The idea was that limiting the number of available options would help people focus on the ones most important to them. You may remember that XP had a system where they presented a simplified control panel and then had a button you had to click for the "classic" control panel. Most features, of course, were only accessible through the old panel or through (I remember this only foggily) an administrative interface connected somewhere else entirely different.
I remember taking a long time to try and find the ODBC control panel under Windows 2000 and then having to find it again under XP. Those kind of things can really ruin productivity.
Another thing annoying about XP is that they would create new wizards with a sleek looking interface for one screen that they obviously labored on quite hard to make look nice. Then you'd select an option and BANG! Back to their 1990s look. It was very jarring. Say what you might about Steve Jobs, but he would have never approved such an ugly mess. I can almost hear him scream at anyone who tried.
I think you're confusing my post with Twitter's, who replied to me.
I definitely would give Joe Average OS X before I gave him Linux. I tried to get a Linux box on my secure wireless network and failed miserably despite there being a GUI configuration tool. It has to be said that the command line tool has a user interface only a hardware expert could love, with confusing acronyms your only guide to what to do. I'm a steely-eyed command line veteran and even I couldn't figure it out.
On Windows I fumbled like crazy and was eventually able to get it working. On the Macintosh, it just worked. This is a little unfair to Windows, though, since I have an AirPort wireless network, and of course that's designed to work best with Macs.
For the average person, I'd say Linux has too big a commercial software deficit to be useful unless they are really and truly interested in nothing but reading web pages. And MacOS has a huge aesthetic advantage that helps when you're learning something new - you can tell there are better things about it if you stick with it.
So generally, unless someone's on a super budget, I highly recommend MacOS X. Heck, I'm a programmer geek, and I use it myself. I use open-source software when it's best of breed (mysql, Ruby on Rails, etc) and commercial software when it's best of breed (MacOS X, Final Cut Pro, etc). That best of both worlds solution works best on Macs.
It's worth comparing Windows XP licensing with Apple, which will cheerfully sell you a five-user license of their latest and greatest for $199. And they don't saddle you with a crippled "home" version, either.
However, I will contest your idea that Windows XP is intuitive while 98 is not. I remember very distinctly seeing my company moving from 98 to 2000 and XP, and in those years it was hard as heck to figure out where everything had been capriciously moved in the newer operating systems. You just think XP is more intuitive now because you haven't used 98 in a long time.
Recently, I've been looking at average people's average computers - ones not maintained by corporate wealth - and all of them suffer from confusing maladies. XP was advertised as something an average home user can maintain successfully, and despite a lot of money spent on anti-virus software, it doesn't seem like most home users can manage at all well.
Now, there are plenty of Slashdotters who have good Windows experiences, and I'm happy for them. But the real contest is what non-technical people face, and in that respect I have to call XP a shameful failure.
I'm building a pseudo Web 2.0(*) site right now, and I wanted to use a modern, CSS-based liquid layout. So I bought a book, and dove in.
There are a lot of confusing workarounds needed to make a pure CSS layout work. In particular, it's extremely difficult to make table cells fill with color for the entire column instead of having the color end at the end of the content, producing a very strange effect. The best workaround seems to be to create a colored image the width of the table, with different colors for the various columns, but that requires fixed-width content, which I really don't like because I (personally!) use lots of different computers and monitors, and want the layout to reform to fit my present screen width.
Worse yet, it requires that I create these images, and I wanted users to be able to design and build their own themes, like myspace. While some think myspace is badly done and distasteful, I saw and liked the crazy creativitiy it had, and wanted to see the same energy start on my own site. (I have some ideas, which I won't reveal here, for encouraging people to use readable color schemes:-) ).
After hours and hours of trying to get it to work, I fell back to tables and had the whole thing working in 15 minutes.
It seems like CSS does OK for fixed layouts but if you want to have a 200 pixel left sidebar and leave the rest of the page for content, I just can't figure out how to do it and have it look as nice as a simple table-driven layout.
Worse, after playing around with it I could not see where the advantages were over tables. Tables work, they don't take long to code up, and I feel I understand them completely with minimal effort. It seems like with a CSS layout, you waste a lot of time fighting bizarre browser compatibilty issues, while if you use tables, they "just work", far as I can tell -- and I've tested in IE, Safari, FireFox and a few others.
So far, then, for me the advantages of tables far outweigh whatever advantages CSS has, which seem like they are more based on abstract principle than on the ground reality.
D
(*) As others have mentioned, Web 2.0 sites blend together so easily I can't tell them apart and certainly won't remember one to the point where it stands out. I've decided to try a middle path between observing conventions and slavish conformance to the norm. So my site is quite different from what else is out there. However, I'm still working on some last-minute details and so I'm not ready to have it sig-slashdotted yet.
I have a Windows computer I use only for testing. It was given to me by a friend who couldn't keep the virii and spyware off of it. I eradicated most of it (I think there's a lot still lurking, but I have limited time for the chase).
McAfee still, every day, several times a day, tells me my virus definitions are out of date, and my anti-spam is out of date. I know but I don't care since i only use the computer to test my web sites.
But several times a day, for a year, the popups still appear.
I'm sure that guideline was written for the people who do things like that, but I'm equally sure nothing will change, because the revenue potential of the daily reminders is too strong.
Marketing by irritation is something I really hate. I'll never buy a McAfee product again, that's for sure. Althogh I'm sure Norton and others do the same thing.
There is indeed a lot more choice on the PC side. Of course most of it is poorly designed junk, since the focus of the PC world is how cheaply you can make things, not how enjoyable you can make the ownership experience. And that's why you can buy PCs for so much less than Macs. It's not that Apple's ripping you off, it's that Steve quite laudably refuses to make junk.
Of course there are exceptions, like Alienware and the like, but they're comparably priced to Macs. It's nice in an abstract sort of way to see all that choice, but that makes the Apple zone, where all is tasteful and beautifully designed, look like the best place there is.
