Everytime anything about Apple gets posted. 95% of posts are:
Either:
1: Apple needs to free OSX for everyones crap whitebox and they will take over the world...
2: Apple really wants everyone to pirate this to see how good it is...
Really folks I think/. needs to just have a script generate these with each story.
Answering the naive majority here:
#1: Uhhh NO!. Hell you could give OSX away for free and it wouldn't make a dent. The overwhelming vast majority of people don't reinstall their OS ever, so moving the installed base off Windows is all but impossible. Further since this is where the market is, this is where the vast majority of SW is, most people will continue to buy new machines to use that majority software.
#2: See #1. This is a pointless exercise as only hardcore pirating geeks who don't buy software anyway are going to look at it. They just want to pirate OSX to add to how many OS's they can multi-boot.
What Apple is doing is the only thing that makes sense, the continue to sell a premium experience and can get better margins because of it. If they want more market share they just need to market some lower priced machines not open it up for the world to compete against them in their own space.
IMO there is every sign that once apple gets it's ducks in a row there will be lower priced machines. The mini was the first sign of that. In it's niche the PC machine is actually more expensive. Couple this with the fact that they will be able to better leverage commodity hardware and I expect decently affordable Macs. To be clear these will be the low end models, premiums will rise on the high end, if you must have the absoulte bleeding edge fastest HW for the buck a white box will be the way to go.
On the low end I will happily pay $100 more for a decent OSX/86 mac mini media center, thank you very much, and it will be my first Apple product of any type.
He pretty much said he was more on a literary track in high school. I just bet he wasn't one of those kids that took everything apart to see how it worked. He just isn't suited for engineering.
This has always been the case and is not why people are avoiding engineering these days.
Pre bubble, we largely had a crop of people following their aptitude. During the bubble, everyone wanted in. That wasn't really good. Post bubble, we have even lost some of those with aptitude. Why?
Buisness has presented an almost hostile attitude toward engineering staff. From outsourcing, huge tech visa quotas, to comments from the likes of Steve Balmer saying we should work for $50000 anual salary.
I would gladly play old low res games that actually have gameplay value over eye candy without substance.
Finished it. Don't recommend. Play BG2 instead....
on
Review: Dungeon Siege II
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have been playing CRPGs since Bards tale on the C64.
Here is my take on Dungeon Siege 2: They tried to figure out what worked in Diablo and failed. It has all the mechanics copied to the point of annoyance. Three play throughs (same story monsters have more HP each time), town portal, teleport locations, skill trees, saves now only save your state, not where you are. Done because I think they can't figure out what actually made Diablo fun. It doesn't work. Throw in some side quests on the linear road to try to inject more Roll play and that does work either. Candy coat it so it is so warm and fuzzy that you 5 year old will be comfy. Pablum RPG.
Action RPG fans of Diablo: No comparison. Diablo 2 is a much better action oriented RPG. This is boring and slow.
Story or hard core RPG: Nothing here. A few pointless sidequest departer from the strict linear game that you couldn't not make it to the end if you tried to get lost. Has nothing on Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Planescape Torment or any good single player games.
It feels like a comitee sat down and picked some elements from succesful RPGs. The result is nothing but a monster/treasure treadmill. For those folks who just want to level up and find more elite weapons endlessly. It is the "spinal tap" of RPG games, with the treasure output cranked to "11". If some treasure is good, heaping piles of it must be great. Somehow the concept of less is more never registers. If you always have tons of crap, it just plain doesn't matter. The value of something is in direct relation to it's scarcity. The best PnP games I played, you might find one magic item during a days play. But when you did find it, it was amazing.
Graphics look pretty much identical, to DS1, which is fine by me, heck they are better than Neverwinter Nights, but NWN is actually a fun game.
Bottom line, there is just a hollow shell again. They just dont' grok action RPG and they don't grok story RPG.
I think you can still buy Neverwinter Nights, or Diablo Gold if action is more your thing. Both cheaper and better.
