personally, I dont think it's really microsofts fault, and that's coming from a mostly happy apple user. MS are an easy target because they have the most clueless users but if you moved all those users to another platform they would not suddenly start caring what the computer says. people in general seem to try and be as completely ignorant as to how things work as possible. it's almost like they think that by being ignorant to how it works, they can then pass off the blame when the computer does what they told it to do.
It couldn't be that people are sick and tired of reading paragraphs upon paragraphs of what usually is meaningless drivel coming out of dialogs such as ULAs and endless confirmations that a "default installation mode" were designed specifically to handle, would it?
And it couldn't be perhaps that people are busy and don't have time to read paragraph upon paragraph of over technical sounding dialogs when they are simply trying to get their work accomplished, right?
Or maybe that confirmation dialogs are pervasive in almost every modern windows application to the point of nausea, with almost all of them being completely pointless handholding the developer inserted to make themselves feel better about leaving out features or designing an interface so unintuitive they felt like they needed complicated confirmation flows, could it?
Nah, I think it's easier to just say "it's cuz they're dumb!!"
Honestly, that argument might work for some people, some people don't know how to use any interface at all. But I work in development, and I can tell you that I, yes, I, am definitely guilty of not reading the entirety of every dialog window before clicking yes or confirm.
And adding another dialog isn't the solution. Making the flow make sense and redesigning the screen is usually the solution. If things are so unintuitive or risky that you have to warn the user about the things they are about to do because it's too easy to do the wrong thing, maybe you should take a second look at your design.
I know that it doesn't really apply to deleting a file, but it applies to almost every other example I see.
Oh, and I definitely don't appreciate the new trend of designers to put cancel buttons where confirm ones should be so you get confused and look at the screen again and realize you hit cancel when you were trying to save your changes, because they thought it was too "risky" for you to do exactly what you were trying to do. Seriously, the war on users has to stop.
In what way does the presents of evolution rule out an intelligent designer; might that designer have included an evolutionary mechanism?
Am I missing something here? Who ever said that evolution ruled out an intelligent designer? It's not an origin theory. Why do we need a movie to determine something that we already know: evolution isn't an origin theory. If you want to take that up with someone, ask some big bang/similar theorists. Evolution isn't an origin theory.
Another thing is, if people have such a problem with evolution, and they can find all kinds of holes in the theory, maybe they should create their own theory that explains more. Because that's how science actually works. A lot of the things you learn in a grade school science classroom have already been outdated but are still taught because the earlier theories display a large proportion of the behavior of the latter theories. But the theories are still taught because it makes sense for science education.
What does Stein propose? Do away with science education, meandering on endlessly about how evolution in particular is a theory? Of course it's a theory. All of scientific research is all about the creation of theory, why does evolution deserve special attention? That's the problem, not that it's a theory.
If people want to cherry pick which scientific theories, what knowledge their children should have, maybe they should fight that battle somewhere outside of the public school system. The people fighting this battle are the same idiots that want to deny teenagers sex education classes and then get outraged when teenagers get pregnant. Get real. People that are at odds with the pursuit of knowledge or truth and at odds with reality have no business telling the children of America what they should and shouldn't be taught. Maybe they should consider their dwindling church statistics as a review of their overzealousness.
I'm a techie too and I have both a Linux PC and Windows PC at home. The Linux PC uses the latest version of Ubuntu. Frankly, Linux has been a huge pain in the ass to install and setup for what I need it for. But it is getting better. On my previous install (Ubuntu 7.04), I finally just threw my hands up in frustration. I couldn't even change the screen resolution without doing it manually in the xorg config file and most of the programs I needed simply weren't available for it (or, if they were available, were either buggy as hell or didn't even have a basic GUI for linux). More recently it has gotten better. The newest version of Ubuntu has better GUI (including the "about fucking time" ability to change screen resolutions without having to go into the terminal). And a lot of programs like TrueCrypt are finally releasing GUI's for linux.
You can change resolutions without editing the x.org config file. I think the problem a lot of semi-technical people have with the Linux GUI is that they think they can't do things they already could. In Windows you look through the GUI to figure out a way to do something before you Google it, in Linux most savvy users think the functionality just isn't there at all and hit Google immediately, which usually gives them help forums containing technical people's responses to technical questions, so they end up using the CLI more than they have to because they Google too much.