However, one of your statements is simply not true. I hooked up my PowerBook G4 to a VGA projector with the adapter Apple provided in the box, for free. So compatibility with projection LCDs is no reason to stick with Windows.
Could someone give me the five-minute executive summary of what LonelyGirl15 was trying to promote?
I saw one of her productions and thought she was cute, and then I looked through the comments. I learned she was fake in some way, but since I would have had to wade through 862 comments to find out exactly how and why, I just got on with the rest of my life.
Since I'm sure at least one Slashdotter has taken this time, perhaps someone could allow me to benefit from their experience:-). I understand what the fuss is about, since she was, well, cute, but from the one video I saw it didn't look like she was promoting anything.
Oops! I apologise, I got absent-minded since I used to buy 12-packs so much. The $5.99 was for a 24-pack.
However, 12-packs here in the Pittsburgh area tend to sell for $3.99. This was interesting considering that before I left Los Angeles, 12-packs were going for about $2.50 almost all the time.
Pittsburgh's mediocre-at-best Giant Eagle grocery chain has no competition in the grocery market other than Wal*Mart, and I suspect that's why prices are low. You probably have better grocery markets than we do.
How's life down there? I thought New Orleans had the chance of becoming the last cheap warm weather place in the US, and then I discovered housing prices pre-Katrina were fairly expensive and they skyrocketed straight to outrageous after Katrina. I'd love to find a nice warm weather place to live where a waterfront (or at least water view) home doesn't cost $700,000 plus.
The truth is that his analysis is sort of beside the point.
I made exactly the same observation he did: Gas prices do not vary that much between stations, and the savings you get through going to the cheapest station is just not all that much, generally speaking. And we do obsess over that last dime, and feel triumphant when we manage to save it.
But the real issue of gas prices is that they have increased by about a third in the last year (although they have settled down again recently). I remember not too long ago seeing that gas was $2 or so a gallon. A month ago it was $3 before settling down to $2.60-odd. These fluctuations make gas prices conspicuous.
By contrast, when I started shopping at Wal*Mart about six months ago, a 12-pack of Diet Coke was $ 5.99, with occasional drops to $4.99 on sale. Today the price is exactly the same, to the penny. Gas pries have changed massively in the same period.
If you happen to own a fancy car and get premium gas for it, though, beware! One station I went to was charging $ 2.79 for regular, $ 2.89 for mid-grade and $3.29 for premium! I went across the street and bought their $ 2.99 premium instead. The first station has since reduced their premium pricing (bad pun intended).
Finally, sometimes shopping has entertainment value; it's a way to get out of the house and have a pleasant excursion. If you think that way, it might be worth going to the more expensive market where people know you by name, the merchandise is always clean and carefully selected, and so on. To give a concrete example, Gelson's in Los Angeles was that way for me. It was just a nice place to go, and although they cost about 10% more than lesser markets, it was worth it for me. Randal's in the linked to article is probably like that too. You have a costlier pepper but it's also a higher-quality pepper, something price surveys tend to ignore.
Where I live, there are no such places and I'm stuck at Wal*Mart with the proles:-(.
It's probably more like 30 seconds, but it sure has FELT like a minute at times.
0.1 seconds is probably not going to hurt. I don't think the human mind can even comprehend that little time.
But often my camera timed out, I had it to my head and I was trying to take a picture, and THEN it started warming up. That was poison for pictures:-(.
I have a Canon EOS D30, which was the first sort of affordable digital SLR. It cost me about $3,300 when I bought it in 2001.
I would like to replace it with a new model eventually, because I'd like a camera that "warmed up" faster. With a modern DSLRs like your 30D, you can take a picture microseconds after you flip the on/off switch. My D30 takes about a minute, and during that minute it has to warm up, a lot of pictures I really wanted to take have been lost.
The D30 is otherwise a great camera and I would have no real desire to replace it with one of today's modern cameras if it weren't for the speed issue. Its 3.5 megapixels have been more than adequate for my needs, and I like the fact that the smaller photos take less disk space. I have saved every photo I've ever taken with the camera and they're all set up nice and easy in iPhoto.
People are not impressed by my camera's megapixel rating, but they are with my pictures. And in the end, that's what matters.
I think that realistically, most people combine trips. For instance, if I wanted to get groceries, I would go to Wal*Mart and maybe check out their videos too. And I did similar things even when I rode the bus years ago.
So I don't think it's that big a hardship to buy a video from a store, unless it's something obscure that I couldn't find any other way.
iTunes works because you can buy music much more cheaply than if you went to a store. I could buy a single song for $ 0.99 and that's something you just can't do in stores. And even albums cost $9.99-odd when you can get them for $ 16-odd in a store. So the model works to save you a lot of money as well as provide convenience.
I feel huge price resistance over $ 9.99 for a video. I think Steve is right.
D
Re:Indians will complain about foreigners soon
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First, you're wrong. If you were a business owner, you would have to make a profit to pay yourself. It's not an easy thing to do. I know this as the battle-trained owner and partner in several different business ventures.
Second, I'm living proof that this concept has appeal. I plan to move to the Philippines when I have my new venture somewhat sorted. Why? Because if it can make $2,000 a month I can live very well, even a bit extravagently. I think I have found something that has potential to make that amount, and then I would be happy living in a place I enjoyed being in.
If I wanted to live in a place I enjoyed (Woodland Hills, in Los Angeles) in the US, it would cost over $8,000 a month. If I wanted to live in a place I really loved (Newport Beach, California, by the sea near Los Angeles) it would cost more like $100,000 a month. It just makes sense to say "Wait a minute, you can work and slave a whole lifetime and not do that well" and consider that maybe the third world has more to offer you than the first.
$2,000 a month in the Philippines gives you a cook, a maid and a luxurious house. Increase it by about $1,000 and you can live on a beautiful beach with lots of amenities. So if I can live cheaply, building my business from and beyond, I can also hire much cheaper Philippines nationals where I am, to do my work. Again, something I could not do in the US on budgets even vaguely close to that.
