In economics, a monopoly (from the Greek monos, one + polein, to sell) is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a kind of product or service. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide, a lack of viable substitute goods, as well as high barriers to entry for potential competitors on the market.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
AMD and Apple? Bad examples, I think. What the hell does AMD have a monopoly on? What does Apple have a "monopoly" on? iPods? iTunes? No, Apple has market dominance, but no monopoly. Further, the market dominance it has is in one localized area. And iPods haven't been around long enough yet to see if they'll outlive the fad stage.
Google? Possibly your one good example. Except I'm not sure how well the "monopoly" concept applies when you don't have to pay any money for the good or service. In any case, I'm not sure that Google actually has a monopoly on searches. Yahoo and MSN are still in the mix--I'm sure Google still gets a great deal of the search traffic, but are there some numbers I could look at to compare?
Rather than having equated monopolies with being automatically bad/evil, perhaps I should have equated monopolies with dictatorships. Now, as you might point out, dictatorships are not necessarily bad/evil either. But there is that old saying about how power corrupts...
But that's not proof. So yeah, I'm sort of vaguely, weakly able to entertain the notion of the friendly monopoly except... wait! no, wtf!
-----> Look, it's like this: If I'm the only guy that can supply you with carrots, and if you and a million other people need (demand) carrots to live, then it's a happy day for me! I can charge you any damn price I like, and as long as you don't kill me and raid my carrot storage bin, I win!
So it goes like this:
1. Horde all the carrots in the whole world
2a make everybody in the whole world love carrots and rig it so they can eat nothing else but
2b destory and kill all the means of production of carrots that I don't directly control
3. $$$ PROFIT!! $$$
>
This has been your economy 101 class for today kids, thanks for attending.
To maintain that monopoly your company will have to lock out potential competitors with patents, laws, or failing all that good ol' threats and intimidation.
Your point, "there's nothing wrong with a monopoly" strikes me as naive. Capitalism, like a game or sport, only has a chance of half-way working when there's a somewhat level playing field. Monopolies are broken like the Black Lotus and Mox cards in Magic the Gathering, and they must be regulated as such. Please go crack open a history book and look up trust busting.
Sometimes the government will allow a monopoly to continue to exist provided the company is willing to allow itself to be regulated by the government. It's my understand that this is how Southwestern Bell worked at one time.
If I sat you in front of my system at home and played a record, and CD of the same recording, you'd think the record was the CD. I've done this nearly 50 times over the last 4 years, and only 3 people have ever guessed correctly.
CDs are only 16bit, and Vinyl has a MUCH higher frequency response range.
Granted, I've got $20K+ into my system, and not everyone has an environment like that, but don't discount a technology because you don't understand it.
Um... *scratches head* First you say that only a very few people were able to tell the difference between the CD and the record. So? This is only telling me that the record is equally good (not better) than the CD. Then you say that Vinyl has a "MUCH higher frequence response range". But if the average listener can't tell the difference between that and a CD, what's the fucking point? Lastly you admit that this oh-so-awesome quality system (that apparenlty only sounds equally good to (not better than) CDs to most humans) set you back $20+.
By your words, you have effectively labeled yourself an "audiophile" and, if you go back and re-read my original comment, I think you'll read me writing that, for you... for just you and others like you, the turntable is not obsolete.
But see then there's people like me and all those poor people you subjected to the "hey, guys! listen to this!" test. I think the rest of us will get by just fine with our CD (and even M-P-3 gasp! lossy compression! horror of horrors!) players. Thanks.
(P.S. the above is not intended to be a rant or to be inflammatory--I'm just going overboard to try to remake my original point: which was just that YMMV and what might be obsolete for the general public will probably never be obsolete for a select few. I'm not part of that select few when it comes to turntables, but for the time being, I am when it comes to floppy drives.)
Like everyone else, I too overgeneralize to a fault and make it appear as though what's true for me is true for *everyone* *everywhere* when it may in fact only be true for many people many places. Did you know x/x *always* equals 1? Oh wait, it doesn't does it?
The easiest way to lose an argument is to overstate it. -- I heard some smart woman on a Penn & Teller Bullshit episode say that.
I thought I read somewhere that MS had to settle out of court at some point because some stuff MS did looked too much like Apple's stuff. Perhaps not with Windows 1.0, but with Windows 95 maybe? *shrug*
Oh, come on. IMHO, both the floppy drive and the turntable have reached a point of near equal obsolesence. Which one is more useless is a matter of your personal needs and interests.
