Skies darkened to block out the Sun so that their solar power sources would be negated? Well, duh. What was stopping them from building taller solar power collectors that were above the black stuff? Neo and Trinity penetrated the layer, didn't they?
Alternatively, they could have used whatever power source the remaining free humans were using: Zion wasn't powered by human batteries, was it?
Move to where there is a grid to hook up to might be a valid argument that you could make in, say, the US, but I doubt it's one that you could use in many developing world nations.
Not everybody can "just move to where they can be hooked up to the grid more efficiently", no matter how much they would like to be able to do so.
Your average nuclear reactor is not exactly portable. This sort of device, if it's all that it's claimed to be, is just that, and that is its strength.
Imagine how useful this sort of thing could be, in remote areas where there aren't power grids to tap into, helping emergency services in disaster recovery zones, etc, etc.
No, you wouldn't use it to power conventional homes in convential situations but you could use it to do a whole bunch of things that would otherwise be more difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to acheive.
In what context did he get it wrong? Don't, say, confuse being not being able to come up with an accurate number off the top of his head with actually making critical decisions on faulty numbers.
And, in case you're forgetting, we're still talking about a very small minority of the BBC website's user base. As others have said, we're arguing about some small fraction of a percentage point here, so in the grand scheme of things it's not like he's radically out of touch with his customers, is it?
Just why are you suggesting that this is worthy of a resignation? This is exactly the sort of hysterical overreaction that I referred to earlier.
Don't be such a dick. It's attitudes like this that get the Linux community such a bad name. "We are clueless"? "Linux-unfriendly nature of the BBC's site"? How old are you?
He got it wrong, he was man enough to admit that he got it wrong. Why do you have to make such a big deal out of it?
And, sorry, but we have to agree that, statistically, it's still a tiny fraction of the user base. If I was developing a cross-platform application or service, commercial or otherwise, then I'd still plan on putting out the Windows version first, the Apple one second and the Linux one third.
Why? Because it just plain makes sense. If you need an explanation why then perhaps you're just not seeing the bigger picture as well as you think you are.
Sigh. Did you bother to read anything that I or others have written on this topic?
Apple is doing very well as it is selling its solution as a package. The one time Apple tried it your way it hurt itself so badly that it lost far more in lost hardware sales than it gained in new software sales. The move was nothing short of a disaster.
Now, please tell me why Apple, which has practically increased its share price by 3000 percent in less than four years, would risk investor confidence and bet its future on a strategy (taking Microsoft head on, trying to support millions of possible desktop permutations in the process) that it has tried and failed once before?
What Apple is doing right now is working for it, and working very, very well. Why would a high risk change of strategy make sense?
Just because you think it would be a good idea doesn't necessarily make it so. Don't you think that Apple has thought about it for more than the five minutes you have? Apple isn't run by idiots and they know that their whole brand would be on the line if they made that call. The potential gains are massively outweighed by the potential losses.
Fanboy? I don't own any Apple hardware, and never have done. The closest I've come to it is buying an iPod Nano for someone as a gift.
Why is it that idiots like you seem to think that the only people capable of expressing anything but disdain for Apple are Apple zealots?
You and some of the other replies our out of touch with reality if the only way you can deal with comments like mine is to reply with not so thinly-veiled insults and flawed thinking.
(By the way, just because I didn't give a complete history of Apple dating back to its inception that doesn't mean that I don't "remember an era when Jobs was not around". Reading my post how did you get the ridiculous idea that my knowledge of Apple from 1986 to 1997 was non-existant? Get a clue, pal.)
I'm fully aware that the architecture that MacOS ran on in the 90s was totally different. Having read my post, which isn't exactly brief or light on detail (come on, I named all the clone makers, including Motorola, didn't I?), what part of it even vaguely gave you the impression that I wasn't aware that MacOS 7.x ran on a non-x86 platform?
But, you're wrong. It is the same. If Apple did the same thing today on the x86 platform the end result would still be the same. Apple hardware sales would plummet, the lost hardware revenues wouldn't be matched by the gained software revenues and then it would have the additional hit of falling overall user satisfaction as frustrated users (please, let's all acknowledge that there would be some) associated their problems with Apple's software rather than the third party hardware, etc.
Clearly, certain things need to be said again. Apple isn't a software company. Apple isn't interested in gaining market share at all costs. Apple is interested in controlling the whole user experience, because that user experience is its brand.
Why you or anybody else thinks that they should abandon these principles, especially when these principles have been at the philosophical core of its ever increasing fortunes in the last decade or so, is incredible.
The parellels that you try to draw between IBM and Apple aren't as close (or as clever) as you seem to think they are. The most important factor here is that the Apple make the hardware and the software whereas IBM did not: IBM only made hardware and relied on a third party, Microsoft, to provide their OS.
IBM didn't create "an opening for a little company named Microsoft", they were in partnership with them. Unfortunately for IBM, and fortunately for Microsoft, Compaq and the rest of us, that partnership didn't contain an exclusivity agreement of any sort.
