Yes, and no... DHTML is done almost completely inline with the page, whereas Silverlight is indeed just an object on the page. Granted, it does compensate for one of Flash's shortcomings by interfacing better with external data, but can you really blatantly ascribe Microsoft's efforts to pure malace? It sounds to me like they're trying to make a buck, and improve their own platform, rather than serve as the death star for all things technological.
I wouldn't ascribe the efforts of all the very talented lower-down people there to malice, but it is run by malicious thugs, and the tone is set by them. The kind that say 'a vig on every transaction', 'cut off the oxygen supply of netscape' etc etc. (Google it, or have a read of Broken Windows (I have no connection to author) ).
Even *if* Microsoft abandons its Mac version, the open-source implementation will still be around.
And if they start a FUD campaign, buy up all the backers of the open-source standard like Novell, and change their standard to make it impossible to interoperate?
I hate to stand up for Microsoft, they never dropped Mac Office..
I'm aware of that, but it's deliberately crippled compared to the Windows version, and a few years behind in releases. It's really not very pleasant to use it right now. I don't think it's even a universal binary.
ac IE was *never* a good product
At the time of its launch (like some Windows versions of Internet Explorer) it was the best browser available on the mac. It was then left in limbo for years and finally axed completely. The reason for this is clear - to kill the web. The hubris of trying to do that is incredible, but they also did it with Active-X, and are now hoping to do the same with Silverlight and XAML, which are clearly positioned to co-opt the web, then turn it into a Windows only standard, or at least a 'Windows for the best experience' standard.
Java's not a Microsoft technology... not quite sure where you were going with that
Why don't you google it then. They tried to kill their own partner's product while they were shipping it by shipping an incompatible version. When the stated intention of higher ups in a company is to 'kill' standards and even entire systems, I don't want to do business with them.
As it stands, DHTML absolutely sucks for creating desktop-like applications
I agree, however the strengths of the web (works the same everywhere) mean it will never rival desktop applications for everything, nor should it try to. There's a lot of things that could improve, but it'll never look/behave like desktop apps *because* it's cross platform, and is running in a sandbox. If you abstract it away using a library, it's not too painful developing with javascript (it can be a lot prettier than you think, have a look at prototype.js for example), though I'd love to use something else, and their are a lot of DOM handling problems in different browsers (mostly Internet Explorer for Windows, funny that). Given Microsoft's past behaviour and stated intentions in things like the Halloween documents I am not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - the most insidious thing about them is that most people don't appear to understand their history or motivations.
The funny thing is that MS have somehow sold you the proposition that it's all or nothing - you must 'standardize' on MS. The reason you think this is you've only ever used the stuff they produce, which doesn't play well with any other system, thus in your mind QED. It's an interesting slight of hand and has served them well. Most other systems (Unix/Linux, OS X) play well with others, including Windows, in spite of the obstacles set up by MS. As to convincing prospective clients, if they really can't see that sometimes Microsoft products are not the answer to everything, I really wouldn't want the pain of having them as a client. I doubt many clients are so hide-bound and inflexible though, most just want the job done with the most suitable tools.
Agreed, although I'm no fan of Microsoft, I will wholeheartedly welcome any serious competitor to Flash.
Silverlight is not just a competitor to Flash, it's yet another attempt to kill the web as a competitor to desktop apps - really it's a competitor to DHTML. I'm unhappy they've released it cross platform, because it'll be supported well everywhere at first (enough to kill the competition), and then deprecated, and then dropped, like IE, Mac Office, Java and countless other techs. Hell, they even left IE to fester on their own platform for several years with no updates, just to slow the inevitable appearance of interactive web apps. Amazingly, people like yourself are actually falling for it once again. It's as open as it needs to be to gain traction, no more.
Thankfully nowadays more and more people won't touch anything from Microsoft, because of their past behaviour and their corporate ethos; as a collective entity, they're sociopaths.
I don't like that he did (as far as I can tell) nothing to advance the technology, but I don't think this patent is without some [legal] merit.
