See, this is the fundamental problem. Everyone wants to make the killer convergence device, but they run out of space.
First we had the cellphone. In terms of functionality, it's about as good as it's going to get. You can make calls, receive calls, and even read/compose SMS messages, if that's your thing.
Then we tacked on the PDA. Now all the wireless data makes sense. I can get my email, check my stocks, and even type quickly, if you have a decent thumbboard.
While we're at it, let's tack on voice memos, since it already has a microphone. Then, let's throw in a camera. Great!
Now I have a device with a crappy camera, an anemic amount of built in storage, and limited expandability, since the space which might normally go to a second flash memory slot is taken up by the cellular radio.
You can't kill the digital camera without having a GOOD digital camera in your phone. And not just on raw megapixels. You need good optics, a decent optical zoom, and a decent interface. A flash becomes pretty important, and that just eats up battery life.
You can't kill the music player without having as much space as the dedicated models. Now we need more power for a 20GB (or greater) hard drive.
You can't kill the video player for the same reasons, only with more storage space.
You can't kill the game system without decent gaming hardware. Now you need a fairly power-hungry CPU, a 3D chipset, plus an MPEG decoder for video and audio, a large backlit color touchscreen, since that's what the convergence people want, and a system that won't crash when it's playing a movie, a song, or a game, and you get a call.
And it has to sync up with a PC, I'm sure. Bluetooth? Wireless USB? Wi-Fi and VoIP support?
How much crap do you have to shove into a handheld device the size of the iPod in order to win? And once you do, how long will it last between charges? And even then, who's going to buy it?
The iPod's spread across a wide range, from $100 up. $200 gets you an iPod mini, your fairly standard cellphone, now with color screen and camera, comes for free with a new contract, and you don't have to move your music around when you replace your phone. I wouldn't say that it's perfect, and I would love some kind of magical tiny convergence device which does the job of my game system, smartphone, iPod, and camera, but the dedicated device approach is far less catastrophic when things break, and far less problematic when you have one function stepping over the other. (If I were to play a game, listen to music, and then get a call on my smartphone, I'm not sure I would trust the whole thing to stay running.)
But hey, if Bill thinks that his people can make a cellphone that doesn't suck when pulling double-duty as a media player, and make it all cost less than a phone and an iPod of a similar capacity, more power to him.
He's moving, though. Just schedule it for the day before the move, hand him the boxes of crap, and send him on his way. That way, the creepy crankhead will kill the NEXT couple to move in.
You had me there for a while, but I have to argue for testing the design.
Any intelligent engineer submits a design, and it *does* get tested. How easily can it break? What are its weak points? Does it function according to its original design?
Now, can we improve upon that? What if I introduce a random mutation on this chromosome? (Oh, look, this guy's now HIV-resistant. What luck!)
It could be argued that we're not entirely intelligently designed, but subtly modified in each successive release, with the hopes of ultimately reaching a superior design.
Of course, humans aren't perfectly flexible across their environment. Some people need darker skin than others due to their exposure to sunlight, others need lighter skin. Some need resistance to malaria, some need a lower incidence of sickle cell anemia.
Engineers make mistakes. Why wouldn't our designer?
(All that said, I believe in evolution, entropy, and the Big Bang, but anything prior to that could just be elephants all the way down until science proves otherwise.)
The analogy holds, as it's referring to the nature of the crook, not the violation itself. I think we're all aware that it's not stealing, though it *is* a copyright violation. Different laws, different issues, but in the end, a crook following a pattern, be it in violation of criminal or civil law, is going to raise a flag when the pattern reasserts itself.
I wouldn't use it on a day-to-day basis, but when I travel, it's all I need. I get about 2 days worth of usage on my Treo 600, so plugging it into a USB port at the end of the day means that I wake up in the morning with a fully charged phone as well as a fully charged laptop.
