...but I think the main problem is not how this could help Apple, but how Apple will respond. It will probably depend on the hacking of OSX to Wintel boxes not gaining too much popularity, real or perceived.
If the perception is something like "only one out of 1,000 users know how to do this, and only one of out 10 of those actually have the time and energy to try," then I really doubt we'll see a concerted, RIAA/MPAA style response to this.
Give it time, though - ESPECIALLY if Longhorn has a lot of inital bugs to work out, or if enough "chatter" builds for OSX vs. Windows much like it did for Firefox vs. IE ("try this on your machine, it's safer and easier to use") and you could see a bunch of users test driving an OSX installation.
That, plus any larger amount of warez available for Max, and / or enough publicity, would probably force Apple to at least make a public show of discouraging the pirates just to save face; at worst we could see the type of intentional software breakage & DRM the article talks about.
One final thought? What if this opens the Pandora's Box of Mac viruses, once a bunch of script kiddies get their hands on OSX and start picking it apart? Those 1337 types who couldn't afford a Mac, or couldn't be bothered to find one someplace, might decide their time has come.
Oh, you're trolling and you know it! The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Me, for instance, I have a problem where I feel compelled to answer trolls...:-)
But anyway. Using your logic, this story never should have been posted to Slashdot's front page to begin with. Yet most of us know that those "peons" you refer to are, for better or worse, the ones in the majority when it comes to determining whether gizmos like this one make it. The buying choices they make dictate which products are most readily available, with which features and formats, and at what price.
Understanding what drives the market - again, for better or worse - is important to anyone who is interested in understanding how technology develops, and what succeeds, and what fails.
How many times have products that you KNOW are better than the "leading brand" been better at what they did, yet failed because the other guy's products were better-advertised, slicker, or whatnot? Cases in point: all the portable game systems that were supposed to kill the original, clunky, monochrome Nintendo Gameboy.
Same for portable media players. I hate DRM as much as the next person; I'm all for improvement in media formats. I want to see how the market responds to these concerns when the "peons" finally start coming around to these things that people on Slashdot have been complaining about for months now.
Some of you who've replied to my post - and, so far, EVERYONE who's modded it - are obviously not getting what I'm trying to say. So, I'll elaborate, as I ought to have done at the beginning.
Sorry, ladies and gents, but I'd wager that 90% or more of the buyers of portable music players in general are going to look at three things when they buy their music:
Does it look stylish?
Will it play most, or all, of the songs I already downloaded / ripped / bought?
How much can I put on it?
In my original post, I said: "Even if you do like I do, and say to hell with the "cool" factor, the FM tuner and the recording capability, this sucks." And I was right. I personally don't care whether or not an iPod plays photos. I don't own an iPod. I don't own an mp3 player, solid state or otherwise, except for the CD MP3 player in my car and a portable CD MP3 player. If I need to turn in my "geek card" for that, well, whatever.
And that was my whole point, although I didn't make it very well. Whether or not you can play Ogg files on your mp3 player, or record with it, look at pictures on it, listen to FM radio on it - all of this is a fart in a hurricane next to the three factors I mentioned above, when you're talking about the average consumer. And everyone on this site knows it. Are most of the people who're technically apt enough to read/. going to buy the iRiver? Not "no," but "hell no." I was just trying to point out what most consumers are going to see when they compare this product to others like it. It's the first, and foremost, comparison *I* make, non-jogger and non-Ogger that I am, when I browse through the MP3 players I come across in stores. Nine out of ten of the music-player shoppers out there aren't going to research this stuff. Their kids are going to ask for "an iPod," I bet, and their parents are going to look at the prices and storage space of those versus the other products they see. That's not trolling, that's common sense.
Forget the bells and whistles; let's just look at the one specification that's going to be chief for many buyers:
iPod Photo = $449.00 base price / 60 gb = ~$7.48 per GB
iRiver iFP-899 = $179.99 base price = $179.99 per GB
'Nuff said. Even if you do like I do, and say to hell with the "cool" factor, the FM tuner and the recording capability, this sucks. The people marketing and manufacturing this ought to know better. Just like you wouldn't send a VW to drag race a Corvette, you shouldn't expect this device to compete on the same playing field as the iPod.
Show me the same product, at this price, with even 10gb, and I'd consider buying. But no less than 10gb is going to fly, I think, at this point.
