I think there's a common thread among the devices you mention: the ones that succeeded did one thing, and did it well. The Ipod plays music very well (plus video, but that feels tacked-on to me). Nintendo handhelds have always played games well. In addition, both have put an emphasis on portability and battery life.
Then you look at devices that aren't doing that well. The PSP has some sweet specs, but (as you mention) it has some issues. The DS getting twice the battery life (or more) probably doesn't help either. As for portable audio players, wake me when the manufacturers that aren't Apple figure out how to design a user interface that doesn't suck.
I think I can see where the harm is. Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message. The problem is that they would (presumably) be sold as the same novels written by the same author, something I am sure she would disapprove of if she were still alive today.
If Rand's novels were edited by people who agree with her views, they would not convey the same message. The same goes for any other book, author, film, etc.
Oh, but I totally agree. Protecting and advancing The Market against those dirty liberals (who have never existed before now, and by virtue of their political orientation are by default stupid) is a tough job.
If you have two companies, company A who spends half its resources on developing new GPL software and half on supporting users, and company B spends all of its resources on support, company B can use all of the new stuff from company A while not commiting the programming resource. (...) The only thing protecting Red Hat from a type B is the perception that Type B's are leeches, and are not supported by the community.
The problem with this situation is that it doesn't translate very smoothly to reality. Companies who devote resources to development get the benefit of having people in-house who understand the internals of the software. If you spend all your money on support, will anyone understand the software? Even worse, upstream providers will probably not devote a lot of time to fixing bugs for a company that is not contributing anything.
So to effectively function, B-type companies will have to hire people to learn how the software actually works. In other words, developers.
I don't have to justify a trend to you, if you want to argue semantics, fine. Go look up competing statistics if you want to have an argument on fact. If you're too lazy to, stop piping up.
You are the one who has no facts. You made a claim. I questioned your claim, and you still have not produced an argument nor any data that would validate it. If you make a claim, you must be prepared to explain how you reached it.
In addition, one does not need multiple sets of statistics to disagree on something. One set of data can have multiple interpretations. This means that simply linking to some data does not validate your claim. You must also put forth an argument that logically explains your conclusion.
I was wondering what type of support Parallels would have for Directx, and it looks like it's not much better than Vmware. Software rendering is a good start, but it's pretty much unusable for any modern games. I'll be excited when I can run an XP session in Linux with decent hardware acceleration. Then I can dump my NTFS partition forever.
Increasingly, the best-selling games in North America...
Okay, so now you've linked to an article that summarizes one year in gaming. How exactly does this show a trend?
And on the subject of sports games, they are not a really good representation of this statistic. Their sales are artificially inflated by the nature of the genre. By this I mean game series that crank out a new title each year when all that's really been changed are the rosters.
Nautilus is nothing more than a Konqueror wannabe. (...) suffer it out with nautilus. (...) But don't claim that Nautilus is a file manager. Nautilus *looks* like a file manager.
Where in my post was I extolling the virtues of Nautilus? Where in my post was I raving about GNOME? Where in my post do I say that I use or prefer either of them? I do use GNOME, but I said nothing about neither GNOME itself nor Nautilus in my post.
In case you don't understand the significance of this, this means that you can have a folder open in one tab, a web page in another, a PDF in a third, and a tarball in a separate frame. This does wonders for the old workflow, doncha know. Yeah, go on, bitch about bloat. I think seamless integration is *goddam useful* myself, and frankly more intuitive than using external utilities.
There's a difference between "seamless integration" and "logical seperation". When things are not logically seperated, your brain tends to get confused.
Finally, some of your points are just plain wrong. -I'm not sure what you mean by "integrated" with mplayer and KPDF, but if you mean thumbnails, Nautilus does that (for images, PDFs, and videos). -GNOME Help can view man pages (as well as info pages). I don't know about you, but when I think of where I might be able to view man pages in my desktop environment, the file manager and web browser do not come to mind. -Nautilus can connect to FTP (as well as Samba shares, SSH connections, and WebDAV shares).
Oh, and people use Nautilus to manage files. I think that makes it a "file manager", whether it has $RANDOM_FEATURE or not.
If an average user can't find help in the OS and an average user can't locate how to run a newly installed app, it's not 'Vista Killer' material.
Average users can't find help inside Windows or Mac OS, either. And if that newly installed app doesn't throw some shortcuts into Startmenu/Newapp or the desktop, most Windows users would have no idea where to look.
