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The Wrath of the Apple Tribe
Narrative Fallacy writes "If you've ever written about Apple products with even a hint of negativity, you'll appreciate Salon's excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's True Enough, about why the Apple tribe is so rabid. 'There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners,' writes Manjoo. 'But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company.' Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has even coined a name for the phenomenon — the 'Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.' 'If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,' says psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University. 'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"
Anybody who wants to experience this first hand.. just flame apple on slashdot :) and see your post mod down to hell
There is at least ten mac hater for every fanboy, each posting ten whining comment for every adulation of apple.
You can't take the sky from me...
to catchup with the Amiga.
I run Ubuntu 7.10 on a dual core HP laptop. My hardware is effectively a clone of the Mac Book Pro at 1/3 of the price. I however have complete control over my operating system, and get to use Compiz for all the fancy visual effects. While I respect the fact that Mac users are running BSD, I feel for most users it is just jewellery with a power button.
Colin McNamara - CCIE #18233 "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer"
..and their ad campaigns.
Seriously, market a product as "stylish", "hip" and "different", and you'll raise a troupe of people to whom presenting themselves as different is pretty much their only end. I personally find it one of the most disgusting facets of consumerist capitalism.
bar
Nobody else has a real live Reality Distortion Field. We're special.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Step 1: Troll Apple users
Step 2: Write an article about all the hate mail you get
Step 3: Ad revenue
Goto Step 1
Dvorak has done this so many times he should be selling his technique on an infomercial at this point.
I wonder why this seems to be localized to the tech industry?
Does slashdot offer any insight?
(hopefully first post yay)
I do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of Apple.
Honestly, it's the biggest reason I no longer buy products from Apple. The astonishing thing is how many years this keeps going on. I had a friend who started hiding his Newton for fear of the cultists that would swarm him and go on about how great it was while he was just trying to look up an address or whatever.
The only sane Apple-nut I ever met was Douglas Adams, but then he was at least reasonable enough to acknowledge other OSes, although you wouldn't believe it from the Apple fans who quote him endlessly.
Why are so many of their consumers complete nutcases?
Sometimes evenhandedness is inappropriate. It elevates the wrong position to the same level as the right position. For instance, intelligent design.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You must be hoping that all the fanboys are asleep, or you are looking to stir up the biggest hornets nest ever.
Lets see, find the biggest least rational fan base you can, then point it out. This should be fun to watch!
(yes, there are lots of irrational fan camps, apple just has the biggest because almost no one loves MS anymore)
The real Apple zealots also all seem to wear funny hats!
--Kevin Cotter
http://velcroman98.googlepages.com/ - New story published every Monday
Kevin
Irrational Diversions
You mean it's not rabies? Oh...I guess I didn't need those shots after the last time I called the MacBook "useless" and one of them bit me...
+1 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Next thread please.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I love my Mac so much I try to project a human characteristic to this inanimate object by putting pictures of naked women on the screen poised in positions that invite deep bonding between man and machine.
I think the Linux/FOSS fanboys are trying to wrestle that crown from the Apple fanboys.
Tell someone they are ignorant, rude, and wrong... then tell them that it's ignorant, rude, and wrong to disagree with you.
Can't think of a better opinion piece. Well done.
I use Apple products all of the time; the only personal computers that I ever have powered on anymore are all Macs. My "promoting" of Macs to friends and family has been more beneficial in convincing some of them to buy Apple products more than any clever advertising. I've even brought Apple into my workplace and who knows, it may even make a decent foothold in the formerly all MS shop. I would consider myself a fan.
But I will point out the negatives in their products where I see them. There is no point in pretending that they don't exist as all that does is give them time to fester. I am a realist. I'll also point out issues with the company when they deserve it. Yeah, praise is better but only if they are going to work for it.
I am more judgmental because I've been in the IT field for years and have used, and I mean really used, many different OSes out there. I also wouldn't have considered calling myself a Mac user before OS X. Sorry fans, but OS 9 was pretty terrible.
I suppose Apple needs the rabid fanbase as they are advertisers that pay the company for the privilege. Maybe Apple should even thank them every now and then for keeping the company afloat for so many years. They also need the realists that speak their mind and truthfully say what is good, what is bad, and what is downright idiotic. Yes, this means that these groups will clash but it is needed.
How else are they going to move forward?
apple didnt invent gui, let alone a gui filesystem (whatever that means)
The Apple phenomenum affects all corporations. Maybe it's because we're more invested in the success of corporations through the stock market than any previous generation or because corporations reach farther into every day life than ever before, through the internet. Except for Microsoft, there is more love, trust, and belief that corporate decisions can do no wrong in lieu our own personal judgement than any previous time.
I was amazed at the number of fanboi's that modded it off-topic, only to have it modded it back up, then back down again. Some apparently thought I had committed blasphemy.
It was a link to a video of a frustrated fox friend getting up and leaving over what was clearly purposeful misunderstanding of a speech delivered by Obama. In the comments (which I really ought not to read) there was a little discussion about how Fox News is a moderate source of news and commentary and NPR spouts communist propaganda. Notable in the argument was its lack of any support to its claim by way of example. I've listened to NPR myself, and while the commentators which speak do lean to the left, I they do a good job of keeping news and comment separate.
I won't say the same for Fox.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
While the employees and shareholders of Apple have every right to boast of its success, I fail to see why fanboys can make any kind of claims as a result. "Hah, I'm superior to you because these people that I am unaffiliated with are better than some other people!" isn't a sane position.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Actually, it was IBM who invented the PC, and Xerox who invented the GUI. But don't let facts get in the way, carry on worshiping Apple.
I had to google "roomba" to find out that it's not a silly name for your shlong. For everyone else - it's the marketing name for one of those self-guided vacuum cleaners.
The real reason Mac fans tend to be overly defensive is that they've felt marginalized by software and hardware vendors for years due to Microsoft's dominance in the desktop computing arena. I'm not blaming the vendors, sometimes fiscal reality precludes making a version of their product for a relatively small market, but it can be frustrating to Mac users who are convinced that their platform is superior to what Microsoft has to offer but still have to wait months or years, if ever, to get their hands on a desirable product.
It's not unlike other minorities--African-Americans, gays etc., (not that Mac marginalization has anywhere near the same significance as the often violent discrimination that gays and blacks have experienced in their lifetimes)--who react to discrimination by the majority by developing a sense community "pride."
Granted, though, many of Apple's fans go way overboard in it's defense. This, BTW, is from a long-time Mac user and recovering "rabid" fanboy who converted from Microsoft way back in DOS days who now uses OS X, Kubuntu and Windows XP interchangeably as necessary.
This ain't rocket surgery.
i mark you +1 apple fanboy.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have experience administering 12 xserves and 35 OSX clients located in US, UK and india. We ended up using xserves, imacs, powerbooks, and G5 towers because the CTO was an apple fanatic, not based on what was the best product after fair evaluation. From my experince I would never use OSX as a server platform because it has been less reliable than windoz and I am not a fan of windoz. Real unix is not tied to the GUI the way OSX is - a GUI problem can easily lock or crash an OSX server while "real" unix or linux does not have this weakness. Perhaps OSX without a GUI would be more reliable???? While I like Linux it also has it's flaws but using it or a "real" unix flavor for servers will lead to much more reliability. From my experience OSX is great as a client for those who are comfortable with the interface but it is not more stable than windoz which is a serious insult but true in my experience. I can say that OSX is more secure than windoz for a dumb user but a careful windoz user can be as or almost as secure if the right safeguards are in place. Personally I use Linux as primary OS and run windoz in virtual machines when needed. Some day Mac users may evolve to the point where they can use more than one mouse button and/or be able to resize windows from any edge or corner. When simple stuff like that happens I may use OSX more for a desktop, but I do not ever expect to use it for important services. Since the CTO has left we have moved most critical services to Linux and things are much more stable now. It seems like a cult of personality, with apple/OSX being the personality, will continue to prevent the apple fanatics from seeing clearly. I will be serverly trashed for these comments but the ones that are serious about apple know there are many real and serious issues with this proprietary OS/Hardware combo especially for critical services. If you want to solve serious apple issues afp548.com is a great resource for serious information and it seems they do not religiously sugar coat issue as most apple users do.
Why are Mac fans so quick to see bias everywhere? On issues we're passionate about, we all tend to think our own views are essentially reasonable. Thus when a reporter, editor, news network, or pundit mentions the other side's arguments, it stings.
That's basically all the article says. And we knew that, of course. But why are Apple fans so extremely sensitive to criticism? I've said many 'bad' things about Apple on this forum, and it inevitably got me modded down. Apple zealots are even worse than the Linux zealots of ten years back.
-- Cheers!
i think it stems from the fact mac's are so much more expensive then pc's, so the owners of them don't want to appear to be in the socially awkard position of being a sucker.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I personally cannot come to any other conclusion than that the last seven years have been a disaster for our nation, but you'd be downright amazed what some people base their opinions on. Usually, it's pretty simplistic, along the lines of "there have not been any more 9/11s" or "we're killing bunches of them over there instead of them coming over here and killing us." What it comes down to is not that these people are insane (as much as I'd like to believe otherwise) or cannot divorce themselves from an ideal (though in many cases this is true) but that they simply have different metrics than you or I do.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
It's kinda like atheism vs. theism. I know, what has this bumbling AC gotten himself into this time? Theists believe there is a god, but don't deliver a falsifiable way to prove/disprove god. Atheist believe there isn't a god, and provides evidence that it is likely so by pointing to stuff that indicates this. Both ultimately rely on belief, as atheists cannot disprove god with absolute certainty since the theists does not provide them with a way to do so.
Which is why I'm an agnostic, don't allow yourself to believe when it comes to important matters, verifiable truth above all is the golden chalice one should strive for. To know > to believe.
Hence I retain my right to objectively criticize theists and mac-users, and expect any rabid response to be nothing but irrational belief. If you wish to be heard, strike out the rhetoric, the passioned love for your inclination, and the boiling hatred of any who'd oppose this.
Bumbling AC over and out.
Hmm lets see, if all three tribes were stuck on a deserted island, Mac, Windows and Linux...who would turn into cannibals?
"Tribe" is the wrong word. I'd use either "rabble", "mob" or perhaps "bunch of loonies who escaped from the asylum island by impersonating garbage".
I hate printers.
Been having lots of problems with my wi-fi dropping out very awell documented at Apples forums.I have done every little trick in the book, I am very computer literate mind you.I posted a "negative" remark on a certain forum and had people who just "switched" even telling me its my problem, because their machines are working.Well, Apple can do wrong and have been for years now!!! Apple is an arrogant 800Lb gorilla now(the mac vs pc ads are proof enough, pure negative marketing), IMHO, far worse now that market share is up.QC is bad, CS is non existent. Unless you pay up for "pro", which is even more insulting when you talk to a tech who knows less than you do.- But the best thing I learned in the last 24 hrs is that win XP on my MBP runs great, has no wi-fi drop outs and must give a big thanks to Apple for Bootcamp, Win XP is the cure for your shoddy OSX.
His columns for the whole past week were excerpts from his new book. And now he's getting air time from /. His basic thesis is - GEE who's a thought - people on the internet all flock to likeminded opinions to the exclusion of all rational discussion about anything that deviates from their gospel. Wow, never saw that coming.
BTW Farhad is the biggest Apple Fanboy in the world. Before this week 80% of his columns were about iPhones, iPods, Macs and Apple.
Mac fans, of the rabid kind, are happy with anything Apple does.
As far as how much better Vista was? I'm not sure what you read but Microsoft fans tend to not look across the fence but internally. I can point you to hundreds of XP vs Vista pages and hundreds deep posts on the same. Heck google "Vista vs Leopard" then "Vista vs XP" You get 268K for the first and 1.75 million for the second. Heck even Vista vs Linux turns up a million hits.
For the most part, MS fans really don't care what Apple does. Sure they might swipe the nifty launcher thing but generally they fight with each other. They only time MS fans get really riled up about Apple is when Apple does something idiotic, like put Safari in an iTunes update.
Mac security isn't an issue not because it is superior (it could be, I don't know) but because it is a small target. On a site I run I get 10,000 hits per month and 0.07% of them are Mac users. Yes, a stunning 700 people run Mac that visit the site. Just shy of 1% use Linux and the other 98% run Windows. If you were going to hack an OS, which target would you pick? The barn or the M&M?
has to be Microsoft fans attacking Mac. Does anyone remember all the talk of Leopard being a knock off of Vista and how much better Vista was?
That's almost certainly not a Microsoft fan posting, but rather someone successfully trolling you.
I assume that trolls go after the Apple die-hards for (one of) the reason most virus writers target insecure Windows boxes: it's just so much damn easier than the alternative. I mean, if someone posted, "Windows is so much better than Linux because it is more secure and runs better on older hardware," on slashdot, 99% of even the most rabid Linux zealots here would recognize that for a troll and leave it be. For whatever reason, equally obvious anti-Apple trolls find bites aplenty.
There were relatively few such posts/discussions. I'm afraid you've just demonstrated the article's point: you see bias where there isn't any (or relatively little).
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Apparently it's not just Apple Fanboys that can't handle criticism!
make world, not war
I have a theory that Republicans and Apple zealots have almost the same in-group / out-group mental processes.
They perceive themselves as underdogs and have inferiority complexes.
They are in reality quite successful, due to careful planning and clever marketing and unwavering commitment to certain goals.
The elites have a deep understanding of human psychology, and exploit it on both their enemies and followers ruthlessly.
Criticism of their leader or "platform" is interpreted as personal attacks by every member of the group.
They employ a very selective morality, and seem incapable of recognizing hypocrisy.
Nothing less than the complete acceptance of the standard dogma is tolerated for membership in the "tribe".
Of course, the difference is, after actually attaining power, Apple remains competent.
The term PC wasn't in usage as a term until later years, they were called Microcomputers to any of us that used them. If anyone should be given credit with inventing the microcomputer / personal computer, it should be Texas Instruments, or perhaps Intel depending on what parts you would consider a true microprocessor.
What Apple did was no different than a host of other hobby computer companies, the Apple II just happened to catch on better than others. But this illustrates the frustrations many of us have with Apple fans, because rewriting history = zealotry.
Mac security isn't an issue not because it is superior (it could be, I don't know) but because it is a small target.
Well, they ARE more secure. It's just that going against Windows it's fairly difficult to actually make something less secure by comparison.
Now if you were to compare OS X to say OpenBSD, it's a different story.
And before I get flamed or accused of being a rabid Mac fanboy, I'm talking about default installations here, as it's possible to security harden any OS. I'm talking about Jane SoccerMom opening the box and using the computer. Of course in that case OpenBSD isn't really an option.
make world, not war
"none more zealous, than fans of Apple"
You have never met Amiga fans have you , there are few still left,
their reality distortion field is such that their computers perform miracles
even though the battery has long bios leaked all over the motherboard a long time ago.
G <ex Amiga user, I don't consider my self free unless I hit the 10 year without it mark>
You allude to one of the most annoying facets of the fanboy wars in your post. If I criticize anything Apple, I'm always called a Microsoft fan. Yeah, I use Windows, and yeah, I'm fairly happy with it. No, I have no emotional attachment whatsoever to MS. I've used OSX, XP, Ubuntu, and KDE, and XP does what I need while the others don't. For me, it just works. I'm not switching to Vista for the same reason I'm not switching to OSX: I'm NOT an OS fanboy, and accordingly I'm not willing to give up functionality to fulfill my pseudo-religious needs.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I rest my case.
ummmm - no
maybe less attacked or have fewer exploits in the wilds (nb exploit - not vulnerability) but only a fanboy or the ignorant actually believe apple is MORE secure than windows. Well ok - maybe more secure than win98.
Apple security comes through it's obscurity - not by design.
The article starts off fine enough, with notations of the fanaticism of *some* Apple fans. I myself like Apple; if I was buying a pre-made computer, it'd probably be a Mac. Imo, very nice build-construction and quality (aside from their keyboards and mice, which are no-where near as good as MS keyboards or mice). But even more-so than Apple, I'm a big big fan of Lian-Li cases. Yet, I have some complaints: the usb-panels on the V1200 and V2000 are at the bottom of the case, instead of up top, or on-top of it, which is more accessible for big cases (which will likely be placed on the floor); and their new V-series have fixed that, but also reduced greatly the ventilation holes on the front. I doubt there'd be many Lian-Li fanatics bashing me for that.
Some Apple fans do really annoy. E.g., the tendency for claiming that Mac invented everything. They accused Lian-Li of copying the G5's holed case-design; yet, servers used ventilation holes for a long time, and my year-2000 Gateway had them on the front. They also acted like the wire-less hard-drive replacement on the new G5's is some new invention of Apple's: it's juts hot-swap, which has been around forever (and Apple's implementation isn't that great, as you have to open the case to do it).
In any event, those kinds of comments are perfectly fine. They're regarding largely matters of personal opinion. And the issue isn't so much that Apple fans disagree, but the way it's done; provide evidence, don't accuse writers of "ball-licking".
But then the article digresses into the pits of moral relativism with talk about the Israel-Palistine conflict, or the abortion issue. These are issues of right and wrong. There isn't a real middle ground. Either something is right, or it isn't. There is no "plusses and minuses". How about we talk about the pro's and cons of rape, too?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Macs aren't absurdly more expensive than comprably spec'd PCs. They're a little more expensive, generally, but not as much as most people think.
The problem is that they don't give you a lot of options per line, and they don't have much in the way of low-end lines comparable to, say, Dell PCs. When you look at the fact that you can get a PC notebook for around $400 these days, and the lowest end Macbook you can get is $1100, it looks pretty bad. When you start looking at the specs, things tend to even out.