It's also good to top off the phone if you forget to charge it, which I've been known to do every so often. Sure, it's not ideal, and if you've got a dead phone, it's the crappiest charging solution you can come up with, but most of the time, it's very convenient, and that more than makes up for trickle charge.
Dear God, have you *seen* the original series? It's embarrassing. From Prime's complete lack of sense and Megatron's less-than-brilliant schemes to placing Spike's brain in some hodgepodge spare-parts Autobot body.
Wait, what about the doppleganger Prime? Even though he screws up everyone's names, can't operate Teletran-1, and otherwise just acts strangely, what's the brilliant solution to find out which one is the real Prime? Let's have a race!
If that hasn't convinced you of the sheer idiocy of the original series, I have three words for you. Big. Blue. Griffin.
The modern stuff isn't any better. You want a solid story, vaguely mature sci-fi, and a mostly serious take on Transformers? Try Beast Wars. Everything before and after that is pure kidvid junk.
Yeah... to be fair, it's only masked out on the Sprint ROM, and when it's running, it's a little flaky.
If it handled disconnects and general stupid user faults, I'd be more upset at Sprint and Cingular, but to be honest, the 650's BT DUN implementation is craptacular.
(This doesn't excuse Verizon's dickery with OBEX on *other* phones, of course. They can burn for that one.)
The Treo 600 doesn't *have* Bluetooth, and Verizon hasn't adopted the Treo 650 yet.
(Will they block OBEX on the 650? Possibly. There's no way of knowing.)
Re:Maybe im crazy too, but I loved that quote
on
PSP Launch Coverage
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· Score: 1
Nintendo didn't really do anything to destroy the other handhelds, though.
The other handhelds lost on battery life, size and weight. Sure, gamers wanted a color handheld, but when one came out, they didn't bite. Nintendo's strategy is to release that kind of technology when it's ready.
For portables, battery life is king, with portability not far behind. Everything else is just gravy.
It's not that sick when you think about the costs of looking everything up, verifying that the applicant deserves the rights to the trademark, and then clearing up any confusion.
We're either talking about lots of taxpayer dollars going into this research for the benefit of the small businessman/artist *and* the large corporation, or much higher trademark application fees, to the detriment of the large corporation and the small businessman/artist.
Or, you can hope that no one's going to be a slimeball, approve everything which passes a basic check, and if that's not enough, then yes, resort to court battles.
Yes, it's trivial for a large company to start threatening to file suit, and the smaller groups, like the MAME developers, will have a hard time paying for their legal defense, except that there are lawyers out there who will happily take their case, pro bono, and file a countersuit (on a contingency basis) if the outcome is so plainly in their favor.
Big company loses, small company wins, countersues and wins damages for barratry as well as trademark infringment, gets the bullies' trademarks withdrawn, and all is well, all without pillaging the small companies' pockets or wasting taxpayer dollars on a system which will more often help the guys who we're currently rallying against.
In short, to avoid these troubles, anyone filing for a patent, trademark, or registering a copyright would do well to Do Their Own Damned Research.
Tivo now supports moving your shows from the Tivo to a PC, but it's a poor implementation. Tivo encodes video in hardware.
Would it really be that hard to revise the hardware to encode in a more Quicktime-friendly format? I doubt it. Likewise, adding Firewire probably wouldn't take much. I'll grant that the UI could use even more work, but it's pretty simple as it is. Turn on the TV, go to the Tivo menu, and pick your show. Even non-techies "get it" within a few minutes.
As for the GPL argument, I think that mainly counts for the kernel. The Tivo "myworld" program, which is more or less the core logic that sets the Tivo apart from a PPC/ARM box with TV out, certainly isn't GPL'ed. Linux is just a convenient kernel and GNU tools a sufficient toolkit to support the program. There's no reason that they couldn't port it to another Unix-like OS, it would just take time to support the hardware.
I think the biggest problem is that no one's making enough money off of this yet. Apple would have to find a good way to guarantee long-term income from a DVR division before committing to such a path.