While it was in Microsoft's interest for the IBM's rivals to develop PC compatibles (possible because IBM used off-the-shelf parts to develop the PC architecture) it certainly wasn't in IBM's interest, was it? If IBM had been able to stop the compatibles then its own PC sales wouldn't have been eaten into and the computer industry as we know it would have been very different.
By the way, IBM, you might have noticed, no longer makes PCs at all. The conclusion of Compaq et al entering competition with IBM was its eventual removal from the market. Far from being a good thing for IBM, the arrival of the compatibles was the first, and perhaps deepest, of the thousand cuts that would eventually see the company leave the personal computing market that it had created.
(The key here is that IBM was never the 300lb gorilla: Microsoft held all the cards (the software) and IBM held none. Microsoft had no incentive to preserve IBM's hardware sales, no incentive to tie itself to an IBM-only platform and no incentive to do anything other than encourage the compatible makers to compete with IBM. Microsoft was always the gorilla, because it always held the cards. It just took a while to bulk up to 300lb, which only happened because IBM practically fed it the bananas.)
Now, please explain to me why Apple, a successful and profitable hardware/software integrator, would abandon its lucrative business model to retry a strategy that miserably failed it once already? So it can emulate IBM's PC division and destroy its own, unique position in the market?
If I was feeling uncharitable then I'd describe your last two paragraphs as ga-ga. As I'm not, I'll simply use the one word that sprung to mind when I read and re-read them: weird. I don't know why you seem to feel the need to put any of this or anything else down to fear on my part.
I've already made it clear that I'd love to run MacOS X on my PCs yet you seem to think that I'm somehow scared of the possibility or espousing an "Apple hardware is better than PC hardware" viewpoint.
As someone who's never owned any Apple hardware (I've bought an iPod for someone as a present, nothing more than that) I find that, as well as the rest of your conclusions, rather funny.
Apple's primary concern isn't market penetration at all costs. If that were so then it would have made some sort of effort to release a x86 version of MacOS X for third party hardware. In fact, Apple has gone in the exact opposite direction, and has done everything possible to make such use of its OS on third party hardware impossible.
Apple isn't a software company. It's not interested in selling you an OS and some tools for a few hundred dollars/pounds/euros. Apple is a hardware company, albeit one which also designs its own software to complete its system. It's interested in selling you a complete experience, one that marries custom-designed hardware with custom-designed software, for several hundred/thousand dollars/pounds/euros.
Selling its software only with its hardware has been very successful for Apple. It has many benefits (eg, it allows it to focus software R&D only on a handful of hardware configurations, which makes post-sales support orders of magnitude easier) and is the backbone of modern Apple.
Your idea of getting the OS out there to as many people as possible was tried by Apple in the mid 90s and failed miserably. Several third party clone manufacturers (APS Technologies, DayStar Digital, Motorola, Power Computing, Radius, and UMAX) quickly gobbled a share of the hardware market... but that share was gobbled from Apple itself, as Apple users bought the cheaper clones to run Mac OS 7.x rather than Apple's comparatively more expensive hardware. The rest of the market (mostly DOS and Windows-based PCs) barely noticed at all.
Rather than gaining it market share (and thus sales) the Mac clone experiment almost became Apple's suicide note. Sure, we can sit around and talk about the "what if..." scenarios and talk about what might have happened had Apple tried it out before Windows had become so entrenched but the simple reality was that by the time that Apple did try it out it was too little, too late for it to capture the market away from Microsoft's baby.
How bad was the cloning? Well, the first thing that Steve Jobs did when he rejoined Apple was sit down with the clone makers and try to renegotiate their licensing terms to raise Apple's per-computer revenues. The clone makers refused and Jobs effectively withdrew their licences (the next version of the MacOS was released as MacOS 8, and the clone makers existing licences only covered 7.x). Apple's hardware sales recovered, eventually, but Apple never once gained any benefit from the exercise in terms of revenues.
Apple today is all about presentation. To that end, it carefully controls every aspect of the user experience. Putting its showcase OS out there in the wild would destroy that simply because for every user that had a good experience installing OS X onto a non-Apple configuration there would be many more that would have nightmares dealing with installation on hardware that wasn't compatible, features that didn't want to work, inconsistent support, etc.
As a technically adept individual, I'd love to run Apple's OS on all my PCs. It would in many ways be a dream come true. However, for the reasons that I've outlined, that will never happen. Apple doesn't want it to happen so it won't happen, and I understand why perfectly.
1. Before you do anything else, talk to to the Trading Standards office that covers the area where the store that you bought the phone from. If you've been missold the phone or the contract, if the goods do not match the description that you were given initially, then you have a case and they may be able to get you a resolution with the store without having to go further.
2. If they can't help you, then speak to the Citizen's Advice Bureau. Between them, these two organisations can normally help you sort out most disputes, or at least provide you with the best information possible as to what options you have at your disposal.
