I have an iBook too, and it runs at a reasonable temperature... But I have heard and read comments and complaints about the heat of Titanium and Aluminum Powerbooks since they were first introduced .
... But, while the number of games may decrease, the quality certainly won't. The best games (or music, or movies) will always find a paying audience. The mediocre, well...
Anyway, Blizzard (and others, of course, but they're the ones who got me) have one good answer to the piracy problem: require a registered serial number (not used by anyone else, of course) to play online. I got hooked on an, ahem, "found" copy of Starcraft and after I went through all the solo missions, I went out and bought the game so I could get on Battle.net. And I did the same a few years later with Warcraft 3. Yes, my values are a bit questionable, but here's a case where the, uh, "borrowed" copies netted them two sales.
75% Windows hits would actually be pretty low, considering most sites would have 15-20% more.
"Hits" doesn't represent the community, as you know. How many hundreds of thousands of people browse every day, and don't post or post snide comments as AC?
Now, if we could see the OS and browser of members in profiles/comments... THAT would be telling.
... If George Lucas would've learned something from his good friend Steven Spielberg. Make movies, don't muck around with your old ones (well, muck around as little as possible, I'm aware of the E.T. walkie talkies. Something tells me Spielberg didn't put in a fraction of the effort coming up with that.) Do something new every now and then. Take your skills and knowledge and try and tell a good story, maybe even break away from science fiction a bit. I know he had it in him at one point, American Graffiti's a great movie.
But I guess Lucas isn't a director at heart. If he was, he would've directed Empire and Return. He likes his special effects and he's good at them-- the last two movies felt more like advertisements for Industrial Light and Magic than labors of love.
Though to his credit, the Star Wars video games have generally been great... Fun, well-made, darker and more true to the promise of Star Wars than any of the movie's sequels have been.
(No, I didn't call it "Episode IV" or "A New Hope." I still call the first one Star Wars. The eight-year-old me would've wanted it that way.)
All economic models are failures. Not one has ever worked as advertised. Why? They forgot the most important variable: human greed! If you quantify that and put it into their formulas, they blow up. Thats why capitalism is having a hard time, monatarism failed as did communism.
And then there's the other six deadly sins... Pride and envy and sloth and all that.
Greed is a huge wrench in the system. But there are other facets of human nature to be considered too. There are some who are born to lead, and some who can't make a decision for themselves. There are some who are naturally gifted at the trades we need, others who can't handle a simple task. No economic model can ever truly succeed for every person, because we're all too different and our skills and abilities to contribute are too scatterered. The best we can hope for is a the hope of upward mobility for those who truly work for and deserve it, and some sort of safety net for those who don't have a chance.
You're assuming that everyone is an audiophile. Most people are casual listeners and casual buyers-- get a song in your head, buy it for a buck, listen to it in your car a couple times and eventually lose it in the shuffle. Or they really want to play a certain song at their party, or they need it for a mix tape for a friend... Etc.
Most people aren't "stupid", as you claim, as much as they would rather take convenience over the absolute best quality. Which is a bad idea when buying a car or a computer, but makes sense when buying a song they'll only listen to a few times. Yes, the sound is a little worse-- I think that's common knowledge. So what? There were plenty of people buying cassette tapes in the 70's and early 80's-- the quality was awful compared to vinyl, buy they were easy to pop in the car stereo, easy to copy and mix, easy to put in a dual-cassette deck and let play without getting up to turn the record over.
And you're missing one point of why iTunes is so popular... You can buy it by the track. It's actually a throwback to the '45s of yesterday. Of course it's foolish to pay $15 for a full CD on iTunes when you can own the physical object at better quality... But what if you're only buying it for the hit, and have no interest in the other tracks? Fifteen dollars for a "mix tape" of songs you know you want (and get instantly, I should add) is a bargain, considering the alternative ten years ago was buying fifteen full CDs...!
Ease of use isn't just the OS, but the fact you don't need to fuck with the hardware. Certain geeks don't get this because they like working with the hardware and don't think that taking a work machine down for a few hours just to throw something new into it isn't a bad thing. I have friends that do the same thing to their cars...I helped a guy change out a perfectly good carb the other day for one that worked slightly better (he wanted one that didn't deal with having to calibrate dual webers ever few weeks -- even though I had the same ones in my vintage car and *NEVER* fucked with the carbs).