That wasn't the point. OS/2 rocked on toast. I knew that much. I'd been exposed to it back in the day, and the only thing that ever bugged me about it was that Wing Commander II occasionally crashed due to an EMS error. That's it.
I'm not arguing anything about OS/2 being good or bad, since it's irrelevant. OS/2 simply wouldn't be good enough to carry the weight of Microchannel. As long as clones were out there, as long as MS needed everyone to run Word, and as long as software companies care about marketshare, EISA, VLB, and PCI support would have been made necessary in any release of OS/2.
IBM wouldn't have liked it, but Microsoft would've demanded it.
By 2001, most PC class machines would have OS/2 running on them (probably OS/2 2.5) with multimedia support. NT OS/2 would also be available for business and office class machines. With IBMs guidance, instead of the PCI bus becoming dominant, the MCA was the dominant bus form factor. The nickname for the PC architecture wasn't "Wintel", instead it was "Intos" (OS2tel was just too awkwards to say). IBM, Microsoft and Intel all worked to drive the hardware platform, and, since IBM was the biggest vendor of PC class hardware, they had a lot to say in the decisions.
Windows has nothing to do with the failure of MCA. In fact, Windows supported most Microchannel devices just fine. I've got a 486 which used to run Windows 95 with an XGA-2 video adapter and a 3com MCA Ethernet card (later moved to a Linux server) without a hitch. In fact, it was *easier* to set up than anything else I'd ever used.
However, IBM wanted *back royalties* on the ISA bus for any third party manufacturer who wanted to add MCA capabilities. Compaq and others decided that this was a braindead move, and released systems with EISA, instead.
Mind you, MCA could've been clock-boosted to compete with PCI. IRQ sharing was in place, MCA's been successfully pumped up to 80MHz (from 20, which was amazing back in the day) without problems, and cards were dead-simple to install. Add hardware, boot, present driver disk when IML detected the new card, then provide OS drivers when that loads up. It not only wasn't hard, it was dead simple.
The PS/2 design philosophy was incredibly solid. Here we had systems which you could strip down to the mainboard in under 5 minutes, using nothing more than your bare hands, with a bus which was damned near idiotproof, and IBM blew it all on the marketing.
But the OS *isn't* designed for it. Nor is it designed against it.
The GUI isn't like oldschool X11, where you can argue a definitive need for three buttons for copy-paste operations, in that there's no keystroke combo which did the job reliably until recently.
You cut and paste with Command-C and Command-V. That's just how it's done. The Mac's designed for righties, of course, and it's trivial to keep a hand on the mouse, select an area, copy, switch apps, and paste. However, the entire OS is designed so that you can access *every* special option via the menubar. Since no developer can count on getting that second button, nothing gets bound exclusively to a right-click menu. This is a Good Thing.
You, as a techie, a Slashdot poster, and someone who's been following what amounts to an MS Windows paradigm (the first place I ever saw right-click menus as a necessity, well before X11,) are used to that second mouse button, and know exactly what it does. Now take your PC, running Windows (or a VERY user-friendly Linux distro) to the oldest person in your family with the coordination and desire to use a computer. (My grandmother is a horrible example, as she will go to a library and demand access to Dewey Decimal cards, even if there's a dead-simple computer interface to finding the books.) Now ask them to click on items to run them, and see which button they hit. Don't mention what the right button does, since I can guarantee that Dell sure as hell won't, the local library won't provide instructions, and any internet café certainly won't give a damn.
Grandma won't use that second button properly. She'll use the menu bar, and when she accidentally clicks the right mouse button, she'll wonder why there's a menu in the middle of her webpage/document/whatever. (On top of this, there are plenty of sites out there which disable right-clicks via Javascript, popping up a dialog box berating you for committing an action which any techie would commit, and any neophyte wouldn't understand that they did in the first place.)