Since I'm not an audiophile, but I do use computers a lot, floppy drives aren't *completely* useless. If you're messing around a lot with BIOS flashing (I'm not but I was a few months back), then floppy drives suddenly become important again--while it's true that fluffy modern BIOSes can boot off of various not-floppy devices, some BIOSes have a special chunk of barebones, emergency backup code to support automatic reflashing of the BIOS in the event that the main bulk of the BIOS code gets trashed by a bad flash.
Meanwhile, turntable? Analog, scratchy audio, hard to copy, hard to maintain, not size-efficient, who the fuck wants *that*!?
Well, obviously audiophiles do 'cause they apparently have more finely honed ears than I. *shrug* Ok, fine, so for the intersection of persons that love music and also know computers this project could be useful.
But please don't tell me turntables are really important in general and that floppy drives aren't 'cause... it's just not so. Thanks.
So instead, you'd rather waste time reading and replaying to the many weak arguments made by people that *aren't* willing to lay their cards on the table right from the beginning? Ok. To each zir own.
(I admit the "evidence" that I present in a moment is rather weak, but then I also think the claims made by this Sophia person are extremely, deeply stupid. IMHO, the idea that she originally created scripts with material used for both the Matrix and Terminator is a typically pathetic urban legend. Just like aligators live in the sewers or that NASA didn't send missions to the moon.)
Evidence (weakly--really more like hearsay, but at least it's someone I consider reliable): In the first half of this vmyths article, Rob Rosenberger claims to have been asked to serve as technical advisor for the Matrix.
The studio sent him materials describing the plot of the movie. When he went to the theater and saw the Matrix, it didn't end like he thought it would. Later, after finding out what was in store for Matrix: Reloaded, he realized the reason the first movie hadn't ended like he'd expected was because the studio materials the studio had sent him had been used in the making of all three movies.
------------
I really don't think Matrix 2 and 3 are so different from the first one. What makes them seem so different is that the first film had a miraculous revelation--that the world we thought was real isn't. The 1st film spent time exploring this notion and let us in on the whole thing slowly. Unfortunately, once the concept of The Matrix had been established, the not-so-bright Wachowski brothers had no new revelations to top it. This happens frequently. I see many, many, many movies, indeed stories in general, that start out with a lot of promise, but are ultimately not able to follow through when it comes around to the middle and especially the end. This is because it's the mystery that survives, not the explanation. To put that another way: it's much easier to ask a thought provoking and inspiring "what if?" question than it is to come up with an equally profound, deeply meaningful answer. 42.
After the first movie had been seen, but before the 2nd or 3rd movies came out, people had a lot of time (waaay too much time) to build up naive ideas about what direction the trilogy would eventually take. Fan expectations rose ever higher, and it's no surprise that the eventual conclusion could not live up to those (unrealistic) expectations.
Please go back and watch The Matrx (#1) again sometime--try to throw away all those ideas about what you thought it was supposed to mean and just watch the thing--I think you'll find it's not quite so brilliant as you may have led yourself to believe.
(P.S. Hope I didn't flame--if so, I didn't mean to, I'm just opinionated.)
(apologies to True Fans if I get these wrong) "If there's a bright center to the Universe, Tatooine is planet that it's farthest from."
"Yeah, there are some people that call this planet the, uh, `ass-end' of space. But I like it here, I like the small, home-town feel. We know everybody here.. _eeverybody_."
Tatooine is basically just a dark future (drought) version of Kansas on a planetary scale. *shudder*
I don't know nearly enough about network design to... well, design one or administor one, but I had a feeling this article was bogus--or you know, pseudo-bogus at least.
The clue was, first it starts out making an extraordinary claim about throwing away the firewall, then when you actually read the brief, it starts backpeddling. Like: "Well, er, you can't *quite* get rid of the firewall, but you *almost* can! really! almost. well, er maybe... ok, *sort* of at least..." --- Now that I think about, assuming your summary is correct (and for the moment, I feel safe making that assumption), the guy saying "throw away your firewall", but really he just discovered network configuration, reminds me a lot of Steve Gibson (http://www.grc.com/
The joke works first because it pokes fun at vast oversimplification, second because it pokes fun at physicists in particular (statisticians will get a good laugh--every branch of science and math has this sort of friendly rivalry thing), and third (most important for me) because the mental image of spherical horses hurtling through a vacuum is just damn humorous.:-)
Next time I see horse racing, I'm gonna be picturing spherical horses hurtling (they don't actually have to be hurtling--but they're round, and they're in a vacuum, and it's funnier this way) through a vacuum and everyone else is gonna wonder why I can't stop chuckling and grinning.:-D
So what kind of argument does yours fall into? I mean your whole post, not your example. It seems to be something like: make the other person feel stupid. What is that, analogy? emotional appeal? It certainly doesn't seem like logic, or at least not plain, simple, dry Spock logic there's a lot of implied elitism in that message.
