I don't think it's about being happy, it's a combination of being satisfied, not knowing that there are alternatives and the effort needed to locate alternative software.
Maybe 'happy' was exaggerating a little, but in any case there are two kinds of people who apply here: (1) people who are too computer-illiterate (OK, i won't call them stupid) to know that alternatives are available, and (2) people who, when you really break it down, are generally satisfied with whatever they've got. (And it may be that they would be happier in the long term with Firefox, but the fact is that they evidently don't think that it's worth the effort in the short term. Which, more or less, means they're happy with IE.)
In my opinion, people should be able to have a clear choice between software, because people generally will just use what is there.
That isn't Microsoft's fault. I realise that being a monopoly changes the rules a little bit, but i hardly think that Microsoft should be legally responsible for people who don't know what they're doing. That's like me buying a car and then getting mad at Ford because they don't tell me about all the different brands of stereos i can buy for it. If you buy something and you're not knowledgeable enough to operate it to its full potential, it's YOUR fault.
Messenger runs on startup by default and to disable it you have to run gpedit.msc, hardly clear and basic.
Actually, you just have to go into the options and uncheck 'run at start-up'.:/
When my friends come to use my computer to use the net they generally look on the desktop for the non existant IE until I tell them to use Firefox as it's like IE. This would indicate to me that they don't realise that there are alternatives and that IE simply equals web browser. These are all uni students by the way so hardly your typical ignorant idiot I think
Well 'idiot' is a strong word, but yes, they are ignorant. If you buy something, you should have at least an intermediate grasp on how it works (or at least the intent to gain one). If you don't, sorry, but you deserve whatever you get. If you're using somebody else's computer and you can't figure it out... bummer. You'll just have to cope (and this applies to everything -- you wouldn't break down and sob about the injustice of it all if you couldn't figure out how to work your friend's dish-washer).
Someone can correct me if i'm wrong, but, if i'm not mistaken, most of the terrorists who highjacked the planes on 9/11 were let on because they had foreign passports. They did not need a driver's licence or a state ID, and the REAL ID Act does not change this fact. You can still board a plane with a foreign passport.
In other words, if REAL ID was in effect in 2001, 9/11 probably still would have happened.
Yeah their are alternatives but what incentive is there for your average user to download firefox, icq or real player (ok so that's not a bad thing!)
Uhh. You tell me. What IS the incentive? Evidently there ISN'T one, because you'd think that if they were unhappy using IE, MSN, and WMP they would go get alternatives.
The fact that people don't want to get alternatives when they're a few clicks away means that either they're idiots or they're happy with what they have. Neither of those reasons makes a company a monopoly. Now, Microsoft forcing people to use Internet Explorer on their operating system might constitute monopolistic practice, but the simple act of including it (i think) doesn't.
If you're willing to buy or pirate Windows, i'm pretty sure you'll get over buying or pirating Opera. (I mention Windows because of the 'IE's woes' thing. Obviously it doesn't necessarily apply if you're using Linux or whatever.)
Out of curiosity (i honestly don't know too much about it), though, what's wrong with Opera's JavaScript?
I know it makes me sound totally creepo to a lot of people, but i have a really huge problem with sex-offender laws. Like, i would never try to down-play the serious stuff, like rape, but a good deal of the stuff that gets you labelled as a sex offender is complete bull shit.
For example, the other day i was reading about some girl who had a crush on her teacher. They kissed, and the parents of the girl somehow found out. There is no doubt about the circumstances: There was no sex, they were fully clothed, the girl was the one who initiated it, and it was completely consensual. But this teacher is in danger of going to prison, getting a huge fine, and being put on a sex-offender registry for the next 10 years of her life. Not to mention, she'll probably have to sell her house and move to the boonies because she won't be allowed to live near schools anymore. (And, in a lot of cities, that's pretty much everywhere.) All because of a CONSENSUAL kiss.
Consensual minor/adult relationships, consensual incest, and providing pornography to minors are some of the dumb-ass 'victimless' things that are apparently justification for the government to completely ruin your life. (I mean, they're not things i would ever do, but come on.)