Third world countries nowadays feature friendly people, beautiful women and perfectly functional DSL. And there is a special bonus: those beautiful women are really interested in middle-aged single American guys, who are total losers in love as long as they stay here.
That advantage can make up for a lot of inconvenience, government corruption and so on.
Maybe Steve is smart in starting with Disney and Pixar films, then.
It will be interesting to see how large a version of their back catalogue they put online. I know Disney traditionally markets their old movies in circles as "events", so I wonder how that practice will change if at all.
I would check out the Mac at Apple Retail stores. You can try before you buy, and the salespeople are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. There is even full high-speed Internet access, and if you work for an educational institution you can get the student discount on hardware at the store.
The biggest difference between using the Mac and Linux with open source software is that the X-Windows implementation is ugly, at least out of the box. The hideous fonts and lacklustre look of the thing will send you speeding back to the Mac user interface. You'll either spend a lot of time configuring your X environment, or dump X and go with Cocoa or writing web applications, depending on your needs.
At least that was what I thought when I last tried X-Windows on the Mac. It may have improved since I haven't had any need to use it in years.
if you've been using Perl I recommend you check out Ruby. Perl's there and it works fine but Ruby's really a class apart, and it's already on your Mac. (Ruby fanatics upgrade it since it's a bit out of date). And Ruby runs on all OSs, so you can still swap software with your Linux-using friends.
My experience in an academic environment is that they welcome MacOS or Linux but prefer you develop on cross-platform applications. So you may need to use x-Windows and its resultant hideousness to stay compatible with the rest of the world. I've switched entirely to web-based development, so this isn't a problem for me. Flash is completely interoperable between Mac and Windows versions, so you don't have to worry there. Safari is standards-compliant and is very similar to FireFox in how it renders pages.
Since I basically do nothing but develop web applications, none of this really mattered to me and the slicker environment, cool hardware and better UI design make working on the Mac a joy. It's a great platform and getting greater all the time.
Why couldn't you get the DVD extras? Surely if you're downloading a DVD you can download the extras too.
There's a huge difference between $9.99 (which I think is doable for many customers) and $15.99 (for which I think people will keep going to the DVD store). So if any online movie download store succeeds, it will be Apple's.
However, I can't help but notice that there are a lot of titles at my local DVD store for $6.99 or thereabouts. I don't know if this will be as lucerative a venture as music, especially since you tend to listen to music a lot but only view movies once or twice. Rental may well still be the best movie model for most people.
If you want a slick and beautiful GUI environment, Apple's going to be head and shoulders above the competition. I haven't done anything in it, but I can't help but notice that applications done with the Cocoa API all look fabulous. So if you want simulations that are beautiful, the Mac's tough to beat.
MacOS X has all commercial web development apps you need, including Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Linux doesn't. MacOS X has the video editing market covered with superb applications, from iMovie to Final Cut at the high end. Linux doesn't.
MacOS X has a beautifully designed operating environment; Linux has been gaining, but it's still not there and probably will neverl catch up entirely, thanks to Steve Jobs' relentless attention to detail. There are some things Open source does very well (operating system kernels) and some things they don't (overall user experience). This "dirty secret" is why you see so many open lovers of open source software, including myself, using PowerBooks.
MacOS X can run nearly all Linux applications. I think with X-Windows installed there are very few that couldn't be run. I use mysql, Ruby on Rails, Perl (much less now that I've discovered Ruby), emacs, etc. There's even a nice gui Emacs nowadays.
Incidentally, in the grandparent's price comparison, he forgot to pay for Windows XP or Vista. Sure, you could put Linux on it, but let's compare two commercial OSs here. Apparently at retail it would cost an amazing $200 to get even Vista Home Basic on the machine, and then you've almost hit the price of the 20" iMac. Dell's 24" monitor is $791.10 at the Dell store, so it looks to me like once you add it, you're pretty close to the price of the 24" iMac, and you haven't even taken the time to set up and install stuff.
As someone who owns an Apple Cinema Display 23", I can say that it's worth every penny of the $1,700-odd I paid for it. I'd probably go for the 30" display now but I'm just a glutton for screen size. The 30" display costs exactly the same as the 24" iMac.
A quick clarification since I think many Slashdot users don't realize this - the $200 is a family pack license which covers up to 5 users. So it's hugely cheaper to legally upgrade multiple Apple machines than Vista. An extra Vista Home Advanced license is $243, a whopping $16 discount over the charge of $259 for one.
This doesn't even consider the fact that newer Apple operating systems run better on old hardware than their predecessors. Tiger on my ancient laptop still runs great and is a wonderful upgrade. By contrast, I don't have any PC hardware, even computers bought at about the same time as my Macs, that will run Aero [Vista's MacOS X-like interface] at all.
I've been really surprised at Vista pricing. It seems to me there's no reason to buy Vista at retail when you could buy a new computer when Vista comes out for not that much more money than the upgrade alone. I could see paying $99 to upgrade to Vista, or even meeting Apple's upgrade price at $129, but pushing $200 to upgrade XP Pro to Vista pro sounds like a bad dream.
From an aesthetic point of view, MacOS X is a no-brainer. You can run Photoshop on it, and if you decide the GIMP or other open source applications are your cup of tea, you can run them too.
Also, if you do video or plan to do video, the Apple applications are absolutely unbeatable.
Of course if you could detect signatures instead of actually fixing bugs, you might be able to get the new signature out at about the same time as the exploit instead of (as you said) three weeks later.
Intuitively, though, I'm not keen on something that rewrites the HTML that I receive. It seems like there's a lot of potential for abuse, like that infamous Internet Explorer linking thing that automatically sprinkled links to Microsoft-friendly sites into the page content you received. Is this just a trojan horse for the likes of that cropping up again?
