bretheren) or wannabes that we would have to shut down for pulling something shady like using eight network cards to circumvent our bandwidth caps. All that aside, this article isn't about looking at these questions and thinking "Oh wow. Look at how stupid those people are!" It's more about looking at those e-mails and thinking, "Wow. Support staff have to sift through a huge amount of crap every day."
It's true that when I received an issue at work that said, only (and I swear this is exactly how it was written), "I have lost all of my mailes can you tell me what happends?", even though I genuinely did want to try to figure out what had happends to this guy's mailes (they were gone forever, by the way, because he deleted them), there was a part of me that was really amused. I don't feel like I have a superiourity complex, and I don't think that many people on slashdot do even though it really does look that way sometimes. I just feel like thinking that e-mail was hilarious and remembering it like I have was a pretty nice way of dealing with the day-to-day stresses of managing e-mail and networking problems for a whole campus of folks.
Ethics: It's money that was given to achieve an end, to hamstring yourself by not trying to do something worthwhile with the money in order to facilitate paying it back, is a waste. It shows well on the article writer that they are wanting to do that. Anything less is lazy.
Before everyone goes crazy about how stupid it is not to invest this money, just hold up a second.
Depending on the terms of your promissory note, it might be illegal (i.e., breach of contract in the best case, actually breaking the law in the worst case). For my student loans, I was careful to read over the promissory note carefully and discovered that, under its terms, pretty much anything I needed was considered an "incidental educational expense". For my federal loans, however, they were very strictly limited to only contributing toward tuition and some immediate expenses like textbooks. Whether you worry about ethics is really your own business, but you should definitely be certain that what you're doing does not constitute a breach of the contract you signed in order to accept that loan. Most loans will automatically be considered defaulted if you do that.
That being said, the CD or T-bill ideas are all good ones. Do NOT invest that money anywhere where there's not a guaranteed return. You don't need super-huge returns here; you just need enough of a return to cover the interest being charged on the loans.
As much as I really do want to agree with you when you say that this really is a selfless act for the good of the world, I can't quite do that. It is in the best interests of the United States that the Internet continue to be one contiguous network, and it's become pretty clear over the past few months that if the US did not cede control of the Internet to some semblence of non-government international organization, their punishment would be their digital ostracization from the world community. While it might not come to that, considering that the rest of the world depends on having access to our public networks, too, even a restriction between networks or, say, a difference in regulations across US-World networks would be pretty bad for the US.
Mind you, I'm not at all saying that this isn't great. I'm just saying that before we go 'round patting ourselves on the back for being such great world citizens, it's important to realize that this is a pretty pragmatic measure for the States.
Again, it used 'think of the children' to role in crappy, unenforceable laws which steal away people freedom, and solve a non-existent problem.
I absolutely agree. If Congress wants to 'fess up and consider this bill to be merely a means of delivering porkbarrel riders, fine. I could almost respect that a whole lot more. The very idea that this bill would somehow be enforceable is laughable. It is both irrationally draconian and, even for the US, way too equivocal to enforce responsibly. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems to me you should be able to prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt if you're going to lock someone away for 20 years for it.
The only, and obvious, solution to the minor problem of children accessing inappropriate content is for parents to be responsible in how their children can access the net.
This is one of those things that I keep coming back to with America. I find it absurd that you could have fiscal conservatives (read: traditional Republicans) who vehemently oppose any form of government regulation of business, yet somehow find it necessary for our justice system to waste its time deciding whether a website featuring photos of Lana Barbie violated this law or not.
There are two things here that really do speak of the bizarre socially conservative nature of the US. One is that, as I think a couple of comments down someone mentioned, there is still this puritanical mentality that sex is somehow dirty or unnatural. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. We do need to protect children from sexual predators and paedophiles, but protecting them from sex itself just means that we have a generation of children out there that genuinely think you can't contract a sexually transmitted disease through oral sex. Children are coming of age with none of the vital information they need to be safe because of this.
The other thing that is happening here, and this is one of my primary complaints about how the US government "handles" the Internet, is that parents expect the Government to manage their children for them. Parents now know less than ever about what their children are up to because their children are conducting more and more of their socialization online. What people in Congress have continually failed to understand is that making the Internet safer for children means drastically restricting free speech protections for everybody else. The solution is not to make the Internet safer, it's for parents to take on a more proactive role in guiding their children's online experience.
I wasn't going to reply to this because it already looks like mopslik has me covered. I really do have to call attention to the fact that you're saying that Adobe should create a proprietary markup format and accompanying plugin and/or browser specifically designed to deal with that? The reason why PDF works is because Adobe PDFs are written and read by Adobe products; the system is completely closed (forgetting for the moment things like ghostview and pdflatex and whatnot) and that's the reason why it works. The problem with your argument here is that you're greatly oversimplifying the situation.
