"Hate Apple? I don't remember anyone hating apple, although they did say their prices were too high in the 1980s."
In the early 90's I hated Apple. The reason why? I had an onboxious Apple-zealot friend. I didn't know much about the machines, but I remember in our programming class I heard him say "too bad, I could do that easily with my Mac"... oh about 1.3 million times over the course of two years. Frankly, I was a know-it-all asshole back then. So yeah, that put me off. The rest of the peeps in the class had PCs, so we all agreed he was just being a zealot and cemented our positions as PC dudes. It didn't matter much, anyway. The Mac was out of reach of any of our price ranges, plus the game selection was a joke (and we cared about that more than anything), so it's not like our doubts about the platform were ever challenged.
Fast foward to the late 90's. Intel was proud of their Pentium 2 chips and Apple was proud of their... erm.. pardon my lack of terminology here, but I think they were using PowerPC chips from IBM. Apple was running ads saying that Photoshop was up to twice as fast on their chips as it was on Intel/P2 chips. I remember reading that that had been de-bunked from a practicality point of view. Something like "yeah, if you did level 80 gaussian blurs throughout most of the day, you'd get your money's worth out of using a Mac instead." The benefits of that processor were enhancements in certain ways it did the math, but were not an overall improvement on the design. Cute. I didn't really hate Apple for this, though. No, what caused this was some guy coming into a chatroom proclaiming "Don't believe what you read in biased sources like PC World, go get the TRUTH at Macfanatic.com!" I cannot believe the irony of that statement was completely lost on that guy! Not long after that, I started seeing posts like that rumbling around the world-wide-web. (This was back in the good 'ol days, when it was called the world wide web.) I remember thinking "yeesh, are these Apple fans under Dogbert's control or something?"
Anyway, yes, I hated Apple. No, I really didn't have a good reason for it... really I hated Apple fanatics, but I didn't draw the distinction back then. For the record, no, I don't hate Apple now. I'm actually about to drop 3k on a Macbook Pro. (I still can't get over Apple's decision to go Intel. Woo!) I cannot scientifically prove this, but I can totally see how there were lots of Apple 'haters' back then. The noise ratio from the fanatics was just too high for that not to happen.
I'm sorry, but if you were really as vilified as you say, then you were either being a jerk or there was a glitch or something. If Apple's extreme fans are reasonbly well rounded, I don't see how a single thing I could say could possibly earn a retaliation like that.
Sorry, but I'm calling BS on this one. No, you're right. I'm making this up so I could get the pitchforks turned on me.
Yeesh. Well, if you decide not to draw conclusions from a data set of one, I'd encourage you to look at one of the replies to my original post. I talked about what happened in more detail. If you still think it's BS, that's cool, don't care. It's not like I require you to believe it to prove that it happened.
Perhaps you were just being a douchebag? Just checking...
Your profile page - I only see one thing modded down and that was: this one. Yep, douchebaggery. If by 'douchebag' you mean "didn't join the pitchfork party when I was called to do so", then yes, you've got a point. If you mean that I made a comment just for the sake of trolling, no. I felt I had a point to make. I did. It was modded up. Then it was yo-yo'd back down a long with a number of other posts I made.
Care to post the other username (assuming there really is one) with all the downmodded comments so we can pass judgement on you? The main reason is that Slashdot's search engine sucks and Google's not being completely helpful, either. There was a story back in early-2006 about Napster's CEO criticizing Apple's de-facto monopoly stifling innovation. I said he had a point: Apple, for example, wasn't considering a subscription service. Because they have control of the market, that sort of service isn't getting attention to the masses. If you find that story, look for several -1 posts by NanoGator. Now, agree with me or disagree, I'm cool either way. I dare you though, to look at it objectively. Did my comment actually warrant a ton of negative moderations? Well, since I haven't been able to cook up the fabled link, I'll paint you a worst case scenario: Let's say that my post merely said that Steve Jobs takes it up the butt from Bill Gates on a nightly basis. Seriously, as silly and childish as that is, that was a heck of a co-ordinated attack. You can see the remains of it here. This was months after the event, and they were still watching me.