Your larger point looks pretty accurate to me. People do seem to be more receptive to buying Macs now that they can run Parallels or Boot Camp to use their "favorite" Windows software. It's interesting to note that about 70% of the commercial software I run is made by Apple (Final Cut Pro, Safari, Motion, etc) or Adobe (Photoshop, After Effects, etc). I also use the Omniweb web browser and the TextMate editor, both of which are solidly in the Apple camp, with Cocoa applications that are probably not easily portable to Windows. So if I am at all usual, all the Parallels/Boot Camp will do for me is to let me use my MacBook (when I get one) to run IE when I need it for testing.
Here are some other notes that don't address your the main point, but might be of interest anyway.
As far as I know, virtually all open source Linux software will compile and run on a Mac, although the GUI stuff needs X-Windows, which people tend to avoid on Macs. But I run mysql, Ruby on Rails, etc on the Mac and it all works flawlessly. (In fact, Ruby on Rails was developed almost exclusively on Macs). mySQL even has most of its GUI utilities ported to MacOS X, and AquaMacs is a pretty good Aqua Emacs. (I wish it had better proportional font support.)
One particularly wonderful thing about MacOS X, which shows Steve Jobs' attention to even the most technical user, is that emacs command keystrokes are burned into the interface. So if I want to go up a line in Safari, Omniweb, mail or any other Cocoa application, I can type Control-P, just as I've been doing for decades of emacs use. Why doesn't FireFox have that feature? You can use those keystrokes in Bash under Linux, as you can in Bash under MacOS X, but not under FireFox. RMS would be rolling over in his grave, if he wasn't still alive:-). I know you can use various programs to remap keystrokes if you get really into things, but I know that often has bizarre unintended consequences. I like having them work out of the box - and in MacOS X, they do.
The way I think of Apple is that it's the ultimate combination of the best of commercial software and the best of the open source world. With Linux, you don't have the polished if expensive world of commercial software, and with Windows Open Source stuff is a pain to get working, and in virii and spyware your have the dark side of commercial software run rampant.
You go with MacOS X because it gives you the best of both worlds, letting you throw away the worst, and because when you spend your entire life in front of a computer screen, it's nice for it to be well thought out in design and aesthetically pleasing.
It is to me, at least. Your mileage may vary. I think people who come from the Windows side get used to gloomy gray environments. I don't know what study they put together that made gloom the norm, but I think it was a big mistake for KDE to copy it. All I'll say is that American society is glum enough without having your computer screen glum too.
Finally, it should be noted that Apple finally developed the Mighty Mouse to put the "no right mouse button" question to rest forever. It's a pity it's such a durable meme, but I guess until people start replacing their older Apple mice, it will be with us for a long time to come:-(.
I prefer the TrackPoint by a significant margin. Right now, I'm using my Apple Powerbook and have a ThinkPad to do Windows testing, and the one thing I prefer on the ThinkPad is that TrackPoint. I can really zip around the screen with commendable efficiency, far more than with the trackpad on the PowerBook.
This really is something accoring to taste. I wish I could get a trackpoint-style mouse for the PowerBook. However, it's certainly not an issue that will switch me to a non-Apple OS:-).
I'd recommend that anyone who has the choice check out both pointer movement systems because it's obvious that people have very strong preferences for one or the other.
If all she needs to do is write letters on occasion, I think MacOS X now includes some kind of text editor/word processor similar to Wordpad. I believe they even made it read Word documents pretty well. You might want to ask your friendly Apple retail store about it.
I really like Pages, which is Apple's advanced word processor. It has really nice style sheet support and you can build great looking documents with it without nearly as much effort as Word requires. And if you need to do presentations, Keynote is a must, and they're both bundled into the iWork package. I just hope they'll get a spreadsheet in it one of these days; when that happens I can dump Office without tears.
I bought the first Office X years ago, because people kept on sending me Word documents I had to read (this is before Apple added that to the OS). It cost something like $469 and I thought it was a real ripoff. I use Excel occasionally and I tried Neooffice's spreadsheet, which seems sluggish and clunky. I don't love Excel but I don't like NeoOffice either. For one thing, it's very Windows like and reminds me of the gray gloom of the Windows UI whenever I use it:-(.
However, now the Microsoft Office Student/Teacher edition would serve my needs just fine and I think it's in the $150 range. They basically allow anyone who doesn't want to blow the big bucks on more expensive versions to think of themselves as students or teachers, so the license is fine.
With the exception of video editing/production software, I run mainly open source software on my Macs. It does great with such stalwarts as emacs, Ruby on Rails, mySQL, etc. And I really love the designer quality interface. I had to use Windows a few times recently and trying to get a printer to work was like pulling teeth. Despite my Unix proficiency, I had similar dismal experiences with desktop Linux.
I have no doubt that you are right and it's possible to run a Windows machine without too much grief. Possible, but perhaps not the best use of your time. If you want to do great things, tis better to do them than to try and fight with the OS and anti-something software in the hopes that the machine won't eat itself up before it's a month old. And that's why I love Apple and MacOS X. It's not a perfect world, because we don't have perfection on this planet. But it's a better one, and for that I thank Steve and his minions.
Apparently early adopters are not buying the new DVD standard in any great numbers (this was another Slashdot story today). One of the reasons is likely to be the DRM. Someone actually pointed this out when this topic was discussed on Free Republic, which is a conservative news forum site that does not generally attract particularly tech-savvy people.
I don't think the average person on the street understands DRM, and iTunes DRM is light enough so that it's never prevented me from doing something I wanted to do. But people who buy $1,000 DVD players tend to expect more from them, and people with that kind of serious money tend to put some serious research into their choices.
So it wouldn't surprise me if DRM would kill off or at least seriously damaage sales of the new DVD systems.
But for an operating system? I'm not so sure about that since it has so many other uses that are not linked to commercial entertainment. It's very possible we will wind up boycotting the major studios and just playing our own videos on YouTube or its successors. The DRM wouldn't affect us and we'd be no less free than if we'd stuck with XP or MacOS X.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea was that limiting the number of available options would help people focus on the ones most important to them. You may remember that XP had a system where they presented a simplified control panel and then had a button you had to click for the "classic" control panel. Most features, of course, were only accessible through the old panel or through (I remember this only foggily) an administrative interface connected somewhere else entirely different.
