I had an Airport base station die on me last summer because of a design flaw in the power supply. The thing was almost three years out of warranty. Called Apple, and they Airborne Expressed me a refurb'd replacement the next day, and told me to use the box it came in to ship the old one back to them, at no cost to me. Way cool.
Some revisions of the Airport base station also had a weak capacitor that was only rated for 1000 hours. I found this out when I was trying to figure out why my friend's kept blinkly strangely. After some searching, we found out it was due to the poor quality capacitor. Even though the thing was also way out of warranty, my friend took it back to the Apple store and they swapped it for free, no questions asked.
I teach at a high school with almost 800 computers, and we have this kid who's an electronics genius. He's been repairing TVs since he was 7 years old, and if there's a problem with the electronics on a motherboard or in a monitor, he can fix it (without killing himself, too). We have a lab of IBM towers (P3 600's or something like that) that have been dying left and right. The kid tells us it's because the motherboard manufacturer for IBM (MSI or something like that) uses crappy capacitors that aren't rated to last past the warranty on the machine. So, we bought a big bag of replacement capacitors, and he's already brought 3 of the dead motherboards back to life. Replacement capacitors are a lot cheaper than replacement motherboards.
Anyway, Apple can be sort of difficult about warranty issues sometimes, though. I was working on another friend's iMac which had a failed logic board, and it was just a week out of the standard 1-year warranty. They hasseled me for a while, but eventually they gave in and sent her to an authorized repair center. Unfortunately, that repair center was going under, and they held onto her iMac for something like 2-3 months. Finally, after repeated calls to Apple, she was able to get her iMac back, and they swapped the dead one for a completely new machine. I don't know what happened to her data, though.
While this sort of behavior is definitely nice, it might explain part of the reason why Macs are more expensive than PCs (besides quality).
uh... IE is also released for the mac, so your statement means absolutely nothing.
The version numbering system for IE for Mac is a little more sane than IE for Windows. I think IE for Mac OS X is on 5.2.3, which makes a lot more sense than "Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1" - is it the browser with the upgrade already installed, or is it only the upgrade for an existing installation? Or is it both?
I guess it makes about as much sense as Netscape skipping from 4.08 to 4.5, and from 4.8 to 6.0, skipping 5 entirely.
The biggest factor in determining whether someone will survive a major heart attack is how fast the paramedics arive. The 2 minutes it takes to get outside the jamming range or find a land line phone may be 2 minutes more than someone has.
The good news is that they're putting automatic defibrilators in airports and malls, which are saving lives everyday.
Jammer manufacturers should create a product that combines a cell phone jammer with a defibrilator. "You're having a heart attack? Your cell phone won't work? Here, use my jam... uhh, pocket defribilator." It might relieve some people of the guilt from jamming an emergency call.
By your logic the comment systems on amazon.com or download.com would be worthless. On the contrary, I have found these services to be very reliable on the whole.
I typed in the subject for my post before I wrote it, so it doesn't completely represent what I was trying to get across. Teacher review sites can have some useful information, but because they're necessarily anonymous, you can't truly fully trust any of the ratings on an individual basis.
The same is true of Amazon. Taken together and interpreted as a whole, the reviews can be helpful in trying to gauge the quality or desirability of a product, but individually they're susceptible to bias and outright misinformation. Take Michael Moore's latest book, "Dude, Where's My Country?". Look at some of the recent 1-star reviews (I've bolded things that appear to be personal attacks instead of useful advice):
Michael Moore, here are a few words of advice: Take a shower, lose some weight, shave once in a while, and, most importantly, stop writing stupid books and making fallacious movies. To everyone else: For a better read, pick up something by someone who hasn't been brainwashed. And maybe listen to a Led Zep CD or something! Then watch the O'Reilly Factor and FoxNews. Just my advice
Ignorance is bliss and that pretty much explains why this book sells. People believe anything that is published. No facts, pure bias and opinion. I read two chapters and sold the book on ebay. Obviously i'm not a pure unquestioned right-winger since I bought the book. I believe in facts and research, not opinion. The book pinpoints and streamlines the typical media bias, brainwashing and filtering of facts. If you are a braindead, DON'T-HAVE-MY-OWN-OPINION dopey liberal, you'll enjoy the book. If you want to waste your money go ahead, you have my blessings.