Even if I were the biggest douchebag in the world (yet somehow still posting at +2...) and I made the douchiest comment in the universe, could you really deny that that sort of Apple fanboism is (or at least was) extreme?
That said, I will be up front about one thing: You won't catch me at my best behaviour if you find that. After my posts started getting modded down I got annoyed and rather defensive. You might look at that and think I was being a douche. That's one thing about looking at this stuff from the past, you can't see what order the events (like moderations) took place in. That's why I don't expect you guys to be kind to me. That's fine, I'll deal with it. Have a good night.
One poorly modded comment does not make a conspiracy against you! Sure. But that's not what I said.
"All of my recent posts had been negatively modded so many times that I was actually banned from Slashdot for WEEKS. Weeks. The last I had bothered to count, I had been modded down over thirty times."
You can't mod down one comment 30 times. Nor can one comment be modded down so many times you get banned. If you have a better explanation behind it, I'm all ears, but at least read what I said before passing judgement.
I dunno. The levels of insanity reached in both Apple fanboyism and the Israeli/Palastenian conflict seems equivalent sometimes. Hey, you hear that? That's the sound of my karma level going through the floor! Funny? Sure. But it has gotten extreme at times. I've been the victim of some of that bs. A couple of years ago there was a story about Apple recieving some critcism over its iTunes market ownership. Lots of people were poo-poo'ing the criticism. I didn't agree with them, I said my bit. It initially earned a couple of insightful mods. Then I was hit with a shitstorm of comments that largely had nothing really to do with my opinion on the matter. Several had gone on to invent theories about why I was so 'bitter'. Whatever. Anyway, that's to be expected, right? Go against popular opinion, popular opinion goes against you. Nothing new here. At least until the mod bombing happened. All of my recent posts had been negatively modded so many times that I was actually banned from Slashdot for WEEKS. Weeks. The last I had bothered to count, I had been modded down over thirty times. I registerred a new account, and kept on moving. A few months later, I logged in with the original account, posted something completely unrelated to Apple. It was modded down, too. Yep, they were still watching me to 'teach me a lesson'.
I wouldn't compare Apple fanboyism to the Israeli/Palastenian conflict, but I can certainly understand why somebody would. I mean, how extreme is that? I don't even know how you get that many people with mod points to come in for the attack. Very extreme. The worst part? I wasn't trolling. I might have been more respectful of it if I had said something snide or shitty, but I didn't. I sat down and explained where I was coming from on it. (Hence the positive mods.) But.. oh no.. Apple can do no wrong. The sad thing? That sort of BS is what gets people outspoken about the downsides of Apple's products.
> Except in real life, they don't really invent a new particle too often, they just make one up and name it after something dumb like themselves and hope at some point it's proven that it's real, which the majority of the time it's not.
For example? Can you list some of these please? I read a book called the Physics of Star Trek, it came out before TNG ended. The guy who wrote it said that they actually used terms circling throughout communities, albeit incorrectly at times. I remember he appreciated that they at least took a stab at it. That said, though, the poster you're replying to may have been referring to Cochrane. He was the fabled inventor of the warp drive and they used his name as a measure of energy, if I recall.
But... that's vague, sorry folks. I don't remember much about that book, it was years ago when I read it, and that doesn't cover DS9, Voy, or Enterprise. I imagine if somebody put a little too much energy into it, they could probably find examples in both cases. The book itself, though, and the sequel that followed it was fun to read. Just don't leave it around for a chick to find. =)
Keep telling yourselves that... as much as you want to believe otherwise, making this kind of stuff available for free does not make them more money, unless it's a completely unknown product. Oh I dunno, that depends on how much PC gamers have been annoyed by games that require the disc or games that fail to run due to over-zealous protection. I'd also say it depends on if a game gets a sequel or not. A no-sale on the first game may create a fan for the second. That no-sale in the beginning wasn't necessarily money lost, just not money earned.