3. Consider sacrificing a Saturday afternoon vocally complaining about the whole affair at the store where you bought your phone initially. Talk to the manager, tell him what you want (be reasonable) but if he refuses to help and just fobs you off then be prepared to talk loudly and use language ("ripping people off", "conning customers into buying something that's useless", "making worthless promises", "useless customer services that contradict each other", etc) that make it clear to any new customers in earshot that a nightmare might await them.
This tactic isn't perhaps the most desirable, and relies on them wanting to keep you happy to shut you up and not cost them new business but from what you've said then they've had plenty of opportunities to do the right thing, so by this stage you're just giving as good as you get.
4. Take them to small claims court. This is a pretty inexpensive option and the CAB I mentioned above should be able to advise you on how to go about it. You have some evidence to back up your claim (invoices), and can testify yourself as to how badly you've been served and how poorly your complaints have been treated. The 50p/minute to be on hold to customer services seems likely to get you sympathy, especially if you can demonstrate it in the courtroom.
It sounds like you've been treated fairly shoddily. Good luck getting the fair deal that you deserve or, lacking that, getting some justice.
The list you made includes the infamous occasion when a Labour party member was heavy-handedly thrown out of the party conference by the party's own event's management personnel: hardly something that you can pin on the security forces.
It also includes an example of an average policeman doing his best to look like an idiot by arresting someone for wearing suspicously bulky clothing in summer. I've had a similar experience myself, when I held a friend's hockey stick for all of one minute while he went to buy something from a store and a passing policeman decided to take offence at my standing there doing nothing and insisted that I walk towards my friend and then proceded to arrest me for possession of an offensive weapon (which lasted for all of five minutes) when I said I'd wait where I was standing. But, to be fair, the paranoia in the case mentioned occured in the same month that 52 people were blown up on public transport in one set of coordinated attacks and another set of attacks was executed but failed to work.
Yep, great list. Proves your point perfectly.
Just this week another trial has taken place. One man has pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges and five more are still being tried.
Again, no operation is going to be 100 percent successful. You have to make a decision on whether to be conservative or aggressive or to take a middle approach. But when the wrong decision can mean losing lives it's not an easy decision to make.
I'd rather have the occasional false positive than see another attack like 7th July happen again. Perhaps you'd prefer that though.
The US consumes 25 percent of the world's goods and resources yet makes up only 5 percent of the population. This is unsustainable and needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
Or do you think that it's somehow an acheivement to take pride in?
Uh, the BBFC cited the reasons for the decision. They do it with every decision they make, in fact, and just because the reasons haven't been clearly outlined in news stories on Gamespot and Slashdot that doesn't mean that they weren't clearly outlined to Rockstar.
Have a look at what's on the BBFC's website and you'll see that they don't operate in secrecy, so your reaction seems a little harsh to me.
Considering how infrequent such raids have been (whenever they've occured they've certainly received plenty of media coverage, so they don't happen under the radar) it would take a pretty big stretch of the imagination to consider that security forces have wasted their time and resources by just picking names out of the hat.
You might want to consider two things. Firstly, that no operation is 100 percent perfect so, unless you do nothing at all, false positives are almost inevitable. Keeping the number of false positives as low as possible is clearly an operational goal but the key objective is to stop terrorists from carrying out further atrocities.
Secondly, plenty of people who've been red flagged and then raided have been sitting on top of bomb arsenals that they were preparing to use. So, for the most part, these raids have been resounding successes.
If the police were truly just picking targets at random then how do you explain the high degree of success they've had in finding the right people at the right time?
If he's guilty of all that, then they might as well drop the part of the charge relating to possession of the book, yeah? Nail him on all the other stuff--like having been to Pakistan. Pakistan! The missing link in the Axis of Evil. Visiting Pakistan should be a capital offense.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?
I'm guessing that you're either ignorant of the number of Islamic extremists that have been further indoctrinated and received terrorism training in Pakistan recently. Or is it that you just don't care?
Three of the four 7th July suicide bombers that killed 52 people had done so. This kid may well have done so as well. Should the security services wait until people have blown themselves up before lifting a finger? Or should they, hmmm, try to stop things before they get that far?
It's not as if police in Britain randomly pick muslim families to harass. This kid's name came up somewhere as a result of some security operation and it raised red flags. Upon investigation he was found to have had bomb-making gear under his bed, etc, etc, and a case was built from there.
He now has his day in court and the Crown Prosecution Service can make their case for his guilt and he can make his case for his innocence, and he'll be given ample opportunity to tell the court his story. It's not like he's been summarily found guilty of anything or indefinitely thrown in a hellhole without any legal recourse.
This is justice working as it should be working. What part of that do you really object to?
Oh, by the way, I know that you were joking with your "Pakistan = Axis of Evil" line but it's closer to the truth than you realise. It was the only country in the world to recognise and support the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, it's chief nuclear weapons scientists gave nuclear secrets to North Korea to help them develop their own nukes, and muslim extremist and other groups backed by Pakistan have committed several terrorist attacks in India (killing plenty in the process). And, of course, Pakistan been a dictatorship for some time now.