(One note about this: the first chapter of the book, whether right or wrong, is heavily researched and contains many, many footnotes that attribute statements to the published news articles they were drawn from.)
This book is a liberals screaming cry for help. Founded on the communist manifesto, the author is highly skilled in spreading lies. The book is really a waste of time if you're looking for the truth. A better book would be," The Real Lincoln",or Webster's Dictionary.
Of course, there were 10 5-star reviews submitted the very day that book was released, so you can search for bias on the other side of the political spectrum as well. For example, "Bias" received a 1-star review within a day or two of being published: "This book is full of (...), innuendo, and (...). There is just as much of a conservative bias in the media as there is a liberal bias. It just shows up in different places. Don't believe this poor analysis. The media may present a distorted veiw, but this book gets IT ALL WRONG. " There may be legitimate 5-star and 1-star reviews for books on Amazon, but it's difficult to take any of them seriously with crap like this.
Admirably, Amazon does some things that teacher rating sites could pick up on - rating of reviews (i.e., "23 out of 30 people found this review helpful") and featured "Spotlight Reviewers", who put their names and reputations behind what they write. Unfortunately, the number of teachers and professors a person will have in their education is probably not as large as the number of books they'll read, so I don't know how useful those features would be with teacher ratings.
I guess I probably should have said "Anonymous reviews are untrustworthy and subject to unsupported opinions and personal attacks" instead of calling them completely worthless, but I feel they're about as useful as a slashdot poll - possibly interesting, somewhat amusing, but not much beyond that.
Some teachers are just mean, and if you complain to them it could come out in your grades. I HAVE seen and experienced this before first hand, a group project I helped on recieved a low grade with a note saying we didn't do something, when we politely pointed out that we did do what he said we didn't(showed proof in our documentation) he got angry and refused to change our grade. After that we kept getting low grades on ALL our projects no matter what, and the excuses given for the low grades were pure BS.
Yeah, I've seen this happen to, on more than one occasion with some of my co-workers. Another poster suggested an academic grievance process, which would be helpful, but I guess it's really up to each person to decide whether or not they can approach their teacher or prof without some sort of retribution. Ideally, professional educators would behave like what they are - professionals - but sometimes they're worse than the kids.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but anonymous teacher rating sites are largely worthless because, with no accountability, there's no reason for anyone to be truthful, whether they're supportive or critical. We've seen the effect anonymity has on people who post to usenet, send email, and troll slashdot - no direction connection with real lfie and a person's reputation, so no real accountability.
There's a similar web site called RateMyTeachers.com that lets you rate high school teachers (its sister site, RateMyProfessors.com, offers the same service for college profs). I've been teaching high school for 5 1/2 years now, and after my sister emailed me a link to the ratings site, I immediately told my students that hang out in my classroom during lunch to go to the site and say the meanest, most ridiculous things about me possible. Why? Simply to prove the point that if students who like me can say awful, untrue things about me and have them published on the internet, then it's impossible to take those reviews any more seriously than a slashdot poll.
Now, as a professional educator, I value feedback and constructive criticism (it's a fundamental basis of education, so if it's good enough for our students, then why not the teachers?), but like any feedback, it needs to be accompanied with sufficient explanation and some degree of trust. Unfortunately, there's no incentive for anyone to be constructive or even honest on sites that allow anonymous ratings. Sure, you might be able to get an overall view of how students liked or disliked a teacher or professor, but giving them a numerical rating from 1.0 to 5.0 is as useful as basing a person's abilities solely on their SAT, ACT or IQ test score.
If a student really wants to have an effect on a teacher, they should go and talk to them about the problems they were having or make some friendly suggestions. Is this going to work on every teacher? Absolutely not - teachers can be some of the most egotistical and defensive people, and there are some you simply can't reach. (You should see teachers react to having other teachers come into their classroom for peer review - you can almost see their skin crawl.) However, I've found some of the negative comments I received about my teaching, especially early on when I was student teaching, which was such a bad experience that I considered not going into teaching at all, and from students who try but are still struggling, are some of the most helpful when I try to improve my teaching abilities.
However, I simply don't think online, anonymous reviews do anyone any good any more than high-stakes testing helps schools or students improve. The only way to improve a professor or teacher is to try to approach them about their shortcomings, and if that doesn't work (which really wouldn't be surprising), then switch classes and take someone you can enjoy, or suffer through it and hope the class goes quickly.