In a nutshell, if you're getting a new PC, and the specs you want happen to match a Mac, you can get the mac for maybe $100-$200 more than the PC and get what many consider to be a superior OS to Windows (I prefer OS X, and I don't even own a Mac.)
but only a fanboy or the ignorant actually believe apple is MORE secure than windows.
Hmm, if you are going to make accusatory assertions like that, then prove it. Meanwhile every bit of evidence points to the exact opposite. Crackers have tried, they've tried really hard, to get Mac exploits in the wild. Remember that whole overhyped Mac month of bugs last year that turned out to be grasping at straws?
There is a huge amount of infamy for any cracker to release the first true Mac worm or virus. Why has it not come yet if Macs are not more secure than Windows? You think the only reason is that windows has about 20x the install base?
An exploit may come out at some point, I don't know any Mac user that thinks they're totally immune for any future attack. But when you look at the security situation between Mac (and Linux) vs Windows, it's the difference between night and day.
make world, not war
It's funny you should say how bad Mac OS 9 was, because I have to say that it was a very hard thing sticking by Apple while their cooperative multi-tasking OS was slouching towards obsolescence and gaining very little internally. I used Mac OS then because I admired the quality of the software, the design of interfaces, the general organization of the system, and the more polished appearance of everything. When things worked (7.6.1, 8.6, 9.2) the Mac experience was generally more... fun... than the Windows experience. Within a given application productivity was the same, so it wasn't hard to see the writing on the wall. Apple would not only need to come up to parity with Windows 95, they would also have to differentiate themselves and produce something with a value that transcended Windows on the desktop. When I first heard that Mac OS X would be a Unix-based system my heart leapt. As a web developer I spent years playing with Linux and BSD webservers from the command-line, logging in from my Mac desktop. Suddenly I'd be able to run a webserver right out of the box on my own computer. And my computer would be able to speak natively with all those *nix boxen out there too.
Now, look at us today! Apple's selling a nice, solid UNIX system with arguably the most usable graphical interface ever designed. They've swapped over to Intel chips so now every kid with a Macbook can run Windows apps at native speeds right alongside their Mac apps. Every technical move Apple makes, whether it garners them any kudos in the mainstream press, brings increased quality, power, and speed to their core product. Hackers all over the world are excited to get Leopard running on their Tablet PC's, just to get a slice of the Mac experience and toy around with a decent UNIX. And frankly, Cygwin and WinCVS should be enough reason for any web tech to give Mac a try.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I'm not a fan (I think "fandom" itself is a symptom of a kind of cultural decay, a defective relationship with artifacts that signals a failure of critical thought and the erosion of human intellectual dignity, but that's just me.) But I don't think "Apple fan" and "MS fan" are in any way symmetrical categories.
Most Mac fans are Apple fans. They are loyal to the brand, to the unified experience of software and hardware.
Their "counterparts" aren't Microsoft fans: they're PC enthusiasts/hobbyists who like the mish-mash, hodge-podge quiltwork world of standards, peripherals, and such that is part of the PC world. There is far less brand loyalty, to Microsoft or anyone else. The "hard geek" version are the ones that do case mods and overclocking.
The true "Microsoft fan" is a rather rare thing - Windows is generally treated as a usually-necessary evil by PC fans.
Also he writes for Salon. Comparing anything to a hot topic issue to give the story mass relevance with a "counter culture" attitude is his job. Even if it is something mundane about how keyboards turned on their end are phallic and representative of a gender oppression.
If he were a Slate writer it would have been a pseudo-snarky opinion piece beginning with a statement claiming that Apple is the devil and ending on how Apple is really Jesus Christ. Or if he were an Onion writer he would just state the obvious and add a few over-the-top fictional details. It is just a facet of his publication. I'm sure it is something that he loathes and is only too happy to make fun of after a few beers.
If you were to replace mention of Apple with 'the Apple II', much the same things could be said about its users, prior to Apple dropping it in favor of the Mac. There is one important difference: the title of TFA is "Why Apple Users Hate Tech Reporters". Apple II users held just the opposite view. We understood the tech because the lid came off (literally and figuratively) Woz's machine. Even after decades the Mac line is far less open than the Apple II ever was. Mac users have to be rabid to make up for the lack of depth of technical understanding. They're much more savvy than early adopters of Mac or Mac II, but they're still behind where we were when we could read every bit of ROM and had documented for us exactly what it did, or see the entire wiring schematic in a SAMS Photofact and a book on TTL logic chips describing their gates. Some modern Mac users can make use of what they can learn and push the machine to its limits, but in terms of running available software including the OS rather than running the machine itself by modifying the software, OS and even the wiring. Apple II users learned how to make that machine do things for which it was never intended. For this we relied in part of tech reporters, who had to be extremely well versed with the machine's innards, which then meant they were one of us. Jobs' legacy of a closed box lives on, and TFA illustrates just another manifestation. Mac users aren't wrong in their intense dedication, they just can tell you why down to bare metal. And since they can't see that far down, they can't logically argue against a tech reporter who these days aren't necessarily one of them. On the other hand, tech reporters of the Apple II not only had to be one of us, they had to get their work past the editors of the magazines of the day, and any magazine worth reading also had editors who were some of us. The tech writers had to be very good if they were going to say something negative, and if they did so they'd back it with hard evidence we could understand. Sometimes they did so, and no matter how much we didn't like it we had to admit they were right. But at least we were allowed to learn enough to be able to do so. Mac users are right in the same way Einstein was right though not showing technically why in his reply to the question asked of him regarding Eddington's search for stellar image displacement: "What if the data fail to show the effect?" "Then God help the data. The theory is correct." He, and they "know" it. They're right, they just can't prove it, and so they replace objective certainty with a prima facia stance of certainty. This makes it somewhat of a faith, which is what Apple intended when they promoted the idea of Mac 'evangelism'. Jobs' tendency to act somewhat like a cult leader supports that. A cult leader isn't necessarily wrong, but they're frequently far more "right" than they need to be, and that rubs off on the followers.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Honestly, it's the biggest reason I no longer buy products from Apple
So you say openly that you no longer buy products from Apple, period - based on the perceived behavior of a group of people.
Letting other people dictate your own actions even when it means taking a course of action possibly not best to your own needs, is to me a far more mindless and destructive philosophy than any delight in finding something that works well for you.
I myself have used many other OS'es, and liked some of them as well. There are many of us Apple users that came over from the UNIX/Linux side of things you know. And knowing what we do, at the moment many of us simply prefer OS X over other options to be had right now. But we are willing to look at different tools to do the job right.
I think a lot of the fondness people develop for products from Apple and other companies, stems from the utter suckage that is the norm of the industry (software and hardware alike). The entire consumer base is just like pack of whipped dogs at this point, beaten to hell and back by mindlessly evil technology that has Done Them Wrong (and who among us can say that some critical piece of technology has once done them terrible harm at a key moment?). When a consumer discovers something that does not proceed to subtly undermine their very existence from the moment it is powered up, that device or software is treasured - even if slightly flawed. Because you may not have experienced the same beatings, to you the same device or software might appear less appealing simply because you cannot see the wrong it has righted for so many.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Funny how there is little controversy about rape.
I think there really is a lot of gray area with the Israel/Palestine conflict. I'm very pro-Palestinian, but I understand how frightened and frustrated most Israelis feel, and of course, Hamas is nuts.
Same with abortion. I'm pro-choice ultimately, but I can understand the nuances and contrary opinions. There is plenty of gray area there for me.
There really isn't a significant position saying "rape is great, let's have more rape!" so it's kind of a straw-man. But there are still gray areas involving rape. What if someone is tipsy and consents, but then claims she wouldn't have consented if sober. Rape? Strikes me as a gray area again, or at least a graded one (3 drinks? 5?) Statutory rape? 19 year old and 17 year old? Again, not cut and dry at all.
You can't have been very clever if you didn't figure out you can SSH into a OS X box and manage them via command line. Too used to Windows where that's really mandatory? A GUI never used, does not crash.
Obviously the platform you were used to was more stable.
The whole dig at the single mouse button is so 1980's, since all serious Mac users have been using three button (or more) mice for decades.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OMG, I thought you said: "who would turn into cannabis? "
I was ready to leave for that deserted island right away!
Apple might be the biggest liar of all the computer companies out there. They criticize MS (not that i'm a fan of MS) and others for protecting their own interests and yet do the exact same thing. Along with all of their hardware being complete shiyte, and having to turn to Intel a few years ago to do their hardware for them, and having to take the BSD kernel because they couldn't do one that was good enough. They now only make the buttons on their desktop shiny and bounce as if computers were meant for three year olds, and put them in shiny boxes with smooth edges as if it increased computing power to include poor design in their product. Yet they still parade their product, which is now almost a PC, only with bad design added on, as if it was their own creation. Some how, they still screw it up, and their "it just works" way of thinking simply doesn't work, for the time i've spent using a mac or have seen friends use a mac, they've broken far more frequently than any of my friends who own PCs, or my own time using a PC (which, being a CS major, is considerable).
Apple and Sony will never see a penny from me for as long as i live.
Modern Mac users (as in OS X users) come from a core of disgruntled UNIX users who got tired of fiddling with configuration on system X (pick your OS flavor) and then bought Macs. From there we realized that telling everyone else to buy Macs, was a great way to not have to do as much system support for friends and family and give us more free time since it really was a system that worked better out of the box for most people, and kept working without intervention much longer.
OS X has the most deeply technical users of any platform around at the moment, thanks to the deep UNIX knowledge base that lies at the core of the user community (which is still greatly applicable) and the fact that some components of OS X (like Webkit and Darwin) are open source.
Also no modern desktop system from a hardware standpoint is generally as easy to get in and look at as the Mac, for those so inclined. Even the iMac is easy to open. Only the laptops are generally hard to open, but then that makes them sturdier systems so there is an upside.
What is different from now to then is, that generally as computer users we are too far removed from the hardware to make the information you are nostalgic for generally useful. You can't say that Mac users are particularly more ignorant of hardware than any other OS user of current systems either, since we are all equally removed from the hardware itself. And since Mac systems now use all the same components as other PC's, you can't even say that the hardware is more or less easier to understand than any other makers hardware for those wanting to learn more (Windows or Linux) - it's just there is so much more to learn. Heck, at least EFI is better documented and more flexible than most BIOS chips you can find now!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Two words: flash drive
Flash drives are dirt cheap these days, works on Macs and PCs. Plug it in on your Mac copy the files over, plug it in on any other machine copy files to that machine. Hmm, just like a FLOPPY, only much bigger capacity than you'll ever find on a floppy.
If there was really a need for floppies in the Mac world, you'd see them a lot more. I think about how often I've used the floppy in my PC and the answer is something like once 3-4 years ago.
You can use a regular ethernet cable to plug the imac into a pc, turn on smb sharing and it will work. Any flash drive should work, I've used dozens of them in old macs, they work fine. Just make sure its formated as FAT32. If that's too complicated for you, go buy any flash drive off the shelf at Best Buy or Wal Mart and it will work.
It's a well-known fact that the more costly a bad decision, the greater the lengths people will go to to justify it. If you spend $10 on a piece of gear and it turns out to be crap you say "oh well, that was a waste of $10" and toss it. If you spend $2,000 on a piece of gear and it doesn't meet expectations, you don't throw it out, because that would be admitting that you wasted two thousand bucks (making you look very silly). Instead, you "find something to love" about it, spend even more money on compatible accessories (or whatever), and tell the world that it's the greatest thing ever. Apple customers are that much more defensive than anyone else, not because Apple products are better than everything else, not because Apple products are worse than everything else, but because Apple products cost that much more than everything else. ;)
Goddamnit where's OUR tribe!
... ...
Apple have got theirs, Linux sure as hell got theirs, but we have to fend for ourselves, and believe me it get's lonely sometimes.
*whimper* Don't leave me!
Right now I am managing 5 XServe's with RAIDs, and about 500+ Mac clients in US, Switzerland, Spain, asia and possibly Central America and India soon. I came into a corporation where the PC techs were setting up the Macs and in some cases the users were setting up the Macs. Not a good situation. Why? Let's look at the reverse - I would not set up a terribly reliable Windows server because my experience is along the Mac side. I would not know some of the subtle things that make it hum rather than hack and cough. No OS is perfect and is really only as good as the admin/architect setting it up. Is that fair, reasonable, and accurate?
You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Windows "admin". But Mac techs are a much harder to hit with cats - dead or otherwise. It would probably take an entire crazy cat lady's trailer full of cats with frikin' lasers to find a good Mac tech to set up your systems. OK - I may be exagerating a lot. NOT because they are hard - but because of the subtle reasons that make them stable and efficient.
Before I rode into town, the Macs were a disaster. The "server" was a G4 with 4 drives, the users were installing their own software, They didn't do any cross platform file sharing, the networking was a mess, In just ONE small department the users had a mix of Illustrator 10, CS and CS2, and on and on... There was literally nobody at the wheel controlling what the Mac users did or did not do. the PC's on the other hand had an architect, security team, server team, help desk, network team, 2nd level on-site support, service contracts, and more. It quickly fell on to me (and I gladly accepted) ALL of those roles of support for the Macintosh users. After I started building good systems, the only time the Mac servers have gone down was from power issues (UPS and Circuit related problems). I can't remember a ticket coming in for one of my builds freezing up on a user. We run about 1 onsite PC tech for 100 PC users. And 1 Mac tech (hi) for 500+ Mac users - 90% of which are remote. I have a number of common problems (Lotus Notes, I am looking at you) that come up, but most have simple fixes or troubleshooting procedeures that I have documented on a Mac intranet community site. If you have a Mac Tech behind the builds, they do pretty well.
And it has NOTHING to do with sizing a window, or if the OS is built to need a second (or third or fourth) mouse button or not. It's simply about knowing enough about the OS (ANY OS) to properly build and maintain it.
Personally I just ignore the comments people make bashing the Macs in most cases. I let my builds speak for themselves. And the more the PC guys learn about the Macs with a seasoned Mac user to show them, the more accepting they became. Many (4-5 that I know of) even bought Macs for home use.
Say what you want about a closed OS/HW combo - but I am building ONE image for my users that is running on a G4 tower, G5 tower, G4 PowerBook, MacPro (Intel tower), and MacBook Pro (old and new display). One image that after a 15-20 minute reimage of the hardware will just require the tech to set up Lotus Notes and a Printer for the user - which takes about 5-10 minutes.
Think Differently...fuckers.
No no, it's just that rog7 thinks buying Apple products causes one to become a fanboy. S/he just doesn't want to turn into one of them.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
Apple zealots may be trying, may be annoying, may be pushy, but people.. Apple zealots got *nothing* on old-school Amiga fans. Apple zealots are tame school children stamping their feet in impotent fury compared to the raging, near-psychotic madness that defined the true Amigoid. During its heyday, the Amiga inspired people to dizzying heights of advocacy that I have *never* seen matched. And the weird part was that they were mostly right, so when they frothed at the mouth, they knew what they were talking about. These Apple fanboys these days.. the ones people seem to be complaining about are just parrots. But when you had a worldwide population of millions, all aligned up in the same direction, and augmented with people like Matthew Dillon (of DragonFlyBSD) and Dave Haynie leading them, you have a near-religious movement that I have never again seen since Commodore bankrupted itself.
So *bah* I say.. Give these Apple people a break. The alternatives were quite a bit worse!
Flash drives don't work on original iMacs. This was one of the first things we tried. The OS is so old that it doesn't recognize them as a device. We can't load USB drivers for the flash drives into the iMac because we can't load anything. There may be a tech solution to this situation, but we aren't tech experts. Neither of us has any Mac experience. When we talk to Mac people they say, buy this...buy that. My friend makes maybe $10 on a good day, he's not going to be buying any $1000 laptop. This iMac was given to him by people who probably realized that it was completely useless but didn't want to pay the recycling fee.
You made a completly unsubstantiated statement and I called BS with a similar amount of proof as you had.
I would put a fully patched XP against any fully patched linux with a default install, and I'd be quite interested in the result. I don't know vista personally but I'd expect it to be about the same. BTW if you don't patch anything then it's a stupid test - I'm not talking about making esoteric configuration, just get updated patches for the OS. These days the security comparisons are getting nitpicky. Both linux & Windows are pretty decent thesee days until you start putting applications on them. Apple tho ... well not so great. When it comes to apple - the fanboys themselves are the biggest vulnerbility, they don't believe they NEED to patch.
Try looking here for some insight - and yes I know - there's a LOT of window, linux and BSD there too http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm
No OS is secure - Apple less so than some. The old claim that "apple is more secure" is turning out to be a modern version of The Emperor's New Clothes - only uttered by fanboys and the ignorant
Blast ... I wasn't going to offer evidence, oh well - the fanboys won't see any
Some Apple fans do really annoy. E.g., the tendency for claiming that Mac invented everything.
Which ones, exactly? Methinks the gnashing of teeth on Mac fanboys is like people who rip into PETA: I've seen far more people with an obsessive hatred of PETA than I've ever seen kook aid drinking, obsessive pet owners.
If you have OS 9 you have to format the drive as HFS+ on the Mac, and then use a program like MacDrive to read it on Windows. The ethernet cable should be all you need though.
of your life. It is a well known fact that people who wear Burberry are much more succesful when it comes to fights in pubs. Individuals who are totally Macced-Out tend (from the observations I made during my years in the Licensed Trade) to fair less well during pub fights. They are usually not amongst the "Early Exiters", that group of society who can exit a pub in the blink of an eye during a fight. This is because their need to carefully pack or stow their branded products uses up valuable time.
Nor are they amongs the "Early Retaliators", that group of society who are able to optimise their probability calculating skills and go for an early, but strategic smack down. They are usually checking that they did indeed transfer the Bjork/featuring Skunk Anansi remix of Army of Me and it is on their playlist.