The only people bothering are teen l33t boys (of any age), who post things like I got to work on my boxen..., then it is back to building their collection of pirated Appz/Gamez and PrOn.
I don't see anyone seriously running their system on this. This is simply a case of "I can do it" no recomendations are going to come from this. The people who DL and install this are not going to leave behind all those wonderful windows piracy tools and start actually running OSX.
Any recommendation from this group will probably be along the lines of it doesn't have much warez available.
Here is a startling thought. Millions of people actually use a Mac with OSX every day as their main machine. They are more likely to generate buzz than a pimply faced geek who tried it for 5 minutes just to say he could get it running.
I have read many claims of getting OSX running all sounded like teenage boasts to me. No sign from anyone that they actually plan to use it.
It seems like half the comments here are along the lines of piracy will be great for Apple. I get the impression a lot of these folks think Dvorak still has a clue.
Let us think this through a bit. I am of the mind that selling the OS for generics, piracy or even giving it away for free! Will not have much positive effect on Mac market share. Reasons:
1: Statistically insignificant numbers of people change the OS that the machine came with. Plain and simple. Apples best bet for increasing market share is to sell more machines.
Why?
2: Installation is a pain, 99% of people never re-install.
Installing and maintaining multiple OS's is non trivial and is not undertaken lightly by most folks. I built my last 5 computers, install my own OS's, did dual and triple boot setups. But yet my windows is sufferring windows rot right now and I really dread the idea of doing another re-install. It is a royal PITA.
How about comparison to something else alternative:
3: Market share when something is universally acclaimed, trivial to install and Free! Firefox 10%. Think about this. The vast vast majority aren't even interested in upgrading their browser which is a trivial operation and free. I would estimate at least 100 fold uptake in browsers over whole OS's. So at best this would gain maybe.1 % market share due to even a free OSX.
Addressing the most tired simplistic argument:
3. Piracy worked for microsoft didn't it? Er No? Where you sleeping? Microsoft is a marketing juggernaut, that had essentially no competition. They also made sure, by hook or by crook that almost all PC's shipped with Windows. Piracy may have helped Office along, but windows was a done deal. One other tiny detail. MS wasn't facing an incumbent monopoly.
Finally the main point. Apple must sell more macs to raise market share.
With less and less Americans are entering CompSci and Engineering, this must be sensible planning to handle the fact that sooner or later American will be run by chimps (oh wait...).
Make that tech staff will have degraded to the point they can't handle modern issues.
Next up: All traffic lights to be replaced with Stop Signs, which are much easier to build and maintain.
I can now migrate to a mac and take my SW with me. Never bought a Mac before but this has me considering it.
A Intel based mini probably won't be that expensive. We have reached the point where the vast majority of people have their needs met by the slowest machine on the market. Now we will be entering a period where the experience will matter more than the horsepower. Entry Macs will compete very well in that environment.
Though it has been years since I fired mine up, don't know if the boot floppies still work.
I remember this as the heyday for games by Psygnosis. "Shadow of the Beast" blew my mind in those days. I can still remember the flute based soundtrack.
I remember some insane vertical scroller that played syth rock and was a total blast to play.
Many years ahead of its time, but the Evil Trammel left it to stagnate.
The market for those that have equipment that can show the resolution difference of HD content is pretty small. DVD offered something for everyone, HD offers something for a tiny percentage.
Infintesimally small percentage when you factor in the ultra DRM on these machines that require DRM connections everywhere in the chain or drops back to standard DVD resolution by downsampling.
I would be a prime candidate for next generation disk, I have been completely turned off by DRM overkill. So while at first I was drooling over the possability of HD LOTR goodness, I have completely given up caring as I won't be buying in for the DRM from hell setup.
And you can bet the vast majority of people like my Mom and Grandmother who only have DVD because I bought them one will NEVER swith.