I personally am not too worried about the privacy rights of rapists and child-pornographers, so the act of tracking them doesn't really bother me too much. But i don't understand the point. If these people are so dangerous that their every move needs to be tracked, why aren't they in prison?
'Skinnable' is shit. No application should EVER be 'skinnable'. Stupidest idea of all time. LOL YEA GUYS I WANT 1 PROGRAM ON MY COMPUTAR TO LOOK AND WORK DIFRENT FROM ALL THE OTHER ONEZ
Idiot use of skins (and the lack of responsiveness that comes with that) aside, though, Trillian has some pretty rad features. I don't use it anymore (mainly because it's too much of a pain in the ass to find working cracks every time they updated it, and i don't think it's good enough to pay for it... on top of the skinning/responsiveness thing), having switched to Miranda now that it isn't completely hideous, but it still has a lot of neat features.
For example, Miranda's emoticons format SUCKS, horribly. Trillian uses XML for almost everything in the interface, including emoticons. (And, i mean, if they're going to go with skins, XML is the least-crappy way.) It's so easy to mess with emoticons in Trillian, it's not even funny. You just copy and paste a line of XML and change a file name or two and you're done. Also it supports animated emoticons and also 'emotisounds'. (All of this can be incredibly annoying, and i don't usually like graphical emoticons for simple stuff like:) and:p, but i do have some inside-joke kind of things with friends that i would love to be able to do in Miranda.)
Trillian also has tons and tons of options for things that you don't find in a lot of other IM clients, like away settings and display settings and formatting options and all kinds of other junk. Miranda gets more of it every time they release a new version, but i don't think it's up to where Trillian is.
Trillian also keeps really on top of the protocol changes, as far as i've seen. They must release a new protocol DLL every day for Miranda, and they still don't have OSCAR support for AIM, it took them ages to get buddy-icon support for some of the protocols (and some of them still don't have it), et cetera. Once they get OSCAR support finished, though, i suppose Miranda will get more popular and they'll be better about adding protocol features.
And another thing that Trillian has over Miranda is the developers' way of thinking. Sometimes they go way too far (my hatred for skins is almost indescribable), but they're closer to the good side of the spectrum than a lot of the Miranda developers are. The Miranda people have this really strict, fascist way of thinking, so much so that if they don't particularly like the idea of something, they won't even add the option. It's not even an arguement. If a developer doesn't like it, you either code it yourself or go find another client. There's a lot of garbage in Trillian that i'd never use, but at least it's there for the people who do need it.:/
I can't stand GAIM, though. Not on Windows, at least.
(He didn't say you did. 'If' and 'going to' imply, you know, a future possibility.)
Semi-off-topic question: I used OpenOffice.org for a while -- mainly because up until very recently Word had this HUGE problem with using a UK dictionary (it would always revert back to US English, no matter how many times i set it to UK) -- and one of the things that really really annoyed me was the fact that it didn't really support visual styles in Windows XP. (Like it used 'generic' scroll bars and drop-downs and buttons and stuff.) I realise that isn't like the biggest tragedy in the whole world, but it really bothers me to have one or two programs on my computer that don't look like the rest of them. Call me obsessive.
Haha, i found that out too. We have like a billion-dollar late fee in the one up here, and then we moved to another town in southern Iowa and were pretty pleased to learn that they just let us make a new account and that was that.
Family Video here is pretty rad. It's about as big as Blockbuster and has about the same selection, but it's a lot cheaper.
What's better than Family Video, though, is this place called Mr Movies. I think it's just a regional Iowa thing, not sure. But they are CHEAP. It's like $2 or $3 for a week, and on Tuesdays all non-new-releases are 50 cents.
I don't know anyone in my town who goes to Blockbuster, except as a very last resort. Which is why all this 'anti-trust' stuff they keep saying about Blockbuster doesn't personally make sense to me. I guess Iowa is just rad like that~~~~~~
You know... i support gay marriage very much. But if they're going to ban it, i wish they'd go and do it already. Stop arguing about WHAT TO CALL IT and argue about WHETHER YOU'RE GOING TO ALLOW IT.