The parent is also assuming you'll always be using your home machine, which just isn't the case for many editors, animators, audio pros and graphic designers. I'll typically work both at home and out of two or three production houses a year. I can sit down at any Mac system and pretty much be ready to go that day-- I couldn't imagine the PITA it would be if I had to figure out what all the mods, hacks and tweaks were in a customized and "optimized" PC.
Isn't one reason why Google won the search engine wars (besides the speed and simplicity, of course) the fact that they didn't sell rankings to the highest bidder? Better to have the ads on the side than have to wade through ten pages of bought search results...
Google ads are a good thing. Well, they're not great, but they beat the alternative. And they do work, many small companies do a tremendous amount of business through them.
I'm making a big assumption here... But I think Slashdotters are more pissed off about being shut off from information than missing the games themselves.
Now these books will appear on every god damn P2P network out there.
With titles like "Take Control of Email with Apple Mail" and "Take Control of What's New in Entourage 2004", I seriously doubt there're many P2P users interested in the titles. If they can figure out how to access the networks in OSX (which takes a bit more savviness than downloading Kazaa for Windows) they probably have enough knowledge to "master" their e-mail programs. (Who's using Entourage anymore, anyway? I didn't know they even updated it!)
Anyone else think these books are overpriced, considering the low-level topics? Ten dollars for an electronic pamphlet on how to share files in Panther? I just bought a three hundred page (real) book on DVD Studio Pro for twenty!
Anyway... May be hard for you to believe, but some of us buy a computer based on, say, our fucking careers. If you're in a creative field, you'll probably use a Mac. That's just the way it is, it's a better experience, and if you don't understand why that us, that's fine. I wouldn't expect you to justify your choice of system to me.
Oh, and the "30% markup" is only for those who must buy the latest and greatest from the Apple store at the mall. If you can stomach the idea of buying last year's latest-and-greatest from a reseller like Powermax or Smalldog, you can get amazing deals. Not that you should buy one, I could care less if you use a Mac.
is how craigslist is a virtual hook-up community, as well. If you want no strings attached sex and can host, you have a good chance of meeting someone to fuck in the major metro area of your choice.
Amazing how everyone calling "bullshit" assumes you're talking only about heterosexual encounters. Craigslist, at least in L.A., is the biggest gay hookup going right now. Let me toss a few sample ads at you--
let's do happy hour j/o bud wanted for 7pm today! - 38 (beverly and fairfax)
HUNGRY THROATER...in Hollywood in need of cocks to SUK - 34 (hollywood)
Hot tub, 420, j/o, RELAX!!!!!!! - 25 (brentwood)
New to area, lookin for 420, straight actn, fun buddies who live near! - 38 (West Los Angeles)
Hung TS will massage you - 25 (oc)
LET'S MAKE A DEAL - 42 (North Hollywood)
looking for leather - 40 (west hollywood)
Top Dad, 61, needs hungry bottoms - 61 (Hollywood)
Needing a free massage tonight - 33 (West Hollywood)
But do you need this technology to record AM radio shows? (couldn't RTFA, of course, I'm going on context...)
I mean, the sound qualiy is so minimal, you can use any of a number of low-tech workarounds to capture shows (including, and I know it's bulky but it works, recording the audio to say, a minidisc, cassette or-- for long shows, to use the timer-- VCR tape and importing it.) I also find that many AM stations have Reaplayer streams (and if they don't, another station in another city will.) Yeah, the apps that would rip a stream to mp3 are long gone, but there are ways around that too...
The T-800 were open source (free as in speech, as opposed to free as in beer, that's a saying I like to use whenever possible.) That turned out to be a huge mistake, however, because John Conner and the other humans simply copied the code and started to compile their own. T-1000 and subsequent models were closed source, proprietary and loaded with spyware.
Oh, and I believe Skynet is actually the natural evolution of Apple's iApps. The next generation will make everything so easy, and handle so many mundane details of their users' lives, that the computers will begin to assume that humans are helpless morons.
But then I came to my senses. Of course this kind of thing would never replace traditional animation. After all, you'd still have to have actors enact the scenes to be animated, the backgrounds would have to be set up or altered, etc. Setting up a shoot of a scene to be animated could end up being more of a PITA than just animating it to begin with. Though the end result could be a cool rotoscope/Waking Life effect, it's not a "cheat" to get an animated feature without the tedious work of animating.
From what I understand, you can't actually go and buy Google shares. They're slowly giving them out to prominent bloggers. Though they'll probably end up for sale on eBay soon enough.
As to the folks who seem to think that domains such as jerryfalwellsucks.com doesn't infringe on anything, you're missing one of the points being made in this frontier of the law - Jerry Falwell is a person and domains like the above make a statement about a person.