I think it is toast just like the DRMd Super Audio CDs...
It's more expensive, more restrictive, more complicated, but hey you get better quality if you have all the right gear and the planets align.
When TA came out, me and several guys at work bought it. This was in the pre-DSL days, but we had high priced ISDN modems for "working from home". We played tons of games of 2v2 with coworkers.
Those early games before we knew anything were the best. Building my first squad of brawlers (about 5) and emg'ing one of the enemy Coms to death. The abject fear when I faced my first incoming bertha strikes. The two pronged death of my ground attacks and my partners air-war-machine.
New maps and units kept us playing for at least a year. Buy far this was the best gaming dollar I every spent. I dusted it off 6 months ago and heck if I still don't think it is a barrel of fun.
I bought Dung Siege on the strength of CT's name, but it was bland. Great engine (seamless loads) but lacked any soul.
I will definitely give him another chance with this return...
Extensions are a bonus rather than a pain for me. Firefox is perfectly usable without extensions if they are that much of a bother, they are strictly a bonus.
Notice I mentioned interface issues with bookmark bar deficience and sidebar ugliness and wastefullness. Is there a cure for either?
Look at all the wasted space for the side panel buttons on the Opera side panel (left) for some reason not getting favicons either.
I vastly prefer the better use of space on firefox sidebar, the favicons and the hierachical view. (opera only shows the current directory level)
I was a longtime user and I still try every version of Opera, but I never find a reason to go back and I keep finding more reasons to use firefox every day.
Funny for myself a former long time Opera user (used it from version 3.5 onward, until FF 1.0)I keep re-trying Opera, but already I am addicted to firefox features and functionality, and keep returning to Firefox.
A couple of times recently I thought I would give Opera yet another try, and I got frustrated with bookmarks both times.
First I was using it with folders on my bookmark toolbar. But when I tried middle clicking the bookmarks in folders nothing happened so I couldn't launch them in new tabs, like I can on firefox. Small thing but frustrating.
So a bit later I got into using the sidebar for bookmarks instead on Firefox, so I thought, hey this probably works on Opera. Yes now I can middle click to a new tab in Opera as well. Good. But the damn panel buttons are always there taking up space uselessly.... Grrrrrrr...
Even if it had worked to my liking, I think without extensions Opera is doomed. I love my gmail notifier, flash blocker, adblocker etc...
Opera still has some great advantages like true MDI interface and page linking. Ultra fast caching, but these are shrinking.
We have a monopoly on the desktop, that monopoly will still be going strong when most of us are dead. Changing the OS is the equivalent of building a new train locomotive, and then stating it is great, just the minor issue of running on non standard track...
No OS will make a dent on the desktop. Even much vaunted OSX would be stillborn if launched openly against windows as many (most?) people here playing armchair CEO think Steve Jobs should do by allowing it to run on generic HW.
The windows platform has multi-year history of applications and importantly devolopers, that serve to keep us all locked in.
The only people even remotely capable of switching are the same people with the skills to keep windows safe from it's achilles heel (virii and malware). I have installed Linux twice and it never achieved full functionality and even if it did, I would still be reliant on dual booting windows. So I came to a conclusion: Why waste my time and disk space configuring two OS's. Now I stick to the one I need. Windows, because I am tied to the monopoly.
Switching is damn hard. But what if it was easy?
Well look at Firefox: Massive word of mouth, massive virus problems in IE, Ad compaigns, Massive feature advantage,Free, easy to switch easy to simultaneously support both. 99% legacy compatible ( few IE only pages).
So why isn't everyone using Firefox??? People consider it a coup for firefox to get 10% market share and that is just an App. A free app that is superior in just about every way.
If nothing more than inertia, niche players will stay were they are and even regress.
Linux is successful because of GPL. GPL is an incentive to share, you know that your sharing will result in more sharing. You know that when you contribute to GPL, you are encouraging more people to do the same. In the end you benefit as well.