Which makes this case a very good argument for dismantling the patent system as we know it. This guy has no product, and no intention of producing one; we don't need people like him in the world, and certainly don't need to encourage them.
You missed out the for me at the end of that sentence. I (and quite a few other people on this thread) have done an upgrade with zero problems, running a wide range of apps, including Adobe ones. The only problem I had was with Lightroom which has now been fixed by an update to Lightroom. I'm sorry if you have had problems, but I doubt they're as widespread as you think, or there would be uproar.
but firewall breaks all sorts of things abd is as annoying as the Vista mother-may-I prompts giving warnings even after applications have been placed on the white list,
Not here, same level of warnings as before, plus a more informative warning about apps when first launch. What all sorts of things does it break for you?
DHCP doesn't acquire addresses properly and firewall must be disabled, airport turned off then back on for it to work again.
Works for me with no such problems.
I've had 2 kernel panics in 2 days (I never experienced a kernel panic under tiger). I have also had the OS go unstable and Finder et al will crash randomly until restart. Final Cut Pro 6.0 crashes all the time doing things as simple moving the timeline. Spotlight crashes and reloads while doing searches sometimes.
No kernel panics or weird behaviour here. This sounds like a more serious problem, have you checked the memory and disk? Are you sure nothing else has changed?
Disk Utility can't repair disk permissions or recognizes them as incorrect when they are not (not sure which).
Haven't tried to repair disk permissions as I had zero problems with them.
Java is completely screwed! No java 6 yet and javascript commands in safari do bizarre things sometimes like launching outside applications such as finder instead of doing what they are intended to do within the application!
Presumably you know that javascript is nothing to do with java (I'm sure you will claim to in a reply). I think this comment and repliesbest sums up the situation with java - people are more worried by what might be than by the present situation. Frankly the stuff about javascript makes me think you don't know what you're talking about, and Java 6 should be the least of your concerns.
Apple has some serious work to do if they want to keep Leopard installed on users' machines - and they had better do it fast!
Well, it's staying on my machine, since :
All my old apps work I've had no problems Time machine is a great backup system Spotlight is faster Coverflow in the Finder is great Quicklook works a treat and saves launching apps just for a quick look at a spreadsheet etc. Safari 3 is a nice improvement on V.2 The finder is improved
The declaration of principles sets the framework for negotiations next year on a long-term bilateral relationship, including the presence of US troops and economic ties.... Correspondents say US investors benefiting from preferential treatment could earn huge profits from Iraq's vast oil reserves, causing widespread resentment among Iraqis.
Free books from gutenberg can be converted into the proper format for free by having them sent to your amazon email acct (to be uploaded by you manualy) or directly to your kindle for $0.10.
I'll wait for a reader which doesn't make me jump through hoops just to get text content onto the device thanks.
Personally, I see the logic in it -- it's the place you can always go to (start from) to perform most any action.
That's the whole problem - it tries to do everything, and has been overloaded with functions. Each part of the GUI should do one thing well, not try to collect an arbitrary selection of actions under a misleading title. That is, incidentally, the source of most of the complaints about the dock in OS X - it tries to do too many things, though it's still not an abomination like the Start menu.
And if the show you are suddenly interested in is no longer airing, and you hadn't recorded it.
Then the BBC's iPlayer will be no use to you, as it only hold shows for a limited time (presently 7 days) after they air. Which makes a mockery of the 'on-demand' part of it.
Re on-demand as opposed to DVRs, I couldn't agree more, a real on-demand service would be great - I'd be happy to pay for it.
If you want a Vista experience this applescript should do it - set it as a folder action on her Documents folder :
on adding folder items to thisFolder after receiving addedItems
repeat with anItem in addedItems
tell application "Finder"
display dialog "Are you sure you want to proceed?" buttons ["Allow", "Deny"] default button (random number (1)) + 1
end tell
end repeat end adding folder items to
Given the limitations, you'd be better off buying a DVR (really quite cheap nowadays) and just recording shows on that - at least they don't disappear after some arbitrary time limit, you can move them to your computer, and your bandwidth isn't chewed up by the P2P application. I'm disappointed the BBC has used our money to pay for such a pointless service, and on top of that it's paying a known monopolist for the privilege of serving only a proportion of the population.