I'd say more but I'm arguing with an AC calling people tards who obviously hasn't put any thought into what he's so opinionated about. Good night.
Your 2 million number, where exactly does this come from? I went to Wikipedia. It said something like 1.2 - 2 million people, that was back in 2006. I've been a subscriber since 2003. It's not a fly-by-night operation.
Cable/satellite TV does not use that model. How can you compare a subscription service to music, to cable/satellite's on demand? They do it as a complementary part of their digital service. It does not encompass their entire service. Difference there. That's not how I see it. If you shut off the Cable, for example, you lose it, it's gone. If you haven't purchased the content or found some way to record it, it's all gone. (With DVRs taking over where VCRs came in, this point's even more important than it was say 4 years ago.) TV/Cable operates on a consumable model, and that's exactly the intent of a music subscription service. Lots of people are stuck on the idea of having the music permenantly, they're not considering the idea of a consumable model where they're paying for a stream of music they want to hear as opposed to building a collection.
Subscription is not a "less" version, its a "rental". I don't "buy" in order to "rent"....the two terms are contradictory. Consequently, the value that the music industries perceives on their music is not the same as my perceived value. That's fine, but I think it supposes that you'd only listen to music you'd want to pay for up front. That doesn't work for me, for example. There's too much crap out there. When there isn't crap, it's often stuff that I'd want to hear once or twice then be done with it. Then there's stuff I just plain have no idea if I want it or not. I pay $10 a month. With that, I have an entire collection of music to listen to whether I'm at home, work, or even if I stay at a friend's house or something. I don't have gigs of stuff I need to keep backed up. If something catches my fancy, I've got it playing 10 or so seconds later. If I feel like exploring and want to try out bands I've never considered before, done, no risk on my part. There's even a bunch of comedy albums there I've been having fun listening to.
To me, it's not as simple as 'rent or buy', it's a matter of having an entirely different set of pros and cons. The fact that I don't have a multi-gigabyte archive to frequently back up is a major pro. Or, the fact that I don't have different selections of music on my laptop, desktop, and work computers is another. Sure, it'll be gone if/when Rhapsody goes under. It's not a big deal to me because I've gotten my entertainment value back out of them. In some ways, I'm getting more bang for my buck than I am with my cable service.
Well that's how I feel. Different strokes for different folks, yadda yadda yadda. I just wish my cable service worked like Rhapsody does.
I hope you'll accept my suggestion that subscription is merely a 'less' version of purchase. There's a whole different set of pros and cons. Crap. That sentence is missing an important word. I meant to say subscription's NOT a 'less' version of a purchase. It's like comparing Coke and Dr. Pepper, not Coke and Diet Coke.
"We've all seen this before, and it doesn't work. Nobody wants to pay for all you can eat when it isn't. "
a.) There are two million 'nobodies' subscribed to Rhapsody right now.
b.) Cable/Satellite TV already uses that model, only it's not on-demand. Not only is that successful, but they're throwing ads on top of it! Heh.
The big problem with it isn't the business model, it's getting people to wrap their heads around the idea that it's not the same as iTunes. Music subscription isn't a music store, it's an on-demand music service. Those are two very different concepts, but not entirely unlike comparing television shows on DVD to being a cable subscriber. Amusingly, just like in the cable/DVD example, the two models aren't mutually exclusive, either.
If you're curious, I can tell you more about what why in some cases subscription would be preferable to purchase. In the mean time, however, I hope you'll accept my suggestion that subscription is merely a 'less' version of purchase. There's a whole different set of pros and cons.
Did it ever occur to you that IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S SO OBVIOUS? Uh, no, that's actually a reason why it's NOT FUNNY. But I'd like to thank you, though. I had been wondering why SNL's still on the air.