The right-click rapidly becomes a confusing option for them, which is more easily explained, especially when you're in a support role, if you tell them "Hold down the Apple key, and click on the icon for a special menu. That's called a Command-click."
Since right-click and left-click are still clicks, a new user won't get the difference at first. Somehow, the idea of holding a key to activate a secondary option just makes more sense to them, and there's really no point in selling your user-friendly PCs while expecting the end users to act like engineers.
Any user who wants the power of that second mouse button (Or in my case, the tenth button,) can still get it. However, a good OS shouldn't assume that the user should understand issues of right versus left-handedness, or anything beyond which key/button does what, either by label, or by default.
If you had color coded mouse buttons, or text-labeled ones, however, then I could see the point, though I'm sure the engineer-types who consider the most esoteric icons and oddball keymappings to be "intuitive" would whine about being presented with a Playskool interface at that point.
I dunno, I always have my left hand on the keyboard anyway. Somehow, holding down Control or Option to emulate buttons 2 and 3 just doesn't seem all that bad, and I'm a recent convert (2 years now) from Windows and Linux desktops.
I also just like having the single large target area to click on, which feels a lot faster than the two buttons beneath a normal touchpad. If I'm holding a modifier, the button acts differently.
Then again, I never was a fan of the X11-style auto-copy/paste button behavior.
(As for the truly broken aspect, scroll areas. Modern PC touchpads have a scrolling zone on the right, but on the Mac, I have to install a third-party program just so that I can scroll by holding down Fn. That's something that should've been available via System Preferences from the start.)
It's the answer to the piece of crap $500 Wal-Mart PCs, which, for all their theoretical upgradability, get tossed out once they're out of date anyway.
The difference here, of course, is that the Mac mini has better hardware (not the CPU, necessarily, but the video is way better,) and isn't a liable to completely suck as the historically mediocre beige boxes you get from Joe PC Builder.
I'm guessing that Apple expects the users to buy a USB mic when they need one, or hook up an iSight and kill two birds with one stone. It's not *too* crazy, but I'll admit, I still haven't used the mic port on my Powerbook, and while I had bought a 1/8" jack based stereo headset for my PC, I could've just as easily gone the USB route.
Using a Mac keyboard, you'd end up with two free USB ports. You'd use one for the keyboard, which is an unpowered 2-port hub, and plug the mouse into one of those ports. You'd still have a place to plug in your thumbdrive, or your iPod Shuffle, or both.
The last port could be used for whatever's left, like a camera or something, but how many USB devices do you leave plugged in all the time, anyway?
Look at a Mac from a peripherals standpoint. Let's go with a Powerbook.
OpenGL acceleration. USB 2.0, Firewire 800, integrated Bluetooth, 802.11g, DVI-out, Gigabit Ethernet, modem, DVD-R drive, and a microphone jack. It's a lot, and it's not that common amongst notebooks.
What Apple tends to do is be the first, or very early, to market with a given technology. USB, WiFi, Firewire, Bluetooth, etc. The main innovation isn't in the whiz-bang CPU, or some new bus design, although the G5 is known for that, it's in the usability, and the options. It's probably not that they're just releasing some random headless Mac, it's that they're either sitting on something absolutely unheard of in a cheap computer, or it's not a cheap computer at all, and all the buzz is going to kill their bottom line.
The Libretto is a nice piece of gear, but it's old, end-of-lifed, and fragile. It's prone to heating-related failures, the display doesn't last very long, and the pointing device isn't something I'd give to anyone with ALS.
I used one, and I liked it, but it's not ideal for this application.
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See, this is the fundamental problem. Everyone wants to make the killer convergence device, but they run out of space.
First we had the cellphone. In terms of functionality, it's about as good as it's going to get. You can make calls, receive calls, and even read/compose SMS messages, if that's your thing.
Then we tacked on the PDA. Now all the wireless data makes sense. I can get my email, check my stocks, and even type quickly, if you have a decent thumbboard.
While we're at it, let's tack on voice memos, since it already has a microphone. Then, let's throw in a camera. Great!