If Pakistan didn't already have nukes then it would have been on the US's shit list a long time ago. But, as it does, the US supports the illegitimate military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf rather than risk the alternative, which would potentially be a radical muslim state armed with nukes.
In many ways Musharraf and Pakistan today are analogous to Saddam Hussein and Iraq pre-1990: Western-backed military dictatorships in heavily armed muslim countries where abuses of power are ignored because of a "hey, he's a mad dog but at least he's our mad dog" attitude.
Finally, I'll point out that we don't execute people in Britain, not even convicted terrorists. And we certainly don't execute convicted children. Ironically, abolishing the death penalty for children is one good thing that Pakistan has done recently.
Now, if only Musharraf would get on the phone and convince his good buddy Dubya that it's time for the US to stop executing children as well...
I'll point out a few things that you seemed to have missed, glossed over and/or skipped:
1. Photoshop is so pervasive that it's become a part of the lexicon.
When you've done that, then it's no longer just a brand name. When my sister, who doesn't use her PC for more than web browsing can show me a magazine photo and ask my opinion on whether or not it's been photoshopped then the notion that the "Photoshop" name doesn't accurately convey what it does flies out the window.
Think Hoover/hoover. Hoover is a brand, but hoover is now a verb that conveys what a Hoover does: vacuum cleaning. Photoshop/photoshop are the same.
People who are used to thinking of floors being hoovered, don't struggle to think what something stamped with the word "Hoover" might do. Similarly, people who are used to thinking of images being photoshopped don't struggle to think of what a piece of software called Photoshop might do. Pretty simple, huh?
2. Image can have more than one meaning, so even that's not as "obvious" as you might think.
In computing terms, we talk about disk images, don't we? We have a whole subsection of the software industry (Drive Image, etc) that deals with that, so it's entirely possible that the word "image", especially when used in conjunction with another non-photographic language could lead an observer to think something other than "picture".
The title "GNU Image manipulation program" is vague. And why? What's the need? Just because someone wanted a "clever" acronym?
And don't get me started on the stupidity of "Manipulation program"? Couldn't that moniker refer to every piece of application software you've ever come across?
...in the Windows World, Opera is not a viable alternative to many people who find the Opera UI to be excessively daunting for casual use.
Sorry, but that's pure bullshit, and I suspect that you know it.
I use Opera on Windows. The UI is pretty damn customisable, and within minutes you can have it doing exactly what you want.
Skins can be downloaded and installed in seconds. And I mean seconds. The main toolbar, the address bar, status bar, etc are all customisable, and you can add, remove and tinker with them and their elements very easily.
Getting a UI that you're not only happy with but that also feels more intuitive to you and that makes you more productive in the long run is very quick and easy to do.
'Out of the box', Opera's default UI is very usable. With a few simple clicks via the installation wizards it can be made more so. And, of course, with a few more minutes spent adjusting things it can be made to feel very personalised.
To be honest, I find it a rather hypocritical (and hilarious) complaint for a Firefox user to make, given that the typical Firefox user will do far more of the same (install, skin, tweak, customise), and on top of that will spend far more of time downloading, installing and customising add-ons, many of which purely play catch-up to core Opera features.
The idea that Opera 'out of the box' is "excessively duanting" compared to Firefox 'out of the box' for casual users is just the funniest thing I've heard in a long time.
GIMP is Called the GNU Image manipulation program in my GNOME menu. Doesn't get much more obvious than that. Certainly clearer than Photoshop.
Are you kidding me? Photoshop is so recognisable that it's transcended computing and has become a verb in its own right.
People who wouldn't even recognised Photoshop if you waved it right in their faces will talk about images being photoshopped.
Even discounting that, I guarantee you that you won't find too many people who would find the role of a piece of software called "Photoshop" hard to work out just from the title. Hint: the word "photo" is a big giveaway.
Meanwhile, "GNU Image manipulation program" is clunky and less clear than you think. "Manipulation" is hardly everyday vernacular, and its most common usage is negative (think "he manipulated the situation"). And while you might read it and think "image editing software", I guarantee you that there will be people out there thinking "What's a GNU image and why would I want to manipulate it?".
Lastly, "Photoshop" is short and sweet. "GNU Image manipulation program" is not. Sit a novice down to use each for an hour and the next day ask them what software they were using and I bet you that he'll remember "Photoshop" but will struggle to remember "GNU Image manipulation program".
No offence, but the original post about usability that you replied to was spot on, and you just illustrated his point (and the problem) for him.
Now please excuse me while I travel forward in time to see next year's results, then further forward another two weeks to see the Slashdot story, then further forward another week to see the dupe.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you mention it, WOW is crying out for a Bard class...
The machines in The Matrix story were so dumb.
Skies darkened to block out the Sun so that their solar power sources would be negated? Well, duh. What was stopping them from building taller solar power collectors that were above the black stuff? Neo and Trinity penetrated the layer, didn't they?