"...and the Microsoft logo caused test subjects to experience extreme confusion and frustration." ... and the Apple logo caused people, men mostly, to lose weight in the wallet side of their rears.
"You have a sudden and irresistible urge to pick up the chair that you are sitting in and throw it across the room while repeating the mantra, "developers, developers, developers"."
HAHAHAHAH!!!!!!! ! I never thought of that before! CHAIR! HAHAHAHAHAHA~!!~~~~!!!! I haven't laughed that hard since TBS ran a back to back Full House and Saved by the Bell marathon!!!
Things seem 'faster', copying files, something that use to take weeks now takes as long as it should.... Re:Auto upbreak. (Score:-1, Informative).. Somebody with first hand experience posts something that goes against public (but not first-hand) opinion gets modded down. Let's motivate those with personal experience to get passionate with their comments!
Nice use of mod points, gentlemen, that's how Microsoft 'shills' are born.
While/. people are wanking off the next CPU from Intel, people die in Tibet because they want to be free. And not free as beer, you nerds. Please tell me how I can save a life over there.
Yes it is silly. The likelihood of an act shouldn't be a reason to ban anything even remotely connected with even the topic of the act you dislike. I'm just talking about why one gets more attention than the other.
"If I tell the FCC to 'go fuck yourself', is that going to encourage teenyboppers to have unprotected sex?"
You're right, I ran two thoughts together and communicated poorly. I'll clarify: Sex on TV gets more negative attention than violence. Bad language gets more attention than violence. Sex amongst teens etc is far more likely than violence. Kids using foul language is far more likely than violence. This is why violence flies when sex and bad language doesn't. It's a more effective influence, at least in a parent's mind.
Maybe I'm wrong, though. Maybe a whole lotta people all took the same crazy pill. Whatever.
Would they go after the entire earth, the individual people who looked, or what? Ideas? This really hasn't been a problem since the Romulans signed the Khitomer Accord.
Re:Happy Pi day...
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"Actually, the cake is a Pi."
Oh great, not another one of you fools tryin to tell me that pie are square....
Hmm... I haven't spent a lot of time considering this but my initial reaction is that I don't think innocent people should have to pay a tax to the music industry just because they've spun some numbers to make it sound like they're being hurt by 'illegal' activity. I also don't think it's fair to subsidize an industry that does not accept returns. Since there is no move being made on their part to satisfy customers, I'm not inclined to give them anything. They're not entitled to have their old business model maintained by whining and legal threats.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hate Apple? I don't remember anyone hating apple, although they did say their prices were too high in the 1980s."
In the early 90's I hated Apple. The reason why? I had an onboxious Apple-zealot friend. I didn't know much about the machines, but I remember in our programming class I heard him say "too bad, I could do that easily with my Mac"... oh about 1.3 million times over the course of two years. Frankly, I was a know-it-all asshole back then. So yeah, that put me off. The rest of the peeps in the class had PCs, so we all agreed he was just being a zealot and cemented our positions as PC dudes. It didn't matter much, anyway. The Mac was out of reach of any of our price ranges, plus the game selection was a joke (and we cared about that more than anything), so it's not like our doubts about the platform were ever challenged.
Fast foward to the late 90's. Intel was proud of their Pentium 2 chips and Apple was proud of their... erm.. pardon my lack of terminology here, but I think they were using PowerPC chips from IBM. Apple was running ads saying that Photoshop was up to twice as fast on their chips as it was on Intel/P2 chips. I remember reading that that had been de-bunked from a practicality point of view. Something like "yeah, if you did level 80 gaussian blurs throughout most of the day, you'd get your money's worth out of using a Mac instead." The benefits of that processor were enhancements in certain ways it did the math, but were not an overall improvement on the design. Cute. I didn't really hate Apple for this, though. No, what caused this was some guy coming into a chatroom proclaiming "Don't believe what you read in biased sources like PC World, go get the TRUTH at Macfanatic.com!" I cannot believe the irony of that statement was completely lost on that guy! Not long after that, I started seeing posts like that rumbling around the world-wide-web. (This was back in the good 'ol days, when it was called the world wide web.) I remember thinking "yeesh, are these Apple fans under Dogbert's control or something?"