Now I have a device with a crappy camera, an anemic amount of built in storage, and limited expandability, since the space which might normally go to a second flash memory slot is taken up by the cellular radio.
You can't kill the digital camera without having a GOOD digital camera in your phone. And not just on raw megapixels. You need good optics, a decent optical zoom, and a decent interface. A flash becomes pretty important, and that just eats up battery life.
You can't kill the music player without having as much space as the dedicated models. Now we need more power for a 20GB (or greater) hard drive.
You can't kill the video player for the same reasons, only with more storage space.
You can't kill the game system without decent gaming hardware. Now you need a fairly power-hungry CPU, a 3D chipset, plus an MPEG decoder for video and audio, a large backlit color touchscreen, since that's what the convergence people want, and a system that won't crash when it's playing a movie, a song, or a game, and you get a call.
And it has to sync up with a PC, I'm sure. Bluetooth? Wireless USB? Wi-Fi and VoIP support?
How much crap do you have to shove into a handheld device the size of the iPod in order to win? And once you do, how long will it last between charges? And even then, who's going to buy it?
The iPod's spread across a wide range, from $100 up. $200 gets you an iPod mini, your fairly standard cellphone, now with color screen and camera, comes for free with a new contract, and you don't have to move your music around when you replace your phone. I wouldn't say that it's perfect, and I would love some kind of magical tiny convergence device which does the job of my game system, smartphone, iPod, and camera, but the dedicated device approach is far less catastrophic when things break, and far less problematic when you have one function stepping over the other. (If I were to play a game, listen to music, and then get a call on my smartphone, I'm not sure I would trust the whole thing to stay running.)
But hey, if Bill thinks that his people can make a cellphone that doesn't suck when pulling double-duty as a media player, and make it all cost less than a phone and an iPod of a similar capacity, more power to him.
He's moving, though. Just schedule it for the day before the move, hand him the boxes of crap, and send him on his way. That way, the creepy crankhead will kill the NEXT couple to move in.
You had me there for a while, but I have to argue for testing the design.
Any intelligent engineer submits a design, and it *does* get tested. How easily can it break? What are its weak points? Does it function according to its original design?
Now, can we improve upon that? What if I introduce a random mutation on this chromosome? (Oh, look, this guy's now HIV-resistant. What luck!)
It could be argued that we're not entirely intelligently designed, but subtly modified in each successive release, with the hopes of ultimately reaching a superior design.
Of course, humans aren't perfectly flexible across their environment. Some people need darker skin than others due to their exposure to sunlight, others need lighter skin. Some need resistance to malaria, some need a lower incidence of sickle cell anemia.
Engineers make mistakes. Why wouldn't our designer?
(All that said, I believe in evolution, entropy, and the Big Bang, but anything prior to that could just be elephants all the way down until science proves otherwise.)
I think he didn't remember "owning any droids."
Which, as far as the prequels have indicated, is true. C-3PO was Anakin's creation, and R2-D2 was assigned to Padme's ship.
Of course, one might wonder if Vader should've recognized the duo, but then again, there's probably a ton of similar looking droids running around.
The analogy holds, as it's referring to the nature of the crook, not the violation itself. I think we're all aware that it's not stealing, though it *is* a copyright violation. Different laws, different issues, but in the end, a crook following a pattern, be it in violation of criminal or civil law, is going to raise a flag when the pattern reasserts itself.
I wouldn't use it on a day-to-day basis, but when I travel, it's all I need. I get about 2 days worth of usage on my Treo 600, so plugging it into a USB port at the end of the day means that I wake up in the morning with a fully charged phone as well as a fully charged laptop.
It's also good to top off the phone if you forget to charge it, which I've been known to do every so often. Sure, it's not ideal, and if you've got a dead phone, it's the crappiest charging solution you can come up with, but most of the time, it's very convenient, and that more than makes up for trickle charge.