I work as a web developer and though I do have many issues with IE when it comes down to Javascript and the box model and everything, for the most part my process is to get things working in Firefox, then tweak them to work in IE. That process works, and with very few exceptions yields pages that look exactly as I designed them in every browser. The CSS standard, like any standard, is not perfect, and the implementations out there are even less perfect. It does, however, allow me to do so much more than "plain jane HTML" would ever permit.
The analogy to light bulbs doesn't hold in the least, either. The main difference between light bulbs and web standards is that your different light bulbs have different uses. Same deal with your projectors. When I worked as a printer we had high-intensity mercury vapour lamps that we used for some things, then the rest of the shop was low-intensity yellow fluourescent lighting. Those two kinds of bulbs have different fixtures and pretty much everything possible about them is different, but that's because they serve extremely different purposes. Web standards have one and only one purpose unto this world: delivering content with a reasonable visual fidelity to the designer's intentions. HTML and CSS do a pretty damn good job of doing that, and as browsers advance things are getting better very rapidly.
What you're proposing is a change back to the days of "This website best viewed in Netscape 3.0", and those of us who are responsible for writing and designing the pages you view are just not interested in that.
Now that you have a better idea of what I'm about and how similar we are perhaps you might feel a little better about my original post.
You're right. I do feel a little better. While both of us may in fact be rarities for our particular platforms, I think that's changing rapidly. Since OS X came out, Apple has been seriously catering to scientific computing—which is a significant portion of the educational market in which they previously couldn't compete reliably. At the time though Apple had a CEO whose marketing message of choice seemed to be that macs aren't toys. That alienated a significant portion of the populace who wanted computers that could be workhorses some of the time, toys the rest of the time. My bottom line in any PC vs. Mac argument has always been that if you've never really used a computer before, your best option is to spend the little extra money on a mac because it's a lot easier to start out on. People who've used Windows forever get frustrated with macs because they try to use the same interface and operational paradigms they're accustomed to on PCs, but to a completely naive user the windows environment can be pretty confusing. Until I got a job fixing them I never really understood PCs; even now I'm pretty frustrated whenever I have to do anything involved on one.
I do use Linux, too. I have an old Powermac G3 tower and an old Powerbook G3 that both run Gentoo linux and never boot into OS X because they're too old to handle the newest versions. I'm much more typical in my linux usage in that I use the tower as a simple dev server and the powerbook . . . well I dont use that one so much just yet.
The cost issue you bring up is becoming less and less of an issue, too. As I was working at my University repairing them all the time, I think more and more people are recognizing that $300 for a Dell may buy you a computer, but it doesn't buy you a reliable one. I only ran across a couple of people who had one who were dying to buy another. Same story with other discount manufacturers. I'm presuming your AMD boxen are custom built, which is by far the cheapest way to do it and the best (since you know what you've got under the hood when you're looking for drivers and/or kernel modules) but for most of your local gentry it's not really a possibility.
Finally, regarding the great eyes remark, maybe you meant it to sound less derogatory than it looked to me when I first read it. I do recognize that I'm an anomaly in the linux, UNIX, and Mac worlds, but I do think that there are a lot more people like me, and like you, out there.
While I agree with your "Good OS" vs. "Good for ME OS" argument, the rest of what you said reflects a total lack of understanding of why people use Mac OS, particularly for graphics work.
I am a photographer and graphic artist, but I am also a programmer. I hold a BS in computer science and am pursuing an MFA in photography. In addition to taking offense at your rampant generalization that graphics people "simply have great eyes and know how to use their apps", I also feel that what you're missing is the fact that all of the tools that we graphics people use simply run better in MacOS. Not taking into account the fact that Adobe has yet to come out with Intel versions of any of its mac programs (I think we might be waiting a while for those; Adobe's codebase is ginormous), Photoshop and Illustrator--the applications that I use most often when doing non-web related graphical work--have always performed much faster in MacOS than in Windows, all the way back to the earliest versions that supported both. This is because the capabilities of macs, all the way down to the hardware, have traditionally been geared towards hardcore graphical work. The very first thing out of Apple's marketing department when they first began releasing processors with FPUs on-board was "Hey, this'll make your photoshop filters work." Same story with AltiVec and multiple processors. When Apple introduced FireWire on their machines, PC manufacturers scoffed, but Apple's line was "Hey, this is a super-fast bus you can connect digital video recorders and hard drives up to." The primary benefactor, again, was graphics and video professionals.