Unfortunately they are not amongst the "Early Avoiders" either, that group of society who demonstrate advanced cognitive process and geo-spatial awareness by hiding in the corner (or the toilet) and easily avoid flying fists, Doc martens, chairs, bottles or even the MacBook Air. This is because the Macced-Out tend to congregate around the pub juke box in order to complain about the appalling lack of interoperability and/or Portishead's third album. Sadly the Juke Box shares its high fight-loci rating with the one-armed-bandit (although the Macced-Out sensibly never go near that)
This strategic imbalance in pubs is further aggravated by the absence of "target acquisition" and "engage RPG" items on the iPhone Menu. However all of this will change when Apple once again catch Microsoft unprepared with the release of their iChair.
Heav clanking sound of lid closing tightly on my iBunker...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
You only said OS X is less reliable than Windows (which is a laugh) and complain about mice.
Real unix is not tied to the GUI the way OSX is - a GUI problem can easily lock or crash an OSX server while "real" unix or linux does not have this weakness.
Your comment is interesting, because from my own experience, the X-Window server is really the achille's heel of the free flavours of UNIX (Linux or FreeBSD).
If the kernel is rock stable, deadlocks are not unseen with the GUI, particularly on some "pecullar" configurations. Most of the times, you can restart the X-Window server by the magic CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE, however you will still have lost most of your work (assuming you were working with a GUI). Harder freezes are more seldom, but can also happen. Sometimes, you can SSH into the machine to try to bring back the X-Window server up, but most likely the best you will be able to do is to perform a "clean" reboot. And sometimes, it's just locked.
In this respect, the OpenGL screensavers of XScreenSaver are sometimes particularly nasty.
Of course, you can always opt not to use a GUI on the free flavours of UNIX, what is not possible (as far as I know?) with Mac OS X.
be nothing, ...and that represents most ppl's (including the FA author) formula of a life worth living?
personally, i wish they'd go volunteer somewhere.
I think I gave a pretty good example of a real-world situation of the annoyances of association that by my own experiences has been obnoxiously commonplace over the years. It's hardly been a matter of people with just a mild "fondness" over Apple's products, that's pretty much the entire point of the article above.
Most products I use don't make other consumers feel compelled to cheer me on as if I'm their comrade-in-arms and then turn on me like a pack of wolves if I don't share the same enthusiasm or I happen to also own a competing product. Since I never felt comfortable being accosted so extremely over something I owned, I simply chose not to own those products anymore.
The assumption that I'm easily swayed away from Apple's products inherently assumes that they're worth caring about. But that's just the thing, I don't find them special enough to put up with the hassle of the surrounding cult.
The article did a good job of explaining why people who feel so strongly fail to see the other side, but what it didn't explain is exactly why the Apple vs Everything-Else debate has held such religious fervour.
You'd be grouchy and humorless too if you paid that much trying to buy coolness... Then in less than 2 years time your system is completely outdated and unsupported and you're an uncool loser. Oops, nevermind.
I couldn't help noticing how Mac fanatics kept on touting their superior OS, until OS X came along, which fixed all of these problems that they never acknowledged having before.
Windows didn't have an ounces worth of usability and security until Windows 2k was released in February of 2000. When was Mac OS 10.0 released? September of 2000.
Same thing with the switch to Intel. They kept saying how superior their Power PC chip was, then with the switch to Intel they're saying its now working so much better. WTF?
Because the G4's and G5's were superior chips to the Pentium's, especially the P4. The problem is that IBM is a shitty fabber. They weren't able to deliver on what they promised (3 ghz G5's within a year of the release of the first Mac G5) much less continue PowerPC development. If IBM had kept up development and you could get a 3ghz dual core G6 in a laptop Apple never would have switched to Intel.
to cut it short dell and apple do cover similar price points on things, only the mac has less cpu speed, 1/2 the harddisk space and generally lower specs.
if you wanted to compare exact spec's, you'll find mac's are $400 or so more expensive than the same dell.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There's a hidden folder named "iPod Control" on the iPod. Just copy the music folder out of that, and then into iTunes (or WMP or whatever) and it'll pull the song info from the ID3 tags.
You're wrong. Details here .
This space for rent.
I do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of Apple.
Probable translation: you troll, and are shocked, shocked! when you get some responses.
The thing the article and most of the comments miss is that Apple don't sell your a product, they sell you a self-image. Buying a PC isn't a bad choice or bad value for money, it makes you a corporate drone. If you own a Mac, you are a free-thinking, creative, pretty young thing - whatever your age, IQ or silouette. You don't pay Steve Jobs to ship you a computer. You pay him to make you a better person.
So when people criticise a Mac, it hits Mac owners at the same level as comments about their personal appearance. When you say that the AirBook is overpriced, it has the same emotional impact as telling the AirBook's owner to consider plastic surgery.
Actually, price criticism isn't too serious, because it invites the "I care about myself enough to buy the best" defence. The real killer is pointing out that, actually, Apple does far more lock-ins than Microsoft nowadays. Those who bought their self-esteem from Apple read that as "You thought you had found the One True Church, but in reality you joined a sect led by an LA snake-oil salesman."
On that basis, expect Mac Rage to turn thermonuclear if/when the Linux desktop ever gets any sort of market penetration, because even Apple can't make Linux look like an evil empire.
And, yes, Linux geeks do the same sort of thing, except that they do it in a nerdier and cheaper way. TBH, Windows users are probably the least religious group out there right now, especially post-Vista.
Virtually serving coffee
A USB Zip drive might work. Seems like those worked on the original iMac.
Using the ethernet port, look for a file server that supports AppleTalk. The simplest would be a Mac with AppleTalk enabled and a shared folder. A Windows NT or 2000 server can do this. Or a Linux box with netatalk (http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/). Make sure AppleTalk is enabled on your friend's computer and use the Chooser to connect.
Well, square corners slightly bothered me for all of the two minutes it took to find Displaperture.app, which restores the roundness and lets you set how much roundness you want. :D
But, yeah, I do find some amusement with the ultra-super fanbois who simply lack the ability to get over it or find another solution instead of bitching and moaning.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
So instead of assaulting technitians with barely bridled rage, they merely crowd about and suffocate them in silent despair.
I'd therefore suggest that a lot of the Amiga userbase went over to Apple due to platform similarities and the fact that they could port code and their own programming skills to the Apple platforms much easier.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The big problem I find is that Macs are not nearly as problem free as many of their users think they are, then they get mad if you can't fix it. For example at work we don't support Macs. We support Windows, Solaris, and very specific versions of Linux. That's just how it is going to be when there's like 4 people for 500 computers. None of us have any Mac experience, and the department isn't willing to hire a Mac person. They also aren't willing to pay to train one of us on Macs. Hence, no Mac support.
However, we get users that insist on buying Macs. Ok, fine, they can support them by themselves. We don't mandate using department support and many research labs have systems that are all their own. Well that would all be fine, except the Mac users come crying to us when things won't work, and then get mad when we can't fix them.
That's why I get tired of. The attitude of "Macs never break so I'll use one, oh wait my Mac has a problem you have to fix it!" This is not the first job I've encountered it at. If a place wants to use Macs and support them, that's great. If a place wants to train me to do Mac support, that's also great. However when the policy is "Macs are unsupported," I get tired of Mac users justifying buying them by saying they won't need support, then bitching about it.
Also, in many cases recently, it has even been almost completely useless. One of our professors bought a number of Macs for his lab. Since there's a good deal of software we use that isn't for Mac OS, Windows is on there too. His students are always booted in to the Windows side since everything they want to do can be done there. So it wasn't as though he bought the Macs out of a well researched need, he bought them because he's a Mac fan, without consideration as to if that's the right tool for the job.
Hence, I get a little annoyed.
I realize this example isn't quite about "Macs," but I ran into Apple trying to gouge people just a day or two ago.
I was looking at the Macbook, and went to the "Buy" link for the 2.4Ghz white one to see what kind of options I'd have; I think the price was $1299, but don't quote me. Anyway, the next screen was customizations and the first option was RAM. The base system had 2GB and they were offering an upgrade to 4:
"4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x2GB [Add $400]"
Fucking seriously? They're trying to rape me for $400 for an extra 2GB stick of RAM? Does that mean that a third of the cost of the base system is the one stick of RAM they put in there? Tell you what guys, give me to me for 33% off and I'll get my own RAM, mmk?
I noticed the same sort of behavior when I was glancing at the iPod touch pricing. $299, $399, $499 for their three models with---whaaa?? 8, 16 or 32GB of storage. The original iPod is up to 80 (or more?), which makes it fairly clear to me that they're just playing games and offering you super-expensive, shitty-sized storage now so they can go "LOOK, DOUBLE!" six months from now. To screw the early adopters, in other words.
In fact, now that I think about it that smells like what happened with the iPhone as well, where they dropped their prices like $100 a couple weeks after product launch for no apparent reason and pissed off a ton of their customers. I think they offered some Apple Store coupons or something to make it up to them, but it doesn't wash the slime off in my book.
I really don't agree with your central point though; my brother just bought a new computer and paid around the $1300 for that Macbook I was talking about. For that same money he got the same amount of RAM but faster speeds, a fairly high-end graphics card, 2x250 GB SATA hard drives (compare to 1x160), same clock speed on the processor (listed speeds) except four cores instead of two, DVD-DL burner and a whompin' cooling system that lets him fairly seriously overclock that sucker and push the system that much further. Granted he built it himself which saves a bit of money in some cases, but these systems don't seem comparably spec'd to me. Not even close. They WERE comparably priced though.
The bottom line is with Apple, you truly are paying for the brand as much and possibly more than anything else. That in itself is not necessarily good or bad--though I think it helps to create fanbois who then feel the need to justify their having paid more--but I think it causes them to do some fairly shady things.
Why would reviewing a product, for the pros or cons, be taken personally or as trolling though?
I don't see cries of sacrilege when I post a gripe that SoundBlaster hasn't made suitable Linux drivers for my X-Fi card, or that I give a thumbs down to Belkin keyboards. The very concept that stating likes / dislikes of Apple products should be conceived as trolling rather proves the point that this stuff is taken way too seriously.
I like my Mac.
That is all.
Unfortunately, most of my colleagues are aware that my home PC is an iMac. This means that I have now lost count of the number of people who have walked up to my desk and said "the iPhone is a bit shit" or "the Macbook Air is far too expensive - you'd be better off with a Dell". I don't own either product. I'm not in the market for a laptop and or a new phone.
Where does this reverse-evangelism come from?
For someone complaining of rewriting history, you certainly do take your liberties with history. Apple did not just do the same thing as a "host of other computer companies" - they did things very differently. And they just didn't "happen to catch on" - there was a reason for that. Do you really think Apple's early success was just chance, and nothing to do with the work they did? So, how do you explain why others failed where Apple succeeded? They just got lucky?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Modern journalists are taught that they must always balance their pieces. That there are always two sides. That sounds fine and is fine if the matters they are dealing with are of no consequence. The problem with it is that they tend to equate the two sides even when they are not of equal merit. Sometimes this is because they cannot or will not take the time to become knowledgeable enough about the matter to evaluate the data they have. They find an expert, get some information. Then they say, I need a balancing opinion, and find another source to provide it. Then they find the most "entertaining" way of presenting what they have and give both sources equal weight. But what if one source was an intelligent, dedicated researcher who has spent many years becoming an expert and the other was not...
... It's just... ranting is so much fun.
I can't speak for other Mac users but my experience has been such as to induce a certain vehemence in supporting the platform. I have used Macs, PCs and many other micro-computers since they each became available. Despite its shortcomings it was clear that Apple had had a fundamentally good idea from the moment the Lisa and Mac appeared. CP/M and DOS immediately seemed dated. If you were a Mac user though, the DOS crowd spent years telling you it was a worthless idea... right up until Windows appeared. Overnight the story changed to; it's no big deal, Windows is just the same as a Mac now. But it was not just the same. In fact most of the people saying this had only a very superficial knowledge of the differences. "They both have windows..."
These days I have (almost) given up discussing the matter. Life is too short. It is the nature of people that they do not like to think that they have made an incorrect or ill-judged decision. They will "invest" their own sense of worth in the decisions they have made. It is human nature but it is not science. As it has been most tellingly put: It is difficult to reason people out of something they were not reasoned into. Most PC users today were taught on PCs at school. They use them at work. They never even got to make that "decision" to use a PC. They know many of the idiosyncrasies of the machine. They are comfortable. They do not wish to hear that they have wasted serious quantities of time doing things that could have been avoided had they used a different system. Better to let them discover it in their own time... possibly by watching over your shoulder. Then their disappointment at realizing they have wasted much time may be mitigated by their pleasure at realizing that they have improved their position by their own efforts. In a cynical age, enthusiasm disturbs people. They are suspicious of it. To display it can have quite the opposite effect to that intended.
Enough. More than enough.
etc etc :)
It's also pretty safe to assume that migrating from Windows to Linux is a technical challenge for newbie users which therefore leads to the conclusion that most people who use Linux do indeed have greater technical knowledge than the "Joe Average" PC user.
People who migrate to Macs and OS X do not, we are frequently told here, need any additional technical knowledge to do so. So whilst I accept there are some very knowledgeable OS X people out there, most of them will still be pretty average users.
Consequently, when it gets to "my computer is better than your computer" discussions on here, most of the Linux people can put forward fairly reasoned technical arguments and there are enough Windows people globally that even if the tiniest percentage of them are technical people, that's still a lot of them.
However, most of the Mac users are not technical people so they are unable, most of the time, to argue at a similar technical level as the Linux people and the Windows people. Consequently, their only alternative is to get very defensive about the products they've paid a lot of money for & therefore try to use emotion, rather than fact, to get their points across.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"Hi I'm a Mac" "And I'm a PC" "Hey PC what are you doing?" "Right Clicking" "*#&%@)$@#"
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Hmm... shouldn't feed the trolls, but whatever...
Assuming that you have an original iMac from about 10 years ago (released in '98) loaded with Mac OS 8.5.x or 8.6 then you need the USB Mass Storage 1.3.5 update to use a flash drive. Download it, burn it to a CD (that version of the Mac OS can read PC CDs no problem) and install it and you will be away with a flash drive. You can get it here http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60394
Only problem might be if the CD drive has died which is reasonably likely after this length of time. It is a standard IDE laptop drive and so pretty easy to replace with a screwdriver and a few minutes.
Yes, the machine is now effectively junk (like pretty much all 10 year old computers), but the 'i' stands for Internet and hence why there was no floppy drive. With flash drives these days I certainly don't miss them. At the time phasing them out was daring, but long term it was the right call.
Cheers, Chris W.
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. --- Dykstra
Using Macs on and off for a number of years, I think I understand at least some of why the fan boys get so bloody defensive all the time:
In the end, I think the fan boys end up with a superiority complex. You know, a bit little like "driving by a car accident, knowing you're the only one who can really help" ;)
Quote: "'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"
However, some facts have more weight than others when judged by objective observer - don't they?
Good example is the (illegal) invasion of Iraq.
The fact that UN1441 required the council to "convene immediately upon receipt of a report in accordance with paragraphs 4 or 11 above, in order to consider the situation and the need for full compliance with all of the relevant Council resolutions in order to secure international peace and security;" i.e. to decide what to do next.
http://community.channel4.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/503603557/m/3490049144/p/1
BTW: I'm MadWorld poster (because it is).
I didn't realize that Think Differently was such a powerful slogan that it affects history.
The Apple II was not perfection or a wonderous machine by any stretch, any of us that used one can tell you that. What was so greatly unique about it that the PET or TRS-80 or homebuilt machine didn't have? Was it the delightfully quaint monochrome screen, or the problematic floppy drives? Perhaps it was the quirky BASIC? I know, I know, it's because they kept churning them out well into the 90's.
Somewhere within the cute stories of the little company started in a garage, you got brainwashed into thinking that being moderately successful made Apple into a god.
That'd be a hoot, let's fill every encyclopedia with "they did things differently". Real solid historical stuff.
Having used almost all OSs since 1978, I can say that yes, there are a ton of Apple fans that have bought Macs because of some sort of status/image, equally I have read many anti-Mac FUD articles in PC mags that leave Mac users very defensive. I have also seen similar Zealots within the PC ranks that readily emerge when they find out that I have a Mac at home, although they ignore my Windoze and linux/UNIX boxes.
Sorry, but I'm calling BS on this one.
Here is a site partially created to praise the glory that is(n't) Linux, and I have written strongly against it on these very pages. I have been modded down accordingly. I have gone months without seeing a mod point.
But I have never been banned. Never even close.
You pay the price for going against the herd, to be sure, but ultimately, the fact that, despite feeling the need to kind of throw a bucket of cold reality on the Linux orgy (oh, let's be honest here--this is Slashdot--the Linux circle-jerk), I'm at least trying to do it fairly and even-handedly.
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.
And I'm writing this from a Mac (which I switched to very recently, largely because VMware Fusion is so damned good that I can run Windows and Linux software I like on top of OSX with very very little trouble).
He relented and offered a floppy on a USB cable. But it was so expensive that no one bought it.
You can find USB floppy drives everywhere, can't you ?
I know I don't make a good sample size (though I have discussed this with my friends and they have experienced the same) but I've been around a bit now and this kind of false premise is getting old.
OSX doesn't really need the GUI unless you specifically want to run a GUI app. For administration it's perfectly possible to do without it - I remotely admin OSX boxes across the world using nothing more than SSH.
Apparently you can launch without the GUI by typing ">console" (without the quotes) into the username at the login prompt.. but I haven't personally tried that.