How about this: In Soviet Russia the Railgun... ummmmm...
No, I can't really see any easy beneficial (which is, I guess, to say "non-military") applications for this tech, unless you can tell me how this could aid in space exploration (a means of launching spacecraft, maybe?)... or how it might help in the advancement of processing or data storage technology...
It doesn't matter how big it is, I want to know how many Han Solos it can freeze per minute.
Wow, you're clearly not a true scientist. Had you been, I think you'd be much more interested in the cooling measurement in tauntauns per time-it-takes-to-reach-the-first-marker, commonly represented as the variable {Aack!}. I'll expect an apology in less than three parsecs.:-)
Sponsored by the Duplin Wineries of scenic North Carolina, and the contributions of Dupers Like You - Thank You!!
Q: What kind of house is CmdrTaco going to buy with the ad revenue from/.? A: A dupe-lex!
Q: Okay, but what brand of paint will he use in his snazzy new server room? A: Dupe-on't! (DuPont)
Q: Okay, okay, but look - a lot of people are bitching about the quality of/. these days. Why? Is there some new philosophy CmdrTaco has chosen to follow? A: Yes! Lately I hear he's been into the teachings of Yo-Duh, from the planet Dupeobah.
Q: What's Yo-Duh's main teaching? A: "Dupe, or dupe not. Either way, don't try."
Fade up on shots of Shuttle launches as theme song begins to play (to the tune of "Faith of the Heart" by Diane Warren, the theme song for Star Trek: Enterprise.)
It's been a long time Since the last shuttle flight There've been some changes And a hell of a lot of gripes But I can see the ship on the gantry now; Nothing's in our way! And they're not gonna hold at T-minus-10 We won't miss our window today!
'Cause I've got faith in Discovery! I'm goin' where the SRBs take me! I've got faith in Atlantis! If we break down she'll come an' get me! I've got faith in George Bush! And on the budget funds he'll send me I'll go all the way to Mars...! 'Cause I've got faith (I've got faith) I've got faith in these shuttles of ours!
Cut to Scott Bakula in elaborate Mission Control set: "Hi! I'm Scott Bakula! You might remember me from such cancelled sci-fi shows as Star Trek: Enterprise and Quantum Leap..."
Come on. I expect that out of my college education I should have at least earned the right to have a professor take the time out of their busy schedule to check over my paper for me. Most would glance over it and say it's fine. I only had *two* that actually spent the time to tear my papers down and show me what was wrong so that I wouldn't make those mistakes again. Does this professor want to do that or does he just want to berate MSFT for not doing it?
A large number of English instructors at American colleges and universities today are either grad. students or part-timers, most of them earning $14,000 - $20,000 per year. Many of these people have 60 to 100 students per semester. Example: I started out as a grad. student teaching assistant. In addition to a full-time teaching load, I had 50 students to teach. I had to balance my own assignments with planning assignments, leading classes, and grading ~200 essays per semester. Later on, as an adjunct (part-time instructor) at a community college in North Carolina, I got paid $24 per credit hour per week. In other words, for teaching a standard 3-credit course, I was paid $72 per week - and I was only paid for the time I spent in class. No compensation for time spent in my office, grading and working with students outside of class, formulating assignments, etc. When my colleagues and I did the math for all the time we spent on these activities, we found we were making about $7.75 an hour. The majority of American students are being taught English by instructors like these.
Different people react to this shameful situation in academia different ways. For me, when I had 400 pages of writing to grade in a week, the only solution was to go over a paper one time, carefully, and to refer the student to a writing tutor at other times. It's not a question of wanting to help, or being too lazy to help. It's a question of the ability to do so. In a perfect world, tuition and fees paid to a university would "earn you the right" to have individual assistance with each writing assignment. Blame the academic world's focus on profit and part-time labor for the fact that isn't so.
I have to agree w/ the previous poster: Grammar checking in MS Word is, for all intents and purposes, useless for students. I am a college English instructor and writing tutor. Several years ago, I tried using the grammar checker and had results similar to others who've posted here - the suggestions the GC offered me were incorrect in each and every case.