That is the biggest problem with the gay-marriage issue in America right now, and it completely stuns me that more people don't see it the way i do. Instead of debating whether or not they're going to let homosexuals get married, they're debating about what semantic legalese term they're going to use to describe gay marriage IF, in fact, it ever does get legalised.
If you're against gay marriage, that's great, you're entitled to that. But if you're for gay marriage, you're for gay marriage. It doesn't matter what it's fucking called on some piece of paper in a drawer in Washington, it's still gay marriage.
Is there really anybody left on Slashdot that hasn't heard the NeXT-became-OS-X story 909850949850480984098409589408545 times?
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
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I was complaining about the general use of the brackets. I wasn't complaining that the use was 'wrong' (as in incorrect as far as branding), i was complaining that it's stupid, whether it's correct or not. It's like how some employees at id Software pronounce it 'eye-dee'. Authoritative, i guess, but they're still stupid.
As far as the Gooooogle thing, whatever. GMail then. The logo capitalises the M, but you suck if you capitalise it in writing.... I guess.
And also, if you wanted to be a REAL pedant about it, it would be 'apple ][' (not 'Apple ]['), since that's what the logo says if i'm remembering right.
And um, by the way, i just noticed something about what you said earlier. My Apple IIc Plus spells it just like that ('I's, not '/'s). Did they change the logo for the Plus?
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
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I didn't say anything was a fact. I know that the dumb logo uses brackets and that a lot of the writing uses brackets too. I don't know about the computer itself (because the Apple II is way before my time), but i do know that i have seen documentation that spells it 'Apple II'. I'm not sure if this is official documentation, though. I think it was. Apple III was spelt both ways, definitely. I don't know which one Apple preferred to use themselves though.
In any case, i don't care what the logo or the ROM said. You're on Slashdot and it looks retarded to spell it that way. It's like typing 'Goooooooooooooooooooogle' because the stupid logo on the bottom of the page says that....:/
(I guess i realise that my habit of not always capitalising the word 'i' is probably equally annoying for people, as i've already seen, so maybe i'll just be quiet now.)
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
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It's not my fault (whoever came up with that dumb idea) is retarded either....
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
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Well, some of them did. The first one. It's not my fault Apple is retarded.:(
And besides, didn't they (in an uncharacteristic stroke of common sense) allow both 'spellings'? Maybe i'm wrong, i don't remember.
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up
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I swear to God.
It's a Roman numeral. The capital letter 'I'. Not a slash, not a bracket. An I.
'Like what exactly?' What trouble are you having with his statement? Opera includes mail, chat, mouse gestures, better tabs, better usability options, better image rendering, real-time page zooming, better developer tools, et cetera, et cetera.... Of course, you can get most of this stuff with Firetruck, too, with extensions. But he already said that, as you know.... Unless you, you know, honed in on the fact that he criticised Firetruck and then totally disregarded the rest of his post.
What the Hell are you talking about? You can have a fucking opinion of something, and act on it, all you want. That doesn't mean you're qualified to. He never said Linus couldn't think what he wanted or do what he wanted or whatever the Hell retarded implication you drew out of his post. He said that he was not an expert in law and therefore not particularly in a position to make a very credible statement regarding the nature of the GPL. It has absolutely nothing to do with 'worshipping the professional classes', you tool.
It's like, OK, i don't like the way they coded Firefox, so i'm absolutely free to go in and re-write it so that it conforms to whatever retarded idea of software design i have. But since i know absolutely nothing about programming, i'm not particularly the person you would trust to do something like that, am i?
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I don't think it's about being happy, it's a combination of being satisfied, not knowing that there are alternatives and the effort needed to locate alternative software.
Maybe 'happy' was exaggerating a little, but in any case there are two kinds of people who apply here: (1) people who are too computer-illiterate (OK, i won't call them stupid) to know that alternatives are available, and (2) people who, when you really break it down, are generally satisfied with whatever they've got. (And it may be that they would be happier in the long term with Firefox, but the fact is that they evidently don't think that it's worth the effort in the short term. Which, more or less, means they're happy with IE.)