Alternatively, they could have used whatever power source the remaining free humans were using: Zion wasn't powered by human batteries, was it?
Worst Plot Hole Ever.
Move to where there is a grid to hook up to might be a valid argument that you could make in, say, the US, but I doubt it's one that you could use in many developing world nations.
Not everybody can "just move to where they can be hooked up to the grid more efficiently", no matter how much they would like to be able to do so.
Your average nuclear reactor is not exactly portable. This sort of device, if it's all that it's claimed to be, is just that, and that is its strength.
Imagine how useful this sort of thing could be, in remote areas where there aren't power grids to tap into, helping emergency services in disaster recovery zones, etc, etc.
No, you wouldn't use it to power conventional homes in convential situations but you could use it to do a whole bunch of things that would otherwise be more difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to acheive.
In what context did he get it wrong? Don't, say, confuse being not being able to come up with an accurate number off the top of his head with actually making critical decisions on faulty numbers.
And, in case you're forgetting, we're still talking about a very small minority of the BBC website's user base. As others have said, we're arguing about some small fraction of a percentage point here, so in the grand scheme of things it's not like he's radically out of touch with his customers, is it?
Just why are you suggesting that this is worthy of a resignation? This is exactly the sort of hysterical overreaction that I referred to earlier.
Don't be such a dick. It's attitudes like this that get the Linux community such a bad name. "We are clueless"? "Linux-unfriendly nature of the BBC's site"? How old are you?
He got it wrong, he was man enough to admit that he got it wrong. Why do you have to make such a big deal out of it?
And, sorry, but we have to agree that, statistically, it's still a tiny fraction of the user base. If I was developing a cross-platform application or service, commercial or otherwise, then I'd still plan on putting out the Windows version first, the Apple one second and the Linux one third.
Why? Because it just plain makes sense. If you need an explanation why then perhaps you're just not seeing the bigger picture as well as you think you are.
Sigh. Did you bother to read anything that I or others have written on this topic?
Apple is doing very well as it is selling its solution as a package. The one time Apple tried it your way it hurt itself so badly that it lost far more in lost hardware sales than it gained in new software sales. The move was nothing short of a disaster.
Now, please tell me why Apple, which has practically increased its share price by 3000 percent in less than four years, would risk investor confidence and bet its future on a strategy (taking Microsoft head on, trying to support millions of possible desktop permutations in the process) that it has tried and failed once before?
What Apple is doing right now is working for it, and working very, very well. Why would a high risk change of strategy make sense?
Just because you think it would be a good idea doesn't necessarily make it so. Don't you think that Apple has thought about it for more than the five minutes you have? Apple isn't run by idiots and they know that their whole brand would be on the line if they made that call. The potential gains are massively outweighed by the potential losses.
Now, please, accept reality and move along.
Fanboy? I don't own any Apple hardware, and never have done. The closest I've come to it is buying an iPod Nano for someone as a gift.
Why is it that idiots like you seem to think that the only people capable of expressing anything but disdain for Apple are Apple zealots?
You and some of the other replies our out of touch with reality if the only way you can deal with comments like mine is to reply with not so thinly-veiled insults and flawed thinking.
(By the way, just because I didn't give a complete history of Apple dating back to its inception that doesn't mean that I don't "remember an era when Jobs was not around". Reading my post how did you get the ridiculous idea that my knowledge of Apple from 1986 to 1997 was non-existant? Get a clue, pal.)
I'm fully aware that the architecture that MacOS ran on in the 90s was totally different. Having read my post, which isn't exactly brief or light on detail (come on, I named all the clone makers, including Motorola, didn't I?), what part of it even vaguely gave you the impression that I wasn't aware that MacOS 7.x ran on a non-x86 platform?
But, you're wrong. It is the same. If Apple did the same thing today on the x86 platform the end result would still be the same. Apple hardware sales would plummet, the lost hardware revenues wouldn't be matched by the gained software revenues and then it would have the additional hit of falling overall user satisfaction as frustrated users (please, let's all acknowledge that there would be some) associated their problems with Apple's software rather than the third party hardware, etc.
Clearly, certain things need to be said again. Apple isn't a software company. Apple isn't interested in gaining market share at all costs. Apple is interested in controlling the whole user experience, because that user experience is its brand.
Why you or anybody else thinks that they should abandon these principles, especially when these principles have been at the philosophical core of its ever increasing fortunes in the last decade or so, is incredible.
I know plenty about PC history, thank you.
The parellels that you try to draw between IBM and Apple aren't as close (or as clever) as you seem to think they are. The most important factor here is that the Apple make the hardware and the software whereas IBM did not: IBM only made hardware and relied on a third party, Microsoft, to provide their OS.
IBM didn't create "an opening for a little company named Microsoft", they were in partnership with them. Unfortunately for IBM, and fortunately for Microsoft, Compaq and the rest of us, that partnership didn't contain an exclusivity agreement of any sort.