Now, *I* know enough about computers and language to understand the difficulty in making a perfect grammar checker. But in our school's tutoring center, I've seen a fair number of students whose essays have been mangled by MS Word. These students don't know the limitations of the software. Microsoft doesn't offer any warning or instructions for users to aid them in using the grammar checker. It arrives turned on by default in Word. So students rely on it out of laziness and/or too much trust in computers to always generate the Right Answers. They believe that whatever the grammar checker suggests is absolutely right.
My experiences with these students are much like my experiences with people who click "Yes" in every dialog box that IE shows them, who trust the ads that "STOP SPYWARE NOW!" and so forth. When my classes discuss revision of writing, I always use some mangled examples taken directly from MS Word's grammar checker to show how computers cannot tell the context of what a person writes.
I'm not MS bashing here. But I have to agree totally with the professor in the article. Though many might not call a grammar checker "mission critical," the students who use it often believe it is a magic bullet. MS could make a lot of people's lives easier by either offering a disclaimer for the grammar checking routine, by improving it, or by getting rid of it altogether. I'd opt for getting rid of it.
If this concept works in the long run, I wonder how (if at all) it might be used to find the "tenth planet" that some scientists think might be orbiting beyond Pluto?
If and when the Hubble is updated, could this type of gear be added, or orbited in tandem, to allow both visual and infared examination of space? (IANA astronaut, so if this sounds stupid...)
People are, by and large, not going to read this slop and/or care.
Those who do read it, and who do raise a fuss, are going to be met with very little interest ("You don't like it? Use another service.") But I hope, and I foresee, that such a broad and far-reaching "license agreement" gets shot apart in court one of these days. There are just too many possibilities for abuse - imagine if your phone company decided to record and use whatever you said on the line in whatever way they wished, without your permission. It'd never fly.
the division in Hollywood and notebook manufacturers... will ensure the bona fide format war we were all secretly pining for.
So why, exactly, should I be pining for a format war?
All that means to me is several years of incompatible hardware, price fluctuation, and annoying-ass FUD campaigns ("Our discs last longer! HD-DVDs melt after three months!" "That's a lie, plus OUR discs have better color density on playback!" "Oh YEAH?? Well, OUR discs...")
A format war might drive prices down more quickly in the short term, but what good is that to me if I need to buy new hardware and don't want to get stuck with a lemon during those few years before either one format wins hands-down or dual-capability drives get introduced?
"So, like, how many, y'know, total losers are going to, like, stop navel-gazing down at Gap and, y'know, go and see this movie? Because - uh! - I tell you, this show? The O.C.? It's, like, so NOT for sci-fi geeks... I mean, for real! It's like, y'know, that time the chick in the band? Tried to get me to ask her out one time, and, like, I know she's into that shit because, like, she TOTALLY camped out for that movie - the other one, with that Jar-Jar guy? I mean, get real, I'm in student council, I work at Abercrombie and fucking Fitch, y'know? Like I'm going out with some weirdo geeky chick... Jesus... pass me a Smirnoff Ice, dude..."
IANA Enterprise fan - the show lost me about a year ago because of Bermaga and their silly milking of the franchise and diluting of what "Classic" Trek stood for.
But I tell you, this outpouring of support is amazing. Say what you will about the quality of the show, or the usage of the money - and I know the flood of comments about what a pitiful waste of capital this is will be starting soon. Hell, I'd like to have $3 mil to blow on [name of pet project] - who doesn't?
But here on Slashdot we love to piss and moan about the state of the entertainment industry and how people ought to vote with their money. I, for one, see this is a perfect example of some devoted fans doing just that. Too bad we didn't get this for Firefly - but we've got a film coming, so...
P. J. O'Rourke wrote that giving money and power to government was like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. With VeriSign's track record being what it is, I'd say that giving them.net might end up being the same kind of bad decision.
I know there's no totally-impartial, non-profit-driven corporation or entity that can do this job well, but Verisign's past practices ("Site Finder" and its blind ignorance of how the Internet should work is a perfect example) have led me to see them as worse than the rest of the pack. I simply don't trust them to do the job right because they can't understand that the Internet != the WWW.
The dinosaurs weren't killed off by the mammals. It took millions (tens of millions?) of dinosaur-free years before mammals were more than rats...... Firefox probably won't be what "kills" IE. It'll take time, and a lot of other factors - if it ever "dies" at all.
The Roman empire split... long before Rome was sacked..... The browser market is starting to split, slowly. As more devices make their way onto the 'Net in one form or another, the concept of a "browser" - a standalone program for Internet / Web access - will probably fragment also.
