Three words concerning that ad campaign: Oh. My. $DEITY. It's as if they wanted to say: "Hey, we don't have arguments but just look at these pictures. Do you see that? Stalin, 9/11? That's what we fight against. You don't want commie terrorists to run this country, do you?"
Note that my wise-ass shot was elaborately set up, mimicked the story and played on Microsoft behaviour that is funny all by itself (announcing Vista to have a lot of exciting features only to drop them one after another). Towards the end it even dipped into the realm of the absurd and it contained a small jab at the Apple crowd by portraying them as them snobbish enough to declare that even their version number jumps are better.
Your shot at Apple was basically a reiteration of the age-old "Mac users are teh arrogant", followed by rather crude comments about their brand worship. The key to making a flame enjoyable to read is to make it humorous and somewhat fitting, without emphasizing the insult. People like jokes at other people's expense, but they rarely find pure insults entertaining.
The Linux joke is much better than the Apple flame - it's much less insulting and most Linux users can relate to what you talked about.
There is a difference between "your operating system is difficult to set up, you know" and "you're an asshole and you jerk off to anything Apple makes" and it's the exact difference between your shots at Linux and Apple users, respectively.
Redmond - In a surprising turn of events Microsoft held a press conference yesterday stating that Windows Vista will not support the 32 bit mode of Intel 80386 and compatible processors. When asked about why this feature was left out from the release lead coder Alfred E. Newman replied: "We felt that 32 bit support was just not ready for Vista. The NT line of operating systems is still too cutting-edge to be used in the productivity powerhouse that Vista is going to be." Instead, Microsoft will deploy a new version of MS-DOS as the operating system's foundation. The new DOS, called "MS-DOS 2006" will feature improved support for TSRs and the capability of automatically loading supporting programs directly into extended memory, allowing it to have all 640 kilobyte of conventional memory ready for applications that depend on it.
Microsoft promised that all other proposed Vista features (except for those already canceled) will "have a chance of making it into Vista". When asked about whether customers coud be expected to put up with Vista's proposed 480 installation floppies Newman replied: "What, me worry?"
The new decision was universally met with conetempt within the Apple world. "They think that pushing the MS-DOS version number from 7 to 2007 is a big step," Random MacGeek from AppleRumorsUpYourButt.com commented, "but we clearly had the biggest version number jump when Bungie went from Marathon 2 to Marathon: Infinity. Microsoft is late to the game, as always."
When asked about the topic of Microsoft being late to the game Apple replied: "It's true! Microsoft promides to buy me and GNU here a beer at the game. Now it's halfway over and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen!" "We're not going to invite Microsoft to the next game," GNU added, "we have better things to do with our time than to spend it waiting for some guy from Redmond."
VMWare is great, but there are some things it just can't do. DirectX, for example. (Yes, I know that there is experimental DX support, but it's too incomplete to be of any use).
Come on, support for optical drives? Or even networking? Do you have an idea how long it takes to load drivers for every single NIC ever produced? Because that's what you have to do in order to support networking from a boot CD - at least it appears that Microsoft is thinking like that. I'd really appreciate them to finally discover hardware detection and put that on the boot CD.
And for the installation not mysteriously hanging when executed on my system, leaving me unable to fix my Windows for the new mainboard.
LaForge is currently busy running a level three disgnostic on the deflector shield. He thinks it's possible that Captain Janeway might have appeared from the future and reconfigured it to emit a focused tetrion beam. She likes doing that.
Another way to take a huge bite out of crime and terrorism would be a Stasi rehash. In case you are not familiar with German history, the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit/Ministry of State Security) was the East German secret police and intelligence agency. The Stasi had a lot of inofficial collaborators - an estimated number of 300.000. Essentially you didn't know who was watching you but someone probably did. If you did something that was not compatible with the Party line you had a talk with some unfriendly people faster than you could say "I have no privacy".
Why did the system work so well? Because nobody had any privacy. You could never tell whether the phone was tapped and whether the old lady next door wasn't busy writing reports about you. Everything you did was on file.