I've been able to change resolutions with the GUI since I started using Ubuntu three or four versions ago, I'm sure you've been able to do it before that as well. There are some things that are in non-obvious/strange places in Ubuntu, but the same goes for Windows, the problem is that if someone in Linux can't find it immediately in the UI instead of looking at the menus, they assume its not there and then bitch and switch back to Windows.
Linux isn't for everyone, it's for those who want a change. I'm tired of people thinking we have to push Linux on everyone or that everyone will eventually get sick of Windows and switch. There's some people that won't switch because a computer is like a toaster oven and they don't care, it emails and goes on the web. Live with it, and stop trying to pretend that your power user apps not transferring over to a new OS is a reason the OS sucks. Linux hasn't gotten any uptake because normal computer users don't care about the OS, they just want to use a computer for a few and want basic little things to work. I guarantee if you personally installed Linux on a lot of computers all they'd care about is some weirdo application they used since 1995 that doesn't work in Linux and has no equivalent. Why try to sell a technical OS to a person that doesn't care about technical features. It's like trying to sell a person who wants an economy car a Jaguar.
The reason I use Firefox instead of Opera is the same reason I use Windows instead of Linux: The former supports the plugins/applications that I want to run, while the latter doesn't. Specifically, the plugins I use in Firefox are:
Everyone always makes excuses for using Windows. The only thing Linux doesn't have that Windows does is support for most games out of the box. Linux gaming leaves a lot to be desired. But for application support, most OSS software is heads above the other stuff even on Windows. I found myself switching to a bunch of OSS applications that were designed for Linux when running Windows, then I figured what the hell's the difference? Might as well just run Linux.
Honestly, any application that runs on Windows but doesn't have an equivalent on Linux because it's a legacy, closed source, or commercial application is kind of the way of the past anyway. But I understand that people still need to run these things. But what I don't understand is why if you actually want to run Linux you don't use the following options:
Wine - Which supports a lot of Windows legacy applications
The OSS alternative - Which sometimes ends up being the same or better compared to the application you were using. There are notable examples otherwise.
Virtualization - In case everyone didn't know it, unless you need gaming/advanced 3d applications, you can simply run Windows in a virtualized Linux environment. (If you want to be legal, I believe there's a charge for this license, but I digress). Aside from the possible purchase of a Windows license, a virtualized Windows environment fills any gaps in application support, because you ARE running Windows, in Linux. I hated GIMP, so I installed Photoshop on my VM, did my business, brought it back into Linux, moved on with my life. There's even VirtualBox, which is close to as good as VMWare Workstation/Player in a lot of cases. I use it personally and I've had very few problems, and I work with VMs mainly for a living.
I'm just so sick of hearing people give me this argument, when it's just not the case anymore. It's understandable if you want to game with your computer, or if all you do is 3d apps (which you'd probably be using a Mac anyway, because it seems like most of the art crowd goes that route), but if you are running Legacy apps and other business/regular applications, you can easily move to Linux today.
People might say "if you are running Windows in a VM, why don't you just run Windows?" And my answer would be, because I don't typically find myself running Windows applications overall. Right now I have a Dell Linux machine and a machine with both Linux and Windows on dual boot for gaming. Most often I find myself never booting into Windows and never running anything in the VM. But it's nice to have the ability if something doesn't work any other way. Not only that, if the VM has a problem you can make snapshots, your Windows VM will be surrounded by Linux so it'll be in a sort of sandbox, and you can (if you get the right version of VirtualBox) attach USB devices directly to the VM so you can even have legacy support for hardware that doesn't support Windows (although I'd just recommend finding better hardware vendors). Then when you are done the little crap you have to do in Windows, you close the Window and you're back home again.
You'd be surprised by how easily people are confused by this.
Create a butt-ugly program where every feature is easy to find and compare it with a beautiful interface where every button is hidden behind layers of hoops. Most people will claim the beautiful one is more usable.
I've seen this while developing games; you can have all the gameplay finished and finetuned but not until the game has nice pictures instead of placeholders will they consider it "playable", even if you tell them you've yet to make it pretty.
This begs the question whether an open source project should be more concerned about looking usable or actually being usable. For commercial software, looks usually sell better than functionality. Sad but true. FOSS doesn't need to sell financially.