Those rose colored glasses make you look a little goofy.
is this "GNOME is easier for the average desktop user, so that's our Enterprise desktop product" because KDE has too much customization for the corporate desktop?
More != better. For example, look at Konqueror. The default setup has 17 buttons sitting on the toolbar. Then there are the menu names. We have "Location" and "go". Then there's "tools" and "settings". I guess the guiding philosophy here is "if you haven't solved the problem, just add more".
Also, since neither chipmaker has had any real innovation for a while,
Sorry, but this isn't true. Unless by "real innovation" you mean something on the magnitude of Intel's jump from the P6 microarchitecture to Netburst (which, by the way, was for marketing reasons, not technical ones).
As far as I'm concerned policies like this, this cell phone policy, is one of the reasons parents are removing their children from public schools.
This is true. However, I would venture to guess that the vast majority of homeschool families in America are good "Christian" types who don't want their children exposed to the evils of sex education, institutionalized non-discrimination, and the scientific process.
And in the interest of full disclosure, I consider myself a Christian. I attended public school, and my parents didn't opt to pull me from sex ed or anything like that.
If, like you say, you have "nothing to hide", then you also shouldn't have any problem posting all that information right here, right now. You also shouldn't have any issue with including your name, address, phone number, driver's license number, social security number, bank account numbers, and medical records. If you have kids, you shouldn't have any problem posting their names, pictures of them, where they go to school, and their daily schedules.
And I absolutely disagree with your assertion that people who value privacy are "terrorists". By your logic, many of the Founding Fathers are terrorists who "wish to strip people of their freedom".
Increasingly, the best-selling games in North America
Interesting. Got some data and analysis to go along with that? Or maybe you're just going to hope nobody calls you on it. Oh wait, looks like somebody did.
Hate groups and extremists like Michelle Malkin love to pretend that pointing out racism is racist in itself - because, the argument goes - "you must have racist tendencies to recognize them in others' speech or behavior".
I think it's easier to understand the idiocy of things like this by reducing the argument to a general rule and then seeing if it makes sense in other contexts. So in this case:
-Bob is left-handed. Therefore other people must be left-handed to recognize that Bob is. -Jane likes jazz music. Therefore other people must like jazz music to recognize that Jane does.
So basically what you're saying here is that you're full of shit. You have failed (many times) to provide any evidence whatsoever that this project ever took place.
Alright, I call bullshit. You provide none of the methodology used in this survey, none of the data collected, and none of the arguments used to reach the conclusions that you state. But most importantly, you fail to provide any evidence that this survey ever took place.
In your replies to people asking for references, you refuse to provide any evidence that is verifiable. Claiming "I know the professor personally, he's great" is all well and good, provided you can give us proof. You provide none.
Then, when people call you on it, you attack them. Claiming that another poster "sounds like a zealot so your opinion is worthless" (quote) is a great example of one of my favorite logical fallacies, the ad hominem attack. Way to go.
It's true that you don't have to provide any references. It's equally true that no one has to believe that this vaporware study ever took place.
mainstream music isn't even as musically "advanced" as even 30 years ago. Compare the melodic sophistication of GreenDay with that of Jimi Hendrix, or The Beatles. We can even take this one step forward and compare most American top 40 to Classical influences such as Beethoven. Clearly, on a cultural level, Americans are dumbed down to an unbelievable state. Music is an example that's gotten so bad... RAP, the "singers" don't even bother carrying a note or in other words... sing. That's much too hard to do; never mind the fact that poetic composition is also hard, which for a RAP artist, it's always customary for them to make stuff up or do whatever it takes to just make something rhyme even if it makes no sense at all with actual real words.
This is such bullshit I don't even know where to start. Do you seriously believe a majority of Americans like the shit that's played on every generic Top 40 radio station across the country?
I'm going to ignore, for a moment, the idiotic conclusion of "because some Americans like shitty music, all Americans are cultural Neanderthals". That being said, let's look at your actual arguments.
You start by implying that "more musically advanced" == "culturally superior". The only quantifiable way of measuring this level of "advancedness" would be by looking at the complexity of the music. Looking at almost anything else would be subjective, and therefore not quantifiable. Now let's think about how this would work in reality. Computers can compose arbitrarily complex rhythms, and do perfect counterpoint. I can't do either of these. Does this make my computer culturally superior to me?