There is a strong analogy with Bit Torrent. Same human nature factors. Bit Torrent works so well because of enforced sharing.
The alternative is what? The "honor system". Well that really doesn't work if you understand human nature.
The "honor system" completely opposite to the way corporations "MUST" act. Must in that if they can take it for free and give nothing back, then then must to maximize profits as they are obligated to do. GPL frees corporations of the necessity to not give anything back. There now is a case for sharing that is compatible with corporate governance.
Of course Piracy sounds nefarious, but we really know it is sharing and that is what we should call it.
Before the net we used to make mixed tapes for our friends. Loan them books or VHS tapes etc... Now I share TV episodes often sharing the Download effort to get multiple episodes.
I am old enough that I had pretty much bought all the CD's that I was going to own when Napster Hit the scene. I might have bought 1CD in the previous 2 years. Napster rekindled my interest in music. I bought 10 new CD's in my first year of Napstering. But after the lawsuits and my growing awareness of the way the industry operated, I have sworn to never by another RIAA supported CD.
Is this news. Microsoft mode of operation seems to be to take open standards and extend them and make the extensions proprietary. Tie in the monopoly and the extensions become defacto standards.
Then you have an open protocol turned into an owned protocol. This time though I suspect a legal approach.
MS will try to get avalanche going, then can say there is a better trusted protocol for legitimate use and now bit torrent only really serves nefarious purposes...
Yes, I experienced that too. But it wasn't one user, they had a block of machines flooding bad data with the express purpose of poisioning the torrent. But you can still get the file.
If you got the torrent from the pirate bay, they also listed the IP's to filter. After filtering those, I only had one bad IP left and Azurues automatically banned it.
After that addess was banned, I didn't have a single hash failure.
This is an interesting test. Everything is about money, so I suspect if the company responsible can get a significant reduction in number of succesful downloads, they will probably be marketing this "service" when the fall TV seasons starts.
Also there is the interesting possability that eventually they can "poison the earth", by moving ISPs and getting different blocks of IP addresses, they can get larger swaths of the IP space banned by P2P block lists, blocking more and more would be users.
Currently I note that the Peer Guardian list is at about 400Million addresses blocked. Or about 10% of the IP space.
First off, I like quality components so price is not that far different Before this announcement I was thinking about getting this Case for my next PC:
Now that is a $160 just for the case, No power supply. Now build a PC up like this, choosing quality components for each system and I think you will discover that Apple pricing won't be that far off the mark.
Apple will get some economies of scale benefits from working with Intel and these will be passed on. In an effort to boost volume, I expect apple will also relax margins a bit. So prices will be closer.
Personally I am waiting for the dust to settle to see if my next "PC" will come from Apple for the first time in 20+ years of owning computers.
Re: followup. No more Gain/Gator in Divx,.
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
I read on the Divx site that they did indeed have Gain/Gator in the 5.1 release, but they no longer do. Still I avoid them as long as there is alternative.
Any company that foists this stuff on its users, is not to be trusted with clear thinking.
Gain/Gator was a supremely offensive piece of spyware, how this escaped the Divx folks is beyond me. They currently claim that Gain was just painted with the spyware brush, but really wasn't that bad.
Ahem. It got me and I would rate it as scumbag level evil.
Slashdot Mirror
When I had it I the next big thing for me was to get a computer (C-64) and I haven't looked back. I think the games are better and cheaper on a PC.
Never had the slightest urge to get a console again.
Now that Sony is matching MS for evil, I think I would have to get a Nintendo if I did.
Everytime anything about Apple gets posted. 95% of posts are:
/. needs to just have a script generate these with each story.
Either:
1: Apple needs to free OSX for everyones crap whitebox and they will take over the world...
2: Apple really wants everyone to pirate this to see how good it is...
