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> This is ridiculous. Apple has NEVER been about their products being easily upgraded. NEVER. NEVER. Not since Apple 2.

Nonsense. I had a G5 Tower that I upgraded with more RAM and larger hard drives. It was dead easy to open and swap in new stuff.

Prior to that, I had a Power Mac 7500 that I upgraded with RAM, cache, an 8x optical drive, larger SCSI hard drive, and a G3 daughterboard. I got a lot of mileage out of that machine. I even bought an Orange Micro PC card to run Windows on it, but never used it because PCs got so cheap. The 7500 case was a dream to work inside, everything was easily accessible. The Quadra 800 tower case, OTOH, ugh! don't get me started. :)

Nice. Right after Hostess files for bankruptcy TFA cites "hacker machismo" with a link to a list of "real programmer" attributes which includes 'surviving on Twinkies'. Seems like there's not much demand for that "food" after all.

It is the shortage of bits that is driving this. This has been a growing problem since 1995: http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/bitshortage.html

Compare and contrast the fit and finish in a Mac G5 and a typical PC.

http://www.wap.org/journal/powermacg5v2/powermacg5v2.jpg

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_BkdiUaeJyCE/Rmou6FFkR6I/AAAAAAAAALU/JCehWQCoHaw/DSC02468.JPG

Note, the inside cables haven't been removed or hidden on the G% photo. The inside of a Mac G5 really does look like that.

What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems?

Well, then 2 poorly managed companies would be together. The employees would fight with each other for dominance.

"... Sun Microsystems and a Taqueria?" You aren't taking this sufficiently seriously. It's spelled Taquería, with an accent mark. There, fixed that.

This is the kind of seriousness we need at times like this: The big news is not Soracle, it is a merger between Microsoft and, well, read the headline. Microsoft acquires the Catholic Church.

It has taken 15 years to arrange the merger, because Satan felt that the connection with the CC might lessen his complete, overwhelming power.

Fight Back for the Mac!

Power Computing was a rabid supporter and promoter of the Mac OS. : http://ifaq.wap.org/posters/fightback.gif

They were so passionate, they sought to out-do Apple. This is probably what Apple fears - If someone is willing to use their nifty OS without a laser-engraved Power Button with which to start up the brushed aluminum, unibody device with the too-shiny screen, Apple loses.

Brown plastic and a lack of industrial 'design' is something Apple is against as much as anything.

To them, cheaper != better, unless it's made exquisitely elegant.

It would be best if THEY didn't know.

I can start effectively marketing MRML (Mind-Reading Markup Language).

Join the team

Then your wishes have been granted.... A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys

It's not a nuke

You're so smart and brave to say this! I'm glad you're not a country president.

Even if it's not a nuke, it's a lot more sad: it's the desparate attempt of a nation to protect itself against inevitable invasion from hostile forces.

If it's just a big pile of TNT, they can't react in the case of an actual attack.

Pretty much like this butterfly trying to convince this guy that it simply wants to be left alone.

IN HONOR OF THE SUBJECT MATERIAL, I HAVE CHOSEN TO USE THE CAPS LOCK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE FOR THIS POST.

On second thought, that's far too annoying.

If the proposed abolishment of caps lock keys is successful, I grow concerned about what myself and my predecessors will celebrate on INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY which happens to be October 22. And don't tell me it's not a real holiday because that is one convincing website. It has a news flash with a picture of a potato, uses the word "bitches" and has a countdown for the days remaining to INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. And look at this other reputable site, Out House Rag that also backs INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. That's more than Adults Day in Japan has to say! Please, if I have to put up with one more Nevada Day (October 31) the least you can do is let me have my INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. Please don't remove your caps lock key because they're not evil!

You know, there's this horrible site that actually encourages you to remap your caps lock to a more suitable function ... but of course that would just be sacrilegious and a very dangerous process (don't try it at home!).

IN HONOR OF THE SUBJECT MATERIAL, I HAVE CHOSEN TO USE THE CAPS LOCK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE FOR THIS POST.

On second thought, that's far too annoying.

If the proposed abolishment of caps lock keys is successful, I grow concerned about what myself and my predecessors will celebrate on INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY which happens to be October 22. And don't tell me it's not a real holiday because that is one convincing website. It has a news flash with a picture of a potato, uses the word "bitches" and has a countdown for the days remaining to INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. And look at this other reputable site, Out House Rag that also backs INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. That's more than Adults Day in Japan has to say! Please, if I have to put up with one more Nevada Day (October 31) the least you can do is let me have my INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. Please don't remove your caps lock key because they're not evil!