While it was in Microsoft's interest for the IBM's rivals to develop PC compatibles (possible because IBM used off-the-shelf parts to develop the PC architecture) it certainly wasn't in IBM's interest, was it? If IBM had been able to stop the compatibles then its own PC sales wouldn't have been eaten into and the computer industry as we know it would have been very different.
By the way, IBM, you might have noticed, no longer makes PCs at all. The conclusion of Compaq et al entering competition with IBM was its eventual removal from the market. Far from being a good thing for IBM, the arrival of the compatibles was the first, and perhaps deepest, of the thousand cuts that would eventually see the company leave the personal computing market that it had created.
(The key here is that IBM was never the 300lb gorilla: Microsoft held all the cards (the software) and IBM held none. Microsoft had no incentive to preserve IBM's hardware sales, no incentive to tie itself to an IBM-only platform and no incentive to do anything other than encourage the compatible makers to compete with IBM. Microsoft was always the gorilla, because it always held the cards. It just took a while to bulk up to 300lb, which only happened because IBM practically fed it the bananas.)
Now, please explain to me why Apple, a successful and profitable hardware/software integrator, would abandon its lucrative business model to retry a strategy that miserably failed it once already? So it can emulate IBM's PC division and destroy its own, unique position in the market?
If I was feeling uncharitable then I'd describe your last two paragraphs as ga-ga. As I'm not, I'll simply use the one word that sprung to mind when I read and re-read them: weird. I don't know why you seem to feel the need to put any of this or anything else down to fear on my part.
I've already made it clear that I'd love to run MacOS X on my PCs yet you seem to think that I'm somehow scared of the possibility or espousing an "Apple hardware is better than PC hardware" viewpoint.
As someone who's never owned any Apple hardware (I've bought an iPod for someone as a present, nothing more than that) I find that, as well as the rest of your conclusions, rather funny.
Apple's primary concern isn't market penetration at all costs. If that were so then it would have made some sort of effort to release a x86 version of MacOS X for third party hardware. In fact, Apple has gone in the exact opposite direction, and has done everything possible to make such use of its OS on third party hardware impossible.
Apple isn't a software company. It's not interested in selling you an OS and some tools for a few hundred dollars/pounds/euros. Apple is a hardware company, albeit one which also designs its own software to complete its system. It's interested in selling you a complete experience, one that marries custom-designed hardware with custom-designed software, for several hundred/thousand dollars/pounds/euros.
Selling its software only with its hardware has been very successful for Apple. It has many benefits (eg, it allows it to focus software R&D only on a handful of hardware configurations, which makes post-sales support orders of magnitude easier) and is the backbone of modern Apple.
Your idea of getting the OS out there to as many people as possible was tried by Apple in the mid 90s and failed miserably. Several third party clone manufacturers (APS Technologies, DayStar Digital, Motorola, Power Computing, Radius, and UMAX) quickly gobbled a share of the hardware market... but that share was gobbled from Apple itself, as Apple users bought the cheaper clones to run Mac OS 7.x rather than Apple's comparatively more expensive hardware. The rest of the market (mostly DOS and Windows-based PCs) barely noticed at all.
Rather than gaining it market share (and thus sales) the Mac clone experiment almost became Apple's suicide note. Sure, we can sit around and talk about the "what if..." scenarios and talk about what might have happened had Apple tried it out before Windows had become so entrenched but the simple reality was that by the time that Apple did try it out it was too little, too late for it to capture the market away from Microsoft's baby.
How bad was the cloning? Well, the first thing that Steve Jobs did when he rejoined Apple was sit down with the clone makers and try to renegotiate their licensing terms to raise Apple's per-computer revenues. The clone makers refused and Jobs effectively withdrew their licences (the next version of the MacOS was released as MacOS 8, and the clone makers existing licences only covered 7.x). Apple's hardware sales recovered, eventually, but Apple never once gained any benefit from the exercise in terms of revenues.
Apple today is all about presentation. To that end, it carefully controls every aspect of the user experience. Putting its showcase OS out there in the wild would destroy that simply because for every user that had a good experience installing OS X onto a non-Apple configuration there would be many more that would have nightmares dealing with installation on hardware that wasn't compatible, features that didn't want to work, inconsistent support, etc.
As a technically adept individual, I'd love to run Apple's OS on all my PCs. It would in many ways be a dream come true. However, for the reasons that I've outlined, that will never happen. Apple doesn't want it to happen so it won't happen, and I understand why perfectly.
Hey, when life throws you a soft pitch like that you don't just tap it for a single, you smack it out of the park.
Hang on a sec, that abbreviated would make a cool ID. I really should do that...
You're excluding, of course, the cases that are currently in the judical system.
But I'll ask you this: when it comes to people preparing to blow up themselves and others to make a point, one is plenty enough, isn't it?
I'm curious: if you were in charge of things then how would you run things? Would you just wait for people to be blown up and then pick up the pieces?