I tend to strongly prefer the logic-style of argument. However, in a debate, I'm likely to go with whatever approach (emotional appeal, analogy, etc) seems most likely to produce the desired result--that is so long as I don't have to twist the facts into a pretzle to get there. (I'm not meaning to imply that you did that--I'm just saying that lying or over-manipulation of the facts is something I try to avoid.)
As much as I love logical arguments ("love"? "logic"?), I think they have more than their fair of weaknesses. (And I'm only going to get around to listing one of them before I go horribly far off topic.;-) ) In general, I'm awfully leary of supposedly purely logical arguments being used in defense of or to attack purely moral stances. I mean--logically, why are you even bothering to continue to exist in a chaotic, senseless, godless universe anyway? What purely *logical* reason is there for you to even exist? May as well just end it all now since, ultimately nothing you ever do will really matter one way or the other...
I state, without actual proof, that humans are fundamentally irrational, emotional, social hairless primates. Therefore, logic will not always be the best way to sway any given hairless primate to your way of thinking. Sometimes emotional appeal will work. Sometimes a big mallet, or the threat of a big mallet to the cranium will do the trick. I personally don't like the mallet to the skull method because it offends my sensibilities (also I feel I'm more likely to be on the receiving end than the dealing end). So it goes. But speaking from a purely logical standpoint, is there anything faulty with the mallet-to-the-skull method?
Sorry I got off topic--just my primate brain wandering again like it does.
But, if you think about it, while it's important for a judge to try to remain impartial, how else could a judge possibly be? I mean, it's bad for a judge to take sides, but OTOH, if the judge doesn't excercise... well, judgement, there'd likely be nothing stopping one side or the other from dragging things out ad mauseum. Well actually, I guess that's what they're doing now, but you know what I mean.
I have not RTFAed. I totally agree with the Dr. Feynman quote, completely. So much so that I just got to wondering... imagine if you could fool nature.:-) Man, that'd be a trip:
Hey, nature, look at the monkey! look at the monkey! what's that? No! No, I'm not defying gravity, keep looking at the damn monkey! What? No--no there's no cold fusion going on over there. Hey, check this out, nature: a whole buuunch of monkeys annd some circus midgets! etc
Someone with a better funny bone could probably exp{ou,a}nd upon this, and turn it into a great legendary Inernet meme. Or maybe I need some sleep.
I'll consider diminishing the frequency with which I use pejorative terms for Microsoft and its products in the future. (But I'll probably still use those negative terms for them sometimes 'cause... I think they're kinda funny.)
So do I still get to use "Co$" for "Church of Scientology"? Or is that childish as well?:-)
As the top Score 5 post suggests, this whole article seems pretty troll-like. Nevertheless, it's mostly true in my case: I have POTS and DSL. My TV is connected to a DVD player and a VCR and I'm subscribed to Netflix. Sometimes I download a movie or TV show from the Internet.
As for terrestial TV: I get one channel (Fox), and occasionally I watch it, but only occasionally. I hate commercials with a firey passion.
No one is going to justify a technology downgrade just so that you can play Yet Another WW2 FPS.
Interesting point of view. Of course, I don't think you'll ever convince the masses to give up their beloved FPSes, but since I don't play those games much in the first place, you're statement might eventually convince me. And since I'm me, that's the part that matter, er... to me that is. (Wow am I selfish or what!:-) )
And yeah, about DirectX--there's no way Apple could get DirectX, right? I mean MS presumably has the rights to that protocol locked up, locked down, and locked in tighter than five fort knoxes, yes?
But isn't OpenGL just a graphics acceleration API whereas DirectX is Direct3D, DirectSound,..., Direct<X>?
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AMD and Apple? Bad examples, I think. What the hell does AMD have a monopoly on? What does Apple have a "monopoly" on? iPods? iTunes? No, Apple has market dominance, but no monopoly. Further, the market dominance it has is in one localized area. And iPods haven't been around long enough yet to see if they'll outlive the fad stage.
