"Inconsistent User Interface. Open iTunes, Safari and Mail. All three of these programs are Apple's own, and they're among the ones most likely to be used by Mac OS X users. So why do all three of them look different? "
This bugs me too, but I think it's intentional. First off, Apple probably doesn't want us thinking of iTunes as just another UI widget like Calculator or TextEdit. It has its own look and feel.
Plus, of course, iTunes has to maintain cross-platform compatibility and an Aero-style interface might look less than optimal running on Windows.
I think that'd be an interesting maneuver by the record industry. Presumably they're sick of Apple dictating pricing to them, since Apple's iPod more or less owns the mp3-player market and iTMS is currently the only way to get DRM'ed music on an iPod. They're probably hoping that when they DON'T need iTMS anymore (because people can download mp3s to their iPod), Apple won't be in a position to boss them around anymore.
The fun part of this is that it can only benefit consumers. It's not like people are buying iPods because iTMS has a stranglehold on the online music market; it's the other way around (people are using iTMS because it works with their iPods). Even if this move "kills" iTMS, it won't do much at all to hurt iPod sales. So for the foreseeable future, the RIAA has to either accept Apple's relatively low and equitable track pricing or else peddle their music DRM-free. Sounds good to me!
Oops, my bad, "Blu-Ray," not "HD-DVD." In my head, they're both code-named "that thing that looks about the same as a DVD on my TV, but has more annoying DRM built in."
The PS3 may be a "gaming console" to you, but it's also the cheapest HD-DVD player on the market. For hi-fi movie afficionados, some of whom probably read Slashdot, the PS3's performance as a video player is a lot more relevant than any games for it.
"It seems the young guns don't have the extra cash to stump up for smooth shiny aesthetics."
I thought we'd pretty much established that Macs were as cheap or cheaper than equivalent Dells, but I guess the "Apples are overpriced" meme ain't going anywhere.
It's kind of funny that the Apple stereotypes seem to live forever, even when they blatantly contradict each other. Hurray for granola-eating hippy trendy yuppy artsy Unix-nerdy wealthy Mac users!
From comments like this you get the idea that the Mac vs. PC ads feature kids skateboarding off a helicopter while bad punk music blasts in the background, but that's not the case. The ads are funny and fairly classy, at least by advertising standards. I don't know that they really seem "targeted" at any one demographic.
""Don't click on links in email messages. Type the URL in your browser manually." - bit overkill. Check to see where they're going first. And your mail client shouldn't have any active content enabled for viewing mail in the first place, so a JavaScript onmouseover/onmouseout/onclick handler attached to a link would have no effect anyway. If you're following the other suggestions on the list, this doesn't matter anyway, since your email is plain text and any links that appear in the body of the mail message are a result of the mail client automatically highlighting what looks like a link."
The issue, as I understand it, is that some phishing URLs use special characters very similar to standard English letters. Stuff like "http://update.mîcrosoft.com/" (notice the weird thingy on the "i"?) but possibly without even that visible a difference. So if you click the link or even copy-paste it, you risk being directed to a phishing site.
Yeah, good luck with that violent revolution. I'm sure your semiautomatic will hold out just fine against the US Army's trained soldiers with body armor, automatic weapons, tanks, jets, and nuclear friggin' missiles.
For better or worse (better in my opinion), a violent revolution in the US is no longer feasible.
Basically, the job market for skilled jobs is shrinking. If you're not capable of going to a GOOD four-year college and landing a white-collar career, you have fewer and fewer options outside the "unskilled" job market. So if you've got a 2.0 GPA, you might as well start earning your MacDonald's salary now; a high school diploma won't help very much, at least in the minds of many kids.
Note: I have absolutely no sources or non-anecdotal data that supports this theory, but I still think it's true.
The thing is, you rarely HAVE to spend hours fighting the same enemies over and over in WoW.
It's very possible to enjoy every aspect of the game, from PvP combat to end-game raiding, with very little "grinding" or "farming." Those who do grind or farm a lot are usually after marginal benefits or "prestige" items with no major functional advantage. Even in the most "endgame" raid guilds, those basement-nerd collectives you've heard about filled with people who play 30+ hours a week, most of those people only spend a couple of those hours a week or less doing things that a bot could do for them. The rest of the time they're actually having fun killing stuff that requires effort and intelligence.