They could have used this opportunity to drive the transition from TV to Internet broadcasting, but instead they're trying to make the Internet into Television. There are already many avenues for selling their content online, and they should be focussing on that, rather than trying to broadcast over the internet.
PS Re the histrionics in the article - you shouldn't expect better of a rag like the register, it's very close to the tabloids in style - not news but entertainment.
You can't be serious. Coming from Europe, I find the food, and the portions, in the US mostly disgusting. There are some nice restaurants which serve decent food, but the food that the majority of people eat (ie the food you can buy in supermarkets and many restaurants) is stuffed full of sugars and processed as far as possible, *and* it's served in huge portions. The taste is bland and sugary compared with real food, and it does you a lot of damage combined with a sedentary lifestyle, regardless of what the 'dietician' du jour is telling you.
As to the grandparent going on about 'bordering on objectively disgusting' I'm sure a lot of Spaniards would disagree, as would I. Perhaps it does appear disgusting if you've grown up on a diet of sugary water in huge portions, sugary coffee in huge portions, and fatty meat/cheese in ever larger portions. To say objectively disgusting implies that everyone agrees - perhaps they would if your audience is Americans...but for the rest of the world, I doubt it. I'd enjoy eating almost anywhere in Spain far more than eating in many restaurants in the US.
This entire article and replies is a series of excuses for being fat, which I guess is going to be popular in a country with an obesity epidemic.
The cause of obesity is a change in lifestyle/diet.
For the people of Iraq, a win would be to see the Americans and their allies leave - they're doing nothing but creating instability and turning sympathy into hatred by propping up corrupt dictators throughout the region (Pakistan, Saudi-Arabia, and in Iraq Chalibi and now Nouri al-Maliki). The US lost the peace when it installed a puppet government and disbanded the army.
For the US, the only way to 'win' now is not to play. The alternative is drawn-out civil war and eventual withdrawal when the political/economic cost becomes too high. It's too late now to flood the country with troops, and the US doesn't have the troops or money to do it in any case without a draft and austerity measures.
American prices don't usually include VAT, so you'd have to subtract that in any comparisons.
US price for Mini - $599 UK price for Mini (before VAT) - £339 = $700 (using 2 USD to 1 £) Euros price for Mini - 503 = $734
US price for Touch = $299 UK price for Touch - £169 = $350 Euros price for Touch - 251 = $367
So there's a roughly 15-20% surcharge when buying Apple products in other countries. Doesn't seem too unreasonable to me, given that Apple is a US company and may pay extra shipping/export taxes/localisation costs for each new country it ships to, each of which has a market much smaller than the US one. For an iPhone it looks like you'd be paying roughly 45 more than people in the US.
Given things like average wage, living standards etc, it's very difficult to get a good idea of how much more/less people are paying in real terms.
Honestly, using.doc makes sense. It is supported by *everything*.
If you'd ever looked inside a.doc document, you wouldn't say that. It's a horrendous format, more a memory dump than a structured document, and trying to use it as a standard for interchange/storage is just insane. Even Word can't open different versions consistently.
The only flaw in your plan is that your cosy house and internet connection etc depend on public services which would drop out during a serious epidemic. Electricity, Water and Telephone service aren't magically maintained by solar-powered robots. As you'll see in any city hit by a major emergency like flood or fire they are surprisingly delicate.
Rolling brownouts would probably start quite quickly in a place with infrastructure as strained as the US, not to mention other stuff like flooding of undermanned facilities like water processing plants and some cities, lack of refined petrol for deliveries, lack of manpower for delivery trucks, eventually looters searching for food etc. A city would be the worst place to be, particularly after a few weeks. You're dependent on too many shared services which would quickly degrade in an emergency situation, and there are millions of others who are just as needy in a very small area. The worst thing would be that entire countries would be hit, not just a small area, so the government would have a whole country to deal with all at once. Probably entire cities would be quarantined and food supplies would be scarce. Although it seems nice and logical to do distribution via the internet and couriers, internet retailers would probably be the first to go, as they're not large established businesses as yet, and thus aren't that profitable.