There's no reason not to run it though.. it does nothing if not used, and ends up in swap eventually anyway.
Yes just tried that and it works perfectly... GUI-less OSX :p
> "Hah, I'm superior to you because these people that I am unaffiliated with
> are better than some other people!" isn't a sane position.
It's not sane, but it certainly appears to be very normal human behaviour. Come to think of it, Apple fanboys are relatively tame in comparison to spectator sports fans.
c.
Log in or piss off.
Even apple store employees have told me not to bother with the apple RAM, when I was looking at an mbp.
Every laptop I've owned has fallen apart within 9 months. The mbp doesn't have a scratch on it... it's very well built. Now I don't normally upgrade for power reasons (any laptop made in the last 5 years is more than powerful enough for development, provided you don't do something stupid like put vista on it), but because the hardware simply gives up. I can easily imagine needing to upgrade the mbp half as much as a windows laptop.. thus halving the cost over time.
...they all have their zealots. They are devout defenders of what they love but, at the same time, they are adverse to change. That's why Balmer can say, with a smile, "I think there is value in Windows Vista" when asked about its instability; that's why Apple machines will continue to be more expensive than PCs at similar performance; that's why Linux will fail to go beyond the limits of its little world.
Some time ago I (using my regular account) posted a comment in which I briefly outlined my frustrations with iTunes on Windows. The result? The comment was modded Troll and my karma became BAD. I doubt my karma will ever improve since I'm now much less likely to comment about anything at all on Slashdot. Shows how easily Apple (and other) fanboys can manipulate sites like Slashdot.
I've personally been always negative about Apple and nothing has ev
> I'll never buy anything else from them and I'm not going to recommend them to other people unless that changes drastically.
Buy products from before the X86 transition (back when they were Apple COMPUTER) and you'll be a lot happier. Platform lockdown really didn't creep onto the scene until the advent of the iTunes music store, and even then it was a process of negligible attrition, easily cast aside, until the Palladium changeover. Frustratingly, both of Steve Jobs' reigns have saddled the platform with a black-box consumer electronics mindset.
The whole dig at the single mouse button is so 1980's, since all serious Mac users have been using three button (or more) mice for decades.
Too bad my powerbook only has one mouse button built-in... When I boot to Linux, ctrl+click doesn't really work.
Twinstiq, game news
Windows NT was a good operating system released in 1993, that is seven years before OS X.
Even windows 95 was superior to MacOS. It was not secure, but it had virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.
MacOS pre OSX was utter shit.
I don't like Apple because there are 2 choices:
:)
* - Common) Premium overpriced [option] hardware for your desktop
1) notebook
2) server/workstation
Oh and btw the fact that I am basically locked in not only by software but by hardware also! So no AMD, no Mac!
(I know that I can run OSX on non Apple HW, but is that really the idea behind Apple? To allow you to run OSX on non Apple HW?)
Oh and by the looks of it since Apple fanboy actually need a lot less brain power to operate their machines, my guess that Apple fanboys are the ones that are stupid
The subject of the media coverage itself is inconsequential: it could have been (from the article) "abortion, genetically modified food, [or] the wisdom of medical research on animals"; the focus is the perception of the media coverage, not issue being covered.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
The security model has been there since the original NT (some might even argue it was better at the beginning, because of the microkernel-like approach of having subsystems like video in user mode, which was later integrated into the kernel)
But I don't think you can talk about great usability for a typical PC user before NT 3.51. But still, that was May 1995, 5+ years ahead of OSX...
I was a NT 3.51 user very happy with the system for a long time (even postponed the Win2K "upgrade" for quite a while, so find the XP vs Vista comments to that regards kind of a deja vu)
You can have a look at what happened to me when I bothered to defend Apple in the latest Wintel crap on Apple festival. The conversation was crap flooded and then I was punished. I count no fewer than 7 "troll" points dropped onto me but the punishment is only obvious when you look at my page. Someone has obviously used two accounts worth of mod points to try and bury the whole conversation and me at the same time. It did not work at the time because the community thought well of it.
Microsoft or some big Microsoft fanboy is obviously gaming Slashdot. For some reason, they keep pointing at and saying nasty things about you. That makes you my friend.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
Amiga users got taught rabidity by the Mac crowd. Mac users were already mindlessly rabid about the Mac even before the Amiga ever shipped.
The biggest attacks on the Amiga came from Mac users, because Mac users were convinced that the Amiga was just a "wannabe Mac". They didn't want to know about multitasking (something every OS does now, and that nobody would dream of trying to get by without), or a uniform hierarchical file system (until HFS came along, then they started using the same arguments that they'd been belittling). The Amiga API had a sophisticated threading and message system, while Mac programs had to be built around an event loop... and many Mac programmers argued for years that writing software to take advantage of multitasking was just locking you into the Amiga (until OS X came along, and suddenly the Mac nuts were all behind it). Amiga's memory management was never all that hot (anyone else remember "an operating system without virtual memory is an operating system without virtue"?), but at least Amiga programs weren't locked in to fixed size partitions, and the Mac advocates would even argue that making end-users fiddle with memory partitions was *good* (until that became unnecessary with OS X).
With that kind of mindless attack coming from the left, and DOS users on the right telling Amiga users that they were wasting their time with a Mac wannabe, what do you expect to happen?
I'd therefore suggest that a lot of the Amiga userbase went over to Apple due to platform similarities
There were no platform similarities between the Amiga and the Mac for Amiga users to take advantage of. Many of them tried to make a go of it with BeOS, but that had doom baked into its very kernel. If anything, the Amiga users have had to find their home in Linux and Windows NT... the Mac OS before OS X was utterly appalling, and the death of the Amiga had already played out and become ancient history well before OS X showed up.
Mac is designed for technically clueless people who have a fear of computers and technology in general and who want a complex machine to act like a white appliance, as simple as a fridge. It is subtly advertised as such, and if you ever used the Mac you would see this "hide" the complexity approach to design everywhere.
And this kind of computer experience attracts the kind of person you describe above. They want it to "just work" TM and don't care how.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
True, there are misinformed masses of Apple users out there that yell loudly and stupidly, but for the most part I find them to be people who are either new to computers in general (more specifically, new to Macs) or are vain, smug idiots who care more about what they THINK you think about them and their pretty plastic device.
Finally, Apple products are held to a higher standard than other products, because of the expectation of greatness. So when some randomly not-so-good feature appears that is TYPICAL in the PC world, Apple gets bashed to all hell for it. Related to this is the PCs crowd incessant will to bash the lack of PC-like features on a Mac, such as "real" delete keys on the laptops. These missing options are generally non-issues and don't warrant the criticism. Again, when I voice that, I'm labeled an apologist fan-boy. Makes no sense...
There's a goodly dose of mindless religion in your post there.
Try suggesting to a Windows user that their security problems are self-inflicted some time, or that Microsoft really did create the flood of viruses... I better not go on, I don't want to be struck down by Lightning from Redmond (at least that's what a good many Windows users seem to expect, even now).
Related to this is the PCs crowd incessant will to bash the lack of PC-like features on a Mac, such as "real" delete keys on the laptops.
You spelled "right mouse button on laptops" in a really strange way there.
And no, the passive-aggressive multi-touch hacks that Apple has come up with are so far from being replacements that dismissing them as "non-issues" is exactly the kind of defensiveness that brings out the Mac bashers baying for blood, and the real advantages of the current Mac OS get lost in the feeding frenzy that follows. Quit being so defensive about the very real shortcomings of Apple's hardware, acknowledge the cost you have to pay to get an OS that doesn't suck as much and applications that don't suck as badly, and move on.
I see no problem in comparing Apple fanatics to religious zealots who overreact to any thing that supports the other side. Both behavioral phenomena are virtually identical when you strip away the objects of devotion. Just because one can lead to violence it does not mean that the comparison is not valid. He did not say Apple people are as crazy as suicide bombers, but he said the two types of tribes share the same reason for existing and not seeing eye to eye in an evolutionary psychological sense. Its also akin to mob psychology.
I for one agree with him. And I think anyone who doesn't see the similarities in systems like this will never fully understand people and culture. Does it not make sense that any cultural phenomena can be observed on different scales and in unobviously analogous situations? That's all he is saying here.
And I will repeat myself a little differently. He did not compare a 60 year conflict to the Apple vs PC argument, just the underlying psychology of picking a side( regardless of reason), sticking with it, and staunchly defending it.
"You don't eat pigs, we don't eat pigs, it seems it's been that way forever. So if you don't eat pigs, and we don't eat pigs, why not not eat pigs together?"
All we need is something in common with our Apple/PC brethren, and for someone to write an awesome song about it.
I sometimes get the feeling that Amiga users that feel slighted by the Windows community went on to become bitter Mac users.
"Victory can be anticipated, but not assured" - Sun Tzu
Heh. Try telling that to sports fans.
the reason apple people are so rabid is cognitive dissonance: the thing is so great, yet it actually aint'
so, you can either give in to reality - people rarely do - or resolve the conflict by creating a psuedo reality where apple is great.
Interesting research. But doesn't this effect apply to basically -every- internet discussion?
When people buy apple, they thing they are going to get this great, wonderful product - after all, it looks really cool in the store.
But then they get it home, and there are all sorts of problems, often with poorly designed hardware (how apple can consistently sell products with bad hardware and still get called a company with fanatical attention to detail is a mystery).
So now the new owner has a mental conflict: he is told that the apple product is great, but his experience says otherwise. This cognitive dissonance can be resovled by either (1)accepting reality, (2) denying reality.
Most of us, most of the time, take 2 -which is what appnatics are doing; they know, at some level, that the product is not that good, but they want to live in a world where it is.
also, alot of appnatics are marketing people, who care more about the sale then customer satisfaction.
His article "praising" the iPhone was actually entitled Why I returned my iPhone...
He mentions that "several" (weasel word alert!) readers flamed him as an Apple hater, but neglected to mention all the other responses making comments such as "Mac products are pure shit..."; "Yep, paying $US600 for a pretty interface and bugger all extra functionality sounds like a poor bargain indeed." or "If the iPhone changed your life... then you must be a loser" and others making more reasoned criticism of the muddled messages given by his article. He does cite an example of previous article drawing one rabid response from a PC zealot, but seems to be spinning that as evidence that he is unbiassed, rather than explaining why it doesn't affect his thesis that Apple fans are uniquely zealous.
Sadly, the full postbag for the Mossberg article he mentions isn't available, so it seems reasonable to question how representative the "several" (again) frothy-mouthed epistles from the church of Jobs really were. Actually, some of Mossberg's criticisms were questionable - he went on to refute his own complaint about memory size (even with the overpriced Apple upgrade the price was still less than the competition) and his request for a memory card slot was a typical, ill-considered "I want a pony!" comment (PC makers throw these in to fill up the floppy bay - at the time Apple would have needed to find space for 4-5 fugly slots to cover all the common formats).
What TFA represents is one common form of "bias" - cherry-picking the rantings of a small lunatic fringe as "evidence" (as in the plural of "anecdote") and presenting them as representing a larger group.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I'm sorry, this is complete horseshit. Almost all Apple tribers and serious fans who follow Apple who I have met, heard and read of know that there is a difference between the Apple Corporation and our favorable view of Apple's *products*. Every serious Apple fanatic likes the products, adores their design but also knows more than anyone else about the realities of Apple as a firm whose actions are sometimes great , sometimes not so great. In other words there is a difference between Mac lovers, lovers of Mac's design and their view of Apple, inc, its actions and policies. In all of the Apple blogs you can find plenty of criticism towards Apple due to one policy or the other. Do not mistake the preference towards their designs as worship of them as a corporate being.
The reason apple devotees are so touchy is that they have had to endure years of swift boat style attacks from microsoft and their toadies like Dvorak. Honestly, some of the early smears resemble Fox News smear campains - apple is dead, apple is going into bankruptcy, all the programmers are leaving because of Steve Jobs, Woz is a crazy drug using hippie, etc.
Ask anyone that used to use OS/2 knows how microsoft smeared their competitors. I think Karl Rove did some time in the microsoft marketing department...
Moral relativism is inescapable, even by those that reject it.
The Israeli-Palestinian situation is a prime example. If you make a claim that one side is right and the other is wrong, you are saying the weight of crimes on one side outweigh the crimes of the other (and this is assuming there are only two sides, which there aren't). Some immorality is worse than other immorality. Congratulations! You are now a moral relativist! Moral absolutionism is only practiced by corpses.
Anyone else amused that one of the biggest selling points of new Intel Macs is the ability to run Windows and access all of the programs that aren't available on the Mac?
Two and half years into owning a G4 Powerbook I've concluded that Macs are no more or less irritating*, crash prone**, or prone to dumb design ideas*** than are PCs. They just incorporate different irritations, ways of crashing, and dumb design choices.
I've given the Mac a good run, and arguably am more knowledgeable than most users. I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac. I doubt that I would buy another.
* No Delete key, but a key marked "delete" which actually backspaces. Yes, I know there is some multiple key combination that will delete stuff, but I still believe that pressing a key marked "delete" should cause things to be deleted.
** "Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death". In my experience the Mac crashes more often than my XP machine. And then there have been programs that just stop working for no apparent reason.
*** The Dock irritates me no end on this small 12" screen. I'll take the Windows task bar any day. Simpler is better. It also drives me crazy that the Mac defaults to leaving all apps running forever instead of shutting them down when you click the "close" button.
Three Squirrels
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really? Because my MacBook has one really big gesture pad combined with a single big button. Infinitely better than the other laptops I've had where all the pad is good for is moving the cursor around the screen combined with three tiny buttons in the least ergonomically placed position possible. Now, the two look superficially similar, but functionally, the Mac design is brilliant.
And if your choice of OS doesn't include proper support for your hardware, well that's your choice isn't it. I thought the whole benefit of Open Source and Linux is that if there is something you don't like, you are free to improve it yourself.
MOD PARENT UP.
I just wanted to add onto the part about how small the Apple market is. The thing that annoys me is how much press Apple gets given they have such a small sliver of the market. Why must every Apple announcement get a front page treatment on the Wall Street Journal? If there's media bias in this country, it's for Apple, not the Democrats.
Linux should be given MORE press, because at least Linux has become essential server software for almost every website everyone uses. It's important. Mac has no direct impact on my life, except that editors use it for movies I watch.
I'm not sure (and note I am mainly a Mac user, although I do have a couple of Windows boxes, and have even built a "Hackintosh") that Apple's idea to try to position itself in the market as the machine for "creative types" was the original goal -- they may, when they were last circling the drain in the 90's, have just decided to play to their base.
I would agree that most people that are really into (insert whater creative thing you wish here) ____________ really don't care what they use as long as it works well for them. They probably also realize it's nice to not to have to bother with the day-to-day issues a Windows user has to deal with in terms of adware, spyware, viruses, WGA, driver issues, etc.
Fact is, that nearly all purchasing decisions are emotional. Once one has taken ownership of a given product the process of being able to "logically" justify your motivation begins. Ford vs Chevy, Apple vs Microsoft, Callaway vs Taylor Made, etc.
I like my Macs because they run well, they look cool, and I like their overall build quality. I also think that some of the perceived "fanboism" comes from the fact that (if you've been around computers long enough) that Apple people have been treated like second-class citizens in the workplace, in the marketplace, and by a lot of people the supposedly know their stuff about computers for many years. They may just be oversensitive about it.
Because my MacBook has one really big gesture pad combined with a single big button.
:)
Mine doesn't let me do that in OSX even.
I thought the whole benefit of Open Source and Linux is that if there is something you don't like, you are free to improve it yourself.
Yeah I agree, I'm looking into it. Just saying though. I bought a Mac because of the hardware, not the software, it's just too bad a lot of stuff doesn't support the special hardware
Twinstiq, game news
The essence of fanatacism is to be enamoured with the venerated things' advantages and willfully blind [deny] the things' disadvantages. To fail at introspection and self-awareness. The same goes for haters who are merely anti-fanatics.
In the case of Apple, they have relatively superior User Interface design, and very robust hardware design and manufacture. They are also secretive, autocratic, non-open and high priced.
I actually bought mine for the same reason. Was looking for a 15" laptop with dedicated graphics that wasn't two inches thick or weighed twenty pounds. I was planning on running 100% windows. I still boot into windows about a third of the time. It has full support for the hardware and mouse pad.
While your post was generally reasonable, I wonder if you realize that your second and third paragraphs somewhat contradict each other.
Avoiding cognitive dissonance is pretty universal, and that includes how people deal with possible buyer's remorse. But it's only a subset of people who translate that into active brand loyalty of the sort you describe (Ford vs. Chevy, etc - you know, there's little brand loyalty to Microsoft per se, it's more to the PC as a a platform, if anything.) Just like people who take their sports-teams loyalty to heart, there is something almost compensatory about those loyalties - I think of it as something that people with little social/cultural capital do.
User base != Cult
Brand preference != Zealotry
Enthusiasm != Rabid
Standing behind one's preference != Defensiveness
Evoking positive emotions from a product != Kool aid
If you love your windows or linux, you get annoyed when someone form another camp picks on you without provocation. Now you understand.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
That's a load of crap, spawned by today's Statist society. Instead of doing this BS weighing of sides, what you could do is look at it in detail, and isolate specific groups (e.g., government and terrorists on each side, which are both wrong in killing innocent civilians). It is never right to just murder some innocent civilian. That's why, for example, both the terrorists responsible for 9/11 and the US government -- rather, numerous individuals in it -- are wrong (the US government in it's response, which has resulted in the murder of thousands of innocents).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
To state there are gray areas, or areas we don't yet fully understand, is different from arguing the moral relativist position. Moral relativism says there isn't necessarily anything wrong with, say for example, the Japanese gang-rape of Chinese women during WWII. It just depends on who's pov you take: from the soldier's pov, it was fine; not from the women's pov. That's pure worthless bullshit.