Then you compare the "melodic sophistication" of some rock & roll groups. Okay, go ahead and ignore the fact that judging the "sophistication" of a piece of music is an entirely subjective affair. So anyway, we have Green Day vs. The Beatles. Once again, the only measurable way of comparing them would be to look at the complexity of their music. Unfortunately for you, if one were to sit down and actually do this, one would find strikingly similar composition. As a side note, I think it's pretty hilarious that your argument is pretty close to just typing "Green Day sucks! Hendrix is SOOO much better!!11".
And then you pull out Beethoven. Except there's a little problem. Beethoven is not, and has never been, popular music. Did Beethoven perform at local pubs? I don't think so. The same could be said of many Classical composers, many of whom took positions in royal courts or lived off the generosity of the aristocracy.
And then you pull out "rap". I admit that for a long time I would have adamantly said "rap isn't music", but that statement completely misses the point. Rapping can be roughly defined as "verse plus rhythm". Call it music if you want; if you don't want to, don't.
The thing I find interesting is that you list no specific rappers or groups. This is telling. I'm guessing you've heard some music on the radio that was labeled "rap", and it was shitty, and you didn't like it. Yet again, you follow the formula of "some of this music sucks, so I'm just going to assume all of it sucks, even though I have no proof". Contrary to your claim, there is a lot of good rap music. The bad part is that you probably won't ever hear it on the radio.
Also, claiming that "rappers" don't write music is completely and utterly false. There are hip-hop groups that perform using live instruments, and there are music groups who combine rapping with other musical styles.
But yeah, Americans are definitely the most dumbed-down people on the planet. Other places in the world have brilliant masterpieces like "Numa Numa". Those guys will be remembered much longer than shitty Americans like Aaron Copland or Charles Ives. (Note, this is SARCASM)
Claiming that "AAC isn't proprietary" is a big, fat lie. If a format requires me to sign NDAs and/or buy patent licenses in order to legally create my own implementation, it's proprietary.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's a common thread among the devices you mention: the ones that succeeded did one thing, and did it well. The Ipod plays music very well (plus video, but that feels tacked-on to me). Nintendo handhelds have always played games well. In addition, both have put an emphasis on portability and battery life.
Then you look at devices that aren't doing that well. The PSP has some sweet specs, but (as you mention) it has some issues. The DS getting twice the battery life (or more) probably doesn't help either. As for portable audio players, wake me when the manufacturers that aren't Apple figure out how to design a user interface that doesn't suck.
For your argument to work, we need an objective definition for Art. Good luck with that.
I think I can see where the harm is. Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message. The problem is that they would (presumably) be sold as the same novels written by the same author, something I am sure she would disapprove of if she were still alive today.
If Rand's novels were edited by people who agree with her views, they would not convey the same message. The same goes for any other book, author, film, etc.
Oh, but I totally agree. Protecting and advancing The Market against those dirty liberals (who have never existed before now, and by virtue of their political orientation are by default stupid) is a tough job.
Let me quote you again:
Increasingly, the best-selling games in North America are made by North American developers.
You linked to data for one point in time. How does that show a trend? Here's a hint: it doesn't.
If you have two companies, company A who spends half its resources on developing new GPL software and half on supporting users, and company B spends all of its resources on support, company B can use all of the new stuff from company A while not commiting the programming resource. (...) The only thing protecting Red Hat from a type B is the perception that Type B's are leeches, and are not supported by the community.
The problem with this situation is that it doesn't translate very smoothly to reality. Companies who devote resources to development get the benefit of having people in-house who understand the internals of the software. If you spend all your money on support, will anyone understand the software? Even worse, upstream providers will probably not devote a lot of time to fixing bugs for a company that is not contributing anything.
So to effectively function, B-type companies will have to hire people to learn how the software actually works. In other words, developers.
I don't have to justify a trend to you, if you want to argue semantics, fine. Go look up competing statistics if you want to have an argument on fact. If you're too lazy to, stop piping up.
You are the one who has no facts. You made a claim. I questioned your claim, and you still have not produced an argument nor any data that would validate it. If you make a claim, you must be prepared to explain how you reached it.
In addition, one does not need multiple sets of statistics to disagree on something. One set of data can have multiple interpretations. This means that simply linking to some data does not validate your claim. You must also put forth an argument that logically explains your conclusion.
I was wondering what type of support Parallels would have for Directx, and it looks like it's not much better than Vmware. Software rendering is a good start, but it's pretty much unusable for any modern games. I'll be excited when I can run an XP session in Linux with decent hardware acceleration. Then I can dump my NTFS partition forever.