Most definitely. I've noticed that when I'm prototyping something out and throwing it together it garners no attention whatsoever. You put some actual stock images on or something and suddenly it's a big hit, even if it works exactly the same as it did a week ago. People are very form over function oriented in general, and most people in charge don't even think about the function until the graphics are all in place, then it's "can we move this here, can we move that there" when that would've been better done in the design phase. Personally, I always prefer tools that work over ones that look pretty, but I'm in the minority.
Where do you get that people are quiting MySpace for Facebook? Do you care to support the basis of your opinion with any kind of facts, figures?
I think you are wrong -- I think they are both growing exponentially and that there's no significant greater shifting to Facebook from Myspace than there is of shifting from Facebook to Myspace.
Maybe if you use account numbers as your statistic you will see that trend. But it's the same people registering for both. More than likely most people didn't do as I did when I left MySpace, and searched for how to actually delete the account, they probably just stopped using it. I know personally that I, my sister, and my girlfriend all left MySpace and all have Facebook accounts. I already feel a little bit of facebook shark jumping with all the stupid plugins and this Microsoft crap furthers the trend. It's only a little while before everyone that knows what's up on the web thinks that facebook sucks and moves on. This pattern will continue until there's a site that will actually resist crappy plugins, annoying spammers, weird people adding you all the time and corporate buyouts. Until then, it'll be site to site to site.
Well let's see, you could easily use something like rsync, but wait, Apple decided that it wasn't good enough to allow direct access to the drive's music partition. Well I guess _I_ could just use rsync then, because I'm smart enough to not buy apple's products and expect them to play nice with everything else, oh, and I read the box.
And that's the way obviousness should be interpreted. There's no way someone else wouldn't have "invented" ("discovered" is perhaps a better word) one-click shopping, if Amazon didn't. Perhaps Amazon was first, but it's still obvious.
Yes, because every police officer and TSA employee are experienced in bomb making and dealing with bombs.
Well then there's your problem. Shouldn't the people who are at the end of a trigger if there's supposedly a bomb know WTF one looks like? I don't understand all the people on here posting responses such as "these people are too busy to go to bomb school", if they are gonna shoot someone over a bomb, I'm pretty sure they should know what one looks like. Why do people accept such crumby accountability from the officials that we allow to roam around the country like GI Joes on a regular basis?
But whatever, I'm just another member of the hive for thinking that someone should probably have a good idea about what their job entails. My bad.
PS: How is she "lucky" they didn't shoot her? We are unlucky to be living in such an alarmist, idiot filled nation, in which you are likely to be shot for having anything that sort of looks like a bomb or a gun. Shoot first and ask questions later right? Nothing wrong with that policy at all.
I'm looking forward to the convoluted arguments as to how the security personnel overreacted, and how she did nothing wrong. The damn thing definitely looks like it could have been a bomb. She really is lucky they didn't shoot her.
Maybe to your well-trained eyes it looks like a bomb. But shouldn't people with experience dealing with bombs and bomb making know that silly putty, a 9V battery and a circuit board with shiny lights do not a bomb make?
Not to mention, why are they allowed to show it to the cameras? Why are they retaining the shirt after it was determined not to be a bomb? Just to show off to the media?
What the hell does having a "hoax device" even mean, and how come people in Boston keep getting charged with it? That city is starting to become the punchline of the state of the nation's national security. I didn't know if was a crime to have a circuit board, a battery, shiny lights, silly putty and a hoodie in Boston, guess I better cancel my plans to visit there...EVER.
"One more such victory and we will be undone."
This headline needs rewriting as "Man wins Pyrrhic Victory". $7500 worse off and he didn't even get an apology. Hell, if he'd actually been shoplifting he'd have got a smaller fine than that.
Which is why I propose a new method of action to likeminded individuals. If the store asks for your receipt, tell them first off that you didn't agree to any policy of bag inspection upon purchase and were unaware of those policies. Then indicate that they have two options, either they can permit you to leave without inspecting the receipt, or they can inspect the receipt and you will return whatever merchandise you purchased immediately and then subsequently never return again. If enough people did this and then followed through with their ultimatum, that would make a difference.
I agree with the statement, and have said similar things to justify the whole niether open source or closed is better, but to say it is opensource is ludacris.