I have analysis on each of the issues you brought up*, but that really is irrelevant to the point. Even if we can't agree on something, that doesn't mean moral relativism is correct. That just means we haven't made good enough logical arguments, or don't have enough evidence. Maybe 500 years ago, we can't agree on why we don't fall off the face of the Earth. That doesn't mean there is no correct and true reason for why we don't. It just means we don't know, yet.
There's a difference between saying we don't always know the truth about everything, and saying there is no truth (which is philosophical relativism). Btw, the relativist position has an internal contradiction, for if one says there is no absolute truth, what should we consider that statement? If we consider it truth, then it's contradictory non-sense; if we don't, then it's just some meaningless babble.
* Neither the Palistineans nor the Isrealis are justified in murdering innocent civilians, which they frequently do, and by that I mean the terrorists and government. I consider abortion as murder, unless it's for the health of the mother or because of rape; because in other cases, the woman consented to have a "passenger onboard" so to speak, and you don't get to invite someone on your private plane, then kick them out at 40,000 feet. Drinking and sex, well if both were drunk, there's no argument for rape even by that argument; but I tend to argue that unless the guy got her drunk or drugged without her knowledge, she made her own decision in that regard, and why should guys have to be judge of that? Put it the other way around: if it were a drunk guy, and a sober woman, no-one would buy that BS argument that he was "raped", they would say, "that lucky sob"; and the drunk guy's wife certainly wouldn't buy that BS. Regarding the age of consent: (1) Certainly, two ppl below whatever it is, neither of them should be accused of statutory (currently, the underaged guy officially raped the underaged girl, because he "did the inserting"; (2) Look at it as an issue of demonstrated maturity, if some1 demonstrates they're mature, then they're of age; that would mean, for example, supporting one's self; (3) Wait until the girl is of age, then let her decide whether or not she was taken advantage of...if we had that reasonable standard, Mary Kay Lauterno wouldn't be in jail, as her "victim", now of age, if I remember right, wants to marry her.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
also, as I said above...
"Even if we can't agree on something, that doesn't mean moral relativism is correct. That just means we haven't made good enough logical arguments, or don't have enough evidence. Maybe 500 years ago, we can't agree on why we don't fall off the face of the Earth. That doesn't mean there is no correct and true reason for why we don't. It just means we don't know, yet.
There's a difference between saying we don't always know the truth about everything, and saying there is no truth (which is philosophical relativism). Btw, the relativist position has an internal contradiction, for if one says there is no absolute truth, what should we consider that statement? If we consider it truth, then it's contradictory non-sense; if we don't, then it's just some meaningless babble."
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
You saw the part where I admitted I thought they looked cool, right? =)
Actually, it was IBM who invented the PC, and Xerox who invented the GUI. But don't let facts get in the way, carry on worshiping Apple.
Thank you for the clarification. I got bad information on my side. I was always told that Microsoft stole the Macintosh interface like Macintosh was the original. I always hear stories about Jobs and Woz making the first PCs. Now I know better.
God spoke to me.
All of the libraries and the service(s) associated with it are still there, though. The services are still running, too. This violates the First Rule of System Administration Paranoia: Disable and remove all unnecessary elements from a server. Leaving unnecessary stuff installed (let alone running!), simply increases the number of attack vectors and points of failure with no additional benefit.
I have yet to see a service function that required a GUI on a server to manage it. I've seen client side GUIs of various sorts interact with servers. I have no problem with that model. The MVC model has been around long as it has because it works, after all.
Nope, I slam MS Windows for making their GUI an integral part of their server OS. I have no problem with slamming Apple for the same thing.
Actually, all he was saying was that the CLI is inseparable from the GUI.
A shame that people keep saying that, since it is wrong.
The Mac has a window manager too, just not an X11 window manager. And as with any UNIX system you can disable processes you do not want or need.
If you leave the GUI up, but no-one is using it - what exactly is it then going to do to cause a crash? If it's not in use it's not really "running", or at any rate not changing state.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Too bad my powerbook only has one mouse button built-in... When I boot to Linux, ctrl+click doesn't really work.
A single mouse button is superiour on laptops, I say that after years of having used many other windows and even UNIX (Solaris) laptops. Keyboard chording makes more sense than making laptop mouse buttons smaller and harder (or too easy) to hit.
If your WM doesn't support ctrl+click that means you need a new window manager.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The assumption that I'm easily swayed away from Apple's products inherently assumes that they're worth caring about.
No, it inherently assumes that a rational personal would always evaluate all alternatives. You have decided not to do that - therefore you are taking a path not rational or logical. You have taken the path of the faithful in shunning something because your belief system tells you to, without ever actually looking at it for yourself.
I bought an iPhone but not before looking carefully at the alternatives at hand, even Windows Mobile devices when I do not care for Windows Mobile. But, at least *I* had the strength of will to look at them. You are taking a lazy path that eventually leads to lack of intellectual rigor in other areas of your life.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What Apple did was no different than a host of other hobby computer companie ...
... the Apple II just happened to catch on better than others.
That was answered in my original post: "The first personal computer widely accepted by individuals and small businesses was the Apple II."
No, it was designed, priced, and marketed in a way to make it more attractive to individuals and small businesses. Also, and more importantly, Apple successfully fostered a large third party development community.
But this illustrates the frustrations many of us have with Apple fans, because rewriting history = zealotry.
I'm sorry, if there is anyone displaying zealotry here it is you. Apple brought personal computers to the masses, the hobbyists and hackers did not, the Commodore PET did not, etc. The hobbyists and hackers pretty much built computers for their own community not the public at large, that is an important distinction. I say this as someone who in the day developed for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and IBM PC. I am not religious about systems, I develop and use Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, but the facts are the facts. Apple made the critical breakthrough with the public at large and small business.
2k was essentially NT 5.0, and NT was already a good OS before that. 2k was just the version that actually obsoleted 95/98/ME, by being reasonably compatible with all the 95/98/ME stuff.
Also, before that, I would easily have argued that 95/98/ME was better than OS9, although Linux beat them both.
95/98/ME lacked basic concepts like user-level security -- sure, you could create separate users, but all you had to do is hit ESC at the password prompt, and you'd login as administrator -- and the filesystem itself (FAT32) lacked any concept of per-user file permissions, so you could access everyone's files anyway.
But hey, at least it actually had memory segmentation. Every Mac OS before OS9, if I remember, did not enforce which memory belonged to which app. Thus, one broken app could bring down the entire system, hard -- or just go play in some other app's memory and make it crash. It also allowed for some... interesting third-party apps. I remember one implementing RAM compression and a swapfile, so that you wouldn't get "out of memory" errors by running out of physical RAM. (The "compression" was the interesting part, to me.)
Then, 2k and OS X -- but hey, 2k was several months earlier than OS X, and it was based on (and fairly close to) NT, whereas OS X was based on (and not at all close to) BSD. I'd also argue that 2K isn't really that much worse than XP, though I'd certainly choose XP -- whereas OS X pretty much sucked until 10.3.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That is an excellent and clear description of the problems we are seeing and explains perfectly the problems in the political system. Wait a sec... Weren't we just talking about a bunch of Apple wonks?
So basically what you are saying is that you are proud as your position of a tool? I am never more entertained when individuals always find unique ways to adapt when different situations present themselves. The truth is that you are a slave to the Apple mother-ship and you are not going to get any thanks. You are not developing interpersonal relationships with Apple engineers, Mr. Jobs is not your best friend... you are simply a number who purchases a few products from a company that does not even know you exist.
As for your objectiveness, I happened to like Mac OS 9 when it was out. Sure it was not stable, clicking on a select icon could send the whole system into a tailspin (or more likely a large freeze), but it ran like a bat out of hell when running on a G3.
You might want to also seriously consider the first couple of releases of OSX. Sure, they were stable, but 10.0, 10.1 and to some extent 10.2 were buggy, lacking many household features and really slow.
Just wait until Apple starts making the iRoomba...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm pretty sure that this "backlash" effect is largely caused by a lot of toolish windbaggery in the tech writing industry about Apple and its products. Almost every week some tech writer on a PC-centric publication writes a column about how Apple will never be successful unless they license FairPlay and their operating system, and that no one really likes the iPhone.
In my experience the people who love to flame Apple are either those who have never used them or used them ten years ago. They have three different lines: "it's not compatible," "there's no software available," or "they're only for rich vegetarian liberals." In comparisson, the majority of Mac users grew up with PCs and have made the choice to pay more for a better computing experience.
I'm not saying that some Mac lovers are not zealots, or that one choice is necessarily better than the other. I am, however, saying that are pretty frequenly baited into the "flaming" mentioned in TFA.
Sorry, but this is an utter load. Many of you don't recall that being an Apple lover up until Jobs' return made you a target of PC snobs of all types. I went through more than a decade of smug DOS and Windows users' shots at my "technological illiteracy" and refusal to kowtow to all things PC. The PC press and PC users insulted, downrated, slandered, and abused all things Apple (whether it be Mac or Apple II) for years, and now WE'RE being called snobs and tribal?
Hypocrites.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only safe way is to run the machine without a GUI. Is this possible on a Mac?
Ofcourse it's possible.
Either you can disable the gui entirely, booting straight into text-mode console:
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/348
Or you can boot to a console + gui mode, where it doesn't load the full gui, but you can still launch individual gui apps:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=24259
The architecture of OS X is not that different from other unices, except that instead of running X for the graphics, it runs Aqua, and instead of using init and a collection of shell scripts, it uses launchd and a collection of xml files.
/fan boy on
;-p
/fanboy off
And yet, with some hacking, the iPod touch turns into the coolest micro-top (laptop, haha i coined a term) on the PLANET. bar none. We rabid fanboys.. well, sometime I think they want it to get hacked and provided for that 'off the record' and 'off the clock' so they could have happy investors AND happy users at the same time.
Whatever their motivation, a hacked ipod touch is the best piece of consumer computing technology i've ever seen - for 300 freakin' dollars! Compare THAT to your 3,995 IBM XT or whatever in 1986
End of the story, apple hardware and software is still better then any other proprietary company. Probably because they listen to their psychologists more then their engineers i'd wager -- because an engineer *really* doesn't let his own eccentric work flow affect how he designs things for aunt matilda (or for just plain common sense).
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Way to not read the parent post and to throw an insult in there to boot. Have you considered the possibility that TFA might be about you?
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's nothing worse than the recently converted.
Yeah, I like Macs and Apple, but what takes the cake is being corrected (incorrectly) by a recently "enlightened" Windows refugee.
They're as bad as former smokers, slingin' Kool-Aid like a pro.
OK, OK, I got to come clean - *some* of these folks were former customers of mine - that *I* moved to an Apple solution because they were so beat up (financially) that their businesses suffered.
They now fix things themselves.
FootBullet.
Should've been a Windows tech (MCSE), those guys got it good. *sigh*
~hylas
You've actually blurred different relativisms here, from epistemological to moral to discursive.
The first is about knowledge: there may be a true world out there, but we may not really be able to know anything, or at least anything stable about it. Perhaps the world is just "stuff," what we now call atoms made of subatomic particles or whatever the physical substrate of the universe is. But our objects of knowledge are based on "things" that are mind-produced: what we call a "tree" is a swirling collection of atoms. The connection it has to another "tree" is that it shares similar process - but even the similarity between processes that we identify is an overlay of our minds. We don't actually use language and thought to arrive at Absolute Truths, we use them to cope, so the failure to create a permanent, stable and static representation of the world (that, except for this "stuff" that lies under it, is itself an unstable field of representations) isn't really an issue.
This epistemological relativism becomes more pronounced when the "things" we are talking about don't even correspond to clusters of matter: things like justice, freedom, the self, rights, fairness, value, truth. When even the likeness that makes us identify two different trees as the same thing is based on perceived properties, how less stable the basis for those "things" which are conceptual, then.
Moral relativism is more straightforward, although it can be based on epistemological relativism. It is the claim that morality is a social and historical invention. There are two alternative explanations: one, that the universe actually has a code for right and wrong in it (a theological explanation, whether described as the law of God or karma or what have you), or that human morality is hard-wired. The first is a position which is outside philosophy and becomes religion, really; the second is dispensed with fairly easy by noting that the bases of altruistic feeling and what has been called the "fairness module" have not, historically, produced anything like universally equivalent moral behavior, and that there is a huge gulf between those moral-seeming "hard-wired" elements and actual human moralities.
Discursive relativism is, at first, also pretty straightforward, though when you open it up, there's a lot more under the hood. It says that even if you could have certainty about the order of things in the world and a stable moral code, that no statement about them is ever neutral or reliable: that there are always illocutionary and perlocutionary considerations behind any utterance: often, claims of power or appeals to mercy, postures of enmity or claims of authority, didactic positions, abasement, etc. A scientist doesn't just stand around "uttering truths," they are in a system of funding, politics, and rhetoric, for which whatever empirical methods, and the language they use to portray the use of those methods, is just a partial factor.
A Nietzschean critique of morality bridged moral and discursive relativism.
I admin 4 OSX Servers (XServes) 4 Linux servers, 35 OSX clients and 10 WinXP clients, almost all running on Mac hardware (only 5 machines are Lenovo laptops). I have in the past done time on Windows Servers as well as Solaris and Novell. I personally own three Macs, one of which runs WinXP as well in dual boot and I do most of my work on WinXP running on a Mac mini at work. My observations:
1. Mac build quality is simply excellent. None of the PC brands even come close (I don't know about Sony Vaios, so perhaps I'm wrong there). To get an idea of this, open up a Mac Pro tower and look inside at how it is built. The only machines which I know of of similar quality are the HP Blackbird Gaming rigs, which are in the same price category as Mac Pros. The laptops are well designed and built machines. So, while Apple machines are definitely more expensive, you pay for what you get.
2. The reliability of Apple hardware is, in general, much better than the average PC. The razor thin margins that most PC manufacturers have is the cause of this. I have seen, however, that PC manufacturers have lately, in the case of Dell as an example, been releasing more expensive and better designed and manufactured models.
3. OSX is very, very robust and can withstand more end user abuse than WinXP can. My experience is that most end users do not know all that much about their systems and will install and use any little extra that they can. On Windows, this very quickly leads to the registry growing to gargantuan size and dll conflicts.
4. I have had exactly two blue screens on Windows in 8 years and one kernel panic. I see more kernel panics on Macs at work than I see blue screens on Windows. In the last 2 years, perhaps 5 kernel panics on all the clients (usually in connection with Rosetta emulation, corrupt font caches, bad hard drives or bad RAM) and 1 blue screen. OSX has (had) one major problem in all versions prior to 10.5 and that was that users could very easily disable system fonts which would lead to erratic behaviour and crashes. Designers, who use and change fonts very often, ran into this problem very often. On Windows, various software packages will, over time, corrupt their registry settings and/or their other settings and cause erratic behaviour of the OS, such as major system slowdowns, certain services no longer working properly and above all, Windows Explorer becoming erratic and hanging and/or crashing.
5. In terms of productivity, OSX has an edge with the very many features that Apple has built into the OS, such as Expose, Bonjour networking, Drag and Drop everywhere (want text from a web page, just select it and drag it to the desktop or another application), configurable keyboard shortcuts for just about everything and favourites on the left hand side. Windows strong side is the start button, which gives you access to everything in the system with just the arrow keys. Obviously, in an AFP network, Apple networking is very simple, but Apple's support for SMB and AD is very good as well. OSX's font support is also much better than Windows.
6. Subjectively, I prefer Windows XP's immediate response to mouse and keyboard events. Pity that Vista threw all this away. In the end, you will be able to get all your work and fun done on both OSes and any hardware is the platform support your software. Windows has a massive edge in terms of the number of software packages, but it is very rare that I cannot find a package to do what I want on OSX. IN vertical markets, or specialised fields, however, there is no contest. Windows is far better supported.
7. Users on both platforms can be as equally clueless about their tools of choice. Very often, on Macs, I find the users know almost nothing about the OSX productivity enhancements, but generally, they cope better with the OS than the equivalent Windows end users. OSX is definitely easier to use.
8. Apple the company can be every bit as malevolent as Microsoft. Both are arrogant and fightened of losing control and will treat busines
As far as your "straightforward cases" go, too: even assuming that we shared a general belief that killing other people is always wrong except in certain cases (which seems to be the basis of allowing abortion for rape/incest) then we can have a real departure on "personhood." An embryo is a cluster of cells - it has never evinced any more sentient behavior that a mouse until well into the 2nd trimester. Unless you are relying on a kind of genetic-determination based update of a Christian story of human conception, that a soul or such actually winds up in the zygote at the moment a unique chromosome pattern is created, I don't see on what basis you assign "human rights" to an embryo.
The issue of the Israelis and the Palestinians largely depends on a complicated set of beliefs about what constitutes nationhood, entitles a people to land, even questions about cadastral rights and reimbursement (if I take something from you that I owned and wanted, can you say, "I'm not going to let you have it, but I'll give you $200,000 instead?" If I die, can you force that same deal to my kids? At what point do you "wash the slate" and say that the original theft doesn't matter? And on a macro level, what is the relationship between ethnicity, ideology, and religion? And how is it related to state, nation, and government? When two different societies have a different view of what is "private" and "public", and how those relate to things like family, self, and governance, you can see how an appeal to moral truths isn't going to go very far.)
A lot of your discussion about rape is selective about when genders are and are not in a symmetrical situation, too. Perhaps I'll discuss that more, later. In any case, I still think that you haven't risen above the level of simple opinion in your discussion about it - certainly not to the level of confirmed, "objective" moral truth.