Yes. More mature.
Dear God, have you *seen* the original series? It's embarrassing. From Prime's complete lack of sense and Megatron's less-than-brilliant schemes to placing Spike's brain in some hodgepodge spare-parts Autobot body.
Wait, what about the doppleganger Prime? Even though he screws up everyone's names, can't operate Teletran-1, and otherwise just acts strangely, what's the brilliant solution to find out which one is the real Prime? Let's have a race!
If that hasn't convinced you of the sheer idiocy of the original series, I have three words for you. Big. Blue. Griffin.
The modern stuff isn't any better. You want a solid story, vaguely mature sci-fi, and a mostly serious take on Transformers? Try Beast Wars. Everything before and after that is pure kidvid junk.
Yeah... to be fair, it's only masked out on the Sprint ROM, and when it's running, it's a little flaky.
If it handled disconnects and general stupid user faults, I'd be more upset at Sprint and Cingular, but to be honest, the 650's BT DUN implementation is craptacular.
(This doesn't excuse Verizon's dickery with OBEX on *other* phones, of course. They can burn for that one.)
They did no such thing to the Treo 600.
The Treo 600 doesn't *have* Bluetooth, and Verizon hasn't adopted the Treo 650 yet.
(Will they block OBEX on the 650? Possibly. There's no way of knowing.)
Nintendo didn't really do anything to destroy the other handhelds, though.
The other handhelds lost on battery life, size and weight. Sure, gamers wanted a color handheld, but when one came out, they didn't bite. Nintendo's strategy is to release that kind of technology when it's ready.
For portables, battery life is king, with portability not far behind. Everything else is just gravy.
And here I thought that it's the one place where the sun *doesn't* shine.
It's not that sick when you think about the costs of looking everything up, verifying that the applicant deserves the rights to the trademark, and then clearing up any confusion.
We're either talking about lots of taxpayer dollars going into this research for the benefit of the small businessman/artist *and* the large corporation, or much higher trademark application fees, to the detriment of the large corporation and the small businessman/artist.
Or, you can hope that no one's going to be a slimeball, approve everything which passes a basic check, and if that's not enough, then yes, resort to court battles.
Yes, it's trivial for a large company to start threatening to file suit, and the smaller groups, like the MAME developers, will have a hard time paying for their legal defense, except that there are lawyers out there who will happily take their case, pro bono, and file a countersuit (on a contingency basis) if the outcome is so plainly in their favor.
Big company loses, small company wins, countersues and wins damages for barratry as well as trademark infringment, gets the bullies' trademarks withdrawn, and all is well, all without pillaging the small companies' pockets or wasting taxpayer dollars on a system which will more often help the guys who we're currently rallying against.
In short, to avoid these troubles, anyone filing for a patent, trademark, or registering a copyright would do well to Do Their Own Damned Research.
Composite output? Good call. I wouldn't want to use a USB camera to catch a serial burglar.
All kidding aside, that's a brilliant simple little setup, and I'm glad that it worked out for you. Have your possessions been retrieved?
Tivo now supports moving your shows from the Tivo to a PC, but it's a poor implementation. Tivo encodes video in hardware.
Would it really be that hard to revise the hardware to encode in a more Quicktime-friendly format? I doubt it. Likewise, adding Firewire probably wouldn't take much. I'll grant that the UI could use even more work, but it's pretty simple as it is. Turn on the TV, go to the Tivo menu, and pick your show. Even non-techies "get it" within a few minutes.
As for the GPL argument, I think that mainly counts for the kernel. The Tivo "myworld" program, which is more or less the core logic that sets the Tivo apart from a PPC/ARM box with TV out, certainly isn't GPL'ed. Linux is just a convenient kernel and GNU tools a sufficient toolkit to support the program. There's no reason that they couldn't port it to another Unix-like OS, it would just take time to support the hardware.
I think the biggest problem is that no one's making enough money off of this yet. Apple would have to find a good way to guarantee long-term income from a DVR division before committing to such a path.
