That's a stretch. If Apple continues their bad programming on the PC side, they'll have a hard time convincing people to switch to Apple. I've heard from at least a dozen people that iTunes sucks and Quicktime is evil and if those basic things suck so badly, why would they want to switch to a Mac? Granted, Mac products on a Mac are pretty sweet, but Mac apps on the PC are pretty awful...EVEN when I find most apps on a PC pretty awful, Apple REALLY stinks them up (as if they just make them as an afterthought, which is very un-Apple).
I think what he is saying is that OSX has a built in download manager, regardless of browser, so the user indeed DOES have to authorize downloads. If an OSX user gets carpet bombed, it's because they said "ok" at some point. You haven't been dumbed. You should try to be less snarky if you want people to take you more seriously. And try some capital letters while you are at it;-)
Nah, it's ok to like it for whatever reason. It's just hard to find people who are willing to admit it. I find more people who "like" something about WinXP because that's the way Windows has conditioned them to think and people have come to expect buggy, awkward, strange behavior in their MS OSes. To me, most everything is relative, and in that world-view, XP is deeply flawed (OSX 5, as you mentioned setting the bar too high for Microsoft).
Everyone in college should know how to do simple Word tasks. Or to model things in their field of study using PowerPoint.
Fixed that for ya. As much as I hate the concept, it is reality. 95% of the world expects employees to understand basic word processing and PowerPoint. While the slashdot crowd would expect more, most of the world isn't on slashdot.
I already have a literature degree and I took zero writing classes in college. What I meant was that you don't have to take classes in Writing to be able to write well enough for college level Literature classes. I assume the same applies for programming and science. I see a lot of other posts stating the same (i.e., learn programming in High School, don't waste time on it in college).
Just as writing isn't a requirement for a literature degree, programming doesn't need to be a requirement for a degree in science. Sounds like wishful thinking on The Nerd's part.
Thanks, but your post isn't helpful. I've been using Macs since the 80s and have been in a Mac dominated industry (Education and Interactive Multimedia Instruction) and have yet to encounter an all-Mac shop, other than some print shops back in the early 90s and a couple of law firms. I find it intriguing that run-of-the-mill cubicle-farm companies would start being all-Mac shops.
who knows why Apple managed to make it. Could it be that their product actually was good enough to last them through? Certainly the Apple fans were no less devoted than Amiga fans. The main reason Apple made it was because the Microsoft Office suite was available in its best forms on the Mac first. The second reason is that the Mac was a professional tool with about 99% penetration into the desktop publishing market (which was revolutionized by the Mac).
I had a couple of Commodores and an Atari 800. They failed because all we ever did with them was play Ultima. Jobs was right at one point about games (but really wrong 10 years later).
When Win95 launched, everyone was excited, the cheap PC Platform got a lot of expensive Mac/Amiga capabilities. Excellent post, but I have to take exception to this bit. I find it funny that people with XP are just starting to do things that I was doing in the early 1990s with Mac OS--as if editing video and doing complex desktop publishing/typography/image editing were only brought to the masses as recently as 2003! I just fired up some old files that I did for Bill Clinton when he ran for President in the Democratic primaries. Man, there's no way that a nationwide logo could have been created on a PC by a 20 year-old college kid in about 20 minutes back then. Luckily my ad agency was loaded with Mac IIfxes and I was able to crank out that Clinton logo in no time flat! (disclaimer: to this day, I've still never created anything professional enough to be used on a national stage, let alone used for the Presidential nominee of the Democratic party!)
The sad thing is that there is a company, Apple, which is horribly evil, which is evil in a way Microsoft only wishes it could be, yet it gets away with it and is universally adored by Slashdotters because it's cute. ...adored by many Slashdotters because it works well. WTF does the word cute have to do with computing?
Windows XP is/was nice... but it wasnt really an exciting achievement, I mean it could be said that XP is just an advanced Windows 95... Actually, I'd say WinXP is what Win95 should have been. Too bad it took them so long to get it (almost) right. WinXP is especially triumphant if you consider it is bogged down with legacy restrictions at nearly every aspect of the OS.
I include Mac, since they drastically lost market share afterwards Simply not true. Macs 'enjoyed' roughly the same market share (around 5%) from the early 90s all the way until their recent increases (no doubt due to the same reasons they never were mainstream in the 90s...Intel architecture).
A lot of people and a lot of companies like it./quote>
It's hard to find somebody who actually "likes" WinXP (more like tolerates it) and companies only like it because it makes them money (nothing wrong with that, btw).