If you want to kill privacy in favor of possible security at least do it in a way that has a somewhat significant chance of actually giving you that security. And stop talking about this freedom bullshit. You know that freedom went down the drain quite some time ago.
Not much better than a country where the Powers That Be can just pretty much invalidate fair use and make the rest of the world implement similar laws.
When questioned as to why they didn't discover the species the other team members answered as follows:
German: *did not answer as he was too busy standing in front of the American member waving a "war is evil" flag* Japanese: "The only marine animal I'm interested in is my clashell mobile." Canadian: "Can't even take a beer break, eh?" Chinese: "Sorry, I was just busy hiding behind my firewall. However, last week we found this interesting smear on our tank treads after we rolled across that square..." English: "Well, I certainly would've, but our American fellow did - most unsportsmanlike, as I might add - dive even though it was definitely teatime. What a ruffian. Pip pip." Korean: "In my country only old people dive. Besides, I was busy continuing some age-old and mostly pointless arguments with the Japanese member." Russian: "I'm kind of surprised, really. Up until now we have just waited for the new species to find us, that worked quite well. Maybe this ocean just isn't communist enough. Next time we'll try it in the Red Sea." Steve Ballmer: "Yeah, why didn't I find that crab? I tell you why: It hid from me because it works for Google! I'm going to fucking bury that crab, I have done it before, and I will do it again! I'm going to fucking kill Kiwa hirsuta!"
...which is a compiler. It does not matter whether you compile to machine code, to your own bytecode or to C. A compiler just translates stuff from language A to language B.
If you know your way around PHP it's good for much more. PHP makes for a decent shell scripting language if you don't care about the scripts being somewhat quick and dirty. Implementational quickness is one of PHP's key features as 90% of the language are syntactic sugar (with the other 10% mostly being C sytax). It's not exactly the fastest language but for shell scripts it's usually fast enough.
And anyone who's a serious C++/Java programmer doesn't think that C# is for morons, it's just a bit different, but still the same thing./em>
You know, that's not what makes C# such an easy target for snobbery. C++ coders laugh about what C# calls performance and Java coders wave a dictionary around and say: "We have this thing called 'por-ta-bili-ty', you might want to look it up."
So actually, yeah, the snobs think that it's for morons, but not because the language is easy. (But yeah, not everyone is a snob. Besides, true snobs see C++ and Java as FORTRAN for kids anyway.)
While I don't neccesarily agree with the notion that the American legal system has to be dismantled the parent is right in one regard: If the government becomes capable of making it impossible to organize an armed revolt the Constitution has pretty much failed. The Second Amendment was put in there for a reason and that reason is not "so people can use.50 cal. anti-materiel rifles to defend themselves against suspected burglars".
When I'm driving through town with my brother (usually because he needs to buy something - I have infinitely more driver's licenses than him) and we see a bunch of oh-so-tough boys hanging arouns we sometimes turn the radio to the classic station, the volume up and the windows down. Then we slowly drive by looking tough.
Sounds great. Regular OOo is not an option for OS X as it relies on X11 and NeoOffice is dog slow. If KOffice 2.0 will have a native interface and not run in slow motion I'll throw away NeoOffice in an instant. No more conversations like this: "Could you please look up that value for me?" - "Sure. let me just start NeoOffice... Wait, it's loading. Don't go away. It's almost there. There, it has opened a window, see? Now I'll just open the file and wait a couple seconds... There it is. Hey, where have you gone? Hello?"
Good question. The one I play in was founded by me and a couple guys scattered all across Germany who couldn't find a local group either. If you know people who like to roleplay and who don't have anyone to roleplay with but who are too far away to meet in the real world you might be able to start a channel. If you don't... Hmm, forums? If you are in some kind of forum-based web community it might be a good idea to just start a thread.
I know that there are things you can do with mobiles; the Japanese are quite busy finding a lot of applications for i-mode. I still find most of them silly (especially sport information, but then again I find organized sport as a whole silly).