I knew someone would bring up iTMS, and I don't really condsider it software. I'd put it more in the category of webstores. Like amazon. You wouldn't call amazon innovative software, would you? The software is secondary to the fact that it's a shop.
I have to disagree with this because the software is the shop - the same program that lets you play and organize your music also lets you buy it. It's far more integrated than just having a link to a web site through your browser, it includes everything in one piece of software. That in itself is an impressive innovation - taking purchasing over the internet out of the web browser and into the app that will use the purchased goods.
Aqua is based on openstep which is over 10 years old. The prettyness may be new, but that's about all.
While I could attribute the above comment about iTunes to personal opinion, there's a lot more going on in Aqua than just an OpenStep update. The GUI itself is a joy to use compared to any version of Windows and most window managers, and that shouldn't be discounted as simply "prettyness".
And napster, there were several peer to peer music systems around before it, so I wouldn't call it innovative, it was nothing new, it just happened to be the one that caught on. I always thought it sucked. Not interesting or innovative to me.
If Napster's ability to enable users to instantly share music online doesn't impress you, then what exactly is your definition of "innovative"? Something similar could be said of Linux - after all, it's just a windowing system based on a command-line operating system, and we've certainly seen that before - but it's considered innovative because it's a part of the cutting edge of software development and offers something stable, secure and free. I would hope Linux isn't considered innovative simply because it's open source, because there are many, many other software and operating system projects out there that are also open source.
In the last rouchly 2 years not a single commercial piece of software has made me bat an eyelid or turn my head. They just aren't doing anything new or interesting. Compare it to the opensource world, where almost every day I find out about a project I didn't know about before that's doing something very clever, very cool or both. Free software constantly amazes me.
Again, I won't argue this, as this is a personal preference (and one I happen to agree with, in essence), but you can't discount that some innovative things have been done in the closed source arena. We didn't even get into a discussion of gaming, where nearly everything is closed source, and many innovative things have been done, but if that's not your cup of tea, you're not likely to notice, or care.
Bullshit. I can't think of a single intriguing interesting or useful piece of mainstream software that has come out in the commercial sector in the past 4 years.
The retail world has been doing nothing for the last god knows however long. The only interesting things I see being done now are in the open source world.
Maybe the iTunes Music Store? It has definitely attracted a lot of positive attention (and sales), and it's not open source. Even Napster almost meets your definition of being released in the past 4 years, and it wasn't open source, but it definitely shook things up. In operating systems, even though the base is available as open source, Mac OS X's Aqua interface has some nice innovations in it that I feel go beyond small improvements.
I'm not disagreeing with the premise that all the excitement in software is in the open source realm, but there have been a few closed-source nuggets that shouldn't be discounted.
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For example, these guys will ship a big ol' batch of live crickets. For $58, we could ship ol' Darl 5000 crickets and I know that would cheer him up!
I'm in for $5. It's better than paying $699 later.
Even though they're invariably smiling senior citizens, at our Wal-Mart, the greeters also cover the exit door and follow people out if they set off the anti-theft alarm. This happened to me when I bought some CD-Rs but the cashier didn't rub the magnetic strip across the demagnetizer enough. As I left, a speaker on the way out told me I had activated the anti-theft sensor and told me to wait for a "customer service representative" to check my bags. The greeter moved as quickly as an 80-year old woman can and checked my bag. They probably wouldn't be able to chase down a kid running out of the store, but they could probably be counted on to identify that kid later when he's caught and prosecuted.
Plus, old people are cute when we make them work meaningless jobs because they don't get enough from Social Security.
You need at least a CCIE to get a networking job in the us now.
Bullshit. I talked to the guys from the company who set up our school district's Cisco VoIP phone system, and they told me the minimum requirement to get hired there is a CCNA. I teach IT classes at our high school, and a lot of my kids get CompTIA certs (A+, Network+, etc.). I completely agree with everyone who has said that a paper certification like A+ or MCSE is just that - a piece of paper. However, the knowledge gained while preparing for the exam can be benefecial when applying for a job; the HR person should be able to figure out pretty quickly if you know your stuff or if you just took a lot of practice tests.
I've had kids get certified and go nowhere, and I've had kids who get certified and it gets them a starter job that builds experience for something bigger and better. One student of mine went from knowing very little about computers at the beginning of his senior year to being A+ and Network+ certified by the time he graduated, and he got a job building servers for HP. He probably wouldn't have been considered had he not had the certifications, but he definitely wouldn't have gotten the job if he didn't know his stuff.