PS Robots don't do most of the work in the US, migrant workers do.
Vista gets bashed because they bombard the user with prompts to the extent that people turn off UAC. Similar prompts on OS X happen infrequently and thus function as a useful warning of possibly dangerous behaviour.
Fanboi IS the correct pseudospelling [whirlpool.net.au].
Using fanboy is bad enough, fanboi should be beyond the pale. It's usually a precursor to irrational rants based on an imagined foe (in this case the 'mac fanboi'). At this point I thought you'd lost all credibility.
A happy Windows user and developer, And PROUD of it!
For some reason those stats break out macintel as a separate section (bizarre), so by your own stats, OS X is at
3.23% + 3.38% = 6.61%
which is considerably up from the previous positions. The stats you link to at hitslink also show 5.07 share for Safari for the same period, which contradicts your reading :
if you look at trends for browsers or OS you'll see that OS X has been steadily gaining ground, and is in fact very close to Vista at this point in time.
And as I've said in other posts, Expose is not an ideal solution. With the taskbar I have an immediate view of all open windows, without any form of interaction. It also encourages a good computing habit in not having a lot of open Windows, since likely I don't need all the windows open.
Your fundamental problem is that OS X is not Windows. What you call a 'good computing habit' is in fact a habit picked up over years of Windows use, which you're now finding post-hoc justifications for. There's nothing wrong with leaving windows open, unless you have 256MB of RAM or something. For people who have more than 5-10 windows open at a time, the Windows solution just doesn't work (window names truncated in the task bar/dock till you don't know what they are). Exposé serves the same function, and scales to many more windows, but for whatever reason, you don't want to use it - you can set it to work on a hot corner, so you just sweep your mouse to the corner to see all your windows, or a key, which requires one key press. Hardly very onerous.
To me one key press/action to see all windows is less work than performing window housekeeping and clicking each one to close them as soon as your windows are over a certain number open. You've interlalised that behaviour though so it no longer seems to count as work. The equivalent on the mac to your Windows behaviour would be to minimise each window when you're not using it, so that you can see them all at the same time in the dock, and choose between them - perhaps that would work for you (though you only see window contents plus app badge, unless you drift the mouse over to see names). Another option is simply to click the app whose windows you want to see, and they'll come to the front.
The only thing 'long overdue' will, hopefully, be the shutting of the mouths of all the incessant whining.
Personally, I'm hoping all the apologists whining about whining will now calm down and not feel the need to jump on any criticism of Apple or the iPhone with spurious after-the-fact justifications of Apple actions. We'll never know whether Apple initially planned an SDK, however if they did it was disingenuous of Steve Jobs to claim that
You don't want your phone to be an open platform..Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.
It's great news that they've intimated they'll release an SDK next year, and I'm sure the availability of apps will spur adoption by people who owned other smart phones in the past and were attached to things like being able to transfer and read PDF files on their device (without emailing them or putting them on the web). For various reasons (which you've elaborated at length) it might have been impossible to launch it with an SDK and/or third party apps - what was possible was to tell the users and developers honestly what action was planned in the future, rather than trying to sell running web apps on the phone as a real SDK.
It still has some flaws (lack of 3G and GPS foremost), but by mid-next year this looks like it will be a great platform instead of just a phone.
About the only thing you can depend on is support for ASCII.
To follow your logic to its absurd endpoint, we should all be speaking your dialect of english, because it makes things easier, for you.
Do you really want a world where people can only check their email if they bring their own laptop?
Mainstream operating systems now support unicode fully, and allow entry of any unicode character. If your system doesn't, complain to the manufacturer - that's their problem, not ICANN's. The fact that the web was anglo-centric is an accident of history, and will soon be irrelevant, so you'd best get used to the idea.