Really folks I think
Answering the naive majority here:
#1: Uhhh NO!. Hell you could give OSX away for free and it wouldn't make a dent. The overwhelming vast majority of people don't reinstall their OS ever, so moving the installed base off Windows is all but impossible. Further since this is where the market is, this is where the vast majority of SW is, most people will continue to buy new machines to use that majority software.
#2: See #1. This is a pointless exercise as only hardcore pirating geeks who don't buy software anyway are going to look at it. They just want to pirate OSX to add to how many OS's they can multi-boot.
What Apple is doing is the only thing that makes sense, the continue to sell a premium experience and can get better margins because of it. If they want more market share they just need to market some lower priced machines not open it up for the world to compete against them in their own space.
IMO there is every sign that once apple gets it's ducks in a row there will be lower priced machines. The mini was the first sign of that. In it's niche the PC machine is actually more expensive. Couple this with the fact that they will be able to better leverage commodity hardware and I expect decently affordable Macs. To be clear these will be the low end models, premiums will rise on the high end, if you must have the absoulte bleeding edge fastest HW for the buck a white box will be the way to go.
On the low end I will happily pay $100 more for a decent OSX/86 mac mini media center, thank you very much, and it will be my first Apple product of any type.
He pretty much said he was more on a literary track in high school. I just bet he wasn't one of those kids that took everything apart to see how it worked. He just isn't suited for engineering.
This has always been the case and is not why people are avoiding engineering these days.
Pre bubble, we largely had a crop of people following their aptitude.
During the bubble, everyone wanted in. That wasn't really good.
Post bubble, we have even lost some of those with aptitude. Why?
Buisness has presented an almost hostile attitude toward engineering staff. From outsourcing, huge tech visa quotas, to comments from the likes of Steve Balmer saying we should work for $50000 anual salary.
Utterly pointless article. Why not examine the parts cost of the software producers. You will then find they have a 99% profit margin.
RIAA and MPAA with DVD and CD?
Heck I think Apple has a pretty lousy profit margin in comparison.
Go for the eye boo, Go for the eyes!
I would gladly play old low res games that actually have gameplay value over eye candy without substance.
I have been playing CRPGs since Bards tale on the C64.
Here is my take on Dungeon Siege 2: They tried to figure out what worked in Diablo and failed. It has all the mechanics copied to the point of annoyance. Three play throughs (same story monsters have more HP each time), town portal, teleport locations, skill trees, saves now only save your state, not where you are. Done because I think they can't figure out what actually made Diablo fun. It doesn't work. Throw in some side quests on the linear road to try to inject more Roll play and that does work either. Candy coat it so it is so warm and fuzzy that you 5 year old will be comfy. Pablum RPG.
Action RPG fans of Diablo: No comparison. Diablo 2 is a much better action oriented RPG. This is boring and slow.
Story or hard core RPG: Nothing here. A few pointless sidequest departer from the strict linear game that you couldn't not make it to the end if you tried to get lost. Has nothing on Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Planescape Torment or any good single player games.
It feels like a comitee sat down and picked some elements from succesful RPGs. The result is nothing but a monster/treasure treadmill. For those folks who just want to level up and find more elite weapons endlessly. It is the "spinal tap" of RPG games, with the treasure output cranked to "11". If some treasure is good, heaping piles of it must be great. Somehow the concept of less is more never registers. If you always have tons of crap, it just plain doesn't matter. The value of something is in direct relation to it's scarcity. The best PnP games I played, you might find one magic item during a days play. But when you did find it, it was amazing.
Graphics look pretty much identical, to DS1, which is fine by me, heck they are better than Neverwinter Nights, but NWN is actually a fun game.
Bottom line, there is just a hollow shell again. They just dont' grok action RPG and they don't grok story RPG.
I think you can still buy Neverwinter Nights, or Diablo Gold if action is more your thing. Both cheaper and better.
Clearly this process is currently beyond ability to predict, so this is an adjustment, not a warming.
Furthermore, this process is too complex to be naturally occuring, so some intelligent hand must be guiding the temperature changes.