When I read comments like "we really love XHTML, but we can't offer full support so we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist. And hey, look! We now support 50% of CSS2! Hurray for IE's great CSS support" I start doubting that they are that committed to bringing Trident on par with the other renderers. Seriously, they should just buy a sourcecode copy of Opera's renderer along with all rights and only include Trident for legacy support, using the Opera renderer as the new codebase. Or port Tasman (the rendering engine used by IE5/Mac), for which they obviously already hold the rights, to Windows.
My opinion is that trying to bring Trident up to snuff would be like taking DR-DOS and trying to turn it into a modrn operating system. Rebuilding or replacing the thing wholesale might just be the better option. And maybe they underestimated the time it takes to bring a product that was obsolete when it went gold five years ago up to date.
NOTE: I called MSHTML "Triton" in my earlier post. The correct name is "Trident".
They DO listen to their customers. If they didn't they wouldn't try to get rid of ODF. Microsoft knows what the customers want and how much they can leave out and still get away with it. Example: IE 7. Is IE 7 vastly improved? The UI is, because Opera and Firefox are luring people away with things like tabbed browsing. But Triton (aka MSHTML) was only marginally improved because Microsoft know that people will care more about a snazzy UI than about web standards and that improved-but-still-partial CSS2 support is enough to appease the crowd.
As for the question for who gets away with that: A monopolist. Control the market and you can dictate what people will put up with.
Oh, I like the fact that it's not a clamshell. Firstly it makes the thing more robust, secondly it underlines the thing's simplicity. I associate clamshell mobiles with built-in cameras and similar nonsense.
Yu are right about the 6210 being lighter and having a better battery. Especially one that desn't die more often than Kenny McCormick. We still have two 3210 replacement batteries somewhere.
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Three words concerning that ad campaign: Oh. My. $DEITY. It's as if they wanted to say: "Hey, we don't have arguments but just look at these pictures. Do you see that? Stalin, 9/11? That's what we fight against. You don't want commie terrorists to run this country, do you?"
This just yells "UNPROFESSIONALISM".
Note that my wise-ass shot was elaborately set up, mimicked the story and played on Microsoft behaviour that is funny all by itself (announcing Vista to have a lot of exciting features only to drop them one after another). Towards the end it even dipped into the realm of the absurd and it contained a small jab at the Apple crowd by portraying them as them snobbish enough to declare that even their version number jumps are better.
Your shot at Apple was basically a reiteration of the age-old "Mac users are teh arrogant", followed by rather crude comments about their brand worship. The key to making a flame enjoyable to read is to make it humorous and somewhat fitting, without emphasizing the insult. People like jokes at other people's expense, but they rarely find pure insults entertaining.
The Linux joke is much better than the Apple flame - it's much less insulting and most Linux users can relate to what you talked about.
There is a difference between "your operating system is difficult to set up, you know" and "you're an asshole and you jerk off to anything Apple makes" and it's the exact difference between your shots at Linux and Apple users, respectively.
Redmond - In a surprising turn of events Microsoft held a press conference yesterday stating that Windows Vista will not support the 32 bit mode of Intel 80386 and compatible processors. When asked about why this feature was left out from the release lead coder Alfred E. Newman replied: "We felt that 32 bit support was just not ready for Vista. The NT line of operating systems is still too cutting-edge to be used in the productivity powerhouse that Vista is going to be." Instead, Microsoft will deploy a new version of MS-DOS as the operating system's foundation. The new DOS, called "MS-DOS 2006" will feature improved support for TSRs and the capability of automatically loading supporting programs directly into extended memory, allowing it to have all 640 kilobyte of conventional memory ready for applications that depend on it.
Microsoft promised that all other proposed Vista features (except for those already canceled) will "have a chance of making it into Vista". When asked about whether customers coud be expected to put up with Vista's proposed 480 installation floppies Newman replied: "What, me worry?"