I remember taking a long time to try and find the ODBC control panel under Windows 2000 and then having to find it again under XP. Those kind of things can really ruin productivity.
Another thing annoying about XP is that they would create new wizards with a sleek looking interface for one screen that they obviously labored on quite hard to make look nice. Then you'd select an option and BANG! Back to their 1990s look. It was very jarring. Say what you might about Steve Jobs, but he would have never approved such an ugly mess. I can almost hear him scream at anyone who tried.
D
I think you're confusing my post with Twitter's, who replied to me.
I definitely would give Joe Average OS X before I gave him Linux. I tried to get a Linux box on my secure wireless network and failed miserably despite there being a GUI configuration tool. It has to be said that the command line tool has a user interface only a hardware expert could love, with confusing acronyms your only guide to what to do. I'm a steely-eyed command line veteran and even I couldn't figure it out.
On Windows I fumbled like crazy and was eventually able to get it working. On the Macintosh, it just worked. This is a little unfair to Windows, though, since I have an AirPort wireless network, and of course that's designed to work best with Macs.
For the average person, I'd say Linux has too big a commercial software deficit to be useful unless they are really and truly interested in nothing but reading web pages. And MacOS has a huge aesthetic advantage that helps when you're learning something new - you can tell there are better things about it if you stick with it.
So generally, unless someone's on a super budget, I highly recommend MacOS X. Heck, I'm a programmer geek, and I use it myself. I use open-source software when it's best of breed (mysql, Ruby on Rails, etc) and commercial software when it's best of breed (MacOS X, Final Cut Pro, etc). That best of both worlds solution works best on Macs.
D
It's worth comparing Windows XP licensing with Apple, which will cheerfully sell you a five-user license of their latest and greatest for $199. And they don't saddle you with a crippled "home" version, either.
However, I will contest your idea that Windows XP is intuitive while 98 is not. I remember very distinctly seeing my company moving from 98 to 2000 and XP, and in those years it was hard as heck to figure out where everything had been capriciously moved in the newer operating systems. You just think XP is more intuitive now because you haven't used 98 in a long time.
Recently, I've been looking at average people's average computers - ones not maintained by corporate wealth - and all of them suffer from confusing maladies. XP was advertised as something an average home user can maintain successfully, and despite a lot of money spent on anti-virus software, it doesn't seem like most home users can manage at all well.
Now, there are plenty of Slashdotters who have good Windows experiences, and I'm happy for them. But the real contest is what non-technical people face, and in that respect I have to call XP a shameful failure.
D
I'm building a pseudo Web 2.0(*) site right now, and I wanted to use a modern, CSS-based liquid layout. So I bought a book, and dove in.
:-) ).
There are a lot of confusing workarounds needed to make a pure CSS layout work. In particular, it's extremely difficult to make table cells fill with color for the entire column instead of having the color end at the end of the content, producing a very strange effect. The best workaround seems to be to create a colored image the width of the table, with different colors for the various columns, but that requires fixed-width content, which I really don't like because I (personally!) use lots of different computers and monitors, and want the layout to reform to fit my present screen width.
Worse yet, it requires that I create these images, and I wanted users to be able to design and build their own themes, like myspace. While some think myspace is badly done and distasteful, I saw and liked the crazy creativitiy it had, and wanted to see the same energy start on my own site. (I have some ideas, which I won't reveal here, for encouraging people to use readable color schemes
After hours and hours of trying to get it to work, I fell back to tables and had the whole thing working in 15 minutes.
It seems like CSS does OK for fixed layouts but if you want to have a 200 pixel left sidebar and leave the rest of the page for content, I just can't figure out how to do it and have it look as nice as a simple table-driven layout.
Worse, after playing around with it I could not see where the advantages were over tables. Tables work, they don't take long to code up, and I feel I understand them completely with minimal effort. It seems like with a CSS layout, you waste a lot of time fighting bizarre browser compatibilty issues, while if you use tables, they "just work", far as I can tell -- and I've tested in IE, Safari, FireFox and a few others.
So far, then, for me the advantages of tables far outweigh whatever advantages CSS has, which seem like they are more based on abstract principle than on the ground reality.
D
(*) As others have mentioned, Web 2.0 sites blend together so easily I can't tell them apart and certainly won't remember one to the point where it stands out. I've decided to try a middle path between observing conventions and slavish conformance to the norm. So my site is quite different from what else is out there. However, I'm still working on some last-minute details and so I'm not ready to have it sig-slashdotted yet.
Funny post!
I have a Windows computer I use only for testing. It was given to me by a friend who couldn't keep the virii and spyware off of it. I eradicated most of it (I think there's a lot still lurking, but I have limited time for the chase).
McAfee still, every day, several times a day, tells me my virus definitions are out of date, and my anti-spam is out of date. I know but I don't care since i only use the computer to test my web sites.
But several times a day, for a year, the popups still appear.
I'm sure that guideline was written for the people who do things like that, but I'm equally sure nothing will change, because the revenue potential of the daily reminders is too strong.
Marketing by irritation is something I really hate. I'll never buy a McAfee product again, that's for sure. Althogh I'm sure Norton and others do the same thing.
D
There is indeed a lot more choice on the PC side. Of course most of it is poorly designed junk, since the focus of the PC world is how cheaply you can make things, not how enjoyable you can make the ownership experience. And that's why you can buy PCs for so much less than Macs. It's not that Apple's ripping you off, it's that Steve quite laudably refuses to make junk.
Of course there are exceptions, like Alienware and the like, but they're comparably priced to Macs. It's nice in an abstract sort of way to see all that choice, but that makes the Apple zone, where all is tasteful and beautifully designed, look like the best place there is.
However, one of your statements is simply not true. I hooked up my PowerBook G4 to a VGA projector with the adapter Apple provided in the box, for free. So compatibility with projection LCDs is no reason to stick with Windows.