(I used to teach chemistry and physics before teaching IT, so I'm not defending because I'm afraid of losing my job - there are benefits and weaknesses to any certification, and a good HR person should be able to recognize the abilities a job candidate has as opposed to what's listed in their resume.)
Intresting thought. I never considered it however, I'm just glad it's all over and squarely in the past. Not something I want to drag out when I've got other things to do.
I understand your desire to move on with your life, but this is exactly why they'll continue the practice with other people (and maybe you again at another time). People figure they're lucky they didn't get arrested, their life didn't completely fall apart, and they're ready to forget about the whole thing. Any government agency that benefits from a secretive police state thrives on this sort of thing.
I'm not saying I would be any different, but I'm just pointing out the vicious cycle.
Did you play Shufflepuck on it? Playing that game on an old Mac SE was one of the first "holy shit" computing experiences of my life. I'm sure it would have worked just fine on a Mac Plus, provided you moved the unnecessary biomedical equipment out of the way.
3. There may be immediate tangible benefits to a moon base: mining, factories, observatories, astronaut training, research.
Don't forget the multimillionairetourists. It's going to end up like that episode of Futurma where the moon is a cheesy coney-island amusement park, isn't it?
Why have crappy MS software for the Mac when it doesn't gain them any noticable marketshare?
Because, as the parent pointed out, NOT having crappy MS software will LOSE them noticeable marketshare. That's one of the evils of an illegal monopoly in the software industry.
Before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Netscape was the default web browser for Mac OS installations. In the findings against Microsoft in their antitrust case, it's mentioned that Bill Gates threatened then-CEO Gil Amelio with cancelling MS Office for Macintosh:
349. A few days after the exchange with Waldman, Gates informed those Microsoft executives most closely involved in the negotiations with Apple that the discussions "have not been going well at all." One of the several reasons for this, Gates wrote, was that "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . .."
So, until there's office software out there that's used at anywhere near the frequency MS Office is used, Apple can't afford to dabble seriously in the office suite market for fear of losing their PC compatibility. After all, Microsoft cancelled Internet Explorer for Macintosh before Safari was even at 1.0. I'm surprised they haven't blown up over Keynote. The only thing that's saving Apple at this point is that Appleworks (aka Clarisworks) still sucks.
55 operating systems, still one button on the mouse.
Maybe the reason this wasn't done on a Windows box is because the extra button gets in the way.
With the 20th anniversary of the release of the Mac in 2004, maybe Apple should do a marketing campaign about the one-button mouse. "Macintosh: 20 years of innovation, one mouse button at a time."
Seriously though, if you want a USB optical mouse with more than one button, they're pretty cheap, and you can keep your one-button mouse in case you accidentally spill coffee on your multi-fangled mouse. Having seen many users (both kids and adults) get confused by the right mouse button, I don't disagree with Apple's stance, I just wish they'd offer a nice Apple multi-button mouse as an option.
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Don't you mean "Clik", another failed Iomega product?
Some revisions of the Airport base station also had a weak capacitor that was only rated for 1000 hours. I found this out when I was trying to figure out why my friend's kept blinkly strangely. After some searching, we found out it was due to the poor quality capacitor. Even though the thing was also way out of warranty, my friend took it back to the Apple store and they swapped it for free, no questions asked.
I teach at a high school with almost 800 computers, and we have this kid who's an electronics genius. He's been repairing TVs since he was 7 years old, and if there's a problem with the electronics on a motherboard or in a monitor, he can fix it (without killing himself, too). We have a lab of IBM towers (P3 600's or something like that) that have been dying left and right. The kid tells us it's because the motherboard manufacturer for IBM (MSI or something like that) uses crappy capacitors that aren't rated to last past the warranty on the machine. So, we bought a big bag of replacement capacitors, and he's already brought 3 of the dead motherboards back to life. Replacement capacitors are a lot cheaper than replacement motherboards.
Anyway, Apple can be sort of difficult about warranty issues sometimes, though. I was working on another friend's iMac which had a failed logic board, and it was just a week out of the standard 1-year warranty. They hasseled me for a while, but eventually they gave in and sent her to an authorized repair center. Unfortunately, that repair center was going under, and they held onto her iMac for something like 2-3 months. Finally, after repeated calls to Apple, she was able to get her iMac back, and they swapped the dead one for a completely new machine. I don't know what happened to her data, though.