You know, there's this horrible site that actually encourages you to remap your caps lock to a more suitable function ... but of course that would just be sacrilegious and a very dangerous process (don't try it at home!).

Y2K Theme Song
Two Digits for a Date

(to the tune of "Gilligan's Island")

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
Of the doom that is our fate.
That started when programmers used
Two digits for a date.
Two digits for a date.

Main memory was smaller then;
Hard disks were smaller, too.
"Four digits are extravagant,
So let's get by with two.
So let's get by with two."

"This works through 1999,"
The programmers did say.
"Unless we rewrite before that
It all will go away.
It all will go away."

But Management had not a clue:
"It works fine now, you bet!
A rewrite is a straight expense;
We won't do it just yet.
We won't do it just yet."

Now when 2000 rolls around
It all goes straight to hell,
For zero's less than ninety-nine,
As anyone can tell.
As anyone can tell.

The mail won't bring your pension check.
It won't be sent to you
When you're no longer sixty-eight,
But minus thirty-two.
But minus thirty-two.

The problems we're about to face
Are frightening, for sure.
And reading every line of code's
The only certain cure.
The only certain cure.

[key change, big finish]

There's not much time,
There's too much code.
(And COBOL-coders, few)
When the century is finished with,
We may be finished, too.
We may be finished, too.

Eight thousand years from now I hope
That things weren't left too late,
And people aren't then lamenting
Four digits for a date

(http://ifaq.wap.org/computers/y2kthemesong.html)

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 17.7).

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Generated 3 paragraphs, 241 words, 1599 bytes of Lorem Ipsum

Linux is now mainstream, it's being spread by slick corporate marketing, and with most distros, installation is a snap. So the question arises, do LUGs still matter?

I remember my days in a user group. It attracted lots of people because there were always things to learn. Even experts could pick up tidbits of valuable information, and more often than not the novices picked up help from the experts. In that way, everyone became a little more expert. And lemme tell you, there are few things more satisfying than telling people something they don't know, and watching their jaws literally drop.

That "slick corporate marketing" will convince you to buy into a particular software and hardware solution, but buy-in and installation are only the beginning. There's later configuration, installations on top of your existing system, new peripherals, and plus you may just want to do new things with it. The original seller can't afford to hold the hand of every novice that comes along and gets their system. Trust me on this, in that case the user group is a godsend.

And now for the twist: note that at no time did I actually mention Linux. That's because the user group I was talking about dealt with a different platform, one that still values its user group network.

Take the hint: easy to set up and easy to install, and it still supports its user groups. There is power in community.

Quick everyone, delete the internet before it's too late!

found my link after posting :)

Heat was not just a problem affecting the memory card. It turned out the chips on the motherboard would pop out during shipping or pop out of their sockets after only a few hours of on and off use (heating and cooling caused the chips to literally wiggle out of their sockets). This led to the famous "two-inch drop" where owners would pick their machine up and drop it two inches to reseat the chips.

http://www.wap.org/a3/a3library/a3faq.html

...personal computers have helped the impoverished third world. Check out this IBM Global Services success story.

'The GPF has been replaced by two significantly improved errors:

• "Specific Protection Fault" - used to corrupt an individual 16-bit process.
• "Global Protection Fault" - this powerful memory management facility will allow a corrupt process not only to corrupt all other running processes, but corrupt processes on all other machines within a five-mile radius.

Even now we are developing "pre-emptive" memory management, which will be able to corrupt processes which are not yet running. Threaded Multi-Tasking: The cooperative multi-tasking found in Winodws 3.1 has now been replaced with the far more powerful "uncooperative multi-tasking". This enhancement will allow several processes to crash simultaneously. Our new crash protection facility greatly enhances the multi-tasking environment. Should one process fail, the CPF will prevent this process from being disturbed by other cleanly running processes.'

Is that a regeneration of Lalla Ward? ;-)

Remember this?

'84 to '86 (< 2 years) isn't really a good proof of "well-established". I'm pretty sure you can find sales figures of how "well-established" Macintosh sales were too.

During '87s, the 65816 did outperform the 68000 clock for clock if you checked the synthetic benchmarks such as dhrystone. Have you ever tried to compile C homework between the Mac or IIGS? I did and the Mac Plus/SE was at least 2x slower and ram limited.

But of course, it's software, not hardware that determines the winner and yes the Mac was a much cleaner 32-bit architecture, but it didn't get its legs until a few more years later. Why did Apple need to disavow its own momentum and mindshare with the Apple II, unless it's because it wasn't Job's baby?