To respond to your "most graphic designers don't know much about networking, scripting or coding, they tend to prefer the Mac" comment, I again have to take exception to that. Though I know a tremendous amount about networking, scripting, and coding, I don't need to constantly network, script, or code in order to get things done when I'm on my mac. In Windows-land my machine (virtualized in Parallels) freaks out if its DHCP lease runs out or if I want to connect to one of my macs for any purpose whatsoever. God forbid I should want to use windows networking to transfer files onto it. Meanwhile my mac, even when I'm on a network mostly consisting of PCs, just automatically does what its supposed to do and requires very little intervention on my part. When I need to script something super-simple, there's applescript. When I need to script something more advanced, there's a rich command-line interface along with perl, python, and a host of other interpreted and/or compiled languages for which I've added support.
What I've always loved about MacOS X particularly is that I can interact with it on two separate levels. The graphic artist within me can have an intuitive interface and a system whose hand I don't need to hold all day long to keep it running, and the hardcore programmer within me has a host of well-designed development tools and an extremely capable command line. When I want a system that's optimized down to the source code level, I have my gentoo linux webserver.
You might say that what I've said above makes me less knowledgeable than you, but you're wrong; it means that I don't enjoy having to worry myself as much as you do.
I disagree. The two ideas, though not interchangable, are very closely related. The situation is more complicated than that.
The purpose of the ACID test is to fully, rigorously test the capabilities of a browser. You're saying it's not that important because complicated CSS isn't part of "real web dev". Well why not? The way that most browsers are forced to render pages is to ignore everything they don't understand, because a different browser will respond to those things differently, and everything is a filthy dirty kludge. ACID gives a single, common ground to which every web browser can aspire. So, I would say that a web browser that passes the ACID test, with all other factors being equal, would be a huge improvement over one that doesn't even try.
When you start looking at web development as only doing what you can with the browsers handed to you, you're really stunting yourself. While I would not say it would be wise to build a site only viewable in Konqueror/Safari/Etc, I do believe that browser vendors need to be under constant pressure to adhere to standards. If they do, we will no longer have to hold back all the cool stuff just because it'll look like crap on IE.
The whole point of standards is to have something everyone can follow, whether they agree about the text of the standard or not; the whole point of the ACID test is to gauge as a developer how well your browser adheres to the standards.
I'm not really sure why the above post was modded "Troll". The article to which it links makes a really good point. Even though, previously, motion-sensing controllers have sucked, the fact of the matter is that this is not a completely new and unique idea even in the console world.
In that case, let's not make this about who ripped off who (*cough*Sony*coughcough*). Suffice it now to say, Which controller design more adequately lends itself to motion-sensing play? In my opinion, the Wii remote, because of the way that it would be held by a player, lends itself quite easily to gesturing. The design of the PS3 controller, in that it is nearly identical to the PS2 controller which was nearly identical to the PS1 controller, really makes me wonder how exactly you would move during play? Are we talking about leaning the controller back and forth? Shaking it?
In the end, it will be another dimension for game designers to consider. If gestural control of game play becomes commonplace because vendors are willing to exploit it to its fullest, then this will be quite revolutionary. If not, then it may become another Le Stick. Another likely scenario is that between Nintendo and Sony one will succeed and one won't. I think people recognize the two controllers as different things, and I think developers have a clear idea how each will change gameplay. All in all, it's very exciting stuff.
Reporters have a right to publish what they learn, they do not have a right to break the law to acquire that knowledge.
While that is absolutely true, the use of anonymous sources does not break the law. It is a freedom that the press has, protected by the first ammendment to the Constitution, as that ammendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court since it was written. Nobody's saying that reporters stole this information, it was leaked to them. That means that nobody is breaking the law except the person who is leaking the information, and their identity is protected by the anonymity afforded them because they are a journalistic source. If the Nixon presidency had the same unprecedented level of executive power that the Bush administration has grabbed for itself, Deep Throat would have been outed the same way and the Watergate story would never have been broken.
The press, as written into the first ammendment, must have the capability to bring important stories to the public. Would you rather not know what the NSA is up to? Do you think we even have the full story? This administration, behind the guise of an abstracted war on terror, has created an environment from which we may never see another Bernstein or Woodward. That prospect makes me sad and it makes me even sadder to know that more people aren't saddened by it.
I agree. With the whole world already hating us enough, we don't need to dump gasoline on the fire by developing a host of sci fi supervillain weapons. When the US crosses that line that divides "superpower" and "lex luthor", that's when we all need to step back and have another look at our priorities.
Look at the language used to present these pages - HTML, hardly an elegant format. I suppose you could call it correct for some very sloppy values of correct, but really, given the purpose it's being used for (presentation of complex styled text) it is woefully inadequate, and also overengineered in some ways.