The corollary to your argument here is the current situation :
Do you really want a world where you can only check your email by typing characters in a foreign language?
A lot of people would obviously rather not, hence this decision. Imagine for a moment if accessing your email meant tapping out 20 characters in mandarin - would you by happy with the status quo?
You knew the terms before you bought the phone. If you didn't like the terms, you should not have bought the phone. It's not all that hard.
There are those who haven't bought an iPhone or touch of course, but think it's really weak of Apple to try to restrict the use of it in this manner.
It's time for Apple to produce an SDK, or at least admit that they're working one and it will come in 1 year or so. That way they won't be hounded continually by the hackers and they won't be bricking their customers' phones or wiping apps - all people are trying to do is install their own applications on the phone - is that so much to ask? Doesn't seem to be for every other smart phone in existence. Remember they've also done this to the touch, so it's not as if they can use the excuse of trying to appease big bad AT&T.
If Apple wants to proclaim a new age of mobile phones based on real operating systems, with real 'desktop class' apps, and the real internet, they should wake up and realise the implications - the walled garden approach failed on the internet, it failed on the desktop, and it sure as hell won't last long on a phone/ipod which has a familiar OS underneath. They're fighting their own customers - that's always a losing proposition. Whether their terms are legal or not, moral or not, or even justifiable, isn't really the question. The question is how long will Apple continue trying to lock things down before they realise they just can't win this battle. The longer they struggle, the more bad press they get.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't ascribe the efforts of all the very talented lower-down people there to malice, but it is run by malicious thugs, and the tone is set by them. The kind that say 'a vig on every transaction', 'cut off the oxygen supply of netscape' etc etc. (Google it, or have a read of Broken Windows (I have no connection to author) ).
And if they start a FUD campaign, buy up all the backers of the open-source standard like Novell, and change their standard to make it impossible to interoperate?
I'm aware of that, but it's deliberately crippled compared to the Windows version, and a few years behind in releases. It's really not very pleasant to use it right now. I don't think it's even a universal binary.
At the time of its launch (like some Windows versions of Internet Explorer) it was the best browser available on the mac. It was then left in limbo for years and finally axed completely. The reason for this is clear - to kill the web. The hubris of trying to do that is incredible, but they also did it with Active-X, and are now hoping to do the same with Silverlight and XAML, which are clearly positioned to co-opt the web, then turn it into a Windows only standard, or at least a 'Windows for the best experience' standard.
Why don't you google it then. They tried to kill their own partner's product while they were shipping it by shipping an incompatible version. When the stated intention of higher ups in a company is to 'kill' standards and even entire systems, I don't want to do business with them.
I agree, however the strengths of the web (works the same everywhere) mean it will never rival desktop applications for everything, nor should it try to. There's a lot of things that could improve, but it'll never look/behave like desktop apps *because* it's cross platform, and is running in a sandbox. If you abstract it away using a library, it's not too painful developing with javascript (it can be a lot prettier than you think, have a look at prototype.js for example), though I'd love to use something else, and their are a lot of DOM handling problems in different browsers (mostly Internet Explorer for Windows, funny that). Given Microsoft's past behaviour and stated intentions in things like the Halloween documents I am not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - the most insidious thing about them is that most people don't appear to understand their history or motivations.
Really? How about :
Security? - Though now much improved
Cost? - Not at all improved
Avoiding being screwed over by your technology partner? - Never likely to improve
The funny thing is that MS have somehow sold you the proposition that it's all or nothing - you must 'standardize' on MS. The reason you think this is you've only ever used the stuff they produce, which doesn't play well with any other system, thus in your mind QED. It's an interesting slight of hand and has served them well. Most other systems (Unix/Linux, OS X) play well with others, including Windows, in spite of the obstacles set up by MS. As to convincing prospective clients, if they really can't see that sometimes Microsoft products are not the answer to everything, I really wouldn't want the pain of having them as a client. I doubt many clients are so hide-bound and inflexible though, most just want the job done with the most suitable tools.