In my opinion, people should be able to have a clear choice between software, because people generally will just use what is there.
That isn't Microsoft's fault. I realise that being a monopoly changes the rules a little bit, but i hardly think that Microsoft should be legally responsible for people who don't know what they're doing. That's like me buying a car and then getting mad at Ford because they don't tell me about all the different brands of stereos i can buy for it. If you buy something and you're not knowledgeable enough to operate it to its full potential, it's YOUR fault.
Messenger runs on startup by default and to disable it you have to run gpedit.msc, hardly clear and basic.
Actually, you just have to go into the options and uncheck 'run at start-up'. :/
When my friends come to use my computer to use the net they generally look on the desktop for the non existant IE until I tell them to use Firefox as it's like IE. This would indicate to me that they don't realise that there are alternatives and that IE simply equals web browser. These are all uni students by the way so hardly your typical ignorant idiot I think
Well 'idiot' is a strong word, but yes, they are ignorant. If you buy something, you should have at least an intermediate grasp on how it works (or at least the intent to gain one). If you don't, sorry, but you deserve whatever you get. If you're using somebody else's computer and you can't figure it out... bummer. You'll just have to cope (and this applies to everything -- you wouldn't break down and sob about the injustice of it all if you couldn't figure out how to work your friend's dish-washer).
Someone can correct me if i'm wrong, but, if i'm not mistaken, most of the terrorists who highjacked the planes on 9/11 were let on because they had foreign passports. They did not need a driver's licence or a state ID, and the REAL ID Act does not change this fact. You can still board a plane with a foreign passport.
In other words, if REAL ID was in effect in 2001, 9/11 probably still would have happened.
Yeah their are alternatives but what incentive is there for your average user to download firefox, icq or real player (ok so that's not a bad thing!)
Uhh. You tell me. What IS the incentive? Evidently there ISN'T one, because you'd think that if they were unhappy using IE, MSN, and WMP they would go get alternatives.
The fact that people don't want to get alternatives when they're a few clicks away means that either they're idiots or they're happy with what they have. Neither of those reasons makes a company a monopoly. Now, Microsoft forcing people to use Internet Explorer on their operating system might constitute monopolistic practice, but the simple act of including it (i think) doesn't.
If you're willing to buy or pirate Windows, i'm pretty sure you'll get over buying or pirating Opera. (I mention Windows because of the 'IE's woes' thing. Obviously it doesn't necessarily apply if you're using Linux or whatever.)
Out of curiosity (i honestly don't know too much about it), though, what's wrong with Opera's JavaScript?
Missouri, actually, is the worst place in the United States. Mississippi is pretty bad, but i would probably put Florida in second over it.
(a) Criminals who have been castrated have gone on to commit further crimes.
(b) What would you do for female rapists?
(c) That's probably cruel and unusual punishment (in America, i mean). That's like cutting off hands for stealing.
I know it makes me sound totally creepo to a lot of people, but i have a really huge problem with sex-offender laws. Like, i would never try to down-play the serious stuff, like rape, but a good deal of the stuff that gets you labelled as a sex offender is complete bull shit.
For example, the other day i was reading about some girl who had a crush on her teacher. They kissed, and the parents of the girl somehow found out. There is no doubt about the circumstances: There was no sex, they were fully clothed, the girl was the one who initiated it, and it was completely consensual. But this teacher is in danger of going to prison, getting a huge fine, and being put on a sex-offender registry for the next 10 years of her life. Not to mention, she'll probably have to sell her house and move to the boonies because she won't be allowed to live near schools anymore. (And, in a lot of cities, that's pretty much everywhere.) All because of a CONSENSUAL kiss.
Consensual minor/adult relationships, consensual incest, and providing pornography to minors are some of the dumb-ass 'victimless' things that are apparently justification for the government to completely ruin your life. (I mean, they're not things i would ever do, but come on.)