Oh, it's ludacris is it? I thought maybe they just think they can become chamillionaires by claiming so. =P
I was going to send you a private message, but I honestly can't figure out how to do that. So let me ask you since you recommended the N800. How would you say it fairs as far as battery life when using the media player. I'm not so much interested in video playing but in music? I'd like something to replace my current archos gmini 402 with a wifi connection built-in. I'm really looking for a UMPC with more storage, but I think if I bought a 8gb, that would be okay for music per trip. So how would you say it fairs for battery life listening to music? Because the competition that it has right now in my mind is the Archos 605 wifi, which is mainly a media player but also a closed platform (but it allows installation of opera and has a bigger HD). Do you think if I can meet the space constraints that I can replace the archos as my media player for work usage?
2) The iPod never claimed to carry any sort of support for Linux whatsoever. It seems to me that if you wanted to support Linux, you'd buy a product that actually supports Linux instead of one that doesn't-- and then complaining when the hack you're using to get it to work no longer works!
Which is exactly why I didn't follow the hive down the iPod path. Apple products for me usually have the same effect, and the iphone did too until all the details came out.
I remember seeing the first Ipod commercials, I was watching it thinking, it's about time a mainstream company came out with a compact mp3 player, and I can't wait till they have a windows version.
Then in a few years they had an Ipod for windows, and when I looked into it versus the competition, I already had an RCA Lyra player, which was, arguably, in some ways a POS, but it was also 100 bucks when I bought it for 20gb, a bargain for the time, and it worked.
When the time came to buy my next MP3 player I did the research, the Ipod was among those I researched. And I got the same thing from the sites, Ipod is awesome! Ipod is great for usability. But what they also let out of the bag was that Ipod used proprietary protocols for transferring MP3s to the thing and that it tried to get you to use Itunes, which I wasn't prepared to do now, having already used a player that functions just as a straight hard drive in windows. So I ended up buying an archos gmini 402 with it's extensive feature set and relatively low price. I was impressed with the results and I lost none of my freedom in the exchange, I can use it on linux, mac, PC, whatever supports a USB disk basically. Same thing with the lyra. I've always heard the hive saying "yes, but you can use players on linux, they support ipod." In the back of my mind I had this thought. Ipod support on Linux and alternative platforms had never been promised because of the way ipods worked, and honestly, it was kind of a hack that they reverse engineered the ipod's functionality and got it to work. I understand why they did it, because Ipods are popular. You know what's great about the players I bought? They don't HAVE to be popular to work. Nobody has to reverse engineer anything.
I thought about getting an Iphone, then I heard they were locking out 3rd party development, that they didn't really have flash or javascript support in the browser, etc. I figured that it would be the same, and it is. People think that because they can hack a device to do something, it's part of its feature set. Nobody remembers that since the platform is locked, you are one patch away from no longer being able to use the things you wanted to put on your iphone. It doesn't matter that the device CAN do things if Apple doesn't let it.
I hope one day the time comes when someone releases an MP3 player with wifi support, with video support, with a flashable OS and a Linux base. One that truly doesn't try to keep the 3rd party, which tends to develop additional features for free, away from the platform. A truly open PMP with wifi access that you can write anything for. A computer in the palm of your hand.
It seems like there's too much money in lock down for a company like Apple to resist once they got the ball rolling. For the people who say "yes, but the support for MP3 players on Mac is going against the stream" I say, at least you have support. You have support for all the platforms you want. I'm not a big fan of creative either because of their tendency to lock you out. I just want a PMP that connects like a HD to the PC, there's no reason why there needs to be a weird protocol. That's why despite style and despite the hive I've gone the opposite way of Ipod. People need to make PMPs as open and useful as general computers, and that's when you'll see a platform truly florish. That's when you'll truly have what we are all sort of seeking: a computer in the palm of our hand.
If that's their business model, then fine. That's their choice as a corporation. Meanwhile, there's still people lining up for jobs every time a walmart opens, and people lining up to buy stuff from there. So while there may be a lot of people who don't like them, there's a ton more people who do like what walmart is doing.
Not liking what they do and shopping there don't have to be mutually exclusive. I shop there and I don't necessarily agree with anything they stand for, in fact, I often say how I hate the place as I'm there. It's hard to find some things anywhere else without spending half of your day driving from one specialty store to another.
Ok, for what its worth, I think Adobe is the biggest monopoly in computer history (Image editing with Photoshop, PostScript which has been freely emulated without fear of reprisal). Mind you, they do not seem to practice monopolistic power, so therefor I really like Adobe. The compete in an apparent, honest fashion: They have fantastic products.