Just curious, what's with the recent spate of "I work in a place with all Macs". Are they really sinking their teeth in that successfully, or is there some strange slashdot causation/correlation thing going on?
He already had the Office suite monopoly going for him long before the Win95 monopoly began. To be fair, though, the Office suite was pretty, err, sweet back in the day--especially the early stuff for Mac OS. I remember the day I shut down Lotus 1-2-3 for good and invested a good, what would be approximately a 20-year exercise in MS Excel. Too bad PowerPoint has always sucked big ones, and Word has grown from excellent to barely usable over the years.
In typical fashion, Microsoft is late to the party. By the time this becomes a reality in the Windows world, Apple will have already moved on to the next "thing". Why should I get excited about this tech, when it's already available in Apple variants? Why even get excited about the tech as it applies to a DESKTOP operating system? Touch is great on the iPhone, good on the Mac laptops (because it has a logical touch surface called the track pad) and seems pretty useless for a desktop monitor.
(We got the Z for $26k new, so it's not exactly expensive, and it will run circles around a speed3 in terms of speed, acceleration, and handling, which I've driven at a zoom-zoom event. But I guess if you're on a strict and low budget, you could do worse.) I sense a bit of understanding on your behalf (finally). I guess we'll have to disagree about running circles, since 2-tenths of a second are miniscule measurements and hardly qualify as a stomping. As for low budget, I am not. I just couldn't JUSTIFY the expense of more desirous cars, such as the G37, BMW1, BMW3 and Porsche Boxster, the other serious contenders for my cash (still probably going to buy a 1-series though and give the MS3 to my wife).
Are you starting to understand that the "subjective reviews" you complained that CR doesn't give aren't quite as useful or desirable as you thought they would be No, I'm not. Quite the opposite actually. I'm not sure what I said that would make you think otherwise. I suppose you are saying that CR's subjective reviews don't jive with my subjective reviews, so therefore I reject CR, which isn't true. What I AM saying is that CRs subjective reviews are so far removed from the desires of car enthusiasts and from what the major auto-journals are saying, that they are practically useless and CRs value is limited to red/black bubbles for vehicle reliability and the occasional blurb about how many cupholders and infant seats a vehicle has, or how round the door frame is (to avoid injury while entering the car...WTF? Who buys a car based on THAT?).
Now I'll take another stab. My Mazda runs circles around your GT3. To prove it, we'll have to exchange cars for the weekend;-)
Now you are just showing how much of a car-guy you aren't. Start with the simple things, like 0-60 (Z: 5.2, MS3: 5.4). As much as I dislike objective measurements, the reality remains that the Z is not as much of a sports car as it wishes it were and the MS3 is much more of one than most people think. Track times support my claim as well. Granted, the Z is slightly better in pure performance, as to be expected from a sports car and its price tag, but a couple tenths here and there are nothing to write home about, nor does that fully denounce my MS3 as being non-car-guy territory. Point me to a car-guy that can think of a better recommendation for a sporty car under $23,000 than an MS3 and I'll buy your dismissive attitude.
oh yeah, and CR DOES take the cost of parts into account when rating reliability. If a Ford Escort has a brake failure three times in 5 years, and each event costs the owner $25, then that trumps the one failure/$350 repair event for a BMW (which is completely unfair to BMW, considering there is lost time from work, car-in-the-shop, general pain-in-the-ass of dealing with garages to take into account, that may or may not have objective monetary value associated with them. In that vein, pretty much any BMW dealer gives you a free loaner car, whereas you 'might' be able to 'borrow' one from a Toyota dealership, with a "small fee"). Methinks you don't readeth the entire CR philosophy and are just looking at the little black and red bubbles.
You mean my Japanese econobox that equals, or betters your 350ZX in nearly every performance measurement, that equals the fit-and-finish, and has a better Consumer Reports repair history, and seats five adults?;-) Horses for courses, or some silly cliche.
I find it blasphemous that a Porsche driver would ever poo-poo a BMW. Having lived in Zuffenhausen Germany, I just can't fathom it. Maybe you can poo-poo Audi or Volkswagen, but come on, BMW??? Lame.
The Ford Contour SVT is possibly the best US Ford product made (from an enthusiast point-of-view) with its heritage stemming first from Ford UK. Contours suck. SVTs don't. Car guys know that...well, car guys that don't drive $106,000 Porsche's that is. By the way, my 1999 Contour SVT (105,000 miles) is for sale in Austin, TX if anyone is interested. Asking $3500.