HTML was adequate back in the days of dialup when people actually used HR tags rather than styling borders on the bottoms of DIV tags and so forth, but really the HTML that people use nowadays in "real" web site design is actually very elegant. It has become less of just a markup language and more of a layout language, with the block layout model used by CSS. While this is true, the old HTML code will still work and you can learn all the new stuff having a cursory knowledge of old-school HTML.
In this way, HTML is just fine, because it's been easy to expand it and adapt it to changing requirements and capabilities of users and servers. I think that ODF, being in the spirit of that same standard (XML), as it's been commonly used with respect to documents, is definitely the winner here. As new capabilities or requirements come about, the standard as described now is flexible enough that it can be extended easily without breaking a lot of applications in the process. What has resulted is a number of different "standards" that are all accurate, but one is definitely identifiable as being more recently defined than the last as opposed to equally-accurate and equally-relevant standards being developed and specified in parallel.
I recall another Apple advertising campaign a long time ago (think early nineties at the latest) that showed alternating shots of two companies, one setting up a printer with a Mac and the other setting up a printer for a PC. (It's been a while, obviously, so don't jump on me if I get the details wrong here.) Long story short, the PC-using company got confused out of the printing business and the Mac-using company had a pretty easy time of making it work.
If that ad campaign weren't effective at the time, I doubt they'd attempt another one now. I also think that now, very much like then, is a time where showing the key differences in usability over time between Macs and PCs, just as then was a good time to show how much easier it was to do day-to-day setup things like printers.
Honestly though marketing people have a memory that's just as good as their audience, so it could just be that everyone's forgotten about that commercial and this is an isolated incident.
Retains some sense of visual continuity with Today's Slashdot - This one is the real challenge I think. From the Slashdot 'Shade of Green' (#006666) to the curve on the upper left hand corner of the page & article headers, to the use of the Coliseo font, I really think that many of these design elements need to persist.
I was crestfallen 'cause the very first thing I'd thought of with this contest was that I'd find a cooler colour scheme. Also, when the OMG!! Ponies!! design was still active I was really wishing that it would become an option later that you could have Slashdot displayed that way via your preferences.
CSS is a wonderful thing in that changing just one file (or a set of Javascript objects in the DOM) can instantly transform the look/feel of a website. I'd see this as an opportunity not just to have a really great default design but to have a small group of different stylesheets registered users can switch between.
Of course, if multiple entries win, then they'll have to saw that MacBook Pro into pieces for everyone to be happy ^_^
Slashdot Mirror
And I do . . . every single time.
ugh I just duped a post, fed a troll, and probably made an ass of myself just now. It's too early here. *goes to get more coffee*
You're serious? Really? I don't know where your christian rock only record store is, but here in the rest of the world the War on Drugs has been a catastrophic failure, resulting in widespread increases in drug use since the eighties. Drug-related and gang-related violence is also up, particularly in urban areas. My guess is that the reason why your business is down is because you grab customers by their shirts and call them little shits; whether he was going to put it up on Limewire later or not you lost a customer, and possibly several others who saw you do it.
Your story is heart-wrenching, yes, but I'll tell one of my own. A few years ago I reduced my CD-buying to a minimum. Back in high school I spent at least half my paycheque every week on old and new CDs and vinyl and I worked as a deejay. I was good friends with the record store owner in my hometown, and I think that I was a good, regular customer. I could depend on him to always have what I was looking for and he could rely on me to be there every couple of days hunting down 7-inches and old 78s. My music collection achieved "ridiculous" proportions just before college.
Then something happened. The RIAA started suing people, and at first maybe it was justified; people were stealing music and there's no way to get around that. But at the same time, something wonderful was also happening and they were putting a stop to it. I was able to seek out rare and interesting bands I'd never have a chance to find out about if not for the internet, and I would go down the street to the record store and buy up their singles and LPs. Most of the people I knew at the time did the same thing. Then the RIAA started suing 13-year-olds, grandparents, single mothers, basically extorting thousands and thousands of dollars from people who really couldn't afford it at all. The fees for infringement became ridiculous and the targets of lawsuits got even more ridiculous and I just stopped buying. Nowadays I add as little money as possible to their coffers (and that means as little as possible to yours, too, buddy) because every dollar I give to the RIAA has a good chance of assisting in the suing of some grandmother out there who doesn't even own a computer.
So before you go around shooting your mouth off about how you're the victim, take a good look around and consider that you might be pointing your finger at the wrong villains here. You're losing your business, but we're all losing our popular culture and creativity at the expense of lining the pockets of RIAA lawyers.
P.S. don't be a troll.
...slashdotted! That was fast.
