It's called relevance. Specifically, unless you're doing stuff that people care about, you won't be relevant for long. From this perspective, MIT's Media Lab is thus ensuring its continuing relevance.
By the way, evolutionary biologists understand that fashion, like geekery, has a direct and clear purpose (in the context of natural selection). Perhaps it's something you should look into before condescending to your evolutionarily more successful peers.
Best browser on the market... for PCs. I just downloaded Opera and tried it for two minutes, and that was enough to turn me off permanently from its ghastly UI. The pervasive tastelessness, lack of coordination, and lack of integration with the operating system make it almost as bad as Firefox. No, I'll be sticking with Safari, thank you.
Slightly offtopic, but can you tell me whether Opera is actually better, in your opinion, than Safari? (I'm assuming both of us regard Firefox, rightly, as a steaming pile of shit.)
You gotta be kidding. Harvard, Columbia, and the rest of them are at least as well known for their humanities and liberal arts programs as for business and law. Princeton doesn't even have a law school. The Ivies are also much less WASPy than your typical Midwestern university, partly because they accept so many students of international background (both undergrad and grad, particularly Columbia), but also because they offer generous need-based financial aid. Finally, MIT's Sloan is considered among the top business schools in the world. Do you have any clue what you're talking about?
You're Dutch? No wonder you hate the Mac and its inclusive, multicultural philosophy. Get the fuck off my Slashdot and take your closed-minded bigotry with you.
And seriously, it's more than a little frightening that you've constructed an entire personality, including a website and a comment history here 400 strong and counting, dedicated to hating of all things an operating system. Is your vision of a white, Christian world order so threatened by the Mac that you have to live every moment of every day seething in anti-Apple rage? Please seek help.
Holy shit. The only way this succeeds as a troll is as a parody of piss-poor trolling. If that was your intent, I congratulate you, sir; otherwise, fail.
Very funny. I invite you to visit any of the hundreds of cities in China with over 1 million people, tour for a few weeks, and come back and tell me with a straight face that anyone's in control over there. China for the past two decades has been chaos--not only protests everywhere, but also the wonderful hurly-burly of an urban marketplace in many ways freer than anything we have here in the West.
Well Christ almighty, so have we Americans. This isn't a useful pissing contest by any means.
Has it occurred to you that the typical Chinese person might, just might not have a problem with the censorship policies put in place by their government?
Life isn't about money, but it isn't about knowledge either. It's about whatever you want it to be. It's about doing whatever you want to do. And to approach life in your own way, to "think different" if you will, is about empowering yourself--giving yourself the power to be your best.
All I'm pointing out is that Mac users and PC users don't think alike. Mac users tend to synthesize disparate data and work with diverse media, where PC users have one-track minds. This is a generalization, of course, and there are many exceptions. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that a Mac person would work more efficiently given a PC workspace, or that a person who thinks like Windows' designers would work more efficiently given a Mac.
You're completely wrong. The Mac marketplace is saturated with add-on processor upgrades, video cards, and sound cards that are as plug-and-play as hardware upgrades can be--hell, the article/satire even mentioned a few. But perhaps I shouldn't even be telling you this; the last thing the Mac needs is tasteless, ugly, NASCAR-watching, gay-bashing PC users (read: morons) like you "switching" to our platform.
If you're not a Mac person, then why would you bother buying a Mac? (I'm interpreting "not a Mac person" to mean you keep your windows maximized instead of scattered across the screen; you don't understand why one-button mice make more sense, ergonomically and intuitively; you're confounded by default buttons on the right-hand side of dialogs; etc.)
Macs are designed for Mac people. If you don't think like a Mac user, buying a Mac will probably do you more harm than good. You'd probably be better off with a Dell or something instead.
Hence the "battery dead" icon on the iPod, which anyone in the iPod's target audience is going to immediately understand means "charge me."
My comment was a reaction to the "people are stupid, let 'em drown" attitude I thought I smelled in the original post. If I read too much into that particular post, consider it a reply instead to that attitude as expressed by Slashbots hundreds of times every day.
Well, sure, geeks like you and me are always going to want to know more, and that's great. The trouble begins when we start saying everyone should have to know what we know just to do simple, everyday things like surf the web and send email. Grandma shouldn't have to know how to setup an 802.11b network or configure port forwarding behind a NAT just to videoconference me in iChat. That's totally unreasonable. You wouldn't expect your brain surgeon to ask you to learn the ins and outs of neurobiology before he removes a tumor, would you?
And that's exactly how it should be, and that's why Apple gets it and Slashdotters don't. The iPod's sole purpose in life is to play music. So it plays music. Why should I need to know any more than that?
So your advice is for him to ditch Opera and descend back into hell, just so he can complain about the thermostat, in the vain hope it might someday be fixed?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes--if she's showing them to you, she must be quite desperate indeed.
It's called relevance. Specifically, unless you're doing stuff that people care about, you won't be relevant for long. From this perspective, MIT's Media Lab is thus ensuring its continuing relevance.
By the way, evolutionary biologists understand that fashion, like geekery, has a direct and clear purpose (in the context of natural selection). Perhaps it's something you should look into before condescending to your evolutionarily more successful peers.