I personally am not too worried about the privacy rights of rapists and child-pornographers, so the act of tracking them doesn't really bother me too much. But i don't understand the point. If these people are so dangerous that their every move needs to be tracked, why aren't they in prison?
Yeah, you definitely are. I've never heard someone else on Slashdot say that that's ironic. Ever!
'Skinnable' is shit. No application should EVER be 'skinnable'. Stupidest idea of all time. LOL YEA GUYS I WANT 1 PROGRAM ON MY COMPUTAR TO LOOK AND WORK DIFRENT FROM ALL THE OTHER ONEZ
Idiot use of skins (and the lack of responsiveness that comes with that) aside, though, Trillian has some pretty rad features. I don't use it anymore (mainly because it's too much of a pain in the ass to find working cracks every time they updated it, and i don't think it's good enough to pay for it... on top of the skinning/responsiveness thing), having switched to Miranda now that it isn't completely hideous, but it still has a lot of neat features.
For example, Miranda's emoticons format SUCKS, horribly. Trillian uses XML for almost everything in the interface, including emoticons. (And, i mean, if they're going to go with skins, XML is the least-crappy way.) It's so easy to mess with emoticons in Trillian, it's not even funny. You just copy and paste a line of XML and change a file name or two and you're done. Also it supports animated emoticons and also 'emotisounds'. (All of this can be incredibly annoying, and i don't usually like graphical emoticons for simple stuff like :) and :p, but i do have some inside-joke kind of things with friends that i would love to be able to do in Miranda.)
Trillian also has tons and tons of options for things that you don't find in a lot of other IM clients, like away settings and display settings and formatting options and all kinds of other junk. Miranda gets more of it every time they release a new version, but i don't think it's up to where Trillian is.
Trillian also keeps really on top of the protocol changes, as far as i've seen. They must release a new protocol DLL every day for Miranda, and they still don't have OSCAR support for AIM, it took them ages to get buddy-icon support for some of the protocols (and some of them still don't have it), et cetera. Once they get OSCAR support finished, though, i suppose Miranda will get more popular and they'll be better about adding protocol features.
And another thing that Trillian has over Miranda is the developers' way of thinking. Sometimes they go way too far (my hatred for skins is almost indescribable), but they're closer to the good side of the spectrum than a lot of the Miranda developers are. The Miranda people have this really strict, fascist way of thinking, so much so that if they don't particularly like the idea of something, they won't even add the option. It's not even an arguement. If a developer doesn't like it, you either code it yourself or go find another client. There's a lot of garbage in Trillian that i'd never use, but at least it's there for the people who do need it. :/
I can't stand GAIM, though. Not on Windows, at least.
Ha ha! He had me going there, didn't he!
'I ain't' is perfectly acceptable. 'Ain't' is a contraction of 'am not', and, last i checked, 'i am not' is fairly grammatically correct.
If you'd said 'that ain't', it'd be different.
(He didn't say you did. 'If' and 'going to' imply, you know, a future possibility.)
Semi-off-topic question: I used OpenOffice.org for a while -- mainly because up until very recently Word had this HUGE problem with using a UK dictionary (it would always revert back to US English, no matter how many times i set it to UK) -- and one of the things that really really annoyed me was the fact that it didn't really support visual styles in Windows XP. (Like it used 'generic' scroll bars and drop-downs and buttons and stuff.) I realise that isn't like the biggest tragedy in the whole world, but it really bothers me to have one or two programs on my computer that don't look like the rest of them. Call me obsessive.
So, um, did they fix that, or what?
Haha, i found that out too. We have like a billion-dollar late fee in the one up here, and then we moved to another town in southern Iowa and were pretty pleased to learn that they just let us make a new account and that was that.
(Also, to the other guy, Iowa is so rad. :/)
Family Video here is pretty rad. It's about as big as Blockbuster and has about the same selection, but it's a lot cheaper.
What's better than Family Video, though, is this place called Mr Movies. I think it's just a regional Iowa thing, not sure. But they are CHEAP. It's like $2 or $3 for a week, and on Tuesdays all non-new-releases are 50 cents.