My suspicion is that they would want to watch the dots to determine how to most efficiently move people through the airport or otherwise study their movements. Were this the case, however, the tags would be anonymous. Either way, it's a problem that is not most effectively solved by RFID tags.
Realistically, what is this going to do for any purpose whatsoever? It saddens me to know that air travel is going to be a fairly annoying if not downright humiliating process for a long time to come....
Ignoring the OEM issue for right now, how do you consolidate the notion of Microsoft as a "cut-rate competitor" now with the fact that their OS costs over three times as much as OS X (buying the software by itself, that is, and not with a new computer)? They also have not replicated (XP) a mature product (OS X, say 10.4), at least not on time (Vista).
Absolutely! This is why I really don't think this will be a problem for *most* companies out there. People are saying that the Aero interface is the reason to upgrade, but why? Even if your machines require no new hardware at all, the price tag for Vista is a little too steep for just a flashy new UI. Of course he might be saying that because all of the features everyone got excited about initially have been nixed for one reason or another.
Stability and ease of deployment will get most companies on the proverbial Vista bandwagon, but with both "ease of deployment" and "stability" only time will tell. Those are hard things to gauge months after much less months before the release of any piece of software. The people who have been assuming that any machines critical to the functioning of a company are going to immediately upgrade I think are largely mistaken. Of course I work at a mac-only office so what do I know....
Advertising is a lot like a global conflict in some ways; there is constant escalation. One firm starts putting ads in games, on buses, on billboards at high school sporting events, inside trains, or in a viral stickering campaign and suddenly a dozen more brands want the same treatment. Brand recognition is just one of those things, and every time it seems like we've reached the minimum signal-to-noise ratio, agencies push things further and further.
Burger King has done crazy things over the past year or two to try to grow their brand, and I think that the very fact that we're discussing this shows they've at least been marginally successful. Their subservient chicken sparked off a short-lived internet sensation. Their bizarre if not creepy King, whether you like him or hate him or are genuinely deeply disturbed, at least encourages discussion of the brand, gets it on people's minds, gets people talking.
Honestly if you want advertising to go away, you can either just not look or you can pay close close attention; that way you know who's trying to manipulate you into doing what.
I disagree. I think what happens is that the world continuously changes more and more rapidly, and each successive generation is more and more equipped to deal with that change. I have a lot of criticisms for my generation (I was born in the early 80s; please don't call me a "millennial", I hate that), and for the one coming right afterwards, but I can't really take myself that seriously. My parents probably felt that way about my generation.
If your appraisal of things were completely accurate, society would've dissolved into rampant chaotic stupidity hundreds of years ago. The percentage of the population interested in knowledge and doing something positive for themselves and humankind is largely constant; I think it's just that those people get less exposure in today's culture than they have previously.
Right with you on the comic book comment though.
I really think you're taking this way too personally. I used to work in IT at my university, first supporting students who actually brought their computers in, then supporting computers, faculty, and staff with their networking problems over the phone. EVERYBODY has problems and calls us. The very few 1337 folk who didn't were either people who actually knew what they were doing (read: extremely small minority composed almost entirely of my computer science bretheren) or wannabes that we would have to shut down for pulling something shady like using eight network cards to circumvent our bandwidth caps. All that aside, this article isn't about looking at these questions and thinking "Oh wow. Look at how stupid those people are!" It's more about looking at those e-mails and thinking, "Wow. Support staff have to sift through a huge amount of crap every day."
It's true that when I received an issue at work that said, only (and I swear this is exactly how it was written), "I have lost all of my mailes can you tell me what happends?", even though I genuinely did want to try to figure out what had happends to this guy's mailes (they were gone forever, by the way, because he deleted them), there was a part of me that was really amused. I don't feel like I have a superiourity complex, and I don't think that many people on slashdot do even though it really does look that way sometimes. I just feel like thinking that e-mail was hilarious and remembering it like I have was a pretty nice way of dealing with the day-to-day stresses of managing e-mail and networking problems for a whole campus of folks.
Before everyone goes crazy about how stupid it is not to invest this money, just hold up a second.
Depending on the terms of your promissory note, it might be illegal (i.e., breach of contract in the best case, actually breaking the law in the worst case). For my student loans, I was careful to read over the promissory note carefully and discovered that, under its terms, pretty much anything I needed was considered an "incidental educational expense". For my federal loans, however, they were very strictly limited to only contributing toward tuition and some immediate expenses like textbooks. Whether you worry about ethics is really your own business, but you should definitely be certain that what you're doing does not constitute a breach of the contract you signed in order to accept that loan. Most loans will automatically be considered defaulted if you do that.