Four things you should consider doing:
1. Before you do anything else, talk to to the Trading Standards office that covers the area where the store that you bought the phone from. If you've been missold the phone or the contract, if the goods do not match the description that you were given initially, then you have a case and they may be able to get you a resolution with the store without having to go further.
2. If they can't help you, then speak to the Citizen's Advice Bureau. Between them, these two organisations can normally help you sort out most disputes, or at least provide you with the best information possible as to what options you have at your disposal.
3. Consider sacrificing a Saturday afternoon vocally complaining about the whole affair at the store where you bought your phone initially. Talk to the manager, tell him what you want (be reasonable) but if he refuses to help and just fobs you off then be prepared to talk loudly and use language ("ripping people off", "conning customers into buying something that's useless", "making worthless promises", "useless customer services that contradict each other", etc) that make it clear to any new customers in earshot that a nightmare might await them.
This tactic isn't perhaps the most desirable, and relies on them wanting to keep you happy to shut you up and not cost them new business but from what you've said then they've had plenty of opportunities to do the right thing, so by this stage you're just giving as good as you get.
4. Take them to small claims court. This is a pretty inexpensive option and the CAB I mentioned above should be able to advise you on how to go about it. You have some evidence to back up your claim (invoices), and can testify yourself as to how badly you've been served and how poorly your complaints have been treated. The 50p/minute to be on hold to customer services seems likely to get you sympathy, especially if you can demonstrate it in the courtroom.
It sounds like you've been treated fairly shoddily. Good luck getting the fair deal that you deserve or, lacking that, getting some justice.
Read the reply above mine.
I'll forgive you for implying that I'm an ass if you'll forgive me for pointing out that you've made an ass of yourself.
Well done for learning how to cut and paste.
I have to laugh.
The list you made includes the infamous occasion when a Labour party member was heavy-handedly thrown out of the party conference by the party's own event's management personnel: hardly something that you can pin on the security forces.
It also includes an example of an average policeman doing his best to look like an idiot by arresting someone for wearing suspicously bulky clothing in summer. I've had a similar experience myself, when I held a friend's hockey stick for all of one minute while he went to buy something from a store and a passing policeman decided to take offence at my standing there doing nothing and insisted that I walk towards my friend and then proceded to arrest me for possession of an offensive weapon (which lasted for all of five minutes) when I said I'd wait where I was standing. But, to be fair, the paranoia in the case mentioned occured in the same month that 52 people were blown up on public transport in one set of coordinated attacks and another set of attacks was executed but failed to work.
Yep, great list. Proves your point perfectly.
Just this week another trial has taken place. One man has pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges and five more are still being tried.
Again, no operation is going to be 100 percent successful. You have to make a decision on whether to be conservative or aggressive or to take a middle approach. But when the wrong decision can mean losing lives it's not an easy decision to make.
I'd rather have the occasional false positive than see another attack like 7th July happen again. Perhaps you'd prefer that though.
Is this meant to be a defence of some sort?
The US consumes 25 percent of the world's goods and resources yet makes up only 5 percent of the population. This is unsustainable and needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
Or do you think that it's somehow an acheivement to take pride in?
Uh, the BBFC cited the reasons for the decision. They do it with every decision they make, in fact, and just because the reasons haven't been clearly outlined in news stories on Gamespot and Slashdot that doesn't mean that they weren't clearly outlined to Rockstar.
Have a look at what's on the BBFC's website and you'll see that they don't operate in secrecy, so your reaction seems a little harsh to me.
Acting on intelligence isn't random harassment.
Considering how infrequent such raids have been (whenever they've occured they've certainly received plenty of media coverage, so they don't happen under the radar) it would take a pretty big stretch of the imagination to consider that security forces have wasted their time and resources by just picking names out of the hat.
You might want to consider two things. Firstly, that no operation is 100 percent perfect so, unless you do nothing at all, false positives are almost inevitable. Keeping the number of false positives as low as possible is clearly an operational goal but the key objective is to stop terrorists from carrying out further atrocities.
Secondly, plenty of people who've been red flagged and then raided have been sitting on top of bomb arsenals that they were preparing to use. So, for the most part, these raids have been resounding successes.
If the police were truly just picking targets at random then how do you explain the high degree of success they've had in finding the right people at the right time?
So, yeah, I'm sure.
I'm guessing that you're either ignorant of the number of Islamic extremists that have been further indoctrinated and received terrorism training in Pakistan recently. Or is it that you just don't care?
Three of the four 7th July suicide bombers that killed 52 people had done so. This kid may well have done so as well. Should the security services wait until people have blown themselves up before lifting a finger? Or should they, hmmm, try to stop things before they get that far?
It's not as if police in Britain randomly pick muslim families to harass. This kid's name came up somewhere as a result of some security operation and it raised red flags. Upon investigation he was found to have had bomb-making gear under his bed, etc, etc, and a case was built from there.