I don't know anyone in my town who goes to Blockbuster, except as a very last resort. Which is why all this 'anti-trust' stuff they keep saying about Blockbuster doesn't personally make sense to me. I guess Iowa is just rad like that~~~~~~
You know what i meant. -_-
You know... i support gay marriage very much. But if they're going to ban it, i wish they'd go and do it already. Stop arguing about WHAT TO CALL IT and argue about WHETHER YOU'RE GOING TO ALLOW IT.
That is the biggest problem with the gay-marriage issue in America right now, and it completely stuns me that more people don't see it the way i do. Instead of debating whether or not they're going to let homosexuals get married, they're debating about what semantic legalese term they're going to use to describe gay marriage IF, in fact, it ever does get legalised.
If you're against gay marriage, that's great, you're entitled to that. But if you're for gay marriage, you're for gay marriage. It doesn't matter what it's fucking called on some piece of paper in a drawer in Washington, it's still gay marriage.
Is there really anybody left on Slashdot that hasn't heard the NeXT-became-OS-X story 909850949850480984098409589408545 times?
I was complaining about the general use of the brackets. I wasn't complaining that the use was 'wrong' (as in incorrect as far as branding), i was complaining that it's stupid, whether it's correct or not. It's like how some employees at id Software pronounce it 'eye-dee'. Authoritative, i guess, but they're still stupid.
As far as the Gooooogle thing, whatever. GMail then. The logo capitalises the M, but you suck if you capitalise it in writing. ... I guess.
And also, if you wanted to be a REAL pedant about it, it would be 'apple ][' (not 'Apple ]['), since that's what the logo says if i'm remembering right.
And um, by the way, i just noticed something about what you said earlier. My Apple IIc Plus spells it just like that ('I's, not '/'s). Did they change the logo for the Plus?
I didn't say anything was a fact. I know that the dumb logo uses brackets and that a lot of the writing uses brackets too. I don't know about the computer itself (because the Apple II is way before my time), but i do know that i have seen documentation that spells it 'Apple II'. I'm not sure if this is official documentation, though. I think it was. Apple III was spelt both ways, definitely. I don't know which one Apple preferred to use themselves though.
In any case, i don't care what the logo or the ROM said. You're on Slashdot and it looks retarded to spell it that way. It's like typing 'Goooooooooooooooooooogle' because the stupid logo on the bottom of the page says that.... :/
(I guess i realise that my habit of not always capitalising the word 'i' is probably equally annoying for people, as i've already seen, so maybe i'll just be quiet now.)
It's not my fault (whoever came up with that dumb idea) is retarded either....
Well, some of them did. The first one. It's not my fault Apple is retarded. :(
And besides, didn't they (in an uncharacteristic stroke of common sense) allow both 'spellings'? Maybe i'm wrong, i don't remember.
I swear to God.
It's a Roman numeral. The capital letter 'I'. Not a slash, not a bracket. An I.
eating more donuts?
That so stopped being clever like a bajillion years ago, i swear to God.
'Like what exactly?' What trouble are you having with his statement? Opera includes mail, chat, mouse gestures, better tabs, better usability options, better image rendering, real-time page zooming, better developer tools, et cetera, et cetera.... Of course, you can get most of this stuff with Firetruck, too, with extensions. But he already said that, as you know. ... Unless you, you know, honed in on the fact that he criticised Firetruck and then totally disregarded the rest of his post.
What the Hell are you talking about? You can have a fucking opinion of something, and act on it, all you want. That doesn't mean you're qualified to. He never said Linus couldn't think what he wanted or do what he wanted or whatever the Hell retarded implication you drew out of his post. He said that he was not an expert in law and therefore not particularly in a position to make a very credible statement regarding the nature of the GPL. It has absolutely nothing to do with 'worshipping the professional classes', you tool.
It's like, OK, i don't like the way they coded Firefox, so i'm absolutely free to go in and re-write it so that it conforms to whatever retarded idea of software design i have. But since i know absolutely nothing about programming, i'm not particularly the person you would trust to do something like that, am i?