Yeah why would you want to compete on the quality of your service when you can just stick to vendor lock-in?
So libel is OK as long as you do it in the interest of business?
I don't think you understand. By getting rid of the UN, The Market(tm) would automagically have taken care of this!
Let me quote you again:
...
Increasingly, the best-selling games in North America
Okay, so now you've linked to an article that summarizes one year in gaming. How exactly does this show a trend?
And on the subject of sports games, they are not a really good representation of this statistic. Their sales are artificially inflated by the nature of the genre. By this I mean game series that crank out a new title each year when all that's really been changed are the rosters.
Nautilus is nothing more than a Konqueror wannabe. (...) suffer it out with nautilus. (...) But don't claim that Nautilus is a file manager. Nautilus *looks* like a file manager.
Where in my post was I extolling the virtues of Nautilus? Where in my post was I raving about GNOME? Where in my post do I say that I use or prefer either of them? I do use GNOME, but I said nothing about neither GNOME itself nor Nautilus in my post.
In case you don't understand the significance of this, this means that you can have a folder open in one tab, a web page in another, a PDF in a third, and a tarball in a separate frame. This does wonders for the old workflow, doncha know. Yeah, go on, bitch about bloat. I think seamless integration is *goddam useful* myself, and frankly more intuitive than using external utilities.
There's a difference between "seamless integration" and "logical seperation". When things are not logically seperated, your brain tends to get confused.
Finally, some of your points are just plain wrong.
-I'm not sure what you mean by "integrated" with mplayer and KPDF, but if you mean thumbnails, Nautilus does that (for images, PDFs, and videos).
-GNOME Help can view man pages (as well as info pages). I don't know about you, but when I think of where I might be able to view man pages in my desktop environment, the file manager and web browser do not come to mind.
-Nautilus can connect to FTP (as well as Samba shares, SSH connections, and WebDAV shares).
Oh, and people use Nautilus to manage files. I think that makes it a "file manager", whether it has $RANDOM_FEATURE or not.
If an average user can't find help in the OS and an average user can't locate how to run a newly installed app, it's not 'Vista Killer' material.
Average users can't find help inside Windows or Mac OS, either. And if that newly installed app doesn't throw some shortcuts into Startmenu/Newapp or the desktop, most Windows users would have no idea where to look.
Those rose colored glasses make you look a little goofy.
That's a mirror you're looking into there, bud.
is this "GNOME is easier for the average desktop user, so that's our Enterprise desktop product" because KDE has too much customization for the corporate desktop?
More != better. For example, look at Konqueror. The default setup has 17 buttons sitting on the toolbar. Then there are the menu names. We have "Location" and "go". Then there's "tools" and "settings". I guess the guiding philosophy here is "if you haven't solved the problem, just add more".
Also, since neither chipmaker has had any real innovation for a while,
Sorry, but this isn't true. Unless by "real innovation" you mean something on the magnitude of Intel's jump from the P6 microarchitecture to Netburst (which, by the way, was for marketing reasons, not technical ones).
As far as I'm concerned policies like this, this cell phone policy, is one of the reasons parents are removing their children from public schools.
This is true. However, I would venture to guess that the vast majority of homeschool families in America are good "Christian" types who don't want their children exposed to the evils of sex education, institutionalized non-discrimination, and the scientific process.
And in the interest of full disclosure, I consider myself a Christian. I attended public school, and my parents didn't opt to pull me from sex ed or anything like that.
If, like you say, you have "nothing to hide", then you also shouldn't have any problem posting all that information right here, right now. You also shouldn't have any issue with including your name, address, phone number, driver's license number, social security number, bank account numbers, and medical records. If you have kids, you shouldn't have any problem posting their names, pictures of them, where they go to school, and their daily schedules.
And I absolutely disagree with your assertion that people who value privacy are "terrorists". By your logic, many of the Founding Fathers are terrorists who "wish to strip people of their freedom".
Increasingly, the best-selling games in North America
Interesting. Got some data and analysis to go along with that? Or maybe you're just going to hope nobody calls you on it. Oh wait, looks like somebody did.
Yes, Absath is the pinnacle of rational discourse.
(/sarcasm)
Hate groups and extremists like Michelle Malkin love to pretend that pointing out racism is racist in itself - because, the argument goes - "you must have racist tendencies to recognize them in others' speech or behavior".