The Confederacy was a far stronger military power than you give it credit for...... Redmond is a far stronger power than most people give it credit for, but the whole point was to illustrate the shortsightedness aspect.:-)
And finally, Hitler didn't defeat the Soviets but he had Leningrad/St. Petersburg under siege for years........ Microsoft has had the personal computer market in the US and elsewhere locked for a long time. But they can only grow so much and have so many irons in the fire - and eventually they'll reach a point of diminishing returns. You can see that already as they drop at least one large project that's not working (.NET Passport).
You make some very good points, though - but I was going for humor more than historical accuracy. As someone already noted, dinosaurs don't speak much English.:-)
...from like-minded individuals throughout history:
T. Rex, 30-some odd million years ago: "Mammals? Ha! I'm the biggest predator in town! Why the hell should I worry, I rule this place!"
Roman generals, c. 200 a.d.: "Barbarians, you say? We've got nothing to worry about. We're the biggest army on the planet. What could possibly go wrong?"
A Confederate general, 1861: "Those Yankees ain't nothin' to worry 'bout! We'll run 'em back across th' Potomac in a month, then we'll go back to plantin' cotton."
Adolf Hitler, 1942: "We can fight a war on two fronts! The Russians can't stop us! We're invincible!"
The Iraqi information minister, 2003: "The Americans will never set foot in Baghdad."
The NBA made a good decision, I believe, by not going with EA's monopolistic deal. As much as EA has been criticized lately for their practices, I'd wonder just what advantage the NFL, or anyone else, could get out of an exclusive contract with such a company. What could possibly be the upshot for the NFL?
That said, I'd be a lot more upset about the aforementioned NFL deal if it meant we'd only see Madden games for one platform. That's not going to happen anytime soon, I don't think. But imagine a day when the only place you might find "official" NFL or NBA games would be the PSn, and all the other consoles would have brand-x football and basketball games.
And just like the US store, I'm sure it'll feature:
A lot of pop artists;
A good selection of works by earlier groups in various genres;
Not a whole lot of imports; and
A lot of partial albums for major singers, because some corporate asshat out there thinks that's good marketing.
I used to download lots of music from Napster in college. Burned it CD, played the hell out of it. But I didn't keep most of those mp3s, and today with a steady job and a little different viewpoint, I'm willing to pay money for good copies and to support artists I like. So I checked out iTunes and loved it. I've spent about $80 there in the first month.
But when I run across artists like Enigma (whose albums have been chopped to hell) and Genesis (none of the most notable songs from the Peter Gabriel era are available), what do I do? I load up my p2p and start searching.
I don't blame iTunes. I commend them for doing the best they can to bring fire to the music industry cavemen. I admire what they're doing, but if the music makers want me as a consumer, they're going to have to deal with me on my level.
Slashdot Mirror
...but I think the main problem is not how this could help Apple, but how Apple will respond. It will probably depend on the hacking of OSX to Wintel boxes not gaining too much popularity, real or perceived.
If the perception is something like "only one out of 1,000 users know how to do this, and only one of out 10 of those actually have the time and energy to try," then I really doubt we'll see a concerted, RIAA/MPAA style response to this.
Give it time, though - ESPECIALLY if Longhorn has a lot of inital bugs to work out, or if enough "chatter" builds for OSX vs. Windows much like it did for Firefox vs. IE ("try this on your machine, it's safer and easier to use") and you could see a bunch of users test driving an OSX installation.
That, plus any larger amount of warez available for Max, and / or enough publicity, would probably force Apple to at least make a public show of discouraging the pirates just to save face; at worst we could see the type of intentional software breakage & DRM the article talks about.
One final thought? What if this opens the Pandora's Box of Mac viruses, once a bunch of script kiddies get their hands on OSX and start picking it apart? Those 1337 types who couldn't afford a Mac, or couldn't be bothered to find one someplace, might decide their time has come.
Oh, you're trolling and you know it! The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Me, for instance, I have a problem where I feel compelled to answer trolls
But anyway. Using your logic, this story never should have been posted to Slashdot's front page to begin with. Yet most of us know that those "peons" you refer to are, for better or worse, the ones in the majority when it comes to determining whether gizmos like this one make it. The buying choices they make dictate which products are most readily available, with which features and formats, and at what price.