Google? Possibly your one good example. Except I'm not sure how well the "monopoly" concept applies when you don't have to pay any money for the good or service. In any case, I'm not sure that Google actually has a monopoly on searches. Yahoo and MSN are still in the mix--I'm sure Google still gets a great deal of the search traffic, but are there some numbers I could look at to compare?
Rather than having equated monopolies with being automatically bad/evil, perhaps I should have equated monopolies with dictatorships. Now, as you might point out, dictatorships are not necessarily bad/evil either. But there is that old saying about how power corrupts...
But that's not proof. So yeah, I'm sort of vaguely, weakly able to entertain the notion of the friendly monopoly except... wait! no, wtf!
-----> Look, it's like this: If I'm the only guy that can supply you with carrots, and if you and a million other people need (demand) carrots to live, then it's a happy day for me! I can charge you any damn price I like, and as long as you don't kill me and raid my carrot storage bin, I win!
So it goes like this:
>1. Horde all the carrots in the whole world
2a make everybody in the whole world love carrots and rig it so they can eat nothing else but
2b destory and kill all the means of production of carrots that I don't directly control
3. $$$ PROFIT!! $$$
This has been your economy 101 class for today kids, thanks for attending.
Why do you trust our corporate masters?
To maintain that monopoly your company will have to lock out potential competitors with patents, laws, or failing all that good ol' threats and intimidation.
Your point, "there's nothing wrong with a monopoly" strikes me as naive. Capitalism, like a game or sport, only has a chance of half-way working when there's a somewhat level playing field. Monopolies are broken like the Black Lotus and Mox cards in Magic the Gathering, and they must be regulated as such. Please go crack open a history book and look up trust busting.
Sometimes the government will allow a monopoly to continue to exist provided the company is willing to allow itself to be regulated by the government. It's my understand that this is how Southwestern Bell worked at one time.
Um... *scratches head* First you say that only a very few people were able to tell the difference between the CD and the record. So? This is only telling me that the record is equally good (not better) than the CD. Then you say that Vinyl has a "MUCH higher frequence response range". But if the average listener can't tell the difference between that and a CD, what's the fucking point? Lastly you admit that this oh-so-awesome quality system (that apparenlty only sounds equally good to (not better than) CDs to most humans) set you back $20+.
By your words, you have effectively labeled yourself an "audiophile" and, if you go back and re-read my original comment, I think you'll read me writing that, for you... for just you and others like you, the turntable is not obsolete.
But see then there's people like me and all those poor people you subjected to the "hey, guys! listen to this!" test. I think the rest of us will get by just fine with our CD (and even M-P-3 gasp! lossy compression! horror of horrors!) players. Thanks.
(P.S. the above is not intended to be a rant or to be inflammatory--I'm just going overboard to try to remake my original point: which was just that YMMV and what might be obsolete for the general public will probably never be obsolete for a select few. I'm not part of that select few when it comes to turntables, but for the time being, I am when it comes to floppy drives.)
Like everyone else, I too overgeneralize to a fault and make it appear as though what's true for me is true for *everyone* *everywhere* when it may in fact only be true for many people many places. Did you know x/x *always* equals 1? Oh wait, it doesn't does it?
The easiest way to lose an argument is to overstate it. -- I heard some smart woman on a Penn & Teller Bullshit episode say that.
I thought I read somewhere that MS had to settle out of court at some point because some stuff MS did looked too much like Apple's stuff. Perhaps not with Windows 1.0, but with Windows 95 maybe? *shrug*
I'm not sure.
Oh, come on. IMHO, both the floppy drive and the turntable have reached a point of near equal obsolesence. Which one is more useless is a matter of your personal needs and interests.
Since I'm not an audiophile, but I do use computers a lot, floppy drives aren't *completely* useless. If you're messing around a lot with BIOS flashing (I'm not but I was a few months back), then floppy drives suddenly become important again--while it's true that fluffy modern BIOSes can boot off of various not-floppy devices, some BIOSes have a special chunk of barebones, emergency backup code to support automatic reflashing of the BIOS in the event that the main bulk of the BIOS code gets trashed by a bad flash.
Meanwhile, turntable? Analog, scratchy audio, hard to copy, hard to maintain, not size-efficient, who the fuck wants *that*!?