D
Could someone give me the five-minute executive summary of what LonelyGirl15 was trying to promote?
:-). I understand what the fuss is about, since she was, well, cute, but from the one video I saw it didn't look like she was promoting anything.
I saw one of her productions and thought she was cute, and then I looked through the comments. I learned she was fake in some way, but since I would have had to wade through 862 comments to find out exactly how and why, I just got on with the rest of my life.
Since I'm sure at least one Slashdotter has taken this time, perhaps someone could allow me to benefit from their experience
What was she promoting and why?
Thanks!
D
Oops! I apologise, I got absent-minded since I used to buy 12-packs so much. The $5.99 was for a 24-pack.
However, 12-packs here in the Pittsburgh area tend to sell for $3.99. This was interesting considering that before I left Los Angeles, 12-packs were going for about $2.50 almost all the time.
Pittsburgh's mediocre-at-best Giant Eagle grocery chain has no competition in the grocery market other than Wal*Mart, and I suspect that's why prices are low. You probably have better grocery markets than we do.
How's life down there? I thought New Orleans had the chance of becoming the last cheap warm weather place in the US, and then I discovered housing prices pre-Katrina were fairly expensive and they skyrocketed straight to outrageous after Katrina. I'd love to find a nice warm weather place to live where a waterfront (or at least water view) home doesn't cost $700,000 plus.
D
The truth is that his analysis is sort of beside the point.
:-(.
I made exactly the same observation he did: Gas prices do not vary that much between stations, and the savings you get through going to the cheapest station is just not all that much, generally speaking. And we do obsess over that last dime, and feel triumphant when we manage to save it.
But the real issue of gas prices is that they have increased by about a third in the last year (although they have settled down again recently). I remember not too long ago seeing that gas was $2 or so a gallon. A month ago it was $3 before settling down to $2.60-odd. These fluctuations make gas prices conspicuous.
By contrast, when I started shopping at Wal*Mart about six months ago, a 12-pack of Diet Coke was $ 5.99, with occasional drops to $4.99 on sale. Today the price is exactly the same, to the penny. Gas pries have changed massively in the same period.
If you happen to own a fancy car and get premium gas for it, though, beware! One station I went to was charging $ 2.79 for regular, $ 2.89 for mid-grade and $3.29 for premium! I went across the street and bought their $ 2.99 premium instead. The first station has since reduced their premium pricing (bad pun intended).
Finally, sometimes shopping has entertainment value; it's a way to get out of the house and have a pleasant excursion. If you think that way, it might be worth going to the more expensive market where people know you by name, the merchandise is always clean and carefully selected, and so on. To give a concrete example, Gelson's in Los Angeles was that way for me. It was just a nice place to go, and although they cost about 10% more than lesser markets, it was worth it for me. Randal's in the linked to article is probably like that too. You have a costlier pepper but it's also a higher-quality pepper, something price surveys tend to ignore.
Where I live, there are no such places and I'm stuck at Wal*Mart with the proles
D
It's probably more like 30 seconds, but it sure has FELT like a minute at times.
:-(.
0.1 seconds is probably not going to hurt. I don't think the human mind can even comprehend that little time.
But often my camera timed out, I had it to my head and I was trying to take a picture, and THEN it started warming up. That was poison for pictures
D
I have a Canon EOS D30, which was the first sort of affordable digital SLR. It cost me about $3,300 when I bought it in 2001.
I would like to replace it with a new model eventually, because I'd like a camera that "warmed up" faster. With a modern DSLRs like your 30D, you can take a picture microseconds after you flip the on/off switch. My D30 takes about a minute, and during that minute it has to warm up, a lot of pictures I really wanted to take have been lost.
The D30 is otherwise a great camera and I would have no real desire to replace it with one of today's modern cameras if it weren't for the speed issue. Its 3.5 megapixels have been more than adequate for my needs, and I like the fact that the smaller photos take less disk space. I have saved every photo I've ever taken with the camera and they're all set up nice and easy in iPhoto.
People are not impressed by my camera's megapixel rating, but they are with my pictures. And in the end, that's what matters.
D
I think that realistically, most people combine trips. For instance, if I wanted to get groceries, I would go to Wal*Mart and maybe check out their videos too. And I did similar things even when I rode the bus years ago.
So I don't think it's that big a hardship to buy a video from a store, unless it's something obscure that I couldn't find any other way.
iTunes works because you can buy music much more cheaply than if you went to a store. I could buy a single song for $ 0.99 and that's something you just can't do in stores. And even albums cost $9.99-odd when you can get them for $ 16-odd in a store. So the model works to save you a lot of money as well as provide convenience.
I feel huge price resistance over $ 9.99 for a video. I think Steve is right.
D
First, you're wrong. If you were a business owner, you would have to make a profit to pay yourself. It's not an easy thing to do. I know this as the battle-trained owner and partner in several different business ventures.
Second, I'm living proof that this concept has appeal. I plan to move to the Philippines when I have my new venture somewhat sorted. Why? Because if it can make $2,000 a month I can live very well, even a bit extravagently. I think I have found something that has potential to make that amount, and then I would be happy living in a place I enjoyed being in.
If I wanted to live in a place I enjoyed (Woodland Hills, in Los Angeles) in the US, it would cost over $8,000 a month. If I wanted to live in a place I really loved (Newport Beach, California, by the sea near Los Angeles) it would cost more like $100,000 a month. It just makes sense to say "Wait a minute, you can work and slave a whole lifetime and not do that well" and consider that maybe the third world has more to offer you than the first.
$2,000 a month in the Philippines gives you a cook, a maid and a luxurious house. Increase it by about $1,000 and you can live on a beautiful beach with lots of amenities. So if I can live cheaply, building my business from and beyond, I can also hire much cheaper Philippines nationals where I am, to do my work. Again, something I could not do in the US on budgets even vaguely close to that.
Third world countries nowadays feature friendly people, beautiful women and perfectly functional DSL. And there is a special bonus: those beautiful women are really interested in middle-aged single American guys, who are total losers in love as long as they stay here.