Silverlight is not just a competitor to Flash, it's yet another attempt to kill the web as a competitor to desktop apps - really it's a competitor to DHTML. I'm unhappy they've released it cross platform, because it'll be supported well everywhere at first (enough to kill the competition), and then deprecated, and then dropped, like IE, Mac Office, Java and countless other techs. Hell, they even left IE to fester on their own platform for several years with no updates, just to slow the inevitable appearance of interactive web apps. Amazingly, people like yourself are actually falling for it once again. It's as open as it needs to be to gain traction, no more.
Thankfully nowadays more and more people won't touch anything from Microsoft, because of their past behaviour and their corporate ethos; as a collective entity, they're sociopaths.
Which makes this case a very good argument for dismantling the patent system as we know it. This guy has no product, and no intention of producing one; we don't need people like him in the world, and certainly don't need to encourage them.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
Lose has one 'o'
http://www.pgdp.net/c/
You missed out the for me at the end of that sentence. I (and quite a few other people on this thread) have done an upgrade with zero problems, running a wide range of apps, including Adobe ones. The only problem I had was with Lightroom which has now been fixed by an update to Lightroom. I'm sorry if you have had problems, but I doubt they're as widespread as you think, or there would be uproar.
Not here, same level of warnings as before, plus a more informative warning about apps when first launch. What all sorts of things does it break for you?
Works for me with no such problems.
No kernel panics or weird behaviour here. This sounds like a more serious problem, have you checked the memory and disk? Are you sure nothing else has changed?
Haven't tried to repair disk permissions as I had zero problems with them.
Presumably you know that javascript is nothing to do with java (I'm sure you will claim to in a reply). I think this comment and replies best sums up the situation with java - people are more worried by what might be than by the present situation. Frankly the stuff about javascript makes me think you don't know what you're talking about, and Java 6 should be the least of your concerns.
Well, it's staying on my machine, since :
All my old apps work
I've had no problems
Time machine is a great backup system
Spotlight is faster
Coverflow in the Finder is great
Quicklook works a treat and saves launching apps just for a quick look at a spreadsheet etc.
Safari 3 is a nice improvement on V.2
The finder is improved
Those are the reasons off the top of my head.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7115131.stm
I'll wait for a reader which doesn't make me jump through hoops just to get text content onto the device thanks.
That's the whole problem - it tries to do everything, and has been overloaded with functions. Each part of the GUI should do one thing well, not try to collect an arbitrary selection of actions under a misleading title. That is, incidentally, the source of most of the complaints about the dock in OS X - it tries to do too many things, though it's still not an abomination like the Start menu.
Then the BBC's iPlayer will be no use to you, as it only hold shows for a limited time (presently 7 days) after they air. Which makes a mockery of the 'on-demand' part of it.
Re on-demand as opposed to DVRs, I couldn't agree more, a real on-demand service would be great - I'd be happy to pay for it.
If you want a Vista experience this applescript should do it - set it as a folder action on her Documents folder :
on adding folder items to thisFolder after receiving addedItems
repeat with anItem in addedItems
tell application "Finder"
display dialog "Are you sure you want to proceed?" buttons ["Allow", "Deny"] default button (random number (1)) + 1
end tell
end repeat
end adding folder items to
Given the limitations, you'd be better off buying a DVR (really quite cheap nowadays) and just recording shows on that - at least they don't disappear after some arbitrary time limit, you can move them to your computer, and your bandwidth isn't chewed up by the P2P application. I'm disappointed the BBC has used our money to pay for such a pointless service, and on top of that it's paying a known monopolist for the privilege of serving only a proportion of the population.
They could have used this opportunity to drive the transition from TV to Internet broadcasting, but instead they're trying to make the Internet into Television. There are already many avenues for selling their content online, and they should be focussing on that, rather than trying to broadcast over the internet.
PS Re the histrionics in the article - you shouldn't expect better of a rag like the register, it's very close to the tabloids in style - not news but entertainment.