Understanding what drives the market - again, for better or worse - is important to anyone who is interested in understanding how technology develops, and what succeeds, and what fails.
How many times have products that you KNOW are better than the "leading brand" been better at what they did, yet failed because the other guy's products were better-advertised, slicker, or whatnot? Cases in point: all the portable game systems that were supposed to kill the original, clunky, monochrome Nintendo Gameboy.
Same for portable media players. I hate DRM as much as the next person; I'm all for improvement in media formats. I want to see how the market responds to these concerns when the "peons" finally start coming around to these things that people on Slashdot have been complaining about for months now.
Some of you who've replied to my post - and, so far, EVERYONE who's modded it - are obviously not getting what I'm trying to say. So, I'll elaborate, as I ought to have done at the beginning.
Sorry, ladies and gents, but I'd wager that 90% or more of the buyers of portable music players in general are going to look at three things when they buy their music:
Does it look stylish?
Will it play most, or all, of the songs I already downloaded / ripped / bought?
How much can I put on it?
In my original post, I said: "Even if you do like I do, and say to hell with the "cool" factor, the FM tuner and the recording capability, this sucks." And I was right. I personally don't care whether or not an iPod plays photos. I don't own an iPod. I don't own an mp3 player, solid state or otherwise, except for the CD MP3 player in my car and a portable CD MP3 player. If I need to turn in my "geek card" for that, well, whatever.
And that was my whole point, although I didn't make it very well. Whether or not you can play Ogg files on your mp3 player, or record with it, look at pictures on it, listen to FM radio on it - all of this is a fart in a hurricane next to the three factors I mentioned above, when you're talking about the average consumer. And everyone on this site knows it. /. going to buy the iRiver? Not "no," but "hell no." I was just trying to point out what most consumers are going to see when they compare this product to others like it. It's the first, and foremost, comparison *I* make, non-jogger and non-Ogger that I am, when I browse through the MP3 players I come across in stores. Nine out of ten of the music-player shoppers out there aren't going to research this stuff. Their kids are going to ask for "an iPod," I bet, and their parents are going to look at the prices and storage space of those versus the other products they see. That's not trolling, that's common sense.
Are most of the people who're technically apt enough to read
Forget the bells and whistles; let's just look at the one specification that's going to be chief for many buyers:
iPod Photo = $449.00 base price / 60 gb = ~$7.48 per GB
iRiver iFP-899 = $179.99 base price = $179.99 per GB
'Nuff said. Even if you do like I do, and say to hell with the "cool" factor, the FM tuner and the recording capability, this sucks.
The people marketing and manufacturing this ought to know better. Just like you wouldn't send a VW to drag race a Corvette, you shouldn't expect this device to compete on the same playing field as the iPod.
Show me the same product, at this price, with even 10gb, and I'd consider buying. But no less than 10gb is going to fly, I think, at this point.
How about this: In Soviet Russia the Railgun ... ummmmm ...
No, I can't really see any easy beneficial (which is, I guess, to say "non-military") applications for this tech, unless you can tell me how this could aid in space exploration (a means of launching spacecraft, maybe?) ... or how it might help in the advancement of processing or data storage technology...
Wait! I've got it:
Railgun confirms: Tank crew is dying.
Ahh, that's more like it. Now I can sleep. :-)
Wow, you're clearly not a true scientist. Had you been, I think you'd be much more interested in the cooling measurement in tauntauns per time-it-takes-to-reach-the-first-marker, commonly represented as the variable {Aack!}. :-)
I'll expect an apology in less than three parsecs.
Q: What kind of house is CmdrTaco going to buy with the ad revenue from /.?
A: A dupe-lex!
Q: Okay, but what brand of paint will he use in his snazzy new server room?
A: Dupe-on't! (DuPont)
Q: Okay, okay, but look - a lot of people are bitching about the quality of /. these days. Why? Is there some new philosophy CmdrTaco has chosen to follow?
A: Yes! Lately I hear he's been into the teachings of Yo-Duh, from the planet Dupeobah.
Q: What's Yo-Duh's main teaching?
A: "Dupe, or dupe not. Either way, don't try."
Oh, yeah. And here's the original.
It's been a long time
Since the last shuttle flight
There've been some changes
And a hell of a lot of gripes
But I can see the ship on the gantry now;
Nothing's in our way!