That advantage can make up for a lot of inconvenience, government corruption and so on.
D
Maybe Steve is smart in starting with Disney and Pixar films, then.
It will be interesting to see how large a version of their back catalogue they put online. I know Disney traditionally markets their old movies in circles as "events", so I wonder how that practice will change if at all.
D
You could bring it off your laptop, and if he has a HDTV it could be shown on the HDTV.
:-).
Of course the DRM nuts want to have HDTV's DVI inputs banned, so that might not work.
Or you could use it as an excuse to invite her to your house instead of vice versa
D
I would check out the Mac at Apple Retail stores. You can try before you buy, and the salespeople are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. There is even full high-speed Internet access, and if you work for an educational institution you can get the student discount on hardware at the store.
The biggest difference between using the Mac and Linux with open source software is that the X-Windows implementation is ugly, at least out of the box. The hideous fonts and lacklustre look of the thing will send you speeding back to the Mac user interface. You'll either spend a lot of time configuring your X environment, or dump X and go with Cocoa or writing web applications, depending on your needs.
At least that was what I thought when I last tried X-Windows on the Mac. It may have improved since I haven't had any need to use it in years.
if you've been using Perl I recommend you check out Ruby. Perl's there and it works fine but Ruby's really a class apart, and it's already on your Mac. (Ruby fanatics upgrade it since it's a bit out of date). And Ruby runs on all OSs, so you can still swap software with your Linux-using friends.
My experience in an academic environment is that they welcome MacOS or Linux but prefer you develop on cross-platform applications. So you may need to use x-Windows and its resultant hideousness to stay compatible with the rest of the world. I've switched entirely to web-based development, so this isn't a problem for me. Flash is completely interoperable between Mac and Windows versions, so you don't have to worry there. Safari is standards-compliant and is very similar to FireFox in how it renders pages.
Since I basically do nothing but develop web applications, none of this really mattered to me and the slicker environment, cool hardware and better UI design make working on the Mac a joy. It's a great platform and getting greater all the time.
Hope that helps.
D
Why couldn't you get the DVD extras? Surely if you're downloading a DVD you can download the extras too.
There's a huge difference between $9.99 (which I think is doable for many customers) and $15.99 (for which I think people will keep going to the DVD store). So if any online movie download store succeeds, it will be Apple's.
However, I can't help but notice that there are a lot of titles at my local DVD store for $6.99 or thereabouts. I don't know if this will be as lucerative a venture as music, especially since you tend to listen to music a lot but only view movies once or twice. Rental may well still be the best movie model for most people.
D
If you want a slick and beautiful GUI environment, Apple's going to be head and shoulders above the competition. I haven't done anything in it, but I can't help but notice that applications done with the Cocoa API all look fabulous. So if you want simulations that are beautiful, the Mac's tough to beat.
MacOS X has all commercial web development apps you need, including Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Linux doesn't. MacOS X has the video editing market covered with superb applications, from iMovie to Final Cut at the high end. Linux doesn't.
MacOS X has a beautifully designed operating environment; Linux has been gaining, but it's still not there and probably will neverl catch up entirely, thanks to Steve Jobs' relentless attention to detail. There are some things Open source does very well (operating system kernels) and some things they don't (overall user experience). This "dirty secret" is why you see so many open lovers of open source software, including myself, using PowerBooks.
MacOS X can run nearly all Linux applications. I think with X-Windows installed there are very few that couldn't be run. I use mysql, Ruby on Rails, Perl (much less now that I've discovered Ruby), emacs, etc. There's even a nice gui Emacs nowadays.
Incidentally, in the grandparent's price comparison, he forgot to pay for Windows XP or Vista. Sure, you could put Linux on it, but let's compare two commercial OSs here. Apparently at retail it would cost an amazing $200 to get even Vista Home Basic on the machine, and then you've almost hit the price of the 20" iMac. Dell's 24" monitor is $791.10 at the Dell store, so it looks to me like once you add it, you're pretty close to the price of the 24" iMac, and you haven't even taken the time to set up and install stuff.
As someone who owns an Apple Cinema Display 23", I can say that it's worth every penny of the $1,700-odd I paid for it. I'd probably go for the 30" display now but I'm just a glutton for screen size. The 30" display costs exactly the same as the 24" iMac.
D
A quick clarification since I think many Slashdot users don't realize this - the $200 is a family pack license which covers up to 5 users. So it's hugely cheaper to legally upgrade multiple Apple machines than Vista. An extra Vista Home Advanced license is $243, a whopping $16 discount over the charge of $259 for one.
This doesn't even consider the fact that newer Apple operating systems run better on old hardware than their predecessors. Tiger on my ancient laptop still runs great and is a wonderful upgrade. By contrast, I don't have any PC hardware, even computers bought at about the same time as my Macs, that will run Aero [Vista's MacOS X-like interface] at all.
D
I've been really surprised at Vista pricing. It seems to me there's no reason to buy Vista at retail when you could buy a new computer when Vista comes out for not that much more money than the upgrade alone. I could see paying $99 to upgrade to Vista, or even meeting Apple's upgrade price at $129, but pushing $200 to upgrade XP Pro to Vista pro sounds like a bad dream.
From an aesthetic point of view, MacOS X is a no-brainer. You can run Photoshop on it, and if you decide the GIMP or other open source applications are your cup of tea, you can run them too.
Also, if you do video or plan to do video, the Apple applications are absolutely unbeatable.
D
Of course if you could detect signatures instead of actually fixing bugs, you might be able to get the new signature out at about the same time as the exploit instead of (as you said) three weeks later.
Intuitively, though, I'm not keen on something that rewrites the HTML that I receive. It seems like there's a lot of potential for abuse, like that infamous Internet Explorer linking thing that automatically sprinkled links to Microsoft-friendly sites into the page content you received. Is this just a trojan horse for the likes of that cropping up again?