Well, obviously audiophiles do 'cause they apparently have more finely honed ears than I. *shrug* Ok, fine, so for the intersection of persons that love music and also know computers this project could be useful.
But please don't tell me turntables are really important in general and that floppy drives aren't 'cause... it's just not so. Thanks.
Good point. Just about everyone has god RDF, it's just that the `charismatic leader' types can extend their RDFs to encompass whole crowds. :-)
So instead, you'd rather waste time reading and replaying to the many weak arguments made by people that *aren't* willing to lay their cards on the table right from the beginning? Ok. To each zir own.
Yes, but not yet. First it'll have to get through the "gimmicky gadget" stage.
(I admit the "evidence" that I present in a moment is rather weak, but then I also think the claims made by this Sophia person are extremely, deeply stupid. IMHO, the idea that she originally created scripts with material used for both the Matrix and Terminator is a typically pathetic urban legend. Just like aligators live in the sewers or that NASA didn't send missions to the moon.)
Evidence (weakly--really more like hearsay, but at least it's someone I consider reliable): In the first half of this vmyths article, Rob Rosenberger claims to have been asked to serve as technical advisor for the Matrix.
The studio sent him materials describing the plot of the movie. When he went to the theater and saw the Matrix, it didn't end like he thought it would. Later, after finding out what was in store for Matrix: Reloaded, he realized the reason the first movie hadn't ended like he'd expected was because the studio materials the studio had sent him had been used in the making of all three movies.
------------I really don't think Matrix 2 and 3 are so different from the first one. What makes them seem so different is that the first film had a miraculous revelation--that the world we thought was real isn't. The 1st film spent time exploring this notion and let us in on the whole thing slowly. Unfortunately, once the concept of The Matrix had been established, the not-so-bright Wachowski brothers had no new revelations to top it. This happens frequently. I see many, many, many movies, indeed stories in general, that start out with a lot of promise, but are ultimately not able to follow through when it comes around to the middle and especially the end. This is because it's the mystery that survives, not the explanation. To put that another way: it's much easier to ask a thought provoking and inspiring "what if?" question than it is to come up with an equally profound, deeply meaningful answer. 42.
After the first movie had been seen, but before the 2nd or 3rd movies came out, people had a lot of time (waaay too much time) to build up naive ideas about what direction the trilogy would eventually take. Fan expectations rose ever higher, and it's no surprise that the eventual conclusion could not live up to those (unrealistic) expectations.
Please go back and watch The Matrx (#1) again sometime--try to throw away all those ideas about what you thought it was supposed to mean and just watch the thing--I think you'll find it's not quite so brilliant as you may have led yourself to believe.
(P.S. Hope I didn't flame--if so, I didn't mean to, I'm just opinionated.)Ok, now even *I* can see that I goofed that first quote kind of badly. But slashdot does not allow editing of posts so... oh well.
(apologies to True Fans if I get these wrong)
"If there's a bright center to the Universe, Tatooine is planet that it's farthest from."
"Yeah, there are some people that call this planet the, uh, `ass-end' of space. But I like it here, I like the small, home-town feel. We know everybody here.. _eeverybody_."
Tatooine is basically just a dark future (drought) version of Kansas on a planetary scale. *shudder*
I don't know nearly enough about network design to... well, design one or administor one, but I had a feeling this article was bogus--or you know, pseudo-bogus at least.
The clue was, first it starts out making an extraordinary claim about throwing away the firewall, then when you actually read the brief, it starts backpeddling. Like: "Well, er, you can't *quite* get rid of the firewall, but you *almost* can! really! almost. well, er maybe... ok, *sort* of at least..."
---
Now that I think about, assuming your summary is correct (and for the moment, I feel safe making that assumption), the guy saying "throw away your firewall", but really he just discovered network configuration, reminds me a lot of Steve Gibson (http://www.grc.com/
Yeah, I agree.
:-)
:-D
The joke works first because it pokes fun at vast oversimplification, second because it pokes fun at physicists in particular (statisticians will get a good laugh--every branch of science and math has this sort of friendly rivalry thing), and third (most important for me) because the mental image of spherical horses hurtling through a vacuum is just damn humorous.
Next time I see horse racing, I'm gonna be picturing spherical horses hurtling (they don't actually have to be hurtling--but they're round, and they're in a vacuum, and it's funnier this way) through a vacuum and everyone else is gonna wonder why I can't stop chuckling and grinning.