And they're not gonna hold at T-minus-10
We won't miss our window today!
'Cause I've got faith in Discovery!
I'm goin' where the SRBs take me!
I've got faith in Atlantis!
If we break down she'll come an' get me!
I've got faith in George Bush!
And on the budget funds he'll send me
I'll go all the way to Mars...!
'Cause I've got faith (I've got faith)
I've got faith in these shuttles of ours!
Cut to Scott Bakula in elaborate Mission Control set:
"Hi! I'm Scott Bakula! You might remember me from such cancelled sci-fi shows as Star Trek: Enterprise and Quantum Leap..."
Obviously, the editorim didn't pay attentions to verb endae during their English classices.
Right. Maybe they'll call it the PSP Reduced Pixel Edition.
A large number of English instructors at American colleges and universities today are either grad. students or part-timers, most of them earning $14,000 - $20,000 per year. Many of these people have 60 to 100 students per semester. Example: I started out as a grad. student teaching assistant. In addition to a full-time teaching load, I had 50 students to teach. I had to balance my own assignments with planning assignments, leading classes, and grading ~200 essays per semester. Later on, as an adjunct (part-time instructor) at a community college in North Carolina, I got paid $24 per credit hour per week. In other words, for teaching a standard 3-credit course, I was paid $72 per week - and I was only paid for the time I spent in class. No compensation for time spent in my office, grading and working with students outside of class, formulating assignments, etc. When my colleagues and I did the math for all the time we spent on these activities, we found we were making about $7.75 an hour. The majority of American students are being taught English by instructors like these.
Different people react to this shameful situation in academia different ways. For me, when I had 400 pages of writing to grade in a week, the only solution was to go over a paper one time, carefully, and to refer the student to a writing tutor at other times. It's not a question of wanting to help, or being too lazy to help. It's a question of the ability to do so. In a perfect world, tuition and fees paid to a university would "earn you the right" to have individual assistance with each writing assignment. Blame the academic world's focus on profit and part-time labor for the fact that isn't so.
Now, *I* know enough about computers and language to understand the difficulty in making a perfect grammar checker. But in our school's tutoring center, I've seen a fair number of students whose essays have been mangled by MS Word. These students don't know the limitations of the software. Microsoft doesn't offer any warning or instructions for users to aid them in using the grammar checker. It arrives turned on by default in Word. So students rely on it out of laziness and/or too much trust in computers to always generate the Right Answers. They believe that whatever the grammar checker suggests is absolutely right.
My experiences with these students are much like my experiences with people who click "Yes" in every dialog box that IE shows them, who trust the ads that "STOP SPYWARE NOW!" and so forth. When my classes discuss revision of writing, I always use some mangled examples taken directly from MS Word's grammar checker to show how computers cannot tell the context of what a person writes.
I'm not MS bashing here. But I have to agree totally with the professor in the article. Though many might not call a grammar checker "mission critical," the students who use it often believe it is a magic bullet. MS could make a lot of people's lives easier by either offering a disclaimer for the grammar checking routine, by improving it, or by getting rid of it altogether. I'd opt for getting rid of it.
If and when the Hubble is updated, could this type of gear be added, or orbited in tandem, to allow both visual and infared examination of space? (IANA astronaut, so if this sounds stupid...)
Those who do read it, and who do raise a fuss, are going to be met with very little interest ("You don't like it? Use another service.") But I hope, and I foresee, that such a broad and far-reaching "license agreement" gets shot apart in court one of these days. There are just too many possibilities for abuse - imagine if your phone company decided to record and use whatever you said on the line in whatever way they wished, without your permission. It'd never fly.
So why, exactly, should I be pining for a format war?
All that means to me is several years of incompatible hardware, price fluctuation, and annoying-ass FUD campaigns ("Our discs last longer! HD-DVDs melt after three months!" "That's a lie, plus OUR discs have better color density on playback!" "Oh YEAH?? Well, OUR discs...")
A format war might drive prices down more quickly in the short term, but what good is that to me if I need to buy new hardware and don't want to get stuck with a lemon during those few years before either one format wins hands-down or dual-capability drives get introduced?
Yeah - and, oh my GOD, let me tell you what she did with that flute... sicko ...