The new decision was universally met with conetempt within the Apple world. "They think that pushing the MS-DOS version number from 7 to 2007 is a big step," Random MacGeek from AppleRumorsUpYourButt.com commented, "but we clearly had the biggest version number jump when Bungie went from Marathon 2 to Marathon: Infinity. Microsoft is late to the game, as always."
When asked about the topic of Microsoft being late to the game Apple replied: "It's true! Microsoft promides to buy me and GNU here a beer at the game. Now it's halfway over and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen!" "We're not going to invite Microsoft to the next game," GNU added, "we have better things to do with our time than to spend it waiting for some guy from Redmond."
VMWare is great, but there are some things it just can't do. DirectX, for example. (Yes, I know that there is experimental DX support, but it's too incomplete to be of any use).
Come on, support for optical drives? Or even networking? Do you have an idea how long it takes to load drivers for every single NIC ever produced? Because that's what you have to do in order to support networking from a boot CD - at least it appears that Microsoft is thinking like that. I'd really appreciate them to finally discover hardware detection and put that on the boot CD.
And for the installation not mysteriously hanging when executed on my system, leaving me unable to fix my Windows for the new mainboard.
LaForge is currently busy running a level three disgnostic on the deflector shield. He thinks it's possible that Captain Janeway might have appeared from the future and reconfigured it to emit a focused tetrion beam. She likes doing that.
Sounds like a cool band name...
Another way to take a huge bite out of crime and terrorism would be a Stasi rehash. In case you are not familiar with German history, the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit/Ministry of State Security) was the East German secret police and intelligence agency. The Stasi had a lot of inofficial collaborators - an estimated number of 300.000. Essentially you didn't know who was watching you but someone probably did. If you did something that was not compatible with the Party line you had a talk with some unfriendly people faster than you could say "I have no privacy".
Why did the system work so well? Because nobody had any privacy. You could never tell whether the phone was tapped and whether the old lady next door wasn't busy writing reports about you. Everything you did was on file.
If you want to kill privacy in favor of possible security at least do it in a way that has a somewhat significant chance of actually giving you that security. And stop talking about this freedom bullshit. You know that freedom went down the drain quite some time ago.
Not much better than a country where the Powers That Be can just pretty much invalidate fair use and make the rest of the world implement similar laws.
Shutupshutupshutup! If we're not careful they might put Jar Jar Binks into the next bin Laden video!
When questioned as to why they didn't discover the species the other team members answered as follows:
German: *did not answer as he was too busy standing in front of the American member waving a "war is evil" flag*
Japanese: "The only marine animal I'm interested in is my clashell mobile."
Canadian: "Can't even take a beer break, eh?"
Chinese: "Sorry, I was just busy hiding behind my firewall. However, last week we found this interesting smear on our tank treads after we rolled across that square..."
English: "Well, I certainly would've, but our American fellow did - most unsportsmanlike, as I might add - dive even though it was definitely teatime. What a ruffian. Pip pip."
Korean: "In my country only old people dive. Besides, I was busy continuing some age-old and mostly pointless arguments with the Japanese member."
Russian: "I'm kind of surprised, really. Up until now we have just waited for the new species to find us, that worked quite well. Maybe this ocean just isn't communist enough. Next time we'll try it in the Red Sea."
Steve Ballmer: "Yeah, why didn't I find that crab? I tell you why: It hid from me because it works for Google! I'm going to fucking bury that crab, I have done it before, and I will do it again! I'm going to fucking kill Kiwa hirsuta!"
I think it's great that what one man finds erotic the next one can find hilarious. I got a good chuckle out of that picture.
...which is a compiler. It does not matter whether you compile to machine code, to your own bytecode or to C. A compiler just translates stuff from language A to language B.
PHP is for dynamic web pages.
If you know your way around PHP it's good for much more. PHP makes for a decent shell scripting language if you don't care about the scripts being somewhat quick and dirty. Implementational quickness is one of PHP's key features as 90% of the language are syntactic sugar (with the other 10% mostly being C sytax). It's not exactly the fastest language but for shell scripts it's usually fast enough.