I never claimed abortion was a straightforward case. I am saying that conception is one objective point, where we start talking about murder; or we can use the heart-beat, or maybe even brainwaves. Letting the mother have an abortion 2 minutes before birth seems quite clearly obscene and criminal. I did however point out that quite clearly, except in the case of rape, and where the mother's health is in danger, the woman did consent to it, and knew the risks (the mother's health in danger being relevant because if the mother dies, so does the z/e/f).
Your example regarding theft appears to be confusingly worded, so I won't deal with it. I will, however, say that if I steal something and give it to my kids, it doesn't somehow magically become theirs. Since it wasn't mine to give in the first place, I couldn't possibly have transferred title of ownership to them. That doesn't mean any guilt on their part, just that if the original owner comes along, he can rightfully take it from them.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Sorry to interject this here but I always think of it during these types of discussions:
Brian: Please, please, please listen! I've got one or two things to say.The Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
The Crowd: Sch!
I for one, welcome you sir, as my new overlord. :-)
Please add me to your newsletter.
!
~hylas
Epistemological: That we group trees together isn't just some imaginary fiction of our mind. It is based off of objective reality, something similar in their properties, and their "ancestry" (two different maple trees share a recent common ancestor). Even things that are all "green", of which we say, "emeralds and trees are green", that isn't some imaginary non-sense, but based off of the reality of wavelengths in nm.
Regarding things that are conceptual, it is very well true that there is no Platonic ideal "right" or "good" out there floating around in some alternate dimension of ideal forms. Just like there is no "2 + 2 = 4" floating around there. That doesn't mean that these things aren't either true or false (depending on the statement).
Moral: Your conception of moral relativism seems vastly different from the reality of moral relativism in the real world, which says crap like, "rape isn't necessarily wrong", or more aptly put, there is no right and wrong. To say that morality is an "invention" is essentially to say there is no such thing as morality (which is a guide to one's conduct, how one ought to act; e.g., is it ok to rape an innocent person, or to nuke 80,000 Japanese people off the face of the Earth). None-the-less, one can argue for normative morality, in which morality is a set of accepted norms; that does not mean there can be no truth, as some moral norms -- such as I can bash you over the head -- violate the norms that are presupposed whenever one engages in argumentation, and thus are performative contradictions to argue for (this is called the "argumentation ethics" justification of the non-aggression axiom). It is also quite clear that, by arguments of estoppel, we don't really need to deal with anyone who claims it is morally fine to murder, rape, and pillage, as they would be estopped from objecting to that kind of treatment themselves (and if they did object, it undermines their argument for such).
Discursive: Statements about truth do not have a "bias"; they are either true or false. We can judge by looking at the logical reasoning from first principles, if they are a priori arguments, or by looking at the empirical evidence (if they are arguments about empirical truths, not conceptual truth). It may well be true that scientists, philosophers, etc have bias; this is not enough to refute an argument put forth. It is a good reason for looking further into things, regarding trust of their statements, or for perhaps explaining why they may have arrived at incorrect conclusions.
Summarily, espistemological, moral, and discursive relativism, along with "post-modernism", is a bunch of crap, anti-intellectual and anti-Western drivel. The belief by many in these doctrines undermines the roots of Western civilization and the civilizing process as well.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Let's keep it simple. I am a very satisfied user of a Mac. I used to work with Wintel, and still do for a living. But at home, it is a Mac. Even the shareware is High Quality.
What I see is that everybody who got exposed to my Mac and the way I use it, ends up buying one, without explicit advocacy of my part.
They are happy, and I am happy.
But what I notice too, is that the press coverage on Apple is pretty negative, even bashing, and FUD spreading lately. I sense some orchestrated way of generating negative clueless nonsense. It's like the Wintel eco system lobby is panicing. And this migration to the Apple platform has to be stopped somehow.
Just my 2 eurocents.
--------
* Sigh *
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
All thinking beings are "biased", except maybe if they're not interested in the subject matter. Giving opposing views equal consideration may express an extreme bias if one of these views is just crazy and offensive. I don't expect impartiality from journalists, nor do I expect them to share my views. What I expect is for them to be transparent about their sources of information, separate information from opinion, and abstain from trying to manipulate me. None of these have anything to do with "impartiality" or "objectivity". My screwdriver is impartial, that's why I don't consult it about current events.
Don't think so. Show me a single Mac that has been remote rooted, either post OS X or pre OS X.
There is reason that people call Macs 100% secure and immune to any attempts at remote attack. Its because its true. Linux has been breached, OpenBSD has had two remote root incidents. MacOS? Zero, zip, nada.
What's a GUI filesystem?
I will start with your conclusion: it's essentially ad hominem, and suggests you have a cultural antipathy to late modern thought, rather than a reasoned disagreement. I think your appeal to so-called certainties is wishful thinking and curmudgeonry, and is ultimately anti-intellectual. But that isn't a reasoned response.
We now have some basis for saying what makes "green" is a certain wavelength. But that wavelength only becomes green when it reaches a human eye, travels up a human optic nerve, and gets processed in a way that produces what we call the experience of "green." The gap between 'greenness' and that wavelength is huge. It's called the problem of qualia.
The properties of "trees" as a category really is imaginary. Each tree is a specific event, and that's why speciation occurs.
You have made morality only as relevant as the internal logic within a set of norms. That does get you from action to morality: that gets you from general claims of morality to specific ones. Hardly an escape from "relativism." Your appeal to the categorical imperative only works for moral agents that believe that there is symmetry between themselves and the object of their activities. In practice, that symmetry doesn't even exist among agents who claim it does, much less in those who don't.
There are no pure statements about truth. Utterances can be understood as having a propositional component, and that component can have a truth-value (within the limits of epistemology itself.) But no utterance is reducible to its propositional component. This is orthogonal to the question of "bias."
This means that all of the former Mexican territory should be returned to Mexico, which then needs to return it to the proper indigenous polities. Also, the territory of the former Iroquois nation needs to be returned, etc. etc.
The fact that I would also be horrified at someone having an abortion 2 minutes before birth is just part of that not-black-and-white that I was talking about. And I would identify some attitudes as problematic or disappointing - casual use of even early-term abortion as birth control - without believing it rises anywhere close to the point of the criminal. I don't believe that a fixed point of personhood is going to ever be uncontested.
How the heck is the parent a troll? The post is simply passing a comment regarding the modding comments made in an earlier post. Yes, the parent did perhaps suggest /. is Linux-centric, but hardly troll material!
Hell, I am 100% Linux here and I wasn't offended by the post.
Awful UID - but I have been here ages...
Nothing worth thinking about, you've just described facts of nature, in the wild. If you want to go live with wild animals, go ahead. In no way does that address the "pros and cons" of rape here in the world of people. So perhaps you should argue why it is good that Chinese women were gang-raped hundreds of times by Japanese soldiers during WWII...
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
You preemptively silenced your critics by making that journal entry Friends Only. At least you have Mactrope to keep you company-- oh, yeah. Sockpuppet. My bad.
No, not really, because who would you be returning the property to? The government? Which just fiat'ed their ownship by decree, and not actual homesteading and working of the land? I can do a lot of "declaring that I own shit" too, on a piece of paper. The real owners of property are those who homestead it from an unowned state, or voluntarily acquire it from someone who did (or someone who acquired it from the original homesteader, etc). The real owners of property aren't some douchebags in Washington DC reaping the rewards of the Founding Father's massive power-grab.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
On most tech forums there are vastly greater numbers of Apple bashers, that are far more annoying than the Apple fanatics who are relatively rare. Even the staff at some forums get their jollies bashing Apple.
/. one of the semi-sane message boards left, where I occasionally learn something.
Here is typical of a forum I was reading just today:
"What the numbers do if anything are further inflate the already over inflated egos of the typical MAC worshiping effete snob zealots."
Prior to this post it was only mainly minor diggs at Apple/users in general, not one person had said anything pro-mac it was largely an Apple Bash fest started by the sites staff (Site starts with [H]). I see ten times as much of this PC owner hatred of Apple/Macs/Mac owners than I do of any kind of mac zealotry. The PC zealots also seem a lot more mean spirited.
I don't own a single Apple product, but I might buy one someday. I don't think I will turn into some kind of Maniac on that day. I have worked with about 7 flavors of UNIX over the years and I have Unbuntu installed at home right now along with WinXP. I like the idea of a well packaged and supported UNIX for the home, so OSX sounds alright with me. Neither worthy of zealous adoration nor zealous denigration.
Other than that I have seen fanatics of every stripe since getting on the net. The first flame fests I remember were between users of Gravis Ultrasound and Creative sound cards. Or lately the big one was HD DVD vs Blu Ray which was quite silly since the formats delivered essentially the same results. In the end this is wasted time and hot air.
It might just be my perception, but it is seems the net is becoming more and more the host of unreasoned thinking. It seems to be supporting conspiracy theory based thinking. Vast number of people believe wacko things that are reinforced by finding like minded wackos online. Things like the CIA being responsible for bringing down the twin towers on 9/11.
I find
The last time I tried to download Quicktime, Apple forced me to get Itunes along with it (this was a while ago). It took a while to find a version of Quicktime that did not have itunes. Then I found the very convenient Quicktime Alternative. Guess who is never installing Quicktime again. No more reminders to upgrade to Pro, no harrasment remving things from startup etc. I hate all bloody software that tries to put a worthless icon in the notification area. Worst offender is the installsheild update manager that got installed with paint shop pro.
The Internet Book Database
That Lockean notion of ownership of land serves agrarian societies over livestock-keeping or nomadic ones, even when the latter have a demonstrated pattern of land use (see how Australian aboriginals used a complex system of images and stories to manage land rights between different nomadic groups, for example.) And in many cases, we actually can determine someone in Mexico who had land rights given to them that was taken by the US during the Mexican-American war, who have known legitimate descendents. We may want to give back Santa Fe, New Mexico to the families that used to own that land.
In the case of Israel, there are still Palestinian families who have legal documents of ownership from land that they have been expelled from. It would be quite interesting if a lands-rights approach to the conflict were followed.
First, you start off with what I think is irrelevant minutia regarding the color green. There may be a gap between wavelength and "greenness" -- and indeed, it is quite conceivable that some hypothetical beings could perceive green in entirely different ways than we do -- but that isn't relevant. Grouping two things together because they are green is not some non-sense that we conjure up from our imagination, that has no bearing on reality. It is a reasonable -- although not always best -- criteria for grouping things. Likewise, our concept of say "maple tree" is a non-precisive abstraction (Aristotlean abstraction) from all instances of things we call "maple trees", not some Platonic ideal form floating around. It has an objective basis in reality (namely, not just the similar appearance, but more importantly, the common ancestry).
What do you mean by: "Your appeal to the categorical imperative only works for moral agents that believe that there is symmetry between themselves and the object of their activities. In practice, that symmetry doesn't even exist among agents who claim it does, much less in those who don't.".
Symmetry between themselves and the object of their activities? I presume what you're talking about is that John wants to have sex with Jane, and views her as an inferior, thus sees no problem in raping her. Yet, Jane can object to that, and it is the fact that we can communicate with one-another that makes norms amongst us possible. Then, John has to justify his actions, and he doesn't have a universalizeable criteria, so isn't going to be able to convince anyone. Jane can just assert the opposite of his superiority-proposition and shoot him dead. He'd be estopped from objecting, as well, based on his own actions.
Nothing you have said addresses the issue's I've brought up regarding ethics being chosen values of acting men, and that they cannot consistently argue for norms that violate the presuppositions of argumentation (ya know, how beating someone over the head doesn't demonstrate that you have the correct position). Nor have you addressed the fundamental internal contradictions of such statements as, "we cannot know anything to be absolutely true", or various other relativist and post-modernist dogma. And hence is the root of my "antipathy" toward post-modernism and relativism, that it is self-contradictory non-sense, that it seeks to undermine everything Western civilization has accomplished, etc.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The claim that "we cannot know anything to be absolutely true" is 1. not post-modernism (nor poststructuralism) 2. not new at all, and not even modern 3. doesn't necessarily undermine anything 4. is not what i claimed. It's the mother of all straw men used by cranky adherents to an insular conservative appeal to a lite-version of what they think is the Western tradition. It shows a very poor grasp of intellectual history (such as the fact that most all of what I said about discursive relativism is well within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.)
Green-ness is not directly percieved, and different brains do percieve it slightly differently, even on an empirical basis. In human brains that don't have one or another form of color-blindness, most people within the same gender will percieve the same wavelengths as primary, though men and women actually have slightly different perceptions of just what wavelength produces a primary color.
There are very few perceptual primitives. They include color, line/edge detection, and other types of abstract pattern detection, in typical human brains. These primitives seem relatively adaptive - they must describe the world well enough that we can get by with them. The farther away you get from these primitives, the farther away you get from the world itself. Instead of rehashing the entire discourse of cognitive linguistics, I recommend that you do some basic reading on cognitive linguistics and vision if you want to talk about any possible "realism" in perception. Outside of those primitives, the empirical anthropological and cross-linguistic evidence weighs against you: ontologies defer wildly between cultures.
All John has to do is say "Jane is outside of my circle of reciprocal moral expectations." Yes, Jane can shoot him, and he will be unable to object on the grounds that she is within a circle of moral expectations. At this point, we have only logical consistency. We don't have morality. We put people and other beings within and outside our circle of expectations all the time, and sometimes we are unilateral, in that we constrain our own behavior to something which cannot reciprocate those expectations (children, animals, etc.) But you don't need a unique moral language to identify inconsistency and contradiction, and inconsistent and contradictory behavior often overlaps between categories we think of as moral and non-moral.
Mac OS has had virtual memory since version 7, released 1991.
I believe I have discovered the root of what makes someone a Mac person or a PC person (with obvious gradients along the continuum). The "requirements" from a PC perspective just don't matter from the perspective of a Mac user (built-in USB card reader, or FM radio for example) From the article:
[Mossberg] had only two tiny complaints. The computer lacked a built-in card reader to access pictures stored in digital cameras, and "Apple scrimped on memory," adding far fewer megabytes of the stuff than was common on Windows machines. Mossberg's column ran for about 900 words; just 70 of them, or 8 percent, by my count, suggested anything even approaching negative criticism.I think this quote sheds light on what people expect from a personal computer, and the differences come to light when it comes to "deal breakers". I think I speak fairly clearly on behalf of someone who might be labeled a fanboy so I can just go ahead and say I think the "tiny complaints" voiced by Mossberg are exactly that..tiny. The problem is, that PC people will take these almost insignificant complaints and run with them. Not having a built-in card reader suddenly becomes a deal-breaker for someone considering a Mac? Huh? A $2 usb add-on isn't a feasible fix? Not enough RAM? Isn't that the truth for ANY computer? How hard is it to buy some more RAM and install it?
These are not Mac fanboi apologies. This is the simple acceptance of the concept of engineering trade-offs. Over the years, Apple has tended to choose the trade-off that has the least impact or is most easily circumvented by the user. Nearly every shortcoming that is criticized by the anti-mac crowd as a show-stopper seems to have a very simple work-around. The reverse, however, is seldom true. What is the work-around for having to use an unsophisticated Windows operating system? What are the work-arounds for not having to load up your computer with every firewall, spyware, and anti-virus program on the market, only to have it go tits-up every year or so anyway? The answer I'm sure many of you will yell is "My PC NEVER crashes and I've never had a virus!" or some other nonesense, which leads to yet more insight to the PC / Mac divide. It seems millions of people have grown frustrated with the real problem of Windows viruses and instability and ARE switching to other platforms, yet the opposite isn't true. Even dismissing the wild claims of many Mac zealots, the anecdotal evidence still shows that switchers to Mac rarely switch back, and Mac users rarely switch to PC. Just because some people go way over the top when justifying the use of OSX doesn't take away from the reality of the situation.
In short, I'd prefer the easily worked around shortcomings of Apple products over the alternative (not including Linux in this discussion, keeping in mind..)
I really don't see the problem with that approach. To be sure, there is no legitimacy in saying, "I beat the crap out of you and took it, now it's mine".
Things do get more difficult when we deal with innocent 2nd-comers adding to the value of the stolen land by their purchase of it from the aggressor, and subsequent improvement upon it. To be sure, the person it was originally stolen from way-back when doesn't have title to the improvements.
But the first thing is, we assume possession is 9/10ths of the law, unless we know otherwise, or know that the current possessor is a crook (as would be the case with politicians controlling property). Someone claiming otherwise -- that they should've inherited -- has to prove otherwise (they'll also have to prove that they would've inherited it).
The ultimate goal is not to punish innocent 2nd-comers for the wrongs of those who they bought property from, but is to punish actual criminal aggressors, and make them do restitution. Of course, when someone buying property does so knowingly in collaboration from those who stole it, they don't get any beneficial treatment, and are simply co-conspirators. But if they are innocent, them being robbed of all the improvements they'd made to property would constitute a new aggression against them. So again, the ultimate aim is to find the real aggressors and make them pay the penalty of restitution. But if that can't be done, then both sides will have to eat a loss b/c of the aggressor.
You seem to be trying to say that my position is absurd. It certainly would seem absurd from the pov of someone who bought property in New Mexico that now their property is going to be given back to original owners it was stolen from many years ago (see below for details on alleviating this). But it wouldn't seem so absurd to those people. Then again, being the great-descendants of them, they might not care, so there really wouldn't be an issue anyways). There is no need to go chasing after difficult legal situations; until someone comes with a claim, we needn't deal with it.