He now has his day in court and the Crown Prosecution Service can make their case for his guilt and he can make his case for his innocence, and he'll be given ample opportunity to tell the court his story. It's not like he's been summarily found guilty of anything or indefinitely thrown in a hellhole without any legal recourse.
This is justice working as it should be working. What part of that do you really object to?
Oh, by the way, I know that you were joking with your "Pakistan = Axis of Evil" line but it's closer to the truth than you realise. It was the only country in the world to recognise and support the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, it's chief nuclear weapons scientists gave nuclear secrets to North Korea to help them develop their own nukes, and muslim extremist and other groups backed by Pakistan have committed several terrorist attacks in India (killing plenty in the process). And, of course, Pakistan been a dictatorship for some time now.
If Pakistan didn't already have nukes then it would have been on the US's shit list a long time ago. But, as it does, the US supports the illegitimate military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf rather than risk the alternative, which would potentially be a radical muslim state armed with nukes.
In many ways Musharraf and Pakistan today are analogous to Saddam Hussein and Iraq pre-1990: Western-backed military dictatorships in heavily armed muslim countries where abuses of power are ignored because of a "hey, he's a mad dog but at least he's our mad dog" attitude.
Finally, I'll point out that we don't execute people in Britain, not even convicted terrorists. And we certainly don't execute convicted children. Ironically, abolishing the death penalty for children is one good thing that Pakistan has done recently.
Now, if only Musharraf would get on the phone and convince his good buddy Dubya that it's time for the US to stop executing children as well...
I'll point out a few things that you seemed to have missed, glossed over and/or skipped:
1. Photoshop is so pervasive that it's become a part of the lexicon.
When you've done that, then it's no longer just a brand name. When my sister, who doesn't use her PC for more than web browsing can show me a magazine photo and ask my opinion on whether or not it's been photoshopped then the notion that the "Photoshop" name doesn't accurately convey what it does flies out the window.
Think Hoover/hoover. Hoover is a brand, but hoover is now a verb that conveys what a Hoover does: vacuum cleaning. Photoshop/photoshop are the same.
People who are used to thinking of floors being hoovered, don't struggle to think what something stamped with the word "Hoover" might do. Similarly, people who are used to thinking of images being photoshopped don't struggle to think of what a piece of software called Photoshop might do. Pretty simple, huh?
2. Image can have more than one meaning, so even that's not as "obvious" as you might think.
In computing terms, we talk about disk images, don't we? We have a whole subsection of the software industry (Drive Image, etc) that deals with that, so it's entirely possible that the word "image", especially when used in conjunction with another non-photographic language could lead an observer to think something other than "picture".
The title "GNU Image manipulation program" is vague. And why? What's the need? Just because someone wanted a "clever" acronym?
And don't get me started on the stupidity of "Manipulation program"? Couldn't that moniker refer to every piece of application software you've ever come across?
I use Opera on Windows. The UI is pretty damn customisable, and within minutes you can have it doing exactly what you want.
Skins can be downloaded and installed in seconds. And I mean seconds. The main toolbar, the address bar, status bar, etc are all customisable, and you can add, remove and tinker with them and their elements very easily.
Getting a UI that you're not only happy with but that also feels more intuitive to you and that makes you more productive in the long run is very quick and easy to do.
'Out of the box', Opera's default UI is very usable. With a few simple clicks via the installation wizards it can be made more so. And, of course, with a few more minutes spent adjusting things it can be made to feel very personalised.
To be honest, I find it a rather hypocritical (and hilarious) complaint for a Firefox user to make, given that the typical Firefox user will do far more of the same (install, skin, tweak, customise), and on top of that will spend far more of time downloading, installing and customising add-ons, many of which purely play catch-up to core Opera features.
The idea that Opera 'out of the box' is "excessively duanting" compared to Firefox 'out of the box' for casual users is just the funniest thing I've heard in a long time.
People who wouldn't even recognised Photoshop if you waved it right in their faces will talk about images being photoshopped.
Even discounting that, I guarantee you that you won't find too many people who would find the role of a piece of software called "Photoshop" hard to work out just from the title. Hint: the word "photo" is a big giveaway.
Meanwhile, "GNU Image manipulation program" is clunky and less clear than you think. "Manipulation" is hardly everyday vernacular, and its most common usage is negative (think "he manipulated the situation"). And while you might read it and think "image editing software", I guarantee you that there will be people out there thinking "What's a GNU image and why would I want to manipulate it?".
Lastly, "Photoshop" is short and sweet. "GNU Image manipulation program" is not. Sit a novice down to use each for an hour and the next day ask them what software they were using and I bet you that he'll remember "Photoshop" but will struggle to remember "GNU Image manipulation program".
No offence, but the original post about usability that you replied to was spot on, and you just illustrated his point (and the problem) for him.
Duh. Time travel.
You're new to this sci-fi lark, aren't you?
Now please excuse me while I travel forward in time to see next year's results, then further forward another two weeks to see the Slashdot story, then further forward another week to see the dupe.