Yeah, but not by being a jackass. Just like everyone wants vengeance, but not necessarily by murder.
Best browser on the market... for PCs. I just downloaded Opera and tried it for two minutes, and that was enough to turn me off permanently from its ghastly UI. The pervasive tastelessness, lack of coordination, and lack of integration with the operating system make it almost as bad as Firefox. No, I'll be sticking with Safari, thank you.
Slightly offtopic, but can you tell me whether Opera is actually better, in your opinion, than Safari? (I'm assuming both of us regard Firefox, rightly, as a steaming pile of shit.)
It is about open source.
You gotta be kidding. Harvard, Columbia, and the rest of them are at least as well known for their humanities and liberal arts programs as for business and law. Princeton doesn't even have a law school. The Ivies are also much less WASPy than your typical Midwestern university, partly because they accept so many students of international background (both undergrad and grad, particularly Columbia), but also because they offer generous need-based financial aid. Finally, MIT's Sloan is considered among the top business schools in the world. Do you have any clue what you're talking about?
You're Dutch? No wonder you hate the Mac and its inclusive, multicultural philosophy. Get the fuck off my Slashdot and take your closed-minded bigotry with you.
And seriously, it's more than a little frightening that you've constructed an entire personality, including a website and a comment history here 400 strong and counting, dedicated to hating of all things an operating system. Is your vision of a white, Christian world order so threatened by the Mac that you have to live every moment of every day seething in anti-Apple rage? Please seek help.
Holy shit. The only way this succeeds as a troll is as a parody of piss-poor trolling. If that was your intent, I congratulate you, sir; otherwise, fail.
Very funny. I invite you to visit any of the hundreds of cities in China with over 1 million people, tour for a few weeks, and come back and tell me with a straight face that anyone's in control over there. China for the past two decades has been chaos--not only protests everywhere, but also the wonderful hurly-burly of an urban marketplace in many ways freer than anything we have here in the West.
Well Christ almighty, so have we Americans. This isn't a useful pissing contest by any means.
Has it occurred to you that the typical Chinese person might, just might not have a problem with the censorship policies put in place by their government?
Life isn't about money, but it isn't about knowledge either. It's about whatever you want it to be. It's about doing whatever you want to do. And to approach life in your own way, to "think different" if you will, is about empowering yourself--giving yourself the power to be your best.
I'm not taking that bet, because I can guess how much your time is worth. Apple-haters tend to be failures at life.
That's even worse than "could care less" Nazism.
I didn't know Bob Jones had a computer science department.
No, Stallman's piss-poor sense of aesthetics would prevent him from understanding how to use a Mac.
All I'm pointing out is that Mac users and PC users don't think alike. Mac users tend to synthesize disparate data and work with diverse media, where PC users have one-track minds. This is a generalization, of course, and there are many exceptions. But I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that a Mac person would work more efficiently given a PC workspace, or that a person who thinks like Windows' designers would work more efficiently given a Mac.
You're completely wrong. The Mac marketplace is saturated with add-on processor upgrades, video cards, and sound cards that are as plug-and-play as hardware upgrades can be--hell, the article/satire even mentioned a few. But perhaps I shouldn't even be telling you this; the last thing the Mac needs is tasteless, ugly, NASCAR-watching, gay-bashing PC users (read: morons) like you "switching" to our platform.
If you're not a Mac person, then why would you bother buying a Mac? (I'm interpreting "not a Mac person" to mean you keep your windows maximized instead of scattered across the screen; you don't understand why one-button mice make more sense, ergonomically and intuitively; you're confounded by default buttons on the right-hand side of dialogs; etc.)
Macs are designed for Mac people. If you don't think like a Mac user, buying a Mac will probably do you more harm than good. You'd probably be better off with a Dell or something instead.
Because Camino still suffers from Gecko's shitty text rendering and non-native widgets in pages.
Hence the "battery dead" icon on the iPod, which anyone in the iPod's target audience is going to immediately understand means "charge me."
My comment was a reaction to the "people are stupid, let 'em drown" attitude I thought I smelled in the original post. If I read too much into that particular post, consider it a reply instead to that attitude as expressed by Slashbots hundreds of times every day.
Well, sure, geeks like you and me are always going to want to know more, and that's great. The trouble begins when we start saying everyone should have to know what we know just to do simple, everyday things like surf the web and send email. Grandma shouldn't have to know how to setup an 802.11b network or configure port forwarding behind a NAT just to videoconference me in iChat. That's totally unreasonable. You wouldn't expect your brain surgeon to ask you to learn the ins and outs of neurobiology before he removes a tumor, would you?
And that's exactly how it should be, and that's why Apple gets it and Slashdotters don't. The iPod's sole purpose in life is to play music. So it plays music. Why should I need to know any more than that?
Anonymous Coward splices comma, calls Columbia professor a "moron," links to article which only illustrates AC's own failure at life. Film at 11.
So your advice is for him to ditch Opera and descend back into hell, just so he can complain about the thermostat, in the vain hope it might someday be fixed?