Jerry Falwell's not just a person, he's a very public figure. A website named after an average guy, listing all the reasons why he "sucks" is clearly out-of-line. (I always thought Steve Bartman could've had a field day suing all the sites like this, as well as media outlets who broadcast his name and address across the world.)
But politicians and celebrities (especially those who are very vocal with polarizing viewpoints and who hold a lot of sway and influence over a large group of people) are fair game for public criticism. Falwell.com is misleading and actionable, but "Falwellsucks.com" would very much have a right to exist.
Re:A good start, a long way to go.
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Also, it should be pointed out that not everyone in prison is a violent criminal. Many, for example, are otherwise "ordinary" folks who are there for using drugs. Our courts are wildly and completely random when it comes to sentencing recreational drug users (and I'm not even talking about dealers, that's more of a grey area), and what may be three months probation and an order to attend rehab for one person in one court in one city may be a five-year sentence in another.
His much publicised tactics had less to do with crime than the booming economy did. The chain gangs, pink underwear and hired thugs for jail staff didn't do diddley squat when the dot com bubble burst and jobs started getting scarce.
So... Your saying all the Dot Commers who rode scooters around the offices and played vintage Galaga machines all day ended up as violent criminals?
Slashdot Mirror
... Just like The New York Times site has over fifty million registered users?
Note: figure completely made up.
I have an iBook too, and it runs at a reasonable temperature... But I have heard and read comments and complaints about the heat of Titanium and Aluminum Powerbooks since they were first introduced .
... But, while the number of games may decrease, the quality certainly won't. The best games (or music, or movies) will always find a paying audience. The mediocre, well...
Anyway, Blizzard (and others, of course, but they're the ones who got me) have one good answer to the piracy problem: require a registered serial number (not used by anyone else, of course) to play online. I got hooked on an, ahem, "found" copy of Starcraft and after I went through all the solo missions, I went out and bought the game so I could get on Battle.net. And I did the same a few years later with Warcraft 3. Yes, my values are a bit questionable, but here's a case where the, uh, "borrowed" copies netted them two sales.
75% Windows hits would actually be pretty low, considering most sites would have 15-20% more.
"Hits" doesn't represent the community, as you know. How many hundreds of thousands of people browse every day, and don't post or post snide comments as AC?
Now, if we could see the OS and browser of members in profiles/comments... THAT would be telling.
... Is very often the other Mac users.
... If George Lucas would've learned something from his good friend Steven Spielberg. Make movies, don't muck around with your old ones (well, muck around as little as possible, I'm aware of the E.T. walkie talkies. Something tells me Spielberg didn't put in a fraction of the effort coming up with that.) Do something new every now and then. Take your skills and knowledge and try and tell a good story, maybe even break away from science fiction a bit. I know he had it in him at one point, American Graffiti's a great movie.
But I guess Lucas isn't a director at heart. If he was, he would've directed Empire and Return. He likes his special effects and he's good at them-- the last two movies felt more like advertisements for Industrial Light and Magic than labors of love.
Though to his credit, the Star Wars video games have generally been great... Fun, well-made, darker and more true to the promise of Star Wars than any of the movie's sequels have been.
(No, I didn't call it "Episode IV" or "A New Hope." I still call the first one Star Wars. The eight-year-old me would've wanted it that way.)
All economic models are failures. Not one has ever worked as advertised. Why? They forgot the most important variable: human greed! If you quantify that and put it into their formulas, they blow up. Thats why capitalism is having a hard time, monatarism failed as did communism. And then there's the other six deadly sins... Pride and envy and sloth and all that. Greed is a huge wrench in the system. But there are other facets of human nature to be considered too. There are some who are born to lead, and some who can't make a decision for themselves. There are some who are naturally gifted at the trades we need, others who can't handle a simple task. No economic model can ever truly succeed for every person, because we're all too different and our skills and abilities to contribute are too scatterered. The best we can hope for is a the hope of upward mobility for those who truly work for and deserve it, and some sort of safety net for those who don't have a chance.
You're assuming that everyone is an audiophile. Most people are casual listeners and casual buyers-- get a song in your head, buy it for a buck, listen to it in your car a couple times and eventually lose it in the shuffle. Or they really want to play a certain song at their party, or they need it for a mix tape for a friend... Etc.