While this sort of behavior is definitely nice, it might explain part of the reason why Macs are more expensive than PCs (besides quality).
The version numbering system for IE for Mac is a little more sane than IE for Windows. I think IE for Mac OS X is on 5.2.3, which makes a lot more sense than "Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1" - is it the browser with the upgrade already installed, or is it only the upgrade for an existing installation? Or is it both?
I guess it makes about as much sense as Netscape skipping from 4.08 to 4.5, and from 4.8 to 6.0, skipping 5 entirely.
Wusses?
The good news is that they're putting automatic defibrilators in airports and malls, which are saving lives everyday.
Jammer manufacturers should create a product that combines a cell phone jammer with a defibrilator. "You're having a heart attack? Your cell phone won't work? Here, use my jam... uhh, pocket defribilator." It might relieve some people of the guilt from jamming an emergency call.
With the instant availability of pop culture minutiae through Google, aren't we all capable of being Comic Book Guy when we're online?
I typed in the subject for my post before I wrote it, so it doesn't completely represent what I was trying to get across. Teacher review sites can have some useful information, but because they're necessarily anonymous, you can't truly fully trust any of the ratings on an individual basis.
The same is true of Amazon. Taken together and interpreted as a whole, the reviews can be helpful in trying to gauge the quality or desirability of a product, but individually they're susceptible to bias and outright misinformation. Take Michael Moore's latest book, "Dude, Where's My Country?". Look at some of the recent 1-star reviews (I've bolded things that appear to be personal attacks instead of useful advice):
- Michael Moore, here are a few words of advice: Take a shower, lose some weight, shave once in a while, and, most importantly, stop writing stupid books and making fallacious movies. To everyone else: For a better read, pick up something by someone who hasn't been brainwashed. And maybe listen to a Led Zep CD or something! Then watch the O'Reilly Factor and FoxNews. Just my advice
- Ignorance is bliss and that pretty much explains why this book sells. People believe anything that is published. No facts, pure bias and opinion. I read two chapters and sold the book on ebay. Obviously i'm not a pure unquestioned right-winger since I bought the book. I believe in facts and research, not opinion. The book pinpoints and streamlines the typical media bias, brainwashing and filtering of facts. If you are a braindead, DON'T-HAVE-MY-OWN-OPINION dopey liberal, you'll enjoy the book. If you want to waste your money go ahead, you have my blessings.
- This book is a liberals screaming cry for help. Founded on the communist manifesto, the author is highly skilled in spreading lies. The book is really a waste of time if you're looking for the truth. A better book would be," The Real Lincoln",or Webster's Dictionary.
Of course, there were 10 5-star reviews submitted the very day that book was released, so you can search for bias on the other side of the political spectrum as well. For example, "Bias" received a 1-star review within a day or two of being published: "This book is full of (...), innuendo, and (...). There is just as much of a conservative bias in the media as there is a liberal bias. It just shows up in different places. Don't believe this poor analysis. The media may present a distorted veiw, but this book gets IT ALL WRONG. " There may be legitimate 5-star and 1-star reviews for books on Amazon, but it's difficult to take any of them seriously with crap like this.(One note about this: the first chapter of the book, whether right or wrong, is heavily researched and contains many, many footnotes that attribute statements to the published news articles they were drawn from.)
Admirably, Amazon does some things that teacher rating sites could pick up on - rating of reviews (i.e., "23 out of 30 people found this review helpful") and featured "Spotlight Reviewers", who put their names and reputations behind what they write. Unfortunately, the number of teachers and professors a person will have in their education is probably not as large as the number of books they'll read, so I don't know how useful those features would be with teacher ratings.
I guess I probably should have said "Anonymous reviews are untrustworthy and subject to unsupported opinions and personal attacks" instead of calling them completely worthless, but I feel they're about as useful as a slashdot poll - possibly interesting, somewhat amusing, but not much beyond that.
Yeah, I've seen this happen to, on more than one occasion with some of my co-workers. Another poster suggested an academic grievance process, which would be helpful, but I guess it's really up to each person to decide whether or not they can approach their teacher or prof without some sort of retribution. Ideally, professional educators would behave like what they are - professionals - but sometimes they're worse than the kids.