Nice Porsche you have, btw. Too bad you diminish those of us who can't afford super-cars as not being car-guys as well. Diminishing a Mazdaspeed3 to a Japanese econobox demonstrates you are neither up on the literature, nor a true car-guy. For the record, the BMW1 that I wanted runs circles around your 350zx (as already established in your Z barely keeping up with my econobox). Back to you, sire...
Oh, the other thing I wanted to respond to....ALL car magazines take ad money from ALL manufacturers, yet not everyone can win the top awards. Therefore, the tinfoil hat theory of Automotive-Journals-are-Inherently-Biased holds no water with me.
As a fan, I can tell you the overt biases that the major pubs carry. The entire culture of a pub is established by the editors' articles. Car and Driver favors the purist/enthusiast elements of cars, without regard for non-car-guy features, such as child booster seats and cupholder efficiency. Road and Track is for old farts who like to putz around in cushy Buicks. Motortrend is the most overtly biased ad-based pub, with their consistent support of Detroit "big iron", even in the face of empirical evidence that US Automakers aren't quite as good as MT thinks they might be. Automobile tends to stress the industrial-design and engineering whiz-bang features, the sort of OSX crowd of auto mags.
LIke the other guy said, a healthy dose of objective CR reviews, mixed with a nice subjective read of Car and Driver AND a test drive is the best. Unfortunately, I know far too many people who just look up the top car on the CR list and go buy it. Good for them. I hope they enjoy their boring car. A car is a huge investment btw, so might as well be something you enjoy. You'll spend tons of time in it stuck in traffic or just hitting the highways, so you might as well spend money on something you can live with on a subjective level, versus the little bubble-meters that CR gives you.
So you can listen to it online as much as you want for $0.10, you just can't take it with you. As long as you don't lose power, or your browser doesn't crash. I can't see this being good for anything at all; this isn't even good for party mixes.
The only irony I would see is if the nerd couldn't do math. It's a no-brainer that nerds suck at right-brain activities such as writing creatively (and the not-so-creative way of writing with correct spelling). There's a reason I work with Tech Writers and Programmers. Tech Writers are the great translators of the world--making technical nonsense mean something to normal folk;-)
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That's a stretch. If Apple continues their bad programming on the PC side, they'll have a hard time convincing people to switch to Apple. I've heard from at least a dozen people that iTunes sucks and Quicktime is evil and if those basic things suck so badly, why would they want to switch to a Mac? Granted, Mac products on a Mac are pretty sweet, but Mac apps on the PC are pretty awful...EVEN when I find most apps on a PC pretty awful, Apple REALLY stinks them up (as if they just make them as an afterthought, which is very un-Apple).
I think what he is saying is that OSX has a built in download manager, regardless of browser, so the user indeed DOES have to authorize downloads. If an OSX user gets carpet bombed, it's because they said "ok" at some point. You haven't been dumbed. You should try to be less snarky if you want people to take you more seriously. And try some capital letters while you are at it ;-)
Nah, it's ok to like it for whatever reason. It's just hard to find people who are willing to admit it. I find more people who "like" something about WinXP because that's the way Windows has conditioned them to think and people have come to expect buggy, awkward, strange behavior in their MS OSes. To me, most everything is relative, and in that world-view, XP is deeply flawed (OSX 5, as you mentioned setting the bar too high for Microsoft).
Fixed that for ya. As much as I hate the concept, it is reality. 95% of the world expects employees to understand basic word processing and PowerPoint. While the slashdot crowd would expect more, most of the world isn't on slashdot.
I already have a literature degree and I took zero writing classes in college. What I meant was that you don't have to take classes in Writing to be able to write well enough for college level Literature classes. I assume the same applies for programming and science. I see a lot of other posts stating the same (i.e., learn programming in High School, don't waste time on it in college).
Just as writing isn't a requirement for a literature degree, programming doesn't need to be a requirement for a degree in science. Sounds like wishful thinking on The Nerd's part.
Thanks, but your post isn't helpful. I've been using Macs since the 80s and have been in a Mac dominated industry (Education and Interactive Multimedia Instruction) and have yet to encounter an all-Mac shop, other than some print shops back in the early 90s and a couple of law firms. I find it intriguing that run-of-the-mill cubicle-farm companies would start being all-Mac shops.
I'm guessing you replied to the wrong post?
I had a couple of Commodores and an Atari 800. They failed because all we ever did with them was play Ultima. Jobs was right at one point about games (but really wrong 10 years later).
Just curious, what's with the recent spate of "I work in a place with all Macs". Are they really sinking their teeth in that successfully, or is there some strange slashdot causation/correlation thing going on?