I was raised on M*A*S*H and original Star Trek reruns. Go figure. :-)
"So, like, how many, y'know, total losers are going to, like, stop navel-gazing down at Gap and, y'know, go and see this movie? Because - uh! - I tell you, this show? The O.C.? It's, like, so NOT for sci-fi geeks ... I mean, for real! It's like, y'know, that time the chick in the band? Tried to get me to ask her out one time, and, like, I know she's into that shit because, like, she TOTALLY camped out for that movie - the other one, with that Jar-Jar guy? I mean, get real, I'm in student council, I work at Abercrombie and fucking Fitch, y'know? Like I'm going out with some weirdo geeky chick... Jesus ... pass me a Smirnoff Ice, dude..."
But I tell you, this outpouring of support is amazing. Say what you will about the quality of the show, or the usage of the money - and I know the flood of comments about what a pitiful waste of capital this is will be starting soon. Hell, I'd like to have $3 mil to blow on [name of pet project] - who doesn't?
But here on Slashdot we love to piss and moan about the state of the entertainment industry and how people ought to vote with their money. I, for one, see this is a perfect example of some devoted fans doing just that. Too bad we didn't get this for Firefly - but we've got a film coming, so...
Bravo, fans!
"The Sound of Silence" was recorded back in '65. Just shows you how little originality is left in the American music scene today ...
I know there's no totally-impartial, non-profit-driven corporation or entity that can do this job well, but Verisign's past practices ("Site Finder" and its blind ignorance of how the Internet should work is a perfect example) have led me to see them as worse than the rest of the pack. I simply don't trust them to do the job right because they can't understand that the Internet != the WWW.
The Roman empire split ... long before Rome was sacked ..... The browser market is starting to split, slowly. As more devices make their way onto the 'Net in one form or another, the concept of a "browser" - a standalone program for Internet / Web access - will probably fragment also.
The Confederacy was a far stronger military power than you give it credit for. ..... Redmond is a far stronger power than most people give it credit for, but the whole point was to illustrate the shortsightedness aspect. :-)
And finally, Hitler didn't defeat the Soviets but he had Leningrad/St. Petersburg under siege for years... ..... Microsoft has had the personal computer market in the US and elsewhere locked for a long time. But they can only grow so much and have so many irons in the fire - and eventually they'll reach a point of diminishing returns. You can see that already as they drop at least one large project that's not working (.NET Passport).
You make some very good points, though - but I was going for humor more than historical accuracy. As someone already noted, dinosaurs don't speak much English. :-)
T. Rex, 30-some odd million years ago: "Mammals? Ha! I'm the biggest predator in town! Why the hell should I worry, I rule this place!"
Roman generals, c. 200 a.d.: "Barbarians, you say? We've got nothing to worry about. We're the biggest army on the planet. What could possibly go wrong?"
A Confederate general, 1861: "Those Yankees ain't nothin' to worry 'bout! We'll run 'em back across th' Potomac in a month, then we'll go back to plantin' cotton."
Adolf Hitler, 1942: "We can fight a war on two fronts! The Russians can't stop us! We're invincible!"
The Iraqi information minister, 2003: "The Americans will never set foot in Baghdad."
That said, I'd be a lot more upset about the aforementioned NFL deal if it meant we'd only see Madden games for one platform. That's not going to happen anytime soon, I don't think. But imagine a day when the only place you might find "official" NFL or NBA games would be the PSn, and all the other consoles would have brand-x football and basketball games.
And just like the US store, I'm sure it'll feature:
A lot of pop artists;
A good selection of works by earlier groups in various genres;
Not a whole lot of imports; and
A lot of partial albums for major singers, because some corporate asshat out there thinks that's good marketing.
I used to download lots of music from Napster in college. Burned it CD, played the hell out of it. But I didn't keep most of those mp3s, and today with a steady job and a little different viewpoint, I'm willing to pay money for good copies and to support artists I like. So I checked out iTunes and loved it. I've spent about $80 there in the first month.
But when I run across artists like Enigma (whose albums have been chopped to hell) and Genesis (none of the most notable songs from the Peter Gabriel era are available), what do I do? I load up my p2p and start searching.
I don't blame iTunes. I commend them for doing the best they can to bring fire to the music industry cavemen. I admire what they're doing, but if the music makers want me as a consumer, they're going to have to deal with me on my level.