There's a similar web site called RateMyTeachers.com that lets you rate high school teachers (its sister site, RateMyProfessors.com, offers the same service for college profs). I've been teaching high school for 5 1/2 years now, and after my sister emailed me a link to the ratings site, I immediately told my students that hang out in my classroom during lunch to go to the site and say the meanest, most ridiculous things about me possible. Why? Simply to prove the point that if students who like me can say awful, untrue things about me and have them published on the internet, then it's impossible to take those reviews any more seriously than a slashdot poll.
Now, as a professional educator, I value feedback and constructive criticism (it's a fundamental basis of education, so if it's good enough for our students, then why not the teachers?), but like any feedback, it needs to be accompanied with sufficient explanation and some degree of trust. Unfortunately, there's no incentive for anyone to be constructive or even honest on sites that allow anonymous ratings. Sure, you might be able to get an overall view of how students liked or disliked a teacher or professor, but giving them a numerical rating from 1.0 to 5.0 is as useful as basing a person's abilities solely on their SAT, ACT or IQ test score.
If a student really wants to have an effect on a teacher, they should go and talk to them about the problems they were having or make some friendly suggestions. Is this going to work on every teacher? Absolutely not - teachers can be some of the most egotistical and defensive people, and there are some you simply can't reach. (You should see teachers react to having other teachers come into their classroom for peer review - you can almost see their skin crawl.) However, I've found some of the negative comments I received about my teaching, especially early on when I was student teaching, which was such a bad experience that I considered not going into teaching at all, and from students who try but are still struggling, are some of the most helpful when I try to improve my teaching abilities.
However, I simply don't think online, anonymous reviews do anyone any good any more than high-stakes testing helps schools or students improve. The only way to improve a professor or teacher is to try to approach them about their shortcomings, and if that doesn't work (which really wouldn't be surprising), then switch classes and take someone you can enjoy, or suffer through it and hope the class goes quickly.
This is SCO we're talking about - does anyone here really expect them to be around in 20 years?
Aren't these all the same person?
I have to disagree with this because the software is the shop - the same program that lets you play and organize your music also lets you buy it. It's far more integrated than just having a link to a web site through your browser, it includes everything in one piece of software. That in itself is an impressive innovation - taking purchasing over the internet out of the web browser and into the app that will use the purchased goods.
Aqua is based on openstep which is over 10 years old. The prettyness may be new, but that's about all.
While I could attribute the above comment about iTunes to personal opinion, there's a lot more going on in Aqua than just an OpenStep update. The GUI itself is a joy to use compared to any version of Windows and most window managers, and that shouldn't be discounted as simply "prettyness".
And napster, there were several peer to peer music systems around before it, so I wouldn't call it innovative, it was nothing new, it just happened to be the one that caught on. I always thought it sucked. Not interesting or innovative to me.
If Napster's ability to enable users to instantly share music online doesn't impress you, then what exactly is your definition of "innovative"? Something similar could be said of Linux - after all, it's just a windowing system based on a command-line operating system, and we've certainly seen that before - but it's considered innovative because it's a part of the cutting edge of software development and offers something stable, secure and free. I would hope Linux isn't considered innovative simply because it's open source, because there are many, many other software and operating system projects out there that are also open source.
In the last rouchly 2 years not a single commercial piece of software has made me bat an eyelid or turn my head. They just aren't doing anything new or interesting. Compare it to the opensource world, where almost every day I find out about a project I didn't know about before that's doing something very clever, very cool or both. Free software constantly amazes me.
Again, I won't argue this, as this is a personal preference (and one I happen to agree with, in essence), but you can't discount that some innovative things have been done in the closed source arena. We didn't even get into a discussion of gaming, where nearly everything is closed source, and many innovative things have been done, but if that's not your cup of tea, you're not likely to notice, or care.
The retail world has been doing nothing for the last god knows however long. The only interesting things I see being done now are in the open source world.
Maybe the iTunes Music Store? It has definitely attracted a lot of positive attention (and sales), and it's not open source. Even Napster almost meets your definition of being released in the past 4 years, and it wasn't open source, but it definitely shook things up. In operating systems, even though the base is available as open source, Mac OS X's Aqua interface has some nice innovations in it that I feel go beyond small improvements.
I'm not disagreeing with the premise that all the excitement in software is in the open source realm, but there have been a few closed-source nuggets that shouldn't be discounted.