I always knew it: C++ is just Haskell with a dumbed down interface. ;)
And anyone who's a serious C++/Java programmer doesn't think that C# is for morons, it's just a bit different, but still the same thing./em>
You know, that's not what makes C# such an easy target for snobbery. C++ coders laugh about what C# calls performance and Java coders wave a dictionary around and say: "We have this thing called 'por-ta-bili-ty', you might want to look it up."
So actually, yeah, the snobs think that it's for morons, but not because the language is easy. (But yeah, not everyone is a snob. Besides, true snobs see C++ and Java as FORTRAN for kids anyway.)
While I don't neccesarily agree with the notion that the American legal system has to be dismantled the parent is right in one regard: If the government becomes capable of making it impossible to organize an armed revolt the Constitution has pretty much failed. The Second Amendment was put in there for a reason and that reason is not "so people can use .50 cal. anti-materiel rifles to defend themselves against suspected burglars".
When I'm driving through town with my brother (usually because he needs to buy something - I have infinitely more driver's licenses than him) and we see a bunch of oh-so-tough boys hanging arouns we sometimes turn the radio to the classic station, the volume up and the windows down. Then we slowly drive by looking tough.
Sounds great. Regular OOo is not an option for OS X as it relies on X11 and NeoOffice is dog slow. If KOffice 2.0 will have a native interface and not run in slow motion I'll throw away NeoOffice in an instant. No more conversations like this: "Could you please look up that value for me?" - "Sure. let me just start NeoOffice... Wait, it's loading. Don't go away. It's almost there. There, it has opened a window, see? Now I'll just open the file and wait a couple seconds... There it is. Hey, where have you gone? Hello?"
Good question. The one I play in was founded by me and a couple guys scattered all across Germany who couldn't find a local group either. If you know people who like to roleplay and who don't have anyone to roleplay with but who are too far away to meet in the real world you might be able to start a channel. If you don't... Hmm, forums? If you are in some kind of forum-based web community it might be a good idea to just start a thread.
I know that there are things you can do with mobiles; the Japanese are quite busy finding a lot of applications for i-mode. I still find most of them silly (especially sport information, but then again I find organized sport as a whole silly).
When I read comments like "we really love XHTML, but we can't offer full support so we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist. And hey, look! We now support 50% of CSS2! Hurray for IE's great CSS support" I start doubting that they are that committed to bringing Trident on par with the other renderers. Seriously, they should just buy a sourcecode copy of Opera's renderer along with all rights and only include Trident for legacy support, using the Opera renderer as the new codebase. Or port Tasman (the rendering engine used by IE5/Mac), for which they obviously already hold the rights, to Windows.
My opinion is that trying to bring Trident up to snuff would be like taking DR-DOS and trying to turn it into a modrn operating system. Rebuilding or replacing the thing wholesale might just be the better option. And maybe they underestimated the time it takes to bring a product that was obsolete when it went gold five years ago up to date.
NOTE: I called MSHTML "Triton" in my earlier post. The correct name is "Trident".
They DO listen to their customers. If they didn't they wouldn't try to get rid of ODF. Microsoft knows what the customers want and how much they can leave out and still get away with it. Example: IE 7. Is IE 7 vastly improved? The UI is, because Opera and Firefox are luring people away with things like tabbed browsing. But Triton (aka MSHTML) was only marginally improved because Microsoft know that people will care more about a snazzy UI than about web standards and that improved-but-still-partial CSS2 support is enough to appease the crowd.
As for the question for who gets away with that: A monopolist. Control the market and you can dictate what people will put up with.
Oh, I like the fact that it's not a clamshell. Firstly it makes the thing more robust, secondly it underlines the thing's simplicity. I associate clamshell mobiles with built-in cameras and similar nonsense.
Yu are right about the 6210 being lighter and having a better battery. Especially one that desn't die more often than Kenny McCormick. We still have two 3210 replacement batteries somewhere.
Only until IE 7 comes out.