That wasn't the point. OS/2 rocked on toast. I knew that much. I'd been exposed to it back in the day, and the only thing that ever bugged me about it was that Wing Commander II occasionally crashed due to an EMS error. That's it.
I'm not arguing anything about OS/2 being good or bad, since it's irrelevant. OS/2 simply wouldn't be good enough to carry the weight of Microchannel. As long as clones were out there, as long as MS needed everyone to run Word, and as long as software companies care about marketshare, EISA, VLB, and PCI support would have been made necessary in any release of OS/2.
IBM wouldn't have liked it, but Microsoft would've demanded it.
By 2001, most PC class machines would have OS/2 running on them (probably OS/2 2.5) with multimedia support. NT OS/2 would also be available for business and office class machines. With IBMs guidance, instead of the PCI bus becoming dominant, the MCA was the dominant bus form factor. The nickname for the PC architecture wasn't "Wintel", instead it was "Intos" (OS2tel was just too awkwards to say). IBM, Microsoft and Intel all worked to drive the hardware platform, and, since IBM was the biggest vendor of PC class hardware, they had a lot to say in the decisions.
Windows has nothing to do with the failure of MCA. In fact, Windows supported most Microchannel devices just fine. I've got a 486 which used to run Windows 95 with an XGA-2 video adapter and a 3com MCA Ethernet card (later moved to a Linux server) without a hitch. In fact, it was *easier* to set up than anything else I'd ever used.
However, IBM wanted *back royalties* on the ISA bus for any third party manufacturer who wanted to add MCA capabilities. Compaq and others decided that this was a braindead move, and released systems with EISA, instead.
Mind you, MCA could've been clock-boosted to compete with PCI. IRQ sharing was in place, MCA's been successfully pumped up to 80MHz (from 20, which was amazing back in the day) without problems, and cards were dead-simple to install. Add hardware, boot, present driver disk when IML detected the new card, then provide OS drivers when that loads up. It not only wasn't hard, it was dead simple.
The PS/2 design philosophy was incredibly solid. Here we had systems which you could strip down to the mainboard in under 5 minutes, using nothing more than your bare hands, with a bus which was damned near idiotproof, and IBM blew it all on the marketing.
OS/2 or not, MCA was dead in the water.
But the OS *isn't* designed for it. Nor is it designed against it.
The GUI isn't like oldschool X11, where you can argue a definitive need for three buttons for copy-paste operations, in that there's no keystroke combo which did the job reliably until recently.
You cut and paste with Command-C and Command-V. That's just how it's done. The Mac's designed for righties, of course, and it's trivial to keep a hand on the mouse, select an area, copy, switch apps, and paste. However, the entire OS is designed so that you can access *every* special option via the menubar. Since no developer can count on getting that second button, nothing gets bound exclusively to a right-click menu. This is a Good Thing.
You, as a techie, a Slashdot poster, and someone who's been following what amounts to an MS Windows paradigm (the first place I ever saw right-click menus as a necessity, well before X11,) are used to that second mouse button, and know exactly what it does. Now take your PC, running Windows (or a VERY user-friendly Linux distro) to the oldest person in your family with the coordination and desire to use a computer. (My grandmother is a horrible example, as she will go to a library and demand access to Dewey Decimal cards, even if there's a dead-simple computer interface to finding the books.) Now ask them to click on items to run them, and see which button they hit. Don't mention what the right button does, since I can guarantee that Dell sure as hell won't, the local library won't provide instructions, and any internet café certainly won't give a damn.
Grandma won't use that second button properly. She'll use the menu bar, and when she accidentally clicks the right mouse button, she'll wonder why there's a menu in the middle of her webpage/document/whatever. (On top of this, there are plenty of sites out there which disable right-clicks via Javascript, popping up a dialog box berating you for committing an action which any techie would commit, and any neophyte wouldn't understand that they did in the first place.)