You can't be serious. Coming from Europe, I find the food, and the portions, in the US mostly disgusting. There are some nice restaurants which serve decent food, but the food that the majority of people eat (ie the food you can buy in supermarkets and many restaurants) is stuffed full of sugars and processed as far as possible, *and* it's served in huge portions. The taste is bland and sugary compared with real food, and it does you a lot of damage combined with a sedentary lifestyle, regardless of what the 'dietician' du jour is telling you.
As to the grandparent going on about 'bordering on objectively disgusting' I'm sure a lot of Spaniards would disagree, as would I. Perhaps it does appear disgusting if you've grown up on a diet of sugary water in huge portions, sugary coffee in huge portions, and fatty meat/cheese in ever larger portions. To say objectively disgusting implies that everyone agrees - perhaps they would if your audience is Americans...but for the rest of the world, I doubt it. I'd enjoy eating almost anywhere in Spain far more than eating in many restaurants in the US.
This entire article and replies is a series of excuses for being fat, which I guess is going to be popular in a country with an obesity epidemic.
The cause of obesity is a change in lifestyle/diet.
The reason they rolled it out was to kill the web. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Define win.
For the people of Iraq, a win would be to see the Americans and their allies leave - they're doing nothing but creating instability and turning sympathy into hatred by propping up corrupt dictators throughout the region (Pakistan, Saudi-Arabia, and in Iraq Chalibi and now Nouri al-Maliki). The US lost the peace when it installed a puppet government and disbanded the army.
For the US, the only way to 'win' now is not to play. The alternative is drawn-out civil war and eventual withdrawal when the political/economic cost becomes too high. It's too late now to flood the country with troops, and the US doesn't have the troops or money to do it in any case without a draft and austerity measures.
American prices don't usually include VAT, so you'd have to subtract that in any comparisons.
US price for Mini - $599
UK price for Mini (before VAT) - £339 = $700 (using 2 USD to 1 £)
Euros price for Mini - 503 = $734
US price for Touch = $299
UK price for Touch - £169 = $350
Euros price for Touch - 251 = $367
So there's a roughly 15-20% surcharge when buying Apple products in other countries. Doesn't seem too unreasonable to me, given that Apple is a US company and may pay extra shipping/export taxes/localisation costs for each new country it ships to, each of which has a market much smaller than the US one. For an iPhone it looks like you'd be paying roughly 45 more than people in the US.
Given things like average wage, living standards etc, it's very difficult to get a good idea of how much more/less people are paying in real terms.
I would have thought this was fairly self-explanatory.
If you'd ever looked inside a
The only flaw in your plan is that your cosy house and internet connection etc depend on public services which would drop out during a serious epidemic. Electricity, Water and Telephone service aren't magically maintained by solar-powered robots. As you'll see in any city hit by a major emergency like flood or fire they are surprisingly delicate.
Rolling brownouts would probably start quite quickly in a place with infrastructure as strained as the US, not to mention other stuff like flooding of undermanned facilities like water processing plants and some cities, lack of refined petrol for deliveries, lack of manpower for delivery trucks, eventually looters searching for food etc. A city would be the worst place to be, particularly after a few weeks. You're dependent on too many shared services which would quickly degrade in an emergency situation, and there are millions of others who are just as needy in a very small area. The worst thing would be that entire countries would be hit, not just a small area, so the government would have a whole country to deal with all at once. Probably entire cities would be quarantined and food supplies would be scarce. Although it seems nice and logical to do distribution via the internet and couriers, internet retailers would probably be the first to go, as they're not large established businesses as yet, and thus aren't that profitable.
PS Robots don't do most of the work in the US, migrant workers do.
Using fanboy is bad enough, fanboi should be beyond the pale. It's usually a precursor to irrational rants based on an imagined foe (in this case the 'mac fanboi'). At this point I thought you'd lost all credibility.
Then I realised you had farther to fall.