But if someone does come with a claim that they can prove, how can we deal with it? Well, we could deal with it the same way we deal with the inheritance of houses...if one person in the family wants to live in that house, they have to buy the rest out of their share of it. We could do the same with these kinds of disputes. Most likely, the original owner of some piece of land 300 years ago wouldn't get much, as most of the value was added after the initial theft. Or alternatively, they could buy out the current owner of his share of the value of that plot of land as a whole, including any buildings on it. In a propertarian society where this kind of dispute-resolution happens, most likely there would be a market for title-insurance to property.
The fundamental problem here -- which is a problem for any system of law, not just the libertarian propertarian one I'm proposing -- is that aggressors can do far more harm than they can do good. It is quit easy for a crook to steal from one person, sell to someone else ignorant of such, drop-dead from drug-overdose, and then leave those two people in a difficult situation at odds with each other. I think that title-insurance, and insurance against theft, can help alleviate this.
The ultimate way to deal with this is to stop advocating and engaging in systematic aggression, such as is war of all kinds.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
So I get modded as "troll" by falling for a Troll???? The guy was obviously exaggerating the fact that he got banned, since nobody can actually find all his posts that were supposedly modded as troll. So anyone care to make me a better slashdot contributor and explain exactly why my post qualifies as troll? All I asked was that if you criticize Apple, to do so in "clear, logical sentences" as opposed to say, "Mac Sucks!"
First off, my comment about the internal contradictions of relativism applies to my initial comments, and not just to your response. And pomo thought is closely linked in with that, although not the same; it is, like hermeneutics, marked by a decided lack of clarity and bewildering multiplication of specialized terms (philo-babble). I would argue that it is part of a "group" of thinking in the modern era that is anti-intellectual and destructive to Western civilization: relativism of all kinds, hermeneutics, feminism, polylogicism, and postmodernism.
I am very well aware of subtle, and sometimes more drastic, differences amongst people in perception, which would include such things as the optical illusions exploited by MC Escher in his brilliant wood-carvings. That can hardly be taken as some justification for an assault on the notion of objective reality. For the most part, the vast majority of people tend to think that red and green go together well, and are not at "odds" with one another. Perceptions of what is beautiful tend to be relatively uniform (you don't hear too many people saying the Mona Lisa is hideous).
Your argument is simply some logical fallacy. You delve into the depths of minutia regarding human perception of images, which is largely uncontroversial, and then mean that to somehow prove or argue for the relativist position; it doesn't.
And John can say such non-sense as "Jane is outside my circle of moral expectations," but that doesn't make it true. It is still none-the-less reasonable to expect her to respond favorably to respectful treatment of her, and unfavorably to disrespectful treatment of her. What he's really saying is that he isn't going to act morally with regards to Jane; he isn't going to treat her as a moral entity. He can do that, but he isn't justified in doing that, and it isn't rational. He can in fact communicate with Jane, if only by reciprocity, and is thus capable of having an ethic between him and her. The challenge is not for John to say he's going to treat Jane immorally, or not regard her, for anyone can do that. The challenge is for him to justify it. And to justify something means it has to be universalizeable to anyone reading or listening to the argument, which presents problems for him re Jane. You see, if he tries to justify it, he is using a peaceful conflict-free method of dispute resolution (debate), and not bashing someone over the head for disagreeing with him about treating Jane that way; but then to argue that he can treat Jane in such manner violates the presuppositions of the argumentation he's engaging in.
To further dismantle relativist positions, I can put forth several axiomatically a-priori true statements, of which the denial would be performative contradiction (and thus false); e.g., "man acts". To deny that is performative contradiction, as the denial would itself be an action, hence showing the truthfulness of the statement the denier is trying to dispute.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
It wouldn't be deserted when I would get there. Forget about smoke signals....
I've shown people photos on my iPod Touch and had them ask "Oh, could I get copies of those" and the answer is, of course, "no, Steve wouldn't like that, and I only do what Steve would like". As a technologist there's something inherently evil to me about deliberately crippling a product to further your own ends (which basically translates to making money). It's akin to a doctor deliberately failing to treat all of an illness so that you keep coming back.
did you even click on the link for the nvd?
I'll say again - the biggest vulnerability that apple has is the huge bunch of users who believe they are invulnerable and that patches either don't exist or they are not worth applying.
Remember th month of apple bugs? Do you think that was a complete list without any other exploits being available?
You do believe that? Then you might be able to help my uncle move a huge amout of cash out of nigeria where he is falsely imprisoned. Please post your email address and we can continue directly.
In his defense, I used to work in a colocation/hosting facility that had many xServes there, and his experience mirrors mine. In one case, a customer moved from a $400 dedicated linux server to an xServe, then had to add a second to keep up, then evenutally gave up and went back to the linux machine. We later bought the xServes from him, installed NetBSD on them, and redeployed them. They were better without OSX, but the fact remained that the original customer was into them for $25K when a $400 ghetto Debian box was mopping the floor with them.
The thing with the GUI, is that whenever OSX boots up, the GUI is there, tying up resources whether you use it or not. Sure, you could SSH into it and manage it that way, but a lot of times the customers would Timbuk2 (like remote desktop) into it so that they could bring up a terminal window, and brag about how 1337 UN1X guys they were. Their level of arrogance was insane.
do() || do_not();
iHad against the microsoft infidels... iHAD brothers and sisters!!!!!
Moral relativism != philosophical relativism, also insert discussion on the nature of "truth".
Moral right and wrong cannot be proven without assumptions, and none of the assumptions of any moral system I've encountered are based merely on facts (facts being one of the few things that every definition of truth I've come across has included). Goodness or badness isn't something you can test an object for. Entities have to define the conditions for good or bad. Within those assumed conditions you can do the moral calculus, but those conditions are not (nor are they based on) physical laws or properties of matter. Even if you theorize a "goodness" and "evilness" property of matter or different types of energy, the fact that those forces obviously have vastly different effects on individuals would make the case for moral relativism.
And even merely assuming that facts are just a part of truth, then Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would strongly suggest that we actually can't know all possible facts, and therefore the full nature of truth is in fact out of reach no matter how good we get at looking at existence.
In the early days of Slashdot, Apple got no respect. Mention Macs in Slashdot and you were dismissed out of hand as being hopelessly wedded to the past or a particularly clueless, nontechnical moron. This was well before the iPod and the iPhone and the "I'm a Mac" ads. The popular perception in Linux and Windows circles was that the Macintosh was essentially dead.
The Mac started gaining cred with the tech elites when Mac OS X shipped. Over a period of several years, with each software and hardware success, Apple gained more respect with geeks and more visibility with non-geeks. Now it is commonplace to hear people talk about Mac users and their vile, insufferably smug attitudes. But before Apple gained this respect, to be a Mac user meant that you were constantly assaulted with comments belittling your intellectual capability and your choice in computers.
In my experience most Mac users who weathered the 1990s aren't very smug about Macs. They are just happy that they're no longer being constantly questioned for using a particular computer platform. Even so, there are plenty of myths about Macs that persist. After you've heard them over and over and over and over, it gets a bit redundant and annoying.
I use Windows and Linux, and as both of those OSes have changed, so has my perception of them. Back in the day, WindowsNT rocked. I was able to do many things with NT that I simply couldn't do with pre-OS X versions of the MacOS. Windows ME sucked, but generally I've been pleased with Windows 2000. By the same token, when I first started using Linux I wondered how it would ever compete with Solaris. I certainly never thought it would be a usable desktop OS. Obviously Linux has matured, and so has my evaluation of the OS.
But there are still people who should know better who proclaim that the Mac is a great machine if you're just concerned with eye candy. They also frequently state that Macs aren't good business machines, which is ironic given that the growth of Windows has been helped in large part by the games industry. I'm not going to say that serious gamers should buy Macs - that would be absurd. But when I hear that Macs are spec-for-spec always more expensive, and that Macs are "more proprietary" than Windows machines, it grates on me. The Mac has changed over the years, just as Windows and Linux have changed.
It is also somewhat amusing that nobody ever got raked over the coals for being consistently anti-Mac. If you enjoy something and feel an affinity for it, you are punished. If you hold a consistently negative opinion of something, or refuse to consider trying something new, you are protected by your majority status and are considered perfectly normal.
Since the tone of responses to the parent post seems to be, "It's about time someone hit back at those annoying Mac users," I have donned by asbestos suit. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The differences I'm discussing are ontological - in the "thingness" of a thing, in its unity and behavior as a member of a category.
The argument about primitives of perception is the closest thing to a domain of possible concession for a realist position, which is only true if a mechanistic argument about perception holds true. Your claim that it is a logical fallacy is essentially a way of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, "la-la-la, I can't hear you."
There is nothing irrational about treating anything as an extra-moral entity. If he does, in fact, argue with her about morality, then one can only claim that his behavior contradicts his claims. If I know, empirically, that you subscribe to a cosmological position (such as fundementalist Islam) that puts me outside your circle of reciprocal moral behavior, I would actually be operating on a false premise to act as if we did have reciprocal moral claims. What you are approaching is morality as a kind of social contract, which isn't really morality.
There are axiomatically true statements, and saying that 1+1=3 is as valid as 1+1=2, or even a historical claim that says the Holocaust didn't happen, are statements that lack authority and are "untrue," from a correspondence-theory of truth. They are problematic statements for different reasons: the first is inconsistent with the system of mathematic expression, the latter is "not founded on good authority," as a post-structuralist would put it. It is still possible that the Holocaust didn't happen (and that we are brains in vats and the universe is 10 minutes old, etc.) but these are uninteresting possibilities. There is still a lot that can be contested about "what happened," including its historical meaning, its moral import (while few would defend it, some place it as a moment in the history of the state, others as a moment in the history of Judaism, others as a moment in the history of Europe, or as a consequence of modernity - as a term, it doesn't mean the events that occured in German-controlled land in the early 1940s. It is deployed for a variety of rhetorical purposes.) The ontological status of numbers isn't that straightforward, however.
The position you are dismantling is one that would state that absolutely no statement has any claim to more authority than any other, a form of "relativism" that I challenge you to identify "in the wild." My 3 different relativist claims are not only not the same as that claim, they remain healthily undismantled.
As an Architect (a real one not a software architect, whatever that is) I refute that statement. Good design regularly partakes in heated scientific discussion, and that's _it_.
I'm not much of a Mac fan. I'd go Mac over windows though. Given a choice I'd run linux. This is problematic due to the poverty of Architectural CAD for non-Mac Unix. My preference for linux & Unix in general is about good design based upon heated 'scientific' discussion.
Mac's best design (and, I dare say, most heated scientific discussion) seems to happen in their marketing department. I really like the boxes their kit comes in. They all say "Designed in the USA" but *SCREAM* Japanese packaging design. I'd still go for commodity parts (given a choice) because they get more design dollars. As for putting them together, I have a quite expensive 5 year design education that I'm still paying off & should probably capitalise on. If I get bored, I might even make up a shiny sexy packing box to take it out of (^-^) but that would be eco-bad & non-pc (^-^) wouldn't it.
I find it's always visually illiterate people with little or no formal design education (past painting with their fingers & colouring inside the lines) that make comments like yours. I never hear them query the time a lawyer puts into changing the names in a contract template though. Probably because they are literate enough to know it's something they couldn't have written themselves.
thx e
I've always found it amusing when people use the 'multiple-button mouse' thing as an indication of superior design.
Sure, extra buttons can be convenient. You can use them as shortcuts to operations that would take more effort another way. I don't buy the idea that right-clicking to open a file is more 'efficient' than double-clicking (show me some numbers for the actual time-savings over a year or two), but if that model of interaction happens to float your boat, fine.
The problem occurs when people start building things that require multiple buttons. That creates a hardware dependency that isn't intrinsic to the problem space of the software itself, and boils down to programmers enforcing their notion of 'necessary hardware' through code.
It takes hard work and discipline to build a program that works well with only a single mouse button. You can't get away with putting a zillion features in the right-click contextual menu then burying their single-click equivalents deep in sub-menus or sub-panes of preference panels in applications twelve clicks away.. if you offer single-click equivalents at all.
Apple designs for good usability with a single-button mouse, then allows you to trick it out with extra buttons if you want to. The baseline is "good" and you can improve it from there. Interfaces that require multiple-button mice can be good if you have the hardware their designers want you to have, but their performance often degrades to "sucks rocks" or "nonfunctional" if you don't.
Of course, people adapt to whatever environment they're in. If you get used to the environment where right/middle-click menus are easy and everything else is harder if not impossible, you learn to rate software in terms of what you can do through the mouse. Fewer buttons equals less-capable software, and moving functionality away from the mouse equals frustration.
That's one of the "Aha!" moments I've seen from Windows users who move to the Mac. They don't recognize it as a change in I/O models, because they're still using menus and mouse clicks, but they suddenly realize that things outside a contextual menu aren't necessarily hard to reach. Once they get comfortable with the new I/O model, they find themselves pleasantly surprised by it. What they expected to be frustrating ends up being fairly simple.
Excuse me?
Linux has X thank you very much! Good luck trying to fix it.
MacOS X has X (sorta). If you want to fix something why start there?
Microsoft I think even has X, but it'd be cludgy & hardly worth the trouble.
thx e
It has gesture support too? Must require some special driver... I never really tried it.
So Cedric
...you'll probably get a seat.
You agree with the person you're criticising. Sucky public transport sucks.
Try Japan. You can set your second hand by the train departures, & you'll get there quicker by train than by car.
You still wont get a seat in a major city but if you're four hours into bumpkin land... (^-^)
good call on the Mac thing though.
I believe Fucking is in Germany isn't it? I remember a BBC news article about brits stealing their signs. Maybe your bus got lost.
thx e
Ehm... I was talking about Intelligent Design, the idea that, somehow, it's scientifically proven that god exists as a creator, following literally what's written in the Bible. I think you took the word "design" in the normal sense...
Erm... well the post you were responding to was clearly talking about 'intelligent design' in it's non-creationist-wakjob sense.
Living outside the US, it astounds me that you feel refuting creationist rhetoric is deemed worthy of neuron time.
Understanding what you are dealing with inside the US, I can see why you might feel the need to refute it vocally.
Perhaps you want to (re)define your terms a little more clearly.
thx e
My use of the term wakjob was in no way a reference to Steve.
thx e
Erm... I mean 'his steveness'
humblest apologies
thx e
You can start OS X without the GUi, which is my main problem with your and and the original response. I would probably use Linux systems myself for servers but this basic lack of understanding from someone who supposedly managed many of them and complained about not being able to do something you could do, seemed to undermine his whole point rather significantly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Way to not read the parent post and to throw an insult in there to boot. Have you considered the possibility that TFA might be about you?
Of course TFA is about me, or rather so as not to seem egotistical people like me. Since I obviously far better understand my motivations than the author or the person I responded to, I am able to provide far better insight into the mistakes made in either case.
Perhaps you should try reading my post again and stop being such an apologist for the hater brigade, or people who do not have as much technical insight to offer as it would seem. In this case you are really backing the wrong horse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
the very instant they prove some asshole wrong that makes a comment like "you can only use one button mice on Macs." OO Oo oO -_- What's next, your going to use the Mellissa Virus that effected Microsoft Office about 10 years ago to drum up "Macs get viruses all the time too?!" C'mon, at least come up with something that has facts. I've heard enough of this from the masses of 15 year olds that are would-be IT experts that weren't even using computers 10 years ago say shit like this.
How bout the fact that it's a bitch to Skin OS X? Or the fact that I keep getting this godamn "error 300: The printer is not responding" dialog every few days when trying to print? Yes, there are issues with Macs, but please, if you're going to insult them, at least know what you're fucking talking about.
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Sorry, personal computers had been out for a while before IBM's PC. IIRC, Osbourne, Radio Shack and Apple, among others beat IBM to the market. The IBM machine was a step up in many ways, explaining why the others have the market position that they enjoy now. Xerox did invent the GUI and the mouse.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
"I do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of substantially incorrect or trollish about Apple"
Maybe this isn't you, but what *I* see, repeated over and over again, is that a lot of Apple's critics have serious terminal gaps not only in their *information* about Apple products and behavior, but possibly in their fundamental ability to understand them. Then when they inflict their factually incorrect and insight-free rantings on the world, they're amazed that they taste a backlash.
None of this is to say that Apple's products and decisions are beyond criticism. I don't think that way and I have plenty my own criticisms.
But if you're the kind of person who even thinks for a moment that merely saying "anything that doesn't approach worship" is the problem, I'm not going out on a limb to say that you may fall in the idiotic and/or uninformed camp.
It's a fact there are people out there who can and do get away with criticism of Apple. The difference is those people know what they're talking about and know how to express themselves.
The rest of the crowd tries to hide the fact they've been incorrect or insulting by shucking it off on strawmen Apple fanbois.
The fact that this category includes so-called tech journalists is extra maddening.
Tweet, tweet.
It's easy to make assumptions on one sentence or two, isn't it? Feel free to throw more insults on the fire, I'm not bashing Apple or even their general user base, it's that segment of nutcases that creep me out.
It's a self-fulfilling designation because it's essentially insulting by nature. Tell anybody their enthusiasm for *any* particular object is "rabid" or "irrational" and you're quite likely to get some kind of rise out of it.
Some of the people throwing it around even realize this, of course, although I'm sure quite a few don't.
The plain and simple fact is there are plenty of people who can make significant criticism of flaws in Apple's products without generating that kind of fallout.
But here's a few differences between these people and the hopelessly vexed critic who's destined, knowingly or not, to essentially be a troll on the matter:
(1) The good critics genuinely understand the products. They haven't just tried them, they've really used them, at least enough to understand the strengths and weaknesses.
(2) The good critics are able to separate the product strengths and weaknesses from value judgments about the buyers, with or without judicious use of the ability to imagine consumers who have different product values from their own.