That said, got it Adobe. I would consider buying Adobe Office, even over OOo (which I know is free). Adobe makes good stuff and in most cases is the de facto standard.
Have you ever even used their PDF Viewer lately? It's such a sad piece of trash that it has problems doing simple tasks like printing properly and takes minutes to load on older hardware. I've recommended that everyone that has a problem with the viewer, which is a lot of people, use another PDF viewer and it alleviates a great deal of their headaches.
That "other" guy that did 5% of it could eb the reason you just got hacked. Web attacks are becoming more and more common and will continue to rise with Web 2.0 features. Surprising? Not at all... we see this stuff all the time and on more popular sites than un.org (is that really saying much?).
It seems like most of the people talking about AJAX and Web2.0 don't even really know what it is. Ajax isn't any bigger of a security threat than is allowing the users of your website to use get or post on a URL, which nearly every site of any complexity already does.
Back to the original post, I think it is dead wrong, and that Windows is bundled makes it worse than a perception that it's free. People feel they have paid for Windows, and feel they should use what they have paid for. I am certain there are people who don't want to blow away their $300 OS for a free OS, just because they feel they have paid for it, and they don't want to appear as fools who pay for something they do not use.
That's why my last system purchase was a dell w/ ubuntu.
The Oil industry has used desktop-sized fusion devices for prospecting for decades. They are also commonly used as neutron sources for various scientific experiments. Heck, there are even teenagers building their own fusors in the basement. Now if you were talking about fusion devices capable of yielding a net power output at prices competitive with existing energy sources, then that is quite a different thing, but I don't think anybody has ever claimed to have achieved this, not even the cold-fusion crowd...
Oh, he meant actual fusion. I'm so much of a geek I thought he was making a reference to this fusion on the desktop, and I was going to say, look, there's alphas or betas available already, what are you getting so fussy about?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm that was a joke from one of his routines. Maybe you aren't as avid a fan as you appear to be trying to be.
It couldn't be that people are sick and tired of reading paragraphs upon paragraphs of what usually is meaningless drivel coming out of dialogs such as ULAs and endless confirmations that a "default installation mode" were designed specifically to handle, would it?
And it couldn't be perhaps that people are busy and don't have time to read paragraph upon paragraph of over technical sounding dialogs when they are simply trying to get their work accomplished, right?
Or maybe that confirmation dialogs are pervasive in almost every modern windows application to the point of nausea, with almost all of them being completely pointless handholding the developer inserted to make themselves feel better about leaving out features or designing an interface so unintuitive they felt like they needed complicated confirmation flows, could it?
Nah, I think it's easier to just say "it's cuz they're dumb!!"
Honestly, that argument might work for some people, some people don't know how to use any interface at all. But I work in development, and I can tell you that I, yes, I, am definitely guilty of not reading the entirety of every dialog window before clicking yes or confirm.
And adding another dialog isn't the solution. Making the flow make sense and redesigning the screen is usually the solution. If things are so unintuitive or risky that you have to warn the user about the things they are about to do because it's too easy to do the wrong thing, maybe you should take a second look at your design.
I know that it doesn't really apply to deleting a file, but it applies to almost every other example I see.
Oh, and I definitely don't appreciate the new trend of designers to put cancel buttons where confirm ones should be so you get confused and look at the screen again and realize you hit cancel when you were trying to save your changes, because they thought it was too "risky" for you to do exactly what you were trying to do. Seriously, the war on users has to stop.
Am I missing something here? Who ever said that evolution ruled out an intelligent designer? It's not an origin theory. Why do we need a movie to determine something that we already know: evolution isn't an origin theory. If you want to take that up with someone, ask some big bang/similar theorists. Evolution isn't an origin theory.
Another thing is, if people have such a problem with evolution, and they can find all kinds of holes in the theory, maybe they should create their own theory that explains more. Because that's how science actually works. A lot of the things you learn in a grade school science classroom have already been outdated but are still taught because the earlier theories display a large proportion of the behavior of the latter theories. But the theories are still taught because it makes sense for science education.
What does Stein propose? Do away with science education, meandering on endlessly about how evolution in particular is a theory? Of course it's a theory. All of scientific research is all about the creation of theory, why does evolution deserve special attention? That's the problem, not that it's a theory.