So what kind of argument does yours fall into? I mean your whole post, not your example. It seems to be something like: make the other person feel stupid. What is that, analogy? emotional appeal? It certainly doesn't seem like logic, or at least not plain, simple, dry Spock logic there's a lot of implied elitism in that message.
;-) ) In general, I'm awfully leary of supposedly purely logical arguments being used in defense of or to attack purely moral stances. I mean--logically, why are you even bothering to continue to exist in a chaotic, senseless, godless universe anyway? What purely *logical* reason is there for you to even exist? May as well just end it all now since, ultimately nothing you ever do will really matter one way or the other...
I tend to strongly prefer the logic-style of argument. However, in a debate, I'm likely to go with whatever approach (emotional appeal, analogy, etc) seems most likely to produce the desired result--that is so long as I don't have to twist the facts into a pretzle to get there. (I'm not meaning to imply that you did that--I'm just saying that lying or over-manipulation of the facts is something I try to avoid.)
As much as I love logical arguments ("love"? "logic"?), I think they have more than their fair of weaknesses. (And I'm only going to get around to listing one of them before I go horribly far off topic.
I state, without actual proof, that humans are fundamentally irrational, emotional, social hairless primates. Therefore, logic will not always be the best way to sway any given hairless primate to your way of thinking. Sometimes emotional appeal will work. Sometimes a big mallet, or the threat of a big mallet to the cranium will do the trick. I personally don't like the mallet to the skull method because it offends my sensibilities (also I feel I'm more likely to be on the receiving end than the dealing end). So it goes. But speaking from a purely logical standpoint, is there anything faulty with the mallet-to-the-skull method?
Sorry I got off topic--just my primate brain wandering again like it does.
By definition (by a definition at least), they can't have been conservative at that time.
But, if you think about it, while it's important for a judge to try to remain impartial, how else could a judge possibly be? I mean, it's bad for a judge to take sides, but OTOH, if the judge doesn't excercise... well, judgement, there'd likely be nothing stopping one side or the other from dragging things out ad mauseum. Well actually, I guess that's what they're doing now, but you know what I mean.
I can see some campus-based grid network thing being used in a future sci-fi "the-computer-became-self-aware-and-tried-to-kill- us" plot.
..."stealth bombers"? I guess maybe he doesn't care since the military isn't (technically) a company?
Tell Microsoft about it, and litigation action might commence.
I have not RTFAed. I totally agree with the Dr. Feynman quote, completely. So much so that I just got to wondering... imagine if you could fool nature. :-) Man, that'd be a trip:
Hey, nature, look at the monkey! look at the monkey! what's that? No! No, I'm not defying gravity, keep looking at the damn monkey! What? No--no there's no cold fusion going on over there. Hey, check this out, nature: a whole buuunch of monkeys annd some circus midgets! etc
Someone with a better funny bone could probably exp{ou,a}nd upon this, and turn it into a great legendary Inernet meme. Or maybe I need some sleep.
Yes that seems more likely. (See also "recreational impossibilities" and "SEP fields".)
You make good points.
:-)
I'll consider diminishing the frequency with which I use pejorative terms for Microsoft and its products in the future. (But I'll probably still use those negative terms for them sometimes 'cause... I think they're kinda funny.)
So do I still get to use "Co$" for "Church of Scientology"? Or is that childish as well?
Perhpas in ten years, we'll get to hear a kid say, "GPU? Oh that stands for General Processing Unit, right?" eh? Perhaps not.
As the top Score 5 post suggests, this whole article seems pretty troll-like. Nevertheless, it's mostly true in my case: I have POTS and DSL. My TV is connected to a DVD player and a VCR and I'm subscribed to Netflix. Sometimes I download a movie or TV show from the Internet.
As for terrestial TV: I get one channel (Fox), and occasionally I watch it, but only occasionally. I hate commercials with a firey passion.
Interesting point of view. Of course, I don't think you'll ever convince the masses to give up their beloved FPSes, but since I don't play those games much in the first place, you're statement might eventually convince me. And since I'm me, that's the part that matter, er... to me that is. (Wow am I selfish or what! :-) )
And yeah, about DirectX--there's no way Apple could get DirectX, right? I mean MS presumably has the rights to that protocol locked up, locked down, and locked in tighter than five fort knoxes, yes?
But isn't OpenGL just a graphics acceleration API whereas DirectX is Direct3D, DirectSound, ..., Direct<X>?