Anyway, yes, I hated Apple. No, I really didn't have a good reason for it... really I hated Apple fanatics, but I didn't draw the distinction back then. For the record, no, I don't hate Apple now. I'm actually about to drop 3k on a Macbook Pro. (I still can't get over Apple's decision to go Intel. Woo!) I cannot scientifically prove this, but I can totally see how there were lots of Apple 'haters' back then. The noise ratio from the fanatics was just too high for that not to happen.
I don't have much to say except thanks. Very classy. I hope your week goes well.
Yeesh. Well, if you decide not to draw conclusions from a data set of one, I'd encourage you to look at one of the replies to my original post. I talked about what happened in more detail. If you still think it's BS, that's cool, don't care. It's not like I require you to believe it to prove that it happened.
Your profile page - I only see one thing modded down and that was: this one. Yep, douchebaggery. If by 'douchebag' you mean "didn't join the pitchfork party when I was called to do so", then yes, you've got a point. If you mean that I made a comment just for the sake of trolling, no. I felt I had a point to make. I did. It was modded up. Then it was yo-yo'd back down a long with a number of other posts I made. Care to post the other username (assuming there really is one) with all the downmodded comments so we can pass judgement on you? The main reason is that Slashdot's search engine sucks and Google's not being completely helpful, either. There was a story back in early-2006 about Napster's CEO criticizing Apple's de-facto monopoly stifling innovation. I said he had a point: Apple, for example, wasn't considering a subscription service. Because they have control of the market, that sort of service isn't getting attention to the masses. If you find that story, look for several -1 posts by NanoGator. Now, agree with me or disagree, I'm cool either way. I dare you though, to look at it objectively. Did my comment actually warrant a ton of negative moderations? Well, since I haven't been able to cook up the fabled link, I'll paint you a worst case scenario: Let's say that my post merely said that Steve Jobs takes it up the butt from Bill Gates on a nightly basis. Seriously, as silly and childish as that is, that was a heck of a co-ordinated attack. You can see the remains of it here. This was months after the event, and they were still watching me.
Even if I were the biggest douchebag in the world (yet somehow still posting at +2...) and I made the douchiest comment in the universe, could you really deny that that sort of Apple fanboism is (or at least was) extreme?
That said, I will be up front about one thing: You won't catch me at my best behaviour if you find that. After my posts started getting modded down I got annoyed and rather defensive. You might look at that and think I was being a douche. That's one thing about looking at this stuff from the past, you can't see what order the events (like moderations) took place in. That's why I don't expect you guys to be kind to me. That's fine, I'll deal with it. Have a good night.
"All of my recent posts had been negatively modded so many times that I was actually banned from Slashdot for WEEKS. Weeks. The last I had bothered to count, I had been modded down over thirty times."
You can't mod down one comment 30 times. Nor can one comment be modded down so many times you get banned. If you have a better explanation behind it, I'm all ears, but at least read what I said before passing judgement.
I wouldn't compare Apple fanboyism to the Israeli/Palastenian conflict, but I can certainly understand why somebody would. I mean, how extreme is that? I don't even know how you get that many people with mod points to come in for the attack. Very extreme. The worst part? I wasn't trolling. I might have been more respectful of it if I had said something snide or shitty, but I didn't. I sat down and explained where I was coming from on it. (Hence the positive mods.) But
Oh well. That's the internet for you.
I miss the old Slashdot. You miss week old news?
I'm not saying this to be funny, but I've been around Slashdot since 2000, and this was ALWAYS a complaint.
For example? Can you list some of these please? I read a book called the Physics of Star Trek, it came out before TNG ended. The guy who wrote it said that they actually used terms circling throughout communities, albeit incorrectly at times. I remember he appreciated that they at least took a stab at it. That said, though, the poster you're replying to may have been referring to Cochrane. He was the fabled inventor of the warp drive and they used his name as a measure of energy, if I recall.