D
Your larger point looks pretty accurate to me. People do seem to be more receptive to buying Macs now that they can run Parallels or Boot Camp to use their "favorite" Windows software. It's interesting to note that about 70% of the commercial software I run is made by Apple (Final Cut Pro, Safari, Motion, etc) or Adobe (Photoshop, After Effects, etc). I also use the Omniweb web browser and the TextMate editor, both of which are solidly in the Apple camp, with Cocoa applications that are probably not easily portable to Windows. So if I am at all usual, all the Parallels/Boot Camp will do for me is to let me use my MacBook (when I get one) to run IE when I need it for testing.
:-). I know you can use various programs to remap keystrokes if you get really into things, but I know that often has bizarre unintended consequences. I like having them work out of the box - and in MacOS X, they do.
:-(.
Here are some other notes that don't address your the main point, but might be of interest anyway.
As far as I know, virtually all open source Linux software will compile and run on a Mac, although the GUI stuff needs X-Windows, which people tend to avoid on Macs. But I run mysql, Ruby on Rails, etc on the Mac and it all works flawlessly. (In fact, Ruby on Rails was developed almost exclusively on Macs). mySQL even has most of its GUI utilities ported to MacOS X, and AquaMacs is a pretty good Aqua Emacs. (I wish it had better proportional font support.)
One particularly wonderful thing about MacOS X, which shows Steve Jobs' attention to even the most technical user, is that emacs command keystrokes are burned into the interface. So if I want to go up a line in Safari, Omniweb, mail or any other Cocoa application, I can type Control-P, just as I've been doing for decades of emacs use. Why doesn't FireFox have that feature? You can use those keystrokes in Bash under Linux, as you can in Bash under MacOS X, but not under FireFox. RMS would be rolling over in his grave, if he wasn't still alive
The way I think of Apple is that it's the ultimate combination of the best of commercial software and the best of the open source world. With Linux, you don't have the polished if expensive world of commercial software, and with Windows Open Source stuff is a pain to get working, and in virii and spyware your have the dark side of commercial software run rampant.
You go with MacOS X because it gives you the best of both worlds, letting you throw away the worst, and because when you spend your entire life in front of a computer screen, it's nice for it to be well thought out in design and aesthetically pleasing.
It is to me, at least. Your mileage may vary. I think people who come from the Windows side get used to gloomy gray environments. I don't know what study they put together that made gloom the norm, but I think it was a big mistake for KDE to copy it. All I'll say is that American society is glum enough without having your computer screen glum too.
Finally, it should be noted that Apple finally developed the Mighty Mouse to put the "no right mouse button" question to rest forever. It's a pity it's such a durable meme, but I guess until people start replacing their older Apple mice, it will be with us for a long time to come
D
I prefer the TrackPoint by a significant margin. Right now, I'm using my Apple Powerbook and have a ThinkPad to do Windows testing, and the one thing I prefer on the ThinkPad is that TrackPoint. I can really zip around the screen with commendable efficiency, far more than with the trackpad on the PowerBook.
:-).
This really is something accoring to taste. I wish I could get a trackpoint-style mouse for the PowerBook. However, it's certainly not an issue that will switch me to a non-Apple OS
I'd recommend that anyone who has the choice check out both pointer movement systems because it's obvious that people have very strong preferences for one or the other.
D
If all she needs to do is write letters on occasion, I think MacOS X now includes some kind of text editor/word processor similar to Wordpad. I believe they even made it read Word documents pretty well. You might want to ask your friendly Apple retail store about it.
:-(.
I really like Pages, which is Apple's advanced word processor. It has really nice style sheet support and you can build great looking documents with it without nearly as much effort as Word requires. And if you need to do presentations, Keynote is a must, and they're both bundled into the iWork package. I just hope they'll get a spreadsheet in it one of these days; when that happens I can dump Office without tears.
I bought the first Office X years ago, because people kept on sending me Word documents I had to read (this is before Apple added that to the OS). It cost something like $469 and I thought it was a real ripoff. I use Excel occasionally and I tried Neooffice's spreadsheet, which seems sluggish and clunky. I don't love Excel but I don't like NeoOffice either. For one thing, it's very Windows like and reminds me of the gray gloom of the Windows UI whenever I use it
However, now the Microsoft Office Student/Teacher edition would serve my needs just fine and I think it's in the $150 range. They basically allow anyone who doesn't want to blow the big bucks on more expensive versions to think of themselves as students or teachers, so the license is fine.
With the exception of video editing/production software, I run mainly open source software on my Macs. It does great with such stalwarts as emacs, Ruby on Rails, mySQL, etc. And I really love the designer quality interface. I had to use Windows a few times recently and trying to get a printer to work was like pulling teeth. Despite my Unix proficiency, I had similar dismal experiences with desktop Linux.
I have no doubt that you are right and it's possible to run a Windows machine without too much grief. Possible, but perhaps not the best use of your time. If you want to do great things, tis better to do them than to try and fight with the OS and anti-something software in the hopes that the machine won't eat itself up before it's a month old. And that's why I love Apple and MacOS X. It's not a perfect world, because we don't have perfection on this planet. But it's a better one, and for that I thank Steve and his minions.
D
Apparently early adopters are not buying the new DVD standard in any great numbers (this was another Slashdot story today). One of the reasons is likely to be the DRM. Someone actually pointed this out when this topic was discussed on Free Republic, which is a conservative news forum site that does not generally attract particularly tech-savvy people.
I don't think the average person on the street understands DRM, and iTunes DRM is light enough so that it's never prevented me from doing something I wanted to do. But people who buy $1,000 DVD players tend to expect more from them, and people with that kind of serious money tend to put some serious research into their choices.
So it wouldn't surprise me if DRM would kill off or at least seriously damaage sales of the new DVD systems.
But for an operating system? I'm not so sure about that since it has so many other uses that are not linked to commercial entertainment. It's very possible we will wind up boycotting the major studios and just playing our own videos on YouTube or its successors. The DRM wouldn't affect us and we'd be no less free than if we'd stuck with XP or MacOS X.
D