If people want to cherry pick which scientific theories, what knowledge their children should have, maybe they should fight that battle somewhere outside of the public school system. The people fighting this battle are the same idiots that want to deny teenagers sex education classes and then get outraged when teenagers get pregnant. Get real. People that are at odds with the pursuit of knowledge or truth and at odds with reality have no business telling the children of America what they should and shouldn't be taught. Maybe they should consider their dwindling church statistics as a review of their overzealousness.
Yeah and I remember when moonpies were a nickel, and someone besides old grampas knew what the hell a moonpie was.
You can change resolutions without editing the x.org config file. I think the problem a lot of semi-technical people have with the Linux GUI is that they think they can't do things they already could. In Windows you look through the GUI to figure out a way to do something before you Google it, in Linux most savvy users think the functionality just isn't there at all and hit Google immediately, which usually gives them help forums containing technical people's responses to technical questions, so they end up using the CLI more than they have to because they Google too much.
I've been able to change resolutions with the GUI since I started using Ubuntu three or four versions ago, I'm sure you've been able to do it before that as well. There are some things that are in non-obvious/strange places in Ubuntu, but the same goes for Windows, the problem is that if someone in Linux can't find it immediately in the UI instead of looking at the menus, they assume its not there and then bitch and switch back to Windows.
Linux isn't for everyone, it's for those who want a change. I'm tired of people thinking we have to push Linux on everyone or that everyone will eventually get sick of Windows and switch. There's some people that won't switch because a computer is like a toaster oven and they don't care, it emails and goes on the web. Live with it, and stop trying to pretend that your power user apps not transferring over to a new OS is a reason the OS sucks. Linux hasn't gotten any uptake because normal computer users don't care about the OS, they just want to use a computer for a few and want basic little things to work. I guarantee if you personally installed Linux on a lot of computers all they'd care about is some weirdo application they used since 1995 that doesn't work in Linux and has no equivalent. Why try to sell a technical OS to a person that doesn't care about technical features. It's like trying to sell a person who wants an economy car a Jaguar.
Everyone always makes excuses for using Windows. The only thing Linux doesn't have that Windows does is support for most games out of the box. Linux gaming leaves a lot to be desired. But for application support, most OSS software is heads above the other stuff even on Windows. I found myself switching to a bunch of OSS applications that were designed for Linux when running Windows, then I figured what the hell's the difference? Might as well just run Linux.
Honestly, any application that runs on Windows but doesn't have an equivalent on Linux because it's a legacy, closed source, or commercial application is kind of the way of the past anyway. But I understand that people still need to run these things. But what I don't understand is why if you actually want to run Linux you don't use the following options:
I'm just so sick of hearing people give me this argument, when it's just not the case anymore. It's understandable if you want to game with your computer, or if all you do is 3d apps (which you'd probably be using a Mac anyway, because it seems like most of the art crowd goes that route), but if you are running Legacy apps and other business/regular applications, you can easily move to Linux today.
People might say "if you are running Windows in a VM, why don't you just run Windows?" And my answer would be, because I don't typically find myself running Windows applications overall. Right now I have a Dell Linux machine and a machine with both Linux and Windows on dual boot for gaming. Most often I find myself never booting into Windows and never running anything in the VM. But it's nice to have the ability if something doesn't work any other way. Not only that, if the VM has a problem you can make snapshots, your Windows VM will be surrounded by Linux so it'll be in a sort of sandbox, and you can (if you get the right version of VirtualBox) attach USB devices directly to the VM so you can even have legacy support for hardware that doesn't support Windows (although I'd just recommend finding better hardware vendors). Then when you are done the little crap you have to do in Windows, you close the Window and you're back home again.
Most definitely. I've noticed that when I'm prototyping something out and throwing it together it garners no attention whatsoever. You put some actual stock images on or something and suddenly it's a big hit, even if it works exactly the same as it did a week ago. People are very form over function oriented in general, and most people in charge don't even think about the function until the graphics are all in place, then it's "can we move this here, can we move that there" when that would've been better done in the design phase. Personally, I always prefer tools that work over ones that look pretty, but I'm in the minority.
Me too, except for in standards, where, of course, I want as much choice as possible.