As an example, you can probably find hundreds of conversations on Slashdot about the iPhone. There's at least two classes of critics visible in these discussions, even amongst those that agree that the iPhone would be a better product with 3G and a truly open development ecosystem. One sees that even without these things, the product has other merits that mean it's valuable to people. The other sees these things missing and concludes it has no other merits ("It's just shiny design!" or "It's just a status item!")... or that those who *buy* it are missing their own superior ability to assess merit ("Fanbois!" "Apple Cultists"). And it's usually this later category that is somehow missing the ability to understand how that judgment could possibly lead to cranky responses from those it's leveled at.
Tweet, tweet.
But there are pro-nutcases for any platform. It's not like Apple is really special in that regard. In that way I feel Apple (or at least Apple users) are unfairly singled out. What I do think Apple has is a more active group of dedicated haters, people who go out of their way to bash Apple products and users, than many other platforms. For example you see lots of people who love Blackberries but you do not see endless numbers of people bashing Blackberries at any opportunity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People in RDF do not know they are in RDF.
I couldn't agree more. I used to be a PC guy and then when I went to film school I started getting hooked on Final Cut Pro and Macs.
Apple is a LONG way from perfect, but considering the other alternatives we really have no choice at the moment. Final Cut Studio is getting bigger and bigger but Compressor sucks and crashes/locksup. Final Cut has a tendancy to give us pinwheel of death...it just really kills us when jobs are on the line and it's the software that's letting us down. The hardware is pretty rock solid...
But the worst part of it is... the blind acceptance that Apple makes everything great and perfect
This screws everyone over. It makes it hard for Apple to gauge what they need to fix because customer survey's say "You all are awesome!". It hurts the consumer because Apple has no idea what they are sucking at and it hurts me the business owner because when I call them and complain they think "Oh he's just a small percentage..."
In december I bought an IPhone. Same thing first personal Apple product. Thing broke after 2 weeks. Went to Apple store and was basically called a liar by the clerk. Then got an apology from Customer Care. Shipped them the broke phone they sent a loaner. Sent back the phone unfixed. Charged me for the loaner. Sent the loaner back. Refunded me only PARTIAL the loaner full price charge. Then the phone heated up a la dell battery.. and they gave me a new iphone because it was deemed "a hazard"...
Honestly there products look good and kinda work, but from a business perspective. They suck. I have to buy their products for business reasons, but I am going to move us away from them... And no apple fanboy is going to change that because I don't take my cues from the blogs or comments, but by real world experience.
Telling your parents you're gay.
You know, if you actually read my post you would have noticed I didn't use that example to justify rapes in the "human" world. I just mentioned that fact since the parent also threw the term around as if it was the most despicable thing in the entire world irrespective of the context. But hey, don't let that stop you from going for my throat.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Yeah, well I use a 60-button mouse, so I must be the most superior person ever!
A reasonable post, but you couldn't help but slip something abusive in there. Congratulations.
This is just silly, the claim was that the Apple II was the first mass-market personal computer envisioned not as a business or hobbyist computer. That's the supposed revolution. Then the claim migrates into a contradictory first small business computer. Then it's a debate over which computer can count their simultaneous unveilings at the same hobby computer faire as their release, when neither made it to real honest-to-goodness store shelves before the TRS-80 anyway.
Now it's discount a host of other computers that actually sold mass-market, by opinion of their lack of serious business capabilities. That's not a winning argument either, I'm not even going to start.
There are so many disclaimers to the original claim, it's absurd.
Three computers were sold in 1977, only ONE of them sold quantities that could be considered even close to mass-market and a host of other computers followed and sold much better. None of them were the first microcomputers. How this is supposedly a revolution from one single company is an awfully big stretch.
You developed software in the 80's, I get it. The difference is you're searching to cement some sort of revolutionary relevance on the heels of someone who tried to do the same thing by claiming they invented the GUI and PC. Of course they had an impact, they're still here aren't they?
My first computer was a Mac. (1985). The mantra for Mac users continues unabated thanks to the Jobs-Sculley axis of evil: "apple products are for suckers that pay too much for too little for too long". By a PC, throw your Mac away and use the money you save for somehting usable like preventing hunger, or global warming, or environmental recycling of junk apples.
Sculley's idiocy and Jobs incompetence has turned the Mac products into Vax's and made Bill Gates the richest man in the world.
Christ, the "thingness of the thing". That's a bunch of hermeneutic incomprehensible philo-babble. Try speaking English. Just because Gadamer's mental processes were obviously confused, leading to confused and convoluted writing, doesn't give everyone else an excuse to talk that way. Your first "sentence" isn't even a sentence, and is just unclear incomprehensible babble. Apparently, most people who pursue an interest in philosophy somehow miraculously lose their ability to communicate in clear English (or German, or whatever language it is).
Your argument about perception is indeed a fallacy; the argument you are trying to make is a non-sequitar, so I'm not interested in following it any further. It is true that there are subtle differences in perception from one person to the next, yet there is clear and overwhelming evidence for, by and large, a similarity of image perception from one person to the next. I've explained the evidence for this. In any event, I've already shown that your argument is a non-sequitar; all you are doing is making assertions, rather than addressing that issue. From the fact that you and I might perceive the colors in the Mona Lisa a little bit differently, it does not at all follow that the rationalist-realist position is false.
I've also shown there to be a number of a priori true statements, such as "man acts" or "I exist", which cannot be denied without performative contradiction, and thus are true. You very well may say such babble as 1 + 1 = 3, and you'll be in the same deluded mindset as the fictional hero of Orwell's 1984: 2 + 2 can equal 4, but it can also equal 5, if Big Brother wants it to. The decimal numbers have an understood meaning between all who use them, and given that meaning, 1 + 1 = 2, and not 3 or 4. It is possible that if we perished, and someone else discovered our Arabic numeric system, they might consider 2 to be what we consider 1 to be...that doesn't alter the fundamental truth behind the statement that 1 + 1 = 2. We can change the symbols we use to describe things or concepts, but that does not change the meaning behind it (Roderick T. Long has written much on this and Wittgenstein).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
It is quite clear that my context was relating to human beings and other persons (if there is non-human intelligent life out there).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I really mean this from the bottom of my heart, but... Suck it up. PC users, Mac users, and Linux users suck it up.
All of your systems suck. I accepted this YEARS ago. Macs aren't worth half the price in hardware and software that you pay for them, even if they do "just work". Windows users, your PC's suck. They can't seem live past a few months without constant babysitting. PS, have fun with Vista, I know I do! Linux users, your systems suck too. You can't play games, and if you do manage to get a Windows emulator working, it's ass-slow (plus M$ will make it difficult for you).
We all have some form of shitty system.
Suck.
It.
Up.
I've had a few times when I felt like folks were mod bombing me.
But it rarely lasted more than a few weeks.
I really don't care... I get the impression a lot of people keep friends and foes here. I think of it a lot more anonymously. Perhaps if folks had avatars or something to remember them by.
I write mostly to think through what I think about the issue at hand. If folks post then I think about what they said and may revise my position. I know I go off half-cocked a lot of the time and when things are going well or badly in real life, it affects my posts here.
Perhaps the apple folks had set up scripts to detect and auto-mod the guy down- however mod points are awarded so randomly, who knows what day you will get them.
I am a bit overwhelmed by the 10 mod point level.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Ehm... Why the hell don't you read the GP post then? He was clearly talking about Intelligent Design, the pseudo-religious doctrine, and that was the point which I responded to. And I'm not in the US, I'm actually Argentine.
For some interesting Macintosh criticism, you should check out Buttobi CPU:I Dream of Mimi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttobi_CPU. Just be warned there is some objectionable content. Definitly not for everyone but the Apple Macintosh Quadra, Centris and Performa systems are the bad guys.
I just got a Mac powerbook and VMware Fusion last Saturday. I created XP Professional and Ubuntu 7.10 virtual machines on it - very easy to do and both are working great so far. I am thrilled with it.
Speaking of universities and macs ... when I went to Virginia Tech (1997 to 2001 for reference), they had a love affair with them for some reason. And this was before the SystemX supercomputer. The library and other public computer labs all had them. (oh ... and that god awful Math Emporium ... I had to get drunk just to step foot in there and have to do something I could have easily done in the dorm room) But, go into a EE or CS lab .. Windows (and a handful on some UNIX or UNIX derivative). This was before OSX or Linux being particularly popular (I had FreeBSD myself for that), so I don't think I knew anybody that personally owned a mac. So, if you happen to use one of those labs ... it was always joy when the floppy wouldn't fuck up and mess up something because you were going from PC to Mac and back. Thank god for USB is all I got to say, to bad it didn't help me then.
.. it's the bigger number after all)
.. that name alone!) ... Google it and this is the second link (after the lab's homepage).
...
... it still felt like a crappy space in a run down mall.
.. why can't I just do it from home computer.
... who is the top and who is the bottom? Or are they flippers?
As far as other zealots, the grad student that taught the UNIX basics course was a huge FreeBSD zealot. And I remember him championing it not just above PCs but above Linux which I didn't really know about at the time. So, that was like listening to some tell me how great Omicron Persei 7 was to Omicron Persei 8. (Anyways, 8 is better
Apparently I can't stop my rant against the Math Emporium (I mean
http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/virginiatech/
At the first sentence, I have problems
"In what used to be a five-and-dime store, a 60,000-square foot space has been converted into Virginia Tech's Math Emporium, a state-of-the-art computer lab that serves 7000 math students each school year."
Um yea
"High ceilings" (?!!) - It's called Wal-Mart or Lowes or a million other places.
"All chairs in the facility are on wheels" - OMG! I can't even believe they would say that was a feature. Does the building contain oxygen as well? Damnit! People need to know!
"Though the classes are essentially self-taught" - So, stating my point that if you didn't need help
" 'We were searching for a way that students could signal a staff-member if they needed help,' Williams reveals. 'We talked about using walkie-talkies, and Palm Pilots' " - You mean, It could have been even worse? The horror.
"Advice to Other Districts: Keep your rules to a minimum; encourage students and faculty to use your facility in creative ways." - Like force them there. Got it!
I just wonder about the Virginia Tech and Apple relationship
You might gather from this I dislike VT, but I don't. I guess its the equivalent of Flexo's "Nah, I'm just messin' with ya; you're all right." (2 Futurama references? oh, it's slashdot)
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
I've heard Mac users will threaten to kill your dog, and they'll threaten to stick a lit cigarette in your eye too!
Oh, wait - that second one was a threat from someone complaining about Mac users. So sorry.
Maybe, just maybe, there's jackasses all around the topic?
(Personally, I just think that we need to string that Artie McStrawman bastard up by his thumbs. HE'S the one causing all this brouhaha. I'm sure that there's an equivalent on the Wintel side, but I haven't heard his name as yet - in any case, he needs to go as well.)
"Stupid! Stupid stupid stupid stupid! I touched the hot wire right there - I'm an idiot!"
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
People, please don't feed the trolls.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Any time.
http://Communityville.com - A free place for new and old neighborhood webmasters to hang out.
Walk into the IT department of your company, to the guys with the "Vista" keychains or whatever trinkets MS handed out at the last trade fair, and ask them for help adding your Linux or Mac machine to the domain. Or tell them you need OpenOffice installed on your PC. Then you'll see "zealous".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Honestly, convincing several close friends, my girl and my team at work to switch partially or completely to Macs has been totally egoistical.
/. are worth, even buying a Mac for a partner/parent/kid would be a profit for us compared to letting them buy a PC.
:-)
It's cut the time I spend on troubleshooting weird driver issues, fixing filesystems from an OS crash or cleaning up malware-infected crap to almost nothing.
At the hourly rates most of us here on
So yes, maybe we Mac fanboys are enthusiastic - and we have damn good reasons for it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Hearing people whine about "Mac fanboys" is like hearing wingnuts complain about "far left" Democrats: they've never seen far left in their entire lives, unless they've gone on vacation to North Korea.
So let's see these great reviews of yours, devoid of any asshatery, and the Mac fanboys that unfairly got on your case.
and NT was already a good OS before that.
Not in the usability department, unless you were lucky with your hardware. NT was like your bad ex-girlfriend on meth when it came to getting devices to work. Installing a nic in my first ATX box was a ritual of installing the card, installing the divers, unplugging and reinstalling the card, and an agnostic prayer or two to any deity that might be listening. And that was a PCI ne2000 card, about the most generic chipset on the planet. Once you had everything installed and working, NT was a rock next to Win9x and Mac OS, but it was a chore to get it there.
2000 fixed all that, and imo is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. Their only real subsequent improvement they've made is instant user switching.
Also, before that, I would easily have argued that 95/98/ME was better than OS9
And I could just as easily argued that's not the case. 9x might have had memory segmentation, it still suffered from registry and dll hell, and crashed faster than Amy Whinehouse on a bender. Hell, even if you left a stock install alone after bootup, Windows would crash after 49.7 days.
But all quibbling aside, my basic point is that it's silly to rag on Apple for having not a usable, secure, stable OS when nobody else really had one either - NT was a pain, and good luck with Linux or BSD.
I remember one implementing RAM compression and a swapfile, so that you wouldn't get "out of memory" errors by running out of physical RAM. (The "compression" was the interesting part, to me.)
RamDoubler? I believe that was made by Connectix, which made also made Soundjam (which was bought by Apple and became iTunes) and VirtualPC, which was bought by Microsoft. But yeah, I don't think OS X had swap until OS 8.5 or 9.
Windows NT was a good operating system released in 1993, that is seven years before OS X.
Not in the usability department, it wasn't. Which is why I was saying Microsoft didn't have a stable and usable OS until Win2k.
Even windows 95 was superior to MacOS. It was not secure, but it had virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.
But it was poor you couldn't tell the difference, especially when 16 bit code was involved. And then you also had the twin cesspools of the registry and dlls to deal with.
MacOS pre OSX was utter shit.
So was Windows. Which was the point.
Far easier to install hardware. USB support. DirectX so you could run games and (generally) not have them take down the entire system when they crashed.
[goes off, reads your Apple Rant] Well, it's not the topic that got you the bum's rush at the Apple store; it's that you were essentially marketing the competition in someone else's store. No different than if you walked into a Target and expounded to every passing employee that you can buy the very same stuff for less at Walmart, or even get it for free off the curb. Stores exist to sell their own product, not to give away someone else's; that's simple economic fact, and the products' relative merits don't enter into it.
:(
As to your recent spate of -1 mods (none of which are from me, BTW -- I never mod down, only up) -- I was surprised to see so many, so I read a bunch of the posts, and I think it's likely because people have become tired of seeing the same rants over and over, some of which make no sense when viewed against market realities.
Also, there's the fact that you invariably dismiss people as M$ fanboys if they happen to be satisfied, or gods forbid even *happy*, running Windows. People get tired of being dissed over and over when that's your only message, especially when it's so often built around prejudice rather than around knowledge -- as with your repeated insistance that [paraphrase] "all Windoze boxes are botfarms" [/paraphrase] when this is patently not so.
This is sad, because a lot of the time you've got good points to make (in fact I've sometimes modded you up), but these valuable messages are frequently lost amid the noise of your own making.
Of course, having foe'd me long ago because you think I'm a M$ shill, you probably won't see this, let alone read it all.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Indeed your experience with people who have switched to the Mac side are a different demographic than the fanatic, forum trolling, old-school Mac zealots who were on the Mac platform throughout the 90's. They are rabid and cultish, after being marginalized for many years and seeing their favorite company almost go bankrupt and computer platform almost get eliminated, they have a paranoid and partisan mentality about computer platforms. New Mac users (of which I am one), are more rational about the whole thing. Recent Mac switchers tend to be involved with OS X because of the reality of the tools, not the religious BS.
How in the world did you conclude I do not use ssh??? I even install cygwin on many windoz boxes th use it there too! And I agree with your mouse comment, savvy Mac users do improvise but their laptops give you less flexibility. Seems like you agree about the need for a change here... what about resizing windows from any edge or corner? This is little stuff but it portrays an attitude of unwillingness to change even when wrong. I told my boss apple would have to run on intel eventually and him and the others spent a great effort trying to convince me how inferior intel was and why apple would never stoop to that level - they were unable to think clearly because they were too busy being fanatics.
Have you found a solution for the problem of spontaneous reboots on xserves. This only happened to us once a month or so but so many other had it much worse. Apple enterprise support did not have a clue how to resolve this issue do you? http://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=18&showtopic=4870
The lack of all corner resizing is the one thing that bugs be from time to time... but I got used to that pretty quickly. I'm not sure I would say it's wrong exactly, even if sometimes I would like that ability to be present... it's just a choice to make that the way windows are resized.
I still think that a single laptop button on laptops is the best possible choice, even while maintaining many buttons is better on a desktop. The thing is that on a laptop your fingers are always on the keyboard anyway so operating a button and chording at the same time is "free" in a way that it can't be when you have a hand on the mouse. Combine that with more than one button being a terrible design element - I used many Windows, and some UNIX laptops and the thing is the second button was either too hard to hit, or way to easy to hit and was being pressed all the time by accident. Stuff that needs three buttons to operate is I think poorly designed, or at least not a good thing to use with current laptops (macs or PC's). If you're going to use such software even if you have two buttons - you are going to be reaching for an external mouse with a third. So even there the single button does not really hurt you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Try to give credit where it's properly due. Dan Bricklin created VisiCalc, not Apple. It wasn't even exclusive to the Apple II. And it was quickly outdone by more capable spreadsheets on other platforms.
As for IBM's change of strategy, the later anecdotes conveniently recall Apple (hindsight is 20/20), but at the time they seemed a whole lot more concerned about Atari and Texas Instruments.
This is exactly the problem with the Apple fanboys, so eager to give the credit to Apple for envisioning the creation of the entire Universe.