He already had the Office suite monopoly going for him long before the Win95 monopoly began. To be fair, though, the Office suite was pretty, err, sweet back in the day--especially the early stuff for Mac OS. I remember the day I shut down Lotus 1-2-3 for good and invested a good, what would be approximately a 20-year exercise in MS Excel. Too bad PowerPoint has always sucked big ones, and Word has grown from excellent to barely usable over the years.
In typical fashion, Microsoft is late to the party. By the time this becomes a reality in the Windows world, Apple will have already moved on to the next "thing". Why should I get excited about this tech, when it's already available in Apple variants? Why even get excited about the tech as it applies to a DESKTOP operating system? Touch is great on the iPhone, good on the Mac laptops (because it has a logical touch surface called the track pad) and seems pretty useless for a desktop monitor.
Now I'll take another stab. My Mazda runs circles around your GT3. To prove it, we'll have to exchange cars for the weekend ;-)
Now you are just showing how much of a car-guy you aren't. Start with the simple things, like 0-60 (Z: 5.2, MS3: 5.4). As much as I dislike objective measurements, the reality remains that the Z is not as much of a sports car as it wishes it were and the MS3 is much more of one than most people think. Track times support my claim as well. Granted, the Z is slightly better in pure performance, as to be expected from a sports car and its price tag, but a couple tenths here and there are nothing to write home about, nor does that fully denounce my MS3 as being non-car-guy territory. Point me to a car-guy that can think of a better recommendation for a sporty car under $23,000 than an MS3 and I'll buy your dismissive attitude.
oh yeah, and CR DOES take the cost of parts into account when rating reliability. If a Ford Escort has a brake failure three times in 5 years, and each event costs the owner $25, then that trumps the one failure/$350 repair event for a BMW (which is completely unfair to BMW, considering there is lost time from work, car-in-the-shop, general pain-in-the-ass of dealing with garages to take into account, that may or may not have objective monetary value associated with them. In that vein, pretty much any BMW dealer gives you a free loaner car, whereas you 'might' be able to 'borrow' one from a Toyota dealership, with a "small fee"). Methinks you don't readeth the entire CR philosophy and are just looking at the little black and red bubbles.
I find it blasphemous that a Porsche driver would ever poo-poo a BMW. Having lived in Zuffenhausen Germany, I just can't fathom it. Maybe you can poo-poo Audi or Volkswagen, but come on, BMW??? Lame.
The Ford Contour SVT is possibly the best US Ford product made (from an enthusiast point-of-view) with its heritage stemming first from Ford UK. Contours suck. SVTs don't. Car guys know that...well, car guys that don't drive $106,000 Porsche's that is. By the way, my 1999 Contour SVT (105,000 miles) is for sale in Austin, TX if anyone is interested. Asking $3500.
Nice Porsche you have, btw. Too bad you diminish those of us who can't afford super-cars as not being car-guys as well. Diminishing a Mazdaspeed3 to a Japanese econobox demonstrates you are neither up on the literature, nor a true car-guy. For the record, the BMW1 that I wanted runs circles around your 350zx (as already established in your Z barely keeping up with my econobox). Back to you, sire...
As a fan, I can tell you the overt biases that the major pubs carry. The entire culture of a pub is established by the editors' articles. Car and Driver favors the purist/enthusiast elements of cars, without regard for non-car-guy features, such as child booster seats and cupholder efficiency. Road and Track is for old farts who like to putz around in cushy Buicks. Motortrend is the most overtly biased ad-based pub, with their consistent support of Detroit "big iron", even in the face of empirical evidence that US Automakers aren't quite as good as MT thinks they might be. Automobile tends to stress the industrial-design and engineering whiz-bang features, the sort of OSX crowd of auto mags.
LIke the other guy said, a healthy dose of objective CR reviews, mixed with a nice subjective read of Car and Driver AND a test drive is the best. Unfortunately, I know far too many people who just look up the top car on the CR list and go buy it. Good for them. I hope they enjoy their boring car. A car is a huge investment btw, so might as well be something you enjoy. You'll spend tons of time in it stuck in traffic or just hitting the highways, so you might as well spend money on something you can live with on a subjective level, versus the little bubble-meters that CR gives you.
The only irony I would see is if the nerd couldn't do math. It's a no-brainer that nerds suck at right-brain activities such as writing creatively (and the not-so-creative way of writing with correct spelling). There's a reason I work with Tech Writers and Programmers. Tech Writers are the great translators of the world--making technical nonsense mean something to normal folk ;-)