I really think they should be teaching Intelligent Thermal Control as an alternate theory is school science classes.
The only people bothering are teen l33t boys (of any age), who post things like I got to work on my boxen..., then it is back to building their collection of pirated Appz/Gamez and PrOn.
I don't see anyone seriously running their system on this. This is simply a case of "I can do it" no recomendations are going to come from this. The people who DL and install this are not going to leave behind all those wonderful windows piracy tools and start actually running OSX.
Any recommendation from this group will probably be along the lines of it doesn't have much warez available.
Here is a startling thought. Millions of people actually use a Mac with OSX every day as their main machine. They are more likely to generate buzz than a pimply faced geek who tried it for 5 minutes just to say he could get it running.
I have read many claims of getting OSX running all sounded like teenage boasts to me. No sign from anyone that they actually plan to use it.
Hey at least have the balls to call it flamebait or something. It doesn't make any sense to mod something over-rated that no one rated.
This smacks of a cowardly moderator just modding down something that he doesn't agree with and taking the cowards "over-rated" category out.
I don't give a rats ass about my karma, but at least have the stones to categorize why you are downrating.
At least the next moderator will likely have the stones to call this one flamebait.
It seems like half the comments here are along the lines of piracy will be great for Apple. I get the impression a lot of these folks think Dvorak still has a clue.
.1 % market share due to even a free OSX.
Let us think this through a bit. I am of the mind that selling the OS for generics, piracy or even giving it away for free! Will not have much positive effect on Mac market share. Reasons:
1: Statistically insignificant numbers of people change the OS that the machine came with. Plain and simple. Apples best bet for increasing market share is to sell more machines.
Why?
2: Installation is a pain, 99% of people never re-install.
Installing and maintaining multiple OS's is non trivial and is not undertaken lightly by most folks. I built my last 5 computers, install my own OS's, did dual and triple boot setups. But yet my windows is sufferring windows rot right now and I really dread the idea of doing another re-install. It is a royal PITA.
How about comparison to something else alternative:
3: Market share when something is universally acclaimed, trivial to install and Free! Firefox 10%. Think about this. The vast vast majority aren't even interested in upgrading their browser which is a trivial operation and free.
I would estimate at least 100 fold uptake in browsers over whole OS's. So at best this would gain maybe
Addressing the most tired simplistic argument:
3. Piracy worked for microsoft didn't it? Er No? Where you sleeping? Microsoft is a marketing juggernaut, that had essentially no competition. They also made sure, by hook or by crook that almost all PC's shipped with Windows. Piracy may have helped Office along, but windows was a done deal. One other tiny detail. MS wasn't facing an incumbent monopoly.
Finally the main point. Apple must sell more macs to raise market share.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, since we know once they pirate the OS, they are going to run out a buy lots of applications.
No, this is not in Apples interest and they do not want their OS pirated.
With less and less Americans are entering CompSci and Engineering, this must be sensible planning to handle the fact that sooner or later American will be run by chimps (oh wait...).
Make that tech staff will have degraded to the point they can't handle modern issues.
Next up: All traffic lights to be replaced with Stop Signs, which are much easier to build and maintain.
I can now migrate to a mac and take my SW with me. Never bought a Mac before but this has me considering it.
A Intel based mini probably won't be that expensive. We have reached the point where the vast majority of people have their needs met by the slowest machine on the market. Now we will be entering a period where the experience will matter more than the horsepower. Entry Macs will compete very well in that environment.
Though it has been years since I fired mine up, don't know if the boot floppies still work.
I remember this as the heyday for games by Psygnosis. "Shadow of the Beast" blew my mind in those days. I can still remember the flute based soundtrack.
I remember some insane vertical scroller that played syth rock and was a total blast to play.
Many years ahead of its time, but the Evil Trammel left it to stagnate.
The market for those that have equipment that can show the resolution difference of HD content is pretty small. DVD offered something for everyone, HD offers something for a tiny percentage.