I think it's easier to understand the idiocy of things like this by reducing the argument to a general rule and then seeing if it makes sense in other contexts. So in this case:
-Bob is left-handed. Therefore other people must be left-handed to recognize that Bob is.
-Jane likes jazz music. Therefore other people must like jazz music to recognize that Jane does.
So basically what you're saying here is that you're full of shit. You have failed (many times) to provide any evidence whatsoever that this project ever took place.
Alright, I call bullshit. You provide none of the methodology used in this survey, none of the data collected, and none of the arguments used to reach the conclusions that you state. But most importantly, you fail to provide any evidence that this survey ever took place.
In your replies to people asking for references, you refuse to provide any evidence that is verifiable. Claiming "I know the professor personally, he's great" is all well and good, provided you can give us proof. You provide none.
Then, when people call you on it, you attack them. Claiming that another poster "sounds like a zealot so your opinion is worthless" (quote) is a great example of one of my favorite logical fallacies, the ad hominem attack. Way to go.
It's true that you don't have to provide any references. It's equally true that no one has to believe that this vaporware study ever took place.
mainstream music isn't even as musically "advanced" as even 30 years ago. Compare the melodic sophistication of GreenDay with that of Jimi Hendrix, or The Beatles. We can even take this one step forward and compare most American top 40 to Classical influences such as Beethoven. Clearly, on a cultural level, Americans are dumbed down to an unbelievable state. Music is an example that's gotten so bad... RAP, the "singers" don't even bother carrying a note or in other words... sing. That's much too hard to do; never mind the fact that poetic composition is also hard, which for a RAP artist, it's always customary for them to make stuff up or do whatever it takes to just make something rhyme even if it makes no sense at all with actual real words.
This is such bullshit I don't even know where to start. Do you seriously believe a majority of Americans like the shit that's played on every generic Top 40 radio station across the country?
I'm going to ignore, for a moment, the idiotic conclusion of "because some Americans like shitty music, all Americans are cultural Neanderthals". That being said, let's look at your actual arguments.
You start by implying that "more musically advanced" == "culturally superior". The only quantifiable way of measuring this level of "advancedness" would be by looking at the complexity of the music. Looking at almost anything else would be subjective, and therefore not quantifiable. Now let's think about how this would work in reality. Computers can compose arbitrarily complex rhythms, and do perfect counterpoint. I can't do either of these. Does this make my computer culturally superior to me?
Then you compare the "melodic sophistication" of some rock & roll groups. Okay, go ahead and ignore the fact that judging the "sophistication" of a piece of music is an entirely subjective affair. So anyway, we have Green Day vs. The Beatles. Once again, the only measurable way of comparing them would be to look at the complexity of their music. Unfortunately for you, if one were to sit down and actually do this, one would find strikingly similar composition. As a side note, I think it's pretty hilarious that your argument is pretty close to just typing "Green Day sucks! Hendrix is SOOO much better!!11".
And then you pull out Beethoven. Except there's a little problem. Beethoven is not, and has never been, popular music. Did Beethoven perform at local pubs? I don't think so. The same could be said of many Classical composers, many of whom took positions in royal courts or lived off the generosity of the aristocracy.
And then you pull out "rap". I admit that for a long time I would have adamantly said "rap isn't music", but that statement completely misses the point. Rapping can be roughly defined as "verse plus rhythm". Call it music if you want; if you don't want to, don't.
The thing I find interesting is that you list no specific rappers or groups. This is telling. I'm guessing you've heard some music on the radio that was labeled "rap", and it was shitty, and you didn't like it. Yet again, you follow the formula of "some of this music sucks, so I'm just going to assume all of it sucks, even though I have no proof". Contrary to your claim, there is a lot of good rap music. The bad part is that you probably won't ever hear it on the radio.
Also, claiming that "rappers" don't write music is completely and utterly false. There are hip-hop groups that perform using live instruments, and there are music groups who combine rapping with other musical styles.
But yeah, Americans are definitely the most dumbed-down people on the planet. Other places in the world have brilliant masterpieces like "Numa Numa". Those guys will be remembered much longer than shitty Americans like Aaron Copland or Charles Ives. (Note, this is SARCASM)
That's interesting. The school I go to uses Windows thin clients for web browsing kiosks all over campus, and they work very well.
Hooray for anecdotes.
Claiming that "AAC isn't proprietary" is a big, fat lie. If a format requires me to sign NDAs and/or buy patent licenses in order to legally create my own implementation, it's proprietary.