For some reason those stats break out macintel as a separate section (bizarre), so by your own stats, OS X is at
3.23% + 3.38% = 6.61%
which is considerably up from the previous positions. The stats you link to at hitslink also show 5.07 share for Safari for the same period, which contradicts your reading :
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0
if you look at trends for browsers or OS you'll see that OS X has been steadily gaining ground, and is in fact very close to Vista at this point in time.
Your fundamental problem is that OS X is not Windows. What you call a 'good computing habit' is in fact a habit picked up over years of Windows use, which you're now finding post-hoc justifications for. There's nothing wrong with leaving windows open, unless you have 256MB of RAM or something. For people who have more than 5-10 windows open at a time, the Windows solution just doesn't work (window names truncated in the task bar/dock till you don't know what they are). Exposé serves the same function, and scales to many more windows, but for whatever reason, you don't want to use it - you can set it to work on a hot corner, so you just sweep your mouse to the corner to see all your windows, or a key, which requires one key press. Hardly very onerous.
To me one key press/action to see all windows is less work than performing window housekeeping and clicking each one to close them as soon as your windows are over a certain number open. You've interlalised that behaviour though so it no longer seems to count as work. The equivalent on the mac to your Windows behaviour would be to minimise each window when you're not using it, so that you can see them all at the same time in the dock, and choose between them - perhaps that would work for you (though you only see window contents plus app badge, unless you drift the mouse over to see names). Another option is simply to click the app whose windows you want to see, and they'll come to the front.
Personally, I'm hoping all the apologists whining about whining will now calm down and not feel the need to jump on any criticism of Apple or the iPhone with spurious after-the-fact justifications of Apple actions. We'll never know whether Apple initially planned an SDK, however if they did it was disingenuous of Steve Jobs to claim that
It's great news that they've intimated they'll release an SDK next year, and I'm sure the availability of apps will spur adoption by people who owned other smart phones in the past and were attached to things like being able to transfer and read PDF files on their device (without emailing them or putting them on the web). For various reasons (which you've elaborated at length) it might have been impossible to launch it with an SDK and/or third party apps - what was possible was to tell the users and developers honestly what action was planned in the future, rather than trying to sell running web apps on the phone as a real SDK.
It still has some flaws (lack of 3G and GPS foremost), but by mid-next year this looks like it will be a great platform instead of just a phone.
To follow your logic to its absurd endpoint, we should all be speaking your dialect of english, because it makes things easier, for you.
Mainstream operating systems now support unicode fully, and allow entry of any unicode character. If your system doesn't, complain to the manufacturer - that's their problem, not ICANN's. The fact that the web was anglo-centric is an accident of history, and will soon be irrelevant, so you'd best get used to the idea.
The corollary to your argument here is the current situation :
Do you really want a world where you can only check your email by typing characters in a foreign language?
A lot of people would obviously rather not, hence this decision. Imagine for a moment if accessing your email meant tapping out 20 characters in mandarin - would you by happy with the status quo?
There are those who haven't bought an iPhone or touch of course, but think it's really weak of Apple to try to restrict the use of it in this manner.
It's time for Apple to produce an SDK, or at least admit that they're working one and it will come in 1 year or so. That way they won't be hounded continually by the hackers and they won't be bricking their customers' phones or wiping apps - all people are trying to do is install their own applications on the phone - is that so much to ask? Doesn't seem to be for every other smart phone in existence. Remember they've also done this to the touch, so it's not as if they can use the excuse of trying to appease big bad AT&T.
If Apple wants to proclaim a new age of mobile phones based on real operating systems, with real 'desktop class' apps, and the real internet, they should wake up and realise the implications - the walled garden approach failed on the internet, it failed on the desktop, and it sure as hell won't last long on a phone/ipod which has a familiar OS underneath. They're fighting their own customers - that's always a losing proposition. Whether their terms are legal or not, moral or not, or even justifiable, isn't really the question. The question is how long will Apple continue trying to lock things down before they realise they just can't win this battle. The longer they struggle, the more bad press they get.