The right-click rapidly becomes a confusing option for them, which is more easily explained, especially when you're in a support role, if you tell them "Hold down the Apple key, and click on the icon for a special menu. That's called a Command-click."
Since right-click and left-click are still clicks, a new user won't get the difference at first. Somehow, the idea of holding a key to activate a secondary option just makes more sense to them, and there's really no point in selling your user-friendly PCs while expecting the end users to act like engineers.
Any user who wants the power of that second mouse button (Or in my case, the tenth button,) can still get it. However, a good OS shouldn't assume that the user should understand issues of right versus left-handedness, or anything beyond which key/button does what, either by label, or by default.
If you had color coded mouse buttons, or text-labeled ones, however, then I could see the point, though I'm sure the engineer-types who consider the most esoteric icons and oddball keymappings to be "intuitive" would whine about being presented with a Playskool interface at that point.
I dunno, I always have my left hand on the keyboard anyway. Somehow, holding down Control or Option to emulate buttons 2 and 3 just doesn't seem all that bad, and I'm a recent convert (2 years now) from Windows and Linux desktops.
I also just like having the single large target area to click on, which feels a lot faster than the two buttons beneath a normal touchpad. If I'm holding a modifier, the button acts differently.
Then again, I never was a fan of the X11-style auto-copy/paste button behavior.
(As for the truly broken aspect, scroll areas. Modern PC touchpads have a scrolling zone on the right, but on the Mac, I have to install a third-party program just so that I can scroll by holding down Fn. That's something that should've been available via System Preferences from the start.)
Wait, I've got it! We'll cast Kevin Sorbo as the captain!
Man, this is gonna *rock.*
It's the answer to the piece of crap $500 Wal-Mart PCs, which, for all their theoretical upgradability, get tossed out once they're out of date anyway.
The difference here, of course, is that the Mac mini has better hardware (not the CPU, necessarily, but the video is way better,) and isn't a liable to completely suck as the historically mediocre beige boxes you get from Joe PC Builder.
I'm guessing that Apple expects the users to buy a USB mic when they need one, or hook up an iSight and kill two birds with one stone. It's not *too* crazy, but I'll admit, I still haven't used the mic port on my Powerbook, and while I had bought a 1/8" jack based stereo headset for my PC, I could've just as easily gone the USB route.
As "FTC Tries Sex in Can."
I wonder if they would bust themselves for spamming.
Using a Mac keyboard, you'd end up with two free USB ports. You'd use one for the keyboard, which is an unpowered 2-port hub, and plug the mouse into one of those ports. You'd still have a place to plug in your thumbdrive, or your iPod Shuffle, or both.
The last port could be used for whatever's left, like a camera or something, but how many USB devices do you leave plugged in all the time, anyway?
Look at a Mac from a peripherals standpoint. Let's go with a Powerbook.
OpenGL acceleration. USB 2.0, Firewire 800, integrated Bluetooth, 802.11g, DVI-out, Gigabit Ethernet, modem, DVD-R drive, and a microphone jack. It's a lot, and it's not that common amongst notebooks.
What Apple tends to do is be the first, or very early, to market with a given technology. USB, WiFi, Firewire, Bluetooth, etc. The main innovation isn't in the whiz-bang CPU, or some new bus design, although the G5 is known for that, it's in the usability, and the options. It's probably not that they're just releasing some random headless Mac, it's that they're either sitting on something absolutely unheard of in a cheap computer, or it's not a cheap computer at all, and all the buzz is going to kill their bottom line.
Man, I'd love to see Bruce Lee kick some ass ANYWHERE.
Seriously, I bet his zombie-fu is quite strong.
No.
The Libretto is a nice piece of gear, but it's old, end-of-lifed, and fragile. It's prone to heating-related failures, the display doesn't last very long, and the pointing device isn't something I'd give to anyone with ALS.
I used one, and I liked it, but it's not ideal for this application.