Nintendo's push for innovation over graphical prowess is exciting for game developers, both because they like innovation and they dislike cutting-edge graphics (which require 8-figure budgets, which leads to more conservative game publishers who don't want to risk such huge investments, which leads to tough times for any developer who doesn't want to spend his or her life updating the facial animations for Madden 20XX).
This doesn't mean ordinary GAMERS should necessarily prefer Wii. A lot of gamers only go for the AAA titles that can afford to have great graphics AND excellent gameplay, plot, etc. For them, it comes down to a much more difficult personal preference between new controller schemes and advanced graphics.
Oh yeah, and a few hundred bucks and a six-day line outside a Gamestop in a gloomy strip mall.
So many comments say things like this and get modded Insightful. Apple doesn't want unmaintained, illegal copies of OSX out there because it weakens Apple's branding. For every person who gets "converted" after downloading a hacked copy of OSX, there's another guy who tries it out, gets some weird driver conflict because he's running non-Apple hardware, and says, "Hey, this thing is just as buggy and confusing as Windows!" And moreover, human nature dictates that people like to bitch more than they like to evangelize, so it's the second guy who's gonna tell all his friends what a piece of crap OSX is.
I'm confused... is this actually the CounterStrike we all know and love, or is it some game created by an Iranian company that happens to share the same name? And if it's the former, are we talking about some kind of mod for it, designed by terrorists, or did some jackass just get the box copy, see the option to play as "terrorists," and call in the press?
"9/11 CANNOT be blamed on one individual."
Sure it can. Bin Laden. And of course the individual terrorists on those planes. It's a sign of that very egoism that the rest of the world is always complaining about that we think these attacks have to have been ultimately caused by US.
Slashdot Mirror
"Inconsistent User Interface. Open iTunes, Safari and Mail. All three of these programs are Apple's own, and they're among the ones most likely to be used by Mac OS X users. So why do all three of them look different? "
This bugs me too, but I think it's intentional. First off, Apple probably doesn't want us thinking of iTunes as just another UI widget like Calculator or TextEdit. It has its own look and feel.
Plus, of course, iTunes has to maintain cross-platform compatibility and an Aero-style interface might look less than optimal running on Windows.
I think that'd be an interesting maneuver by the record industry. Presumably they're sick of Apple dictating pricing to them, since Apple's iPod more or less owns the mp3-player market and iTMS is currently the only way to get DRM'ed music on an iPod. They're probably hoping that when they DON'T need iTMS anymore (because people can download mp3s to their iPod), Apple won't be in a position to boss them around anymore.
The fun part of this is that it can only benefit consumers. It's not like people are buying iPods because iTMS has a stranglehold on the online music market; it's the other way around (people are using iTMS because it works with their iPods). Even if this move "kills" iTMS, it won't do much at all to hurt iPod sales. So for the foreseeable future, the RIAA has to either accept Apple's relatively low and equitable track pricing or else peddle their music DRM-free. Sounds good to me!
According to his explanation, 1/0=infinity, so each of the zero children would get FIVE INFINITIES of apples.
Worst. Bar. Ever.
Oops, my bad, "Blu-Ray," not "HD-DVD." In my head, they're both code-named "that thing that looks about the same as a DVD on my TV, but has more annoying DRM built in."
The PS3 may be a "gaming console" to you, but it's also the cheapest HD-DVD player on the market. For hi-fi movie afficionados, some of whom probably read Slashdot, the PS3's performance as a video player is a lot more relevant than any games for it.
"It seems the young guns don't have the extra cash to stump up for smooth shiny aesthetics." I thought we'd pretty much established that Macs were as cheap or cheaper than equivalent Dells, but I guess the "Apples are overpriced" meme ain't going anywhere. It's kind of funny that the Apple stereotypes seem to live forever, even when they blatantly contradict each other. Hurray for granola-eating hippy trendy yuppy artsy Unix-nerdy wealthy Mac users!
From comments like this you get the idea that the Mac vs. PC ads feature kids skateboarding off a helicopter while bad punk music blasts in the background, but that's not the case. The ads are funny and fairly classy, at least by advertising standards. I don't know that they really seem "targeted" at any one demographic.
Especially the ladybugs, who hastened to emphasize that they can ALREADY FLY.