Infintesimally small percentage when you factor in the ultra DRM on these machines that require DRM connections everywhere in the chain or drops back to standard DVD resolution by downsampling.
I would be a prime candidate for next generation disk, I have been completely turned off by DRM overkill. So while at first I was drooling over the possability of HD LOTR goodness, I have completely given up caring as I won't be buying in for the DRM from hell setup.
And you can bet the vast majority of people like my Mom and Grandmother who only have DVD because I bought them one will NEVER swith.
I think it is toast just like the DRMd Super Audio CDs...
It's more expensive, more restrictive, more complicated, but hey you get better quality if you have all the right gear and the planets align.
When TA came out, me and several guys at work bought it. This was in the pre-DSL days, but we had high priced ISDN modems for "working from home". We played tons of games of 2v2 with coworkers.
Those early games before we knew anything were the best. Building my first squad of brawlers (about 5) and emg'ing one of the enemy Coms to death. The abject fear when I faced my first incoming bertha strikes. The two pronged death of my ground attacks and my partners air-war-machine.
New maps and units kept us playing for at least a year. Buy far this was the best gaming dollar I every spent. I dusted it off 6 months ago and heck if I still don't think it is a barrel of fun.
I bought Dung Siege on the strength of CT's name, but it was bland. Great engine (seamless loads) but lacked any soul.
I will definitely give him another chance with this return...
Extensions are a bonus rather than a pain for me. Firefox is perfectly usable without extensions if they are that much of a bother, they are strictly a bonus.
Notice I mentioned interface issues with bookmark bar deficience and sidebar ugliness and wastefullness. Is there a cure for either?
http://www.trytel.com/~pguidry/sidebar.png
Look at all the wasted space for the side panel buttons on the Opera side panel (left) for some reason not getting favicons either.
I vastly prefer the better use of space on firefox sidebar, the favicons and the hierachical view. (opera only shows the current directory level)
I was a longtime user and I still try every version of Opera, but I never find a reason to go back and I keep finding more reasons to use firefox every day.
Funny for myself a former long time Opera user (used it from version 3.5 onward, until FF 1.0)I keep re-trying Opera, but already I am addicted to firefox features and functionality, and keep returning to Firefox.
A couple of times recently I thought I would give Opera yet another try, and I got frustrated with bookmarks both times.
First I was using it with folders on my bookmark toolbar. But when I tried middle clicking the bookmarks in folders nothing happened so I couldn't launch them in new tabs, like I can on firefox. Small thing but frustrating.
So a bit later I got into using the sidebar for bookmarks instead on Firefox, so I thought, hey this probably works on Opera. Yes now I can middle click to a new tab in Opera as well. Good. But the damn panel buttons are always there taking up space uselessly.... Grrrrrrr...
Even if it had worked to my liking, I think without extensions Opera is doomed. I love my gmail notifier, flash blocker, adblocker etc...
Opera still has some great advantages like true MDI interface and page linking. Ultra fast caching, but these are shrinking.
Integrated Torrent client... Yawn...
We have a monopoly on the desktop, that monopoly will still be going strong when most of us are dead. Changing the OS is the equivalent of building a new train locomotive, and then stating it is great, just the minor issue of running on non standard track...
No OS will make a dent on the desktop. Even much vaunted OSX would be stillborn if launched openly against windows as many (most?) people here playing armchair CEO think Steve Jobs should do by allowing it to run on generic HW.
The windows platform has multi-year history of applications and importantly devolopers, that serve to keep us all locked in.
The only people even remotely capable of switching are the same people with the skills to keep windows safe from it's achilles heel (virii and malware). I have installed Linux twice and it never achieved full functionality and even if it did, I would still be reliant on dual booting windows. So I came to a conclusion: Why waste my time and disk space configuring two OS's. Now I stick to the one I need. Windows, because I am tied to the monopoly.