I'm in for $5. It's better than paying $699 later.
Even though they're invariably smiling senior citizens, at our Wal-Mart, the greeters also cover the exit door and follow people out if they set off the anti-theft alarm. This happened to me when I bought some CD-Rs but the cashier didn't rub the magnetic strip across the demagnetizer enough. As I left, a speaker on the way out told me I had activated the anti-theft sensor and told me to wait for a "customer service representative" to check my bags. The greeter moved as quickly as an 80-year old woman can and checked my bag. They probably wouldn't be able to chase down a kid running out of the store, but they could probably be counted on to identify that kid later when he's caught and prosecuted.
Plus, old people are cute when we make them work meaningless jobs because they don't get enough from Social Security.
Bullshit. I talked to the guys from the company who set up our school district's Cisco VoIP phone system, and they told me the minimum requirement to get hired there is a CCNA. I teach IT classes at our high school, and a lot of my kids get CompTIA certs (A+, Network+, etc.). I completely agree with everyone who has said that a paper certification like A+ or MCSE is just that - a piece of paper. However, the knowledge gained while preparing for the exam can be benefecial when applying for a job; the HR person should be able to figure out pretty quickly if you know your stuff or if you just took a lot of practice tests.
I've had kids get certified and go nowhere, and I've had kids who get certified and it gets them a starter job that builds experience for something bigger and better. One student of mine went from knowing very little about computers at the beginning of his senior year to being A+ and Network+ certified by the time he graduated, and he got a job building servers for HP. He probably wouldn't have been considered had he not had the certifications, but he definitely wouldn't have gotten the job if he didn't know his stuff.
(I used to teach chemistry and physics before teaching IT, so I'm not defending because I'm afraid of losing my job - there are benefits and weaknesses to any certification, and a good HR person should be able to recognize the abilities a job candidate has as opposed to what's listed in their resume.)
Welcome to America! You must be new here.
I understand your desire to move on with your life, but this is exactly why they'll continue the practice with other people (and maybe you again at another time). People figure they're lucky they didn't get arrested, their life didn't completely fall apart, and they're ready to forget about the whole thing. Any government agency that benefits from a secretive police state thrives on this sort of thing.
I'm not saying I would be any different, but I'm just pointing out the vicious cycle.
Did you play Shufflepuck on it? Playing that game on an old Mac SE was one of the first "holy shit" computing experiences of my life. I'm sure it would have worked just fine on a Mac Plus, provided you moved the unnecessary biomedical equipment out of the way.
I think you've got the order wrong. First you buy XP, then you do drugs to counter the effects, and finally jump off a cliff to end it all.
Wait... you'd have to be on drugs to buy Windows XP, so it must be: drugs -> XP -> cliff.
It's all circular, really.
This coming from an Anonymous Coward.
Don't forget the multimillionaire tourists. It's going to end up like that episode of Futurma where the moon is a cheesy coney-island amusement park, isn't it?
Can we start with people on this planet?
Because, as the parent pointed out, NOT having crappy MS software will LOSE them noticeable marketshare. That's one of the evils of an illegal monopoly in the software industry.
Before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Netscape was the default web browser for Mac OS installations. In the findings against Microsoft in their antitrust case, it's mentioned that Bill Gates threatened then-CEO Gil Amelio with cancelling MS Office for Macintosh:
So, until there's office software out there that's used at anywhere near the frequency MS Office is used, Apple can't afford to dabble seriously in the office suite market for fear of losing their PC compatibility. After all, Microsoft cancelled Internet Explorer for Macintosh before Safari was even at 1.0. I'm surprised they haven't blown up over Keynote. The only thing that's saving Apple at this point is that Appleworks (aka Clarisworks) still sucks.
Maybe the reason this wasn't done on a Windows box is because the extra button gets in the way.
With the 20th anniversary of the release of the Mac in 2004, maybe Apple should do a marketing campaign about the one-button mouse. "Macintosh: 20 years of innovation, one mouse button at a time."
Seriously though, if you want a USB optical mouse with more than one button, they're pretty cheap, and you can keep your one-button mouse in case you accidentally spill coffee on your multi-fangled mouse. Having seen many users (both kids and adults) get confused by the right mouse button, I don't disagree with Apple's stance, I just wish they'd offer a nice Apple multi-button mouse as an option.