But
Keep telling yourselves that... as much as you want to believe otherwise, making this kind of stuff available for free does not make them more money, unless it's a completely unknown product. Oh I dunno, that depends on how much PC gamers have been annoyed by games that require the disc or games that fail to run due to over-zealous protection. I'd also say it depends on if a game gets a sequel or not. A no-sale on the first game may create a fan for the second. That no-sale in the beginning wasn't necessarily money lost, just not money earned.
I'd say more but I'm arguing with an AC calling people tards who obviously hasn't put any thought into what he's so opinionated about. Good night.
To me, it's not as simple as 'rent or buy', it's a matter of having an entirely different set of pros and cons. The fact that I don't have a multi-gigabyte archive to frequently back up is a major pro. Or, the fact that I don't have different selections of music on my laptop, desktop, and work computers is another. Sure, it'll be gone if/when Rhapsody goes under. It's not a big deal to me because I've gotten my entertainment value back out of them. In some ways, I'm getting more bang for my buck than I am with my cable service.
Well that's how I feel. Different strokes for different folks, yadda yadda yadda. I just wish my cable service worked like Rhapsody does.
"We've all seen this before, and it doesn't work. Nobody wants to pay for all you can eat when it isn't. "
a.) There are two million 'nobodies' subscribed to Rhapsody right now.
b.) Cable/Satellite TV already uses that model, only it's not on-demand. Not only is that successful, but they're throwing ads on top of it! Heh.
The big problem with it isn't the business model, it's getting people to wrap their heads around the idea that it's not the same as iTunes. Music subscription isn't a music store, it's an on-demand music service. Those are two very different concepts, but not entirely unlike comparing television shows on DVD to being a cable subscriber. Amusingly, just like in the cable/DVD example, the two models aren't mutually exclusive, either.
If you're curious, I can tell you more about what why in some cases subscription would be preferable to purchase. In the mean time, however, I hope you'll accept my suggestion that subscription is merely a 'less' version of purchase. There's a whole different set of pros and cons.
"You have a sudden and irresistible urge to pick up the chair that you are sitting in and throw it across the room while repeating the mantra, "developers, developers, developers"."
HAHAHAHAH!!!!!!! ! I never thought of that before! CHAIR! HAHAHAHAHAHA~!!~~~~!!!! I haven't laughed that hard since TBS ran a back to back Full House and Saved by the Bell marathon!!!
Re:Auto upbreak. (Score:-1, Informative)
Nice use of mod points, gentlemen, that's how Microsoft 'shills' are born.
"If I tell the FCC to 'go fuck yourself', is that going to encourage teenyboppers to have unprotected sex?"
You're right, I ran two thoughts together and communicated poorly. I'll clarify: Sex on TV gets more negative attention than violence. Bad language gets more attention than violence. Sex amongst teens etc is far more likely than violence. Kids using foul language is far more likely than violence. This is why violence flies when sex and bad language doesn't. It's a more effective influence, at least in a parent's mind.
Maybe I'm wrong, though. Maybe a whole lotta people all took the same crazy pill. Whatever.
That discrepency isn't as silly as it initially sounds.
"Actually, the cake is a Pi."
Oh great, not another one of you fools tryin to tell me that pie are square....
Hmm... I haven't spent a lot of time considering this but my initial reaction is that I don't think innocent people should have to pay a tax to the music industry just because they've spun some numbers to make it sound like they're being hurt by 'illegal' activity. I also don't think it's fair to subsidize an industry that does not accept returns. Since there is no move being made on their part to satisfy customers, I'm not inclined to give them anything. They're not entitled to have their old business model maintained by whining and legal threats.
"Israelis sue government! Bring out! Dangerous weapon! They call. It. The short sentence. For effect. Profit. The. Win."
Denny Crane.