Switching is damn hard. But what if it was easy?
Well look at Firefox: Massive word of mouth, massive virus problems in IE, Ad compaigns, Massive feature advantage,Free, easy to switch easy to simultaneously support both. 99% legacy compatible ( few IE only pages).
So why isn't everyone using Firefox??? People consider it a coup for firefox to get 10% market share and that is just an App. A free app that is superior in just about every way.
If nothing more than inertia, niche players will stay were they are and even regress.
And make that corporate behavior as well.
Linux is successful because of GPL. GPL is an incentive to share, you know that your sharing will result in more sharing. You know that when you contribute to GPL, you are encouraging more people to do the same. In the end you benefit as well.
There is a strong analogy with Bit Torrent. Same human nature factors. Bit Torrent works so well because of enforced sharing.
The alternative is what? The "honor system". Well that really doesn't work if you understand human nature.
The "honor system" completely opposite to the way corporations "MUST" act. Must in that if they can take it for free and give nothing back, then then must to maximize profits as they are obligated to do. GPL frees corporations of the necessity to not give anything back. There now is a case for sharing that is compatible with corporate governance.
GPL is a necessity.
Of course Piracy sounds nefarious, but we really know it is sharing and that is what we should call it.
Before the net we used to make mixed tapes for our friends. Loan them books or VHS tapes etc... Now I share TV episodes often sharing the Download effort to get multiple episodes.
I am old enough that I had pretty much bought all the CD's that I was going to own when Napster Hit the scene. I might have bought 1CD in the previous 2 years. Napster rekindled my interest in music. I bought 10 new CD's in my first year of Napstering. But after the lawsuits and my growing awareness of the way the industry operated, I have sworn to never by another RIAA supported CD.
Is this news. Microsoft mode of operation seems to be to take open standards and extend them and make the extensions proprietary. Tie in the monopoly and the extensions become defacto standards.
Then you have an open protocol turned into an owned protocol. This time though I suspect a legal approach.
MS will try to get avalanche going, then can say there is a better trusted protocol for legitimate use and now bit torrent only really serves nefarious purposes...
Yes, I experienced that too. But it wasn't one user, they had a block of machines flooding bad data with the express purpose of poisioning the torrent. But you can still get the file.
If you got the torrent from the pirate bay, they also listed the IP's to filter. After filtering those, I only had one bad IP left and Azurues automatically banned it.
After that addess was banned, I didn't have a single hash failure.
This is an interesting test. Everything is about money, so I suspect if the company responsible can get a significant reduction in number of succesful downloads, they will probably be marketing this "service" when the fall TV seasons starts.
Also there is the interesting possability that eventually they can "poison the earth", by moving ISPs and getting different blocks of IP addresses, they can get larger swaths of the IP space banned by P2P block lists, blocking more and more would be users.
Currently I note that the Peer Guardian list is at about 400Million addresses blocked. Or about 10% of the IP space.
First off, I like quality components so price is not that far different Before this announcement I was thinking about getting this Case for my next PC:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article249-page1.ht
Now that is a $160 just for the case, No power supply. Now build a PC up like this, choosing quality components for each system and I think you will discover that Apple pricing won't be that far off the mark.
Apple will get some economies of scale benefits from working with Intel and these will be passed on. In an effort to boost volume, I expect apple will also relax margins a bit. So prices will be closer.
Personally I am waiting for the dust to settle to see if my next "PC" will come from Apple for the first time in 20+ years of owning computers.
I read on the Divx site that they did indeed have Gain/Gator in the 5.1 release, but they no longer do. Still I avoid them as long as there is alternative.
Any company that foists this stuff on its users, is not to be trusted with clear thinking.
Gain/Gator was a supremely offensive piece of spyware, how this escaped the Divx folks is beyond me. They currently claim that Gain was just painted with the spyware brush, but really wasn't that bad.
Ahem. It got me and I would rate it as scumbag level evil.