That being said, the CD or T-bill ideas are all good ones. Do NOT invest that money anywhere where there's not a guaranteed return. You don't need super-huge returns here; you just need enough of a return to cover the interest being charged on the loans.
As much as I really do want to agree with you when you say that this really is a selfless act for the good of the world, I can't quite do that. It is in the best interests of the United States that the Internet continue to be one contiguous network, and it's become pretty clear over the past few months that if the US did not cede control of the Internet to some semblence of non-government international organization, their punishment would be their digital ostracization from the world community. While it might not come to that, considering that the rest of the world depends on having access to our public networks, too, even a restriction between networks or, say, a difference in regulations across US-World networks would be pretty bad for the US.
Mind you, I'm not at all saying that this isn't great. I'm just saying that before we go 'round patting ourselves on the back for being such great world citizens, it's important to realize that this is a pretty pragmatic measure for the States.
I absolutely agree. If Congress wants to 'fess up and consider this bill to be merely a means of delivering porkbarrel riders, fine. I could almost respect that a whole lot more. The very idea that this bill would somehow be enforceable is laughable. It is both irrationally draconian and, even for the US, way too equivocal to enforce responsibly. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems to me you should be able to prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt if you're going to lock someone away for 20 years for it.
This is one of those things that I keep coming back to with America. I find it absurd that you could have fiscal conservatives (read: traditional Republicans) who vehemently oppose any form of government regulation of business, yet somehow find it necessary for our justice system to waste its time deciding whether a website featuring photos of Lana Barbie violated this law or not.
There are two things here that really do speak of the bizarre socially conservative nature of the US. One is that, as I think a couple of comments down someone mentioned, there is still this puritanical mentality that sex is somehow dirty or unnatural. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. We do need to protect children from sexual predators and paedophiles, but protecting them from sex itself just means that we have a generation of children out there that genuinely think you can't contract a sexually transmitted disease through oral sex. Children are coming of age with none of the vital information they need to be safe because of this.
The other thing that is happening here, and this is one of my primary complaints about how the US government "handles" the Internet, is that parents expect the Government to manage their children for them. Parents now know less than ever about what their children are up to because their children are conducting more and more of their socialization online. What people in Congress have continually failed to understand is that making the Internet safer for children means drastically restricting free speech protections for everybody else. The solution is not to make the Internet safer, it's for parents to take on a more proactive role in guiding their children's online experience.
I wasn't going to reply to this because it already looks like mopslik has me covered. I really do have to call attention to the fact that you're saying that Adobe should create a proprietary markup format and accompanying plugin and/or browser specifically designed to deal with that? The reason why PDF works is because Adobe PDFs are written and read by Adobe products; the system is completely closed (forgetting for the moment things like ghostview and pdflatex and whatnot) and that's the reason why it works. The problem with your argument here is that you're greatly oversimplifying the situation. I work as a web developer and though I do have many issues with IE when it comes down to Javascript and the box model and everything, for the most part my process is to get things working in Firefox, then tweak them to work in IE. That process works, and with very few exceptions yields pages that look exactly as I designed them in every browser. The CSS standard, like any standard, is not perfect, and the implementations out there are even less perfect. It does, however, allow me to do so much more than "plain jane HTML" would ever permit. The analogy to light bulbs doesn't hold in the least, either. The main difference between light bulbs and web standards is that your different light bulbs have different uses. Same deal with your projectors. When I worked as a printer we had high-intensity mercury vapour lamps that we used for some things, then the rest of the shop was low-intensity yellow fluourescent lighting. Those two kinds of bulbs have different fixtures and pretty much everything possible about them is different, but that's because they serve extremely different purposes. Web standards have one and only one purpose unto this world: delivering content with a reasonable visual fidelity to the designer's intentions. HTML and CSS do a pretty damn good job of doing that, and as browsers advance things are getting better very rapidly. What you're proposing is a change back to the days of "This website best viewed in Netscape 3.0", and those of us who are responsible for writing and designing the pages you view are just not interested in that.
You're right. I do feel a little better. While both of us may in fact be rarities for our particular platforms, I think that's changing rapidly. Since OS X came out, Apple has been seriously catering to scientific computing—which is a significant portion of the educational market in which they previously couldn't compete reliably. At the time though Apple had a CEO whose marketing message of choice seemed to be that macs aren't toys. That alienated a significant portion of the populace who wanted computers that could be workhorses some of the time, toys the rest of the time. My bottom line in any PC vs. Mac argument has always been that if you've never really used a computer before, your best option is to spend the little extra money on a mac because it's a lot easier to start out on. People who've used Windows forever get frustrated with macs because they try to use the same interface and operational paradigms they're accustomed to on PCs, but to a completely naive user the windows environment can be pretty confusing. Until I got a job fixing them I never really understood PCs; even now I'm pretty frustrated whenever I have to do anything involved on one.