""Don't click on links in email messages. Type the URL in your browser manually." - bit overkill. Check to see where they're going first. And your mail client shouldn't have any active content enabled for viewing mail in the first place, so a JavaScript onmouseover/onmouseout/onclick handler attached to a link would have no effect anyway. If you're following the other suggestions on the list, this doesn't matter anyway, since your email is plain text and any links that appear in the body of the mail message are a result of the mail client automatically highlighting what looks like a link."
The issue, as I understand it, is that some phishing URLs use special characters very similar to standard English letters. Stuff like "http://update.mîcrosoft.com/" (notice the weird thingy on the "i"?) but possibly without even that visible a difference. So if you click the link or even copy-paste it, you risk being directed to a phishing site.
Yeah, good luck with that violent revolution. I'm sure your semiautomatic will hold out just fine against the US Army's trained soldiers with body armor, automatic weapons, tanks, jets, and nuclear friggin' missiles.
For better or worse (better in my opinion), a violent revolution in the US is no longer feasible.
25% of laptops sold is "irrelevant"? Mkay.
How can any comment that includes the line, "The software didn't install? Big deal!" be considered "insightful"?
Basically, the job market for skilled jobs is shrinking. If you're not capable of going to a GOOD four-year college and landing a white-collar career, you have fewer and fewer options outside the "unskilled" job market. So if you've got a 2.0 GPA, you might as well start earning your MacDonald's salary now; a high school diploma won't help very much, at least in the minds of many kids.
Note: I have absolutely no sources or non-anecdotal data that supports this theory, but I still think it's true.
The thing is, you rarely HAVE to spend hours fighting the same enemies over and over in WoW.
It's very possible to enjoy every aspect of the game, from PvP combat to end-game raiding, with very little "grinding" or "farming." Those who do grind or farm a lot are usually after marginal benefits or "prestige" items with no major functional advantage. Even in the most "endgame" raid guilds, those basement-nerd collectives you've heard about filled with people who play 30+ hours a week, most of those people only spend a couple of those hours a week or less doing things that a bot could do for them. The rest of the time they're actually having fun killing stuff that requires effort and intelligence.
Nintendo's push for innovation over graphical prowess is exciting for game developers, both because they like innovation and they dislike cutting-edge graphics (which require 8-figure budgets, which leads to more conservative game publishers who don't want to risk such huge investments, which leads to tough times for any developer who doesn't want to spend his or her life updating the facial animations for Madden 20XX).
This doesn't mean ordinary GAMERS should necessarily prefer Wii. A lot of gamers only go for the AAA titles that can afford to have great graphics AND excellent gameplay, plot, etc. For them, it comes down to a much more difficult personal preference between new controller schemes and advanced graphics.
Oh yeah, and a few hundred bucks and a six-day line outside a Gamestop in a gloomy strip mall.
Are you implying that OSX wasn't released under a GNU license?!?
The iPod cassette converter thing costs like five bucks, dude.
So many comments say things like this and get modded Insightful. Apple doesn't want unmaintained, illegal copies of OSX out there because it weakens Apple's branding. For every person who gets "converted" after downloading a hacked copy of OSX, there's another guy who tries it out, gets some weird driver conflict because he's running non-Apple hardware, and says, "Hey, this thing is just as buggy and confusing as Windows!" And moreover, human nature dictates that people like to bitch more than they like to evangelize, so it's the second guy who's gonna tell all his friends what a piece of crap OSX is.
Yeah, good thing we don't have a GLOBAL ECONOMY, right? Because if we did, we might have Americans investing in Japanese multinationals!
An animated demonstration of the principle, provided quasi-legally via YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=54LcZbig8fY
I have no idea what any of that means, but rest assured that by the time this thread ends I will have developed ironclad opinions on the subject.
LOUD ones.
I'm confused... is this actually the CounterStrike we all know and love, or is it some game created by an Iranian company that happens to share the same name? And if it's the former, are we talking about some kind of mod for it, designed by terrorists, or did some jackass just get the box copy, see the option to play as "terrorists," and call in the press?
I mean, come ON. Virtual lasers have been around since Space Invaders...
"9/11 CANNOT be blamed on one individual." Sure it can. Bin Laden. And of course the individual terrorists on those planes. It's a sign of that very egoism that the rest of the world is always complaining about that we think these attacks have to have been ultimately caused by US.