Most people aren't "stupid", as you claim, as much as they would rather take convenience over the absolute best quality. Which is a bad idea when buying a car or a computer, but makes sense when buying a song they'll only listen to a few times. Yes, the sound is a little worse-- I think that's common knowledge. So what? There were plenty of people buying cassette tapes in the 70's and early 80's-- the quality was awful compared to vinyl, buy they were easy to pop in the car stereo, easy to copy and mix, easy to put in a dual-cassette deck and let play without getting up to turn the record over.
And you're missing one point of why iTunes is so popular... You can buy it by the track. It's actually a throwback to the '45s of yesterday. Of course it's foolish to pay $15 for a full CD on iTunes when you can own the physical object at better quality... But what if you're only buying it for the hit, and have no interest in the other tracks? Fifteen dollars for a "mix tape" of songs you know you want (and get instantly, I should add) is a bargain, considering the alternative ten years ago was buying fifteen full CDs...!
I'm a non-technical type, and I use IE 6 exclusively. I find it laughable that people would use that Mozilla 1.7 thing when IE is clearly 4.3 better.
Though I do plan to switch to Netscape because it is, of course, 1.2 better than IE.
Ease of use isn't just the OS, but the fact you don't need to fuck with the hardware. Certain geeks don't get this because they like working with the hardware and don't think that taking a work machine down for a few hours just to throw something new into it isn't a bad thing. I have friends that do the same thing to their cars...I helped a guy change out a perfectly good carb the other day for one that worked slightly better (he wanted one that didn't deal with having to calibrate dual webers ever few weeks -- even though I had the same ones in my vintage car and *NEVER* fucked with the carbs).
The parent is also assuming you'll always be using your home machine, which just isn't the case for many editors, animators, audio pros and graphic designers. I'll typically work both at home and out of two or three production houses a year. I can sit down at any Mac system and pretty much be ready to go that day-- I couldn't imagine the PITA it would be if I had to figure out what all the mods, hacks and tweaks were in a customized and "optimized" PC.
I have the feeling it's not easy for a third-world citizen who makes a dollar a day to get someone to finance them a loan...
You don't think buying a higher ranking in a search engine is an ad?
Isn't one reason why Google won the search engine wars (besides the speed and simplicity, of course) the fact that they didn't sell rankings to the highest bidder? Better to have the ads on the side than have to wade through ten pages of bought search results...
Google ads are a good thing. Well, they're not great, but they beat the alternative. And they do work, many small companies do a tremendous amount of business through them.
I'm making a big assumption here... But I think Slashdotters are more pissed off about being shut off from information than missing the games themselves.
It also had a lot to do with SNES "cleaning up" violent games. You could see blood and exploding skulls on Genesis games, not so on SNES.
Now these books will appear on every god damn P2P network out there.
With titles like "Take Control of Email with Apple Mail" and "Take Control of What's New in Entourage 2004", I seriously doubt there're many P2P users interested in the titles. If they can figure out how to access the networks in OSX (which takes a bit more savviness than downloading Kazaa for Windows) they probably have enough knowledge to "master" their e-mail programs. (Who's using Entourage anymore, anyway? I didn't know they even updated it!)
Anyone else think these books are overpriced, considering the low-level topics? Ten dollars for an electronic pamphlet on how to share files in Panther? I just bought a three hundred page (real) book on DVD Studio Pro for twenty!
How'd this troll get marked up to "interesting?"
Anyway... May be hard for you to believe, but some of us buy a computer based on, say, our fucking careers. If you're in a creative field, you'll probably use a Mac. That's just the way it is, it's a better experience, and if you don't understand why that us, that's fine. I wouldn't expect you to justify your choice of system to me.
Oh, and the "30% markup" is only for those who must buy the latest and greatest from the Apple store at the mall. If you can stomach the idea of buying last year's latest-and-greatest from a reseller like Powermax or Smalldog, you can get amazing deals. Not that you should buy one, I could care less if you use a Mac.
is how craigslist is a virtual hook-up community, as well. If you want no strings attached sex and can host, you have a good chance of meeting someone to fuck in the major metro area of your choice.
... And this isn't even half of the ads posted by 5:30 PM today.