I do use Linux, too. I have an old Powermac G3 tower and an old Powerbook G3 that both run Gentoo linux and never boot into OS X because they're too old to handle the newest versions. I'm much more typical in my linux usage in that I use the tower as a simple dev server and the powerbook . . . well I dont use that one so much just yet.
The cost issue you bring up is becoming less and less of an issue, too. As I was working at my University repairing them all the time, I think more and more people are recognizing that $300 for a Dell may buy you a computer, but it doesn't buy you a reliable one. I only ran across a couple of people who had one who were dying to buy another. Same story with other discount manufacturers. I'm presuming your AMD boxen are custom built, which is by far the cheapest way to do it and the best (since you know what you've got under the hood when you're looking for drivers and/or kernel modules) but for most of your local gentry it's not really a possibility.
Finally, regarding the great eyes remark, maybe you meant it to sound less derogatory than it looked to me when I first read it. I do recognize that I'm an anomaly in the linux, UNIX, and Mac worlds, but I do think that there are a lot more people like me, and like you, out there.
While I agree with your "Good OS" vs. "Good for ME OS" argument, the rest of what you said reflects a total lack of understanding of why people use Mac OS, particularly for graphics work.
I am a photographer and graphic artist, but I am also a programmer. I hold a BS in computer science and am pursuing an MFA in photography. In addition to taking offense at your rampant generalization that graphics people "simply have great eyes and know how to use their apps", I also feel that what you're missing is the fact that all of the tools that we graphics people use simply run better in MacOS. Not taking into account the fact that Adobe has yet to come out with Intel versions of any of its mac programs (I think we might be waiting a while for those; Adobe's codebase is ginormous), Photoshop and Illustrator--the applications that I use most often when doing non-web related graphical work--have always performed much faster in MacOS than in Windows, all the way back to the earliest versions that supported both. This is because the capabilities of macs, all the way down to the hardware, have traditionally been geared towards hardcore graphical work. The very first thing out of Apple's marketing department when they first began releasing processors with FPUs on-board was "Hey, this'll make your photoshop filters work." Same story with AltiVec and multiple processors. When Apple introduced FireWire on their machines, PC manufacturers scoffed, but Apple's line was "Hey, this is a super-fast bus you can connect digital video recorders and hard drives up to." The primary benefactor, again, was graphics and video professionals.
To respond to your "most graphic designers don't know much about networking, scripting or coding, they tend to prefer the Mac" comment, I again have to take exception to that. Though I know a tremendous amount about networking, scripting, and coding, I don't need to constantly network, script, or code in order to get things done when I'm on my mac. In Windows-land my machine (virtualized in Parallels) freaks out if its DHCP lease runs out or if I want to connect to one of my macs for any purpose whatsoever. God forbid I should want to use windows networking to transfer files onto it. Meanwhile my mac, even when I'm on a network mostly consisting of PCs, just automatically does what its supposed to do and requires very little intervention on my part. When I need to script something super-simple, there's applescript. When I need to script something more advanced, there's a rich command-line interface along with perl, python, and a host of other interpreted and/or compiled languages for which I've added support.
What I've always loved about MacOS X particularly is that I can interact with it on two separate levels. The graphic artist within me can have an intuitive interface and a system whose hand I don't need to hold all day long to keep it running, and the hardcore programmer within me has a host of well-designed development tools and an extremely capable command line. When I want a system that's optimized down to the source code level, I have my gentoo linux webserver.
You might say that what I've said above makes me less knowledgeable than you, but you're wrong; it means that I don't enjoy having to worry myself as much as you do.
I disagree. The two ideas, though not interchangable, are very closely related. The situation is more complicated than that.
The purpose of the ACID test is to fully, rigorously test the capabilities of a browser. You're saying it's not that important because complicated CSS isn't part of "real web dev". Well why not? The way that most browsers are forced to render pages is to ignore everything they don't understand, because a different browser will respond to those things differently, and everything is a filthy dirty kludge. ACID gives a single, common ground to which every web browser can aspire. So, I would say that a web browser that passes the ACID test, with all other factors being equal, would be a huge improvement over one that doesn't even try.
When you start looking at web development as only doing what you can with the browsers handed to you, you're really stunting yourself. While I would not say it would be wise to build a site only viewable in Konqueror/Safari/Etc, I do believe that browser vendors need to be under constant pressure to adhere to standards. If they do, we will no longer have to hold back all the cool stuff just because it'll look like crap on IE.
The whole point of standards is to have something everyone can follow, whether they agree about the text of the standard or not; the whole point of the ACID test is to gauge as a developer how well your browser adheres to the standards.