Well let's see, you could easily use something like rsync, but wait, Apple decided that it wasn't good enough to allow direct access to the drive's music partition. Well I guess _I_ could just use rsync then, because I'm smart enough to not buy apple's products and expect them to play nice with everything else, oh, and I read the box.
Thanks,
Dampy Smiff
Sir Lancelot stops to keep from marching into a giant hole.
Sir Lancelot: Halt here!
Servants stop.
Servant: Why'd we stop sire?
Sir Lancelot: Well isn't it obvious?
Servant: Isn't what obvious?
Sir Lancelot: Why we stopped, isn't it obvious?
Servant: That's what I was asking.
Sir Lancelot: There's a giant hole there.
Servant: Ahh, I see, great job stopping there. Fine job indeed. I shall tell tales of your decisiveness and cunning.
Sir Lancelot: Decisiveness and cunning? But it was obvious!
Servant: What was obvious?
Sir Lancelot: Stopping in front of the hole there of course.
Servant: Well, that might have been obvious to someone such as you, your excellence. But I'd hardly call that obvious.
Sir Lancelot: But it's a hole!
Servant: Yes... Yes it is...
Sir Lancelot: And it's quite deep.
Servant: Yes sir, quite deep indeed.
Sir Lancelot: And falling down it would've indeed injured us.
Servant: Perhaps so, your excellence, perhaps so.
Sir Lancelot: So it was obvious to stop then!
Servant: To someone with your skills and decisiveness perhaps.
Sir Lancelot: Are you saying you wouldn't have stopped then?
Servant: Perhaps not.
Sir Lancelot: But you would of fallen.
Servant: Probably yes, your majesty.
Sir Lancelot: Did you see the hole?
Servant: Yes, yes I did, it was a quite impressive hole.
Sir Lancelot: But you would've still gone?
Servant: Perhaps.
Sir Lancelot: But WHY?!? IT WAS OBVIOUS THEN!
Servant: No offense, but maybe to you it was obvious, your excellence. But to me it was less so.
King Arthur strides up with servants.
King Arthur: HALT HERE!
Servants and Arthur halt.
King Arthur: Why have you stopped here Lancelot?
Sir Lancelot: Well, isn't it obvious?
Servant: Here he goes again, twas what we were just discussing.
King Arthur: AHA the hole, but wait, why did we stop? There's a bridge over there.
It sure is obvious...An obviously bad idea.
Well then there's your problem. Shouldn't the people who are at the end of a trigger if there's supposedly a bomb know WTF one looks like? I don't understand all the people on here posting responses such as "these people are too busy to go to bomb school", if they are gonna shoot someone over a bomb, I'm pretty sure they should know what one looks like. Why do people accept such crumby accountability from the officials that we allow to roam around the country like GI Joes on a regular basis?
But whatever, I'm just another member of the hive for thinking that someone should probably have a good idea about what their job entails. My bad.
PS: How is she "lucky" they didn't shoot her? We are unlucky to be living in such an alarmist, idiot filled nation, in which you are likely to be shot for having anything that sort of looks like a bomb or a gun. Shoot first and ask questions later right? Nothing wrong with that policy at all.
Maybe to your well-trained eyes it looks like a bomb. But shouldn't people with experience dealing with bombs and bomb making know that silly putty, a 9V battery and a circuit board with shiny lights do not a bomb make?
Not to mention, why are they allowed to show it to the cameras? Why are they retaining the shirt after it was determined not to be a bomb? Just to show off to the media?
What the hell does having a "hoax device" even mean, and how come people in Boston keep getting charged with it? That city is starting to become the punchline of the state of the nation's national security. I didn't know if was a crime to have a circuit board, a battery, shiny lights, silly putty and a hoodie in Boston, guess I better cancel my plans to visit there...EVER.
Which is why I propose a new method of action to likeminded individuals. If the store asks for your receipt, tell them first off that you didn't agree to any policy of bag inspection upon purchase and were unaware of those policies. Then indicate that they have two options, either they can permit you to leave without inspecting the receipt, or they can inspect the receipt and you will return whatever merchandise you purchased immediately and then subsequently never return again. If enough people did this and then followed through with their ultimatum, that would make a difference.
Oh, it's ludacris is it? I thought maybe they just think they can become chamillionaires by claiming so. =P
I'd appreciate that, thanks.