At this same time, there have been rumors of a 65C832 in development by WDC (vaporware) as well as a prototype ARM-Apple II that would've gave the obvious headroom, as well as a consumer friendly upgrade/migration path. There was also the Mark Twain ROM04 IIGS freshener project.

At the time, GS/OS did support up to 8MB of ram since '87. Matching that with the lower software bloat, it was quite head-n-shoulders above even the "business" game PCs which continued to be software limited to 640K.

Jobs of course wouldn't have wanted his Mac baby killed in the cradle, so any significant Apple II improvement that would have eclipsed the Mac would be stillborn. And that management bias probably continued to hold sway after Jobs left. It IS always better to concentrate on one product than split your resources.

Apple II sales did support the Macs into the 90s if just not into the late 90s... Wasn't Apple a dying company in the late 90s until Jobs came back? :)

So whatever, this still qualifies as an Apple flop. :)

It's all a matter of frame of reference. And of course if yo pick the right frame of reference, the universe is just a few light-minutes wide and about 6000 years old.

Column view at its finest: Mac OS X provides a refreshingly convenient way to burrow deep into one's machine or network and find important information. This isn't just another way to view a folder's contents. Instead, it's a new method to jump between and browse among many folders at a time ... Column View is a navigation context, showing multiple folders at once. Icon and List Views are more like document contexts, showing exactly one folder's contents.

Heh - I totally read that as apophallation. Those crazy banana slugs.

Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg Machine Contest

while I'm at it...

BackOffice

FrontPage

IntelliMouse

NetMeeting

TM

• Me!
• Brigitte Boisselier (info)
• Arnold Schwartzenegar (pic)
• Lance Bass (info)
• Sally Ride (pic)
• Team Gates (pic)
• Mike Meyers (pic)
• Space Coyboy Neal

This?

I massively disagree. This article is the stuff of frustration. And I agree with them. As an old corporate guy I've been watching the various open source content management systems for years and to me they *all* look like muck.
Specifically, they look like the work of a bunch of programmers who have never for a moment on their lives run or even worked in an actual content creation environment. They program in the features that are "cool" to implement instead of what an actual publisher could use.
So they're finally talking about how poorly an aspect of this whole movement functions in the real "I need to make a living with this" world and surprise, surprise, it sucks so bad that the room is filled with (heh, heh) jabber, in which they can't even agree on what they're arguing about or what goal they're seeking.
This all looks promising to me but frankly I wrote this whole category off years ago. As far as I'm concerned the dedicated content management systems that are available or well on the way now are VisiCalc in a world where most of us need Excel. I. e., this is all very nice but I'll wait until they've putzed around for a few more years, have worked out the most egregious mistakes, and start over from scratch.
BTW, if any of you ever want to check out a *real* content management system, you know, one that complex pubs (like the New York Times, Time Magazine, JCrew, etc.) actually *use*, then study the feature list, UI, etc. of QPS. Now almost a decade old and in the hands of a succession of commerce-impaired clueless corporations, it's still more usable, easier to administer, and more powerful than anything I've seen. Now if only *that* would get open sourced (a la PostGres) we'ld be getting somewhere.
Until then I'm placing my bets on well-customized SQL-compliant systems based on rigorous adherence to rich XML schemas.
Happy days,
Rustin

By adulthood, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements is firmly planted in a typical mind either as a tool for study or proof of mystical forces at work in nature. There are alternative structures: some clever and others using alternate media, extensions to the table providing nuclear structure, fermi surfaces, and line spectra.

Still others are extraordinarily cross-thematic, merging chemistry with comic books, poetry or haiku. But only the grouping-nature of the columns is retained in rejected elements, condiments and beer. Eventually the elements and the periodic qualities have been lost entirely, reducing the periodic table to a design template for topical lists of funk and rock music, comedy and TV shows, famous mathematicians and presidents, even SGI products. Soon a complete breakdown of the scientific aspect yields no similarity to the original, becoming a glorified table, a marketing tool, or hype itself. There is mounting evidence of a conspiracy.

When I read about the user inferface I thought it was a joke.

Didn't we get them the last time the Internet was cleaned? Gosh, darn it!

Maybe the metaphor needs to be broadened. We've already got hundreds (well, probably) of Sodoms and Gomorrahs online, ready to be terminally DOSed by yahweh@heaven.org... :-)

Check out wap.org. Coincidence, or is something waiting in the wings?...

I think, in addition to all the great points mentioned above, Microsoft feels that it has a better chance of using it's World Domination powers to successfully influence the government in their favor at a lower level, rather than having to contend with the mighty Supreme Court.
- - - - - - - - -

I hope Microsoft is forced to retool Windows and add some more user-interface and safety features.

Then travesties like this wouldn't happen!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.