Amazing how everyone calling "bullshit" assumes you're talking only about heterosexual encounters. Craigslist, at least in L.A., is the biggest gay hookup going right now. Let me toss a few sample ads at you--
let's do happy hour j/o bud wanted for 7pm today! - 38 (beverly and fairfax)
HUNGRY THROATER...in Hollywood in need of cocks to SUK - 34 (hollywood)
Hot tub, 420, j/o, RELAX!!!!!!! - 25 (brentwood)
New to area, lookin for 420, straight actn, fun buddies who live near! - 38 (West Los Angeles)
Hung TS will massage you - 25 (oc)
LET'S MAKE A DEAL - 42 (North Hollywood)
looking for leather - 40 (west hollywood)
Top Dad, 61, needs hungry bottoms - 61 (Hollywood)
Needing a free massage tonight - 33 (West Hollywood)
MASC DADDY LKNG 4 HOT, YNG COCKSUCKER - 49 (W. HWD)
super hot, hung huge stud lookin to play with the same tonight - 30 (hollywood)
LETS ALL GO TO THE BEST NUDE BEACH THIS SUNDAY - 44 (W.L.A.,S.D.)
I suck Mexican cock
Hard thick top looking to impale a young lean hottie... - 28 (Valley / Hollywood / +)
Make me gulp it - 34 (West L.A. area)
24m athlete seeks friends or more - 24 (los angeles/downtown la)
looking for a legit deep tissue massage this afternoon - 38 (sherman oaks)
Bimale looking friendship and fun - 31 (Valley)
HANCOCK PARK JERK OFF SESSION - 26 (Hancock Park)
Foot Sucker, Licker, Fucker HERE - 38 (VALLEY)
Handsome Black Man In Need of RELEASE - 33 (Downtown/Hollywood)
BLACK MALE 4 BLACK MALE (ONLY) IN THE 909 - 31 (CHINO/POMONA)
any musclebears? - 37 (West Hollywood)
Bottom boy needs some now. - 34 (Ventura/Oxnard)
But do you need this technology to record AM radio shows? (couldn't RTFA, of course, I'm going on context...) I mean, the sound qualiy is so minimal, you can use any of a number of low-tech workarounds to capture shows (including, and I know it's bulky but it works, recording the audio to say, a minidisc, cassette or-- for long shows, to use the timer-- VCR tape and importing it.) I also find that many AM stations have Reaplayer streams (and if they don't, another station in another city will.) Yeah, the apps that would rip a stream to mp3 are long gone, but there are ways around that too...
The T-800 were open source (free as in speech, as opposed to free as in beer, that's a saying I like to use whenever possible.) That turned out to be a huge mistake, however, because John Conner and the other humans simply copied the code and started to compile their own. T-1000 and subsequent models were closed source, proprietary and loaded with spyware.
Oh, and I believe Skynet is actually the natural evolution of Apple's iApps. The next generation will make everything so easy, and handle so many mundane details of their users' lives, that the computers will begin to assume that humans are helpless morons.
My first thought-- oh, great. Put me out of work.
But then I came to my senses. Of course this kind of thing would never replace traditional animation. After all, you'd still have to have actors enact the scenes to be animated, the backgrounds would have to be set up or altered, etc. Setting up a shoot of a scene to be animated could end up being more of a PITA than just animating it to begin with. Though the end result could be a cool rotoscope/Waking Life effect, it's not a "cheat" to get an animated feature without the tedious work of animating.
From what I understand, you can't actually go and buy Google shares. They're slowly giving them out to prominent bloggers. Though they'll probably end up for sale on eBay soon enough.
As to the folks who seem to think that domains such as jerryfalwellsucks.com doesn't infringe on anything, you're missing one of the points being made in this frontier of the law - Jerry Falwell is a person and domains like the above make a statement about a person.
Jerry Falwell's not just a person, he's a very public figure. A website named after an average guy, listing all the reasons why he "sucks" is clearly out-of-line. (I always thought Steve Bartman could've had a field day suing all the sites like this, as well as media outlets who broadcast his name and address across the world.)
But politicians and celebrities (especially those who are very vocal with polarizing viewpoints and who hold a lot of sway and influence over a large group of people) are fair game for public criticism. Falwell.com is misleading and actionable, but "Falwellsucks.com" would very much have a right to exist.
Also, it should be pointed out that not everyone in prison is a violent criminal. Many, for example, are otherwise "ordinary" folks who are there for using drugs. Our courts are wildly and completely random when it comes to sentencing recreational drug users (and I'm not even talking about dealers, that's more of a grey area), and what may be three months probation and an order to attend rehab for one person in one court in one city may be a five-year sentence in another.
His much publicised tactics had less to do with crime than the booming economy did. The chain gangs, pink underwear and hired thugs for jail staff didn't do diddley squat when the dot com bubble burst and jobs started getting scarce. So... Your saying all the Dot Commers who rode scooters around the offices and played vintage Galaga machines all day ended up as violent criminals?