I was going to send you a private message, but I honestly can't figure out how to do that. So let me ask you since you recommended the N800. How would you say it fairs as far as battery life when using the media player. I'm not so much interested in video playing but in music? I'd like something to replace my current archos gmini 402 with a wifi connection built-in. I'm really looking for a UMPC with more storage, but I think if I bought a 8gb, that would be okay for music per trip. So how would you say it fairs for battery life listening to music? Because the competition that it has right now in my mind is the Archos 605 wifi, which is mainly a media player but also a closed platform (but it allows installation of opera and has a bigger HD). Do you think if I can meet the space constraints that I can replace the archos as my media player for work usage?
Which is exactly why I didn't follow the hive down the iPod path. Apple products for me usually have the same effect, and the iphone did too until all the details came out.
I remember seeing the first Ipod commercials, I was watching it thinking, it's about time a mainstream company came out with a compact mp3 player, and I can't wait till they have a windows version.
Then in a few years they had an Ipod for windows, and when I looked into it versus the competition, I already had an RCA Lyra player, which was, arguably, in some ways a POS, but it was also 100 bucks when I bought it for 20gb, a bargain for the time, and it worked.
When the time came to buy my next MP3 player I did the research, the Ipod was among those I researched. And I got the same thing from the sites, Ipod is awesome! Ipod is great for usability. But what they also let out of the bag was that Ipod used proprietary protocols for transferring MP3s to the thing and that it tried to get you to use Itunes, which I wasn't prepared to do now, having already used a player that functions just as a straight hard drive in windows. So I ended up buying an archos gmini 402 with it's extensive feature set and relatively low price. I was impressed with the results and I lost none of my freedom in the exchange, I can use it on linux, mac, PC, whatever supports a USB disk basically. Same thing with the lyra. I've always heard the hive saying "yes, but you can use players on linux, they support ipod." In the back of my mind I had this thought. Ipod support on Linux and alternative platforms had never been promised because of the way ipods worked, and honestly, it was kind of a hack that they reverse engineered the ipod's functionality and got it to work. I understand why they did it, because Ipods are popular. You know what's great about the players I bought? They don't HAVE to be popular to work. Nobody has to reverse engineer anything.
I thought about getting an Iphone, then I heard they were locking out 3rd party development, that they didn't really have flash or javascript support in the browser, etc. I figured that it would be the same, and it is. People think that because they can hack a device to do something, it's part of its feature set. Nobody remembers that since the platform is locked, you are one patch away from no longer being able to use the things you wanted to put on your iphone. It doesn't matter that the device CAN do things if Apple doesn't let it.
I hope one day the time comes when someone releases an MP3 player with wifi support, with video support, with a flashable OS and a Linux base. One that truly doesn't try to keep the 3rd party, which tends to develop additional features for free, away from the platform. A truly open PMP with wifi access that you can write anything for. A computer in the palm of your hand.
It seems like there's too much money in lock down for a company like Apple to resist once they got the ball rolling. For the people who say "yes, but the support for MP3 players on Mac is going against the stream" I say, at least you have support. You have support for all the platforms you want. I'm not a big fan of creative either because of their tendency to lock you out. I just want a PMP that connects like a HD to the PC, there's no reason why there needs to be a weird protocol. That's why despite style and despite the hive I've gone the opposite way of Ipod. People need to make PMPs as open and useful as general computers, and that's when you'll see a platform truly florish. That's when you'll truly have what we are all sort of seeking: a computer in the palm of our hand.
Not liking what they do and shopping there don't have to be mutually exclusive. I shop there and I don't necessarily agree with anything they stand for, in fact, I often say how I hate the place as I'm there. It's hard to find some things anywhere else without spending half of your day driving from one specialty store to another.
Have you ever even used their PDF Viewer lately? It's such a sad piece of trash that it has problems doing simple tasks like printing properly and takes minutes to load on older hardware. I've recommended that everyone that has a problem with the viewer, which is a lot of people, use another PDF viewer and it alleviates a great deal of their headaches.
It seems like most of the people talking about AJAX and Web2.0 don't even really know what it is. Ajax isn't any bigger of a security threat than is allowing the users of your website to use get or post on a URL, which nearly every site of any complexity already does.
That's why my last system purchase was a dell w/ ubuntu.
Oh, he meant actual fusion. I'm so much of a geek I thought he was making a reference to this fusion on the desktop, and I was going to say, look, there's alphas or betas available already, what are you getting so fussy about?