I'm not really sure why the above post was modded "Troll". The article to which it links makes a really good point. Even though, previously, motion-sensing controllers have sucked, the fact of the matter is that this is not a completely new and unique idea even in the console world.
In that case, let's not make this about who ripped off who (*cough*Sony*coughcough*). Suffice it now to say, Which controller design more adequately lends itself to motion-sensing play? In my opinion, the Wii remote, because of the way that it would be held by a player, lends itself quite easily to gesturing. The design of the PS3 controller, in that it is nearly identical to the PS2 controller which was nearly identical to the PS1 controller, really makes me wonder how exactly you would move during play? Are we talking about leaning the controller back and forth? Shaking it?
In the end, it will be another dimension for game designers to consider. If gestural control of game play becomes commonplace because vendors are willing to exploit it to its fullest, then this will be quite revolutionary. If not, then it may become another Le Stick. Another likely scenario is that between Nintendo and Sony one will succeed and one won't. I think people recognize the two controllers as different things, and I think developers have a clear idea how each will change gameplay. All in all, it's very exciting stuff.
While that is absolutely true, the use of anonymous sources does not break the law. It is a freedom that the press has, protected by the first ammendment to the Constitution, as that ammendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court since it was written. Nobody's saying that reporters stole this information, it was leaked to them. That means that nobody is breaking the law except the person who is leaking the information, and their identity is protected by the anonymity afforded them because they are a journalistic source. If the Nixon presidency had the same unprecedented level of executive power that the Bush administration has grabbed for itself, Deep Throat would have been outed the same way and the Watergate story would never have been broken.
The press, as written into the first ammendment, must have the capability to bring important stories to the public. Would you rather not know what the NSA is up to? Do you think we even have the full story? This administration, behind the guise of an abstracted war on terror, has created an environment from which we may never see another Bernstein or Woodward. That prospect makes me sad and it makes me even sadder to know that more people aren't saddened by it.
If that's true, wouldn't he be dismayed rather than proud of receiving an "award" from them? - m a x
Listed among Jack Thompson's accolades in the article:
So . . . Jack Thompson doesn't know what the ACLU is? *scratches head*
I agree. With the whole world already hating us enough, we don't need to dump gasoline on the fire by developing a host of sci fi supervillain weapons. When the US crosses that line that divides "superpower" and "lex luthor", that's when we all need to step back and have another look at our priorities.
HTML was adequate back in the days of dialup when people actually used HR tags rather than styling borders on the bottoms of DIV tags and so forth, but really the HTML that people use nowadays in "real" web site design is actually very elegant. It has become less of just a markup language and more of a layout language, with the block layout model used by CSS. While this is true, the old HTML code will still work and you can learn all the new stuff having a cursory knowledge of old-school HTML.
In this way, HTML is just fine, because it's been easy to expand it and adapt it to changing requirements and capabilities of users and servers. I think that ODF, being in the spirit of that same standard (XML), as it's been commonly used with respect to documents, is definitely the winner here. As new capabilities or requirements come about, the standard as described now is flexible enough that it can be extended easily without breaking a lot of applications in the process. What has resulted is a number of different "standards" that are all accurate, but one is definitely identifiable as being more recently defined than the last as opposed to equally-accurate and equally-relevant standards being developed and specified in parallel.
I recall another Apple advertising campaign a long time ago (think early nineties at the latest) that showed alternating shots of two companies, one setting up a printer with a Mac and the other setting up a printer for a PC. (It's been a while, obviously, so don't jump on me if I get the details wrong here.) Long story short, the PC-using company got confused out of the printing business and the Mac-using company had a pretty easy time of making it work.
If that ad campaign weren't effective at the time, I doubt they'd attempt another one now. I also think that now, very much like then, is a time where showing the key differences in usability over time between Macs and PCs, just as then was a good time to show how much easier it was to do day-to-day setup things like printers.
Honestly though marketing people have a memory that's just as good as their audience, so it could just be that everyone's forgotten about that commercial and this is an isolated incident.
Exactly! When I saw this rule:
I was crestfallen 'cause the very first thing I'd thought of with this contest was that I'd find a cooler colour scheme. Also, when the OMG!! Ponies!! design was still active I was really wishing that it would become an option later that you could have Slashdot displayed that way via your preferences.
CSS is a wonderful thing in that changing just one file (or a set of Javascript objects in the DOM) can instantly transform the look/feel of a website. I'd see this as an opportunity not just to have a really great default design but to have a small group of different stylesheets registered users can switch between.
Of course, if multiple entries win, then they'll have to saw that MacBook Pro into pieces for everyone to be happy ^_^