I hate this troll. Someone wrote it many years ago with the exact same words only substituting SGI and SGI applications, and I've seen it popping up in random places on Slashdot ever since.
I don't know if users really find it easiest to use. It's just "what's installed on the computer". I would say that way under 5% of the user community has made any kind of comparison between alternative operating systems and decided, as a personal choice, which one they want to use.
I know that after trying MacOS, Linux and various flavors of Windows, I find MacOS X much easier to use than Windows - but at lot of this is just that MacOS X doesn't move their preferences around constantly between OS versions.
In the end, though, my preference for MacOS is more aesthetic than anything else - I like the huge amount of work that's gone into making it slick and designer-friendly. There's also the ability not to have to worry constantly about virii and spyware.
I do think more people would work on spyware for MacOS X if it was more popular, but it's hard for me to believe people haven't done it and are not working on it even in its current state. After all, if someone can get their spyware on the Mac, there are still millions of machines to infect and they might be the only infection on the machine instead of one of fifty or so as in the Windows world.
It's quite possible that Mac users are more knowledgeable about their computers, or at least tasteful enough not to download 600,000,000 free smiley faces with hideous background art including 20 new spyware programs. Or perhaps having to type your password after downloading software gives people an idea that downloading software just might be dangerous...
It's illegal to work in the Philippines, but it's not illegal to visit the country.
The authorities don't care that you still have a job in the US while you're visiting.
And of course if you are running a business, that's not even a job.
I'm not sure what their attitude towards employing their workers is, but I know that most retirees wind up hiring Filipina maids (as well as marrying Filipina women) and nobody ever gives them any trouble about it.
In that scenerio, if you like living in a third-world country, probably you and your employer have both benefitted, since they are still going to pay you far more in local terms than you were paid in the US. You'll look rich, they'll save a lot of money, and everyone wins.
So what's wrong with that again?
The only thing that really loses in that scenerio is the factors that prop up the American cost of living, which bluntly is bloody high compared to the rest of the world.
When I lived in LA, I had a $428,000 house, which I subsequently sold for $500,000. It was one of the cheapest homes in my upper middle class neighborhood.
By paying me, my local employer was really paying for that house, which you could buy for $20,000 elsewhere in the world.
Is he, or I, really gaining big-time by paying for my high cost of living? What does he get out of it? And, more intrigingly, what did I get out of it?
I'm putting together a web service type business, and I figure I can outsource myself to the Philippines and save a lot of money thanks to the low cost of living. It might make totally new business models possible, such actually, seriously, being able to make a living of blogging, even if you're not in the top 1% of it, through a combination of the generosity of Google ads and the incredibly low cost of living. Most bloggers who try this are in the high-cost SF Bay Area and bleed money like crazy, but you're just one person and don't have to do that.
It also brings new social opportunities. Third-world chicks dig American guys. You're a millionaire in their eyes, even if you make $1,000 a month. You are also exotic and curious and odd, and that uniqueness is attractive in ways money doesn't completely explain. True, they love you for your money, as well as being you, but that's really no different from how American girls work. The only difference is that you're at the top of the food chain instead of the middle.
The biggest problem, of course, is that your options in getting customers don't include the schmoozing that is so necessary in cases like this. In my case, I have a business partner who's staying in the US and dealing with those things. At the very least, you would need a US bank account to accept money and someone in the US to deposit checks. Most affiliate programs and Google Adwords require US addresses and banks.
In the Philippines, you come in on a tourist visa and can renew it for up to 12 months. At that point you have to leave the country for 24 hours. Most people doing this take one day vacations in nearby Hong Kong, Singapore or Taiwan.
Make sure you have very carefully researched the cost of living in your chosen area. You can usually bring in your laptop computer, but parts and service for it may be scarce. Computers and other electronics can cost double or triple what they do in the US thanks to stiff tariffs and corruption. On the other hand if you're stopped by a cop, you pay PHP500 ($10) and you can go on your merry way without the slightest stain on your driving record.
Bear in mind that costs are lower, but not evenly so. Used cars in the Philippines cost maybe 40% more than they do in the US, because there are a lot of import duties. You can get cheap native made cars but you probably won't like them. Gas in the Philippines cost slightly less than the US, thanks to lower taxes, but it's still expensive. On the other hand, a high-rise apartment in Manila's most expensive elite area goes for about PHP60,000 ($1,000) a month. You can get housing in major cities for PHP7000 (about $125). True, it lacks a bath tub or hot water, but the water's lukewarm anyway.
DSL Internet, in areas that support it, is about $50 a month. Everyone uses cellphones and they're all on prepaid plans which are very cheap. Despite this, most people in the Philippines use text messaging because it's even cheaper.
So why did I choose the Philippines? Amazingly low cost of living, for one thing. Most people speak a bastardized version of English, so the language isn't a big problem. And of course it's a tropical island which means I can enjoy going swimming and boating.
So if you've always wanted to be your own boss, and have a good business plan you can execute, going to a third world country might just be the way to do it.
But beware: You won't be able to make money there yourself. Skilled workers go begging at P200 ($4) a day. And even technical workers don't fare much better, from what I've been told. The key in going to a third-world country is to keep some reasonable fraction of your first-world income.
I'm in the final phases of my research and will be visiting the Philippines in February. (All of this information is from my pre-trip research.) I plan to blog during my trip showing my reactions to real life there. Watch amazing.com (which will be changing radically soon) for details.
The same dual CPU system worked great in video editing as long as I was using internal drives. It was when I went to external drives that there was a problem. The system had 1.5gb RAM. Mail and Safari were usually running, but I seem to remember shutting them down and finding that it didn't affect the results.
I recently loaned that system to a music composer using Protools who needed a machine. I figured the low CPU performance would be compensated for by the Protools hardware, and so it proved... except when he used an external drive. Even though the Protools instruction manual tells you to use an external drive instead of the system disk, I found that copying the data from the external drive to the system disk solved the problem, just as it did when I ran Final Cut Pro on it years ago.
So there seems to be something about external drive support on at least that particular Mac model that gave it hideous performance problems, even on expensive LaCie drives.
I'd love an Apple-branded phone; I do trust Steve to give me the best experience, as he has in the past.
That being said, I'm amazed at the talk of Apple setting up its own cellphone network. As far as I can tell, huge companies work very hard to create a decent quality cellphone signal and yet they fall on their faces all the time. Even Verizon, said to have the best service, is still not all that great.
I don't see Apple killing their hard-earned image by running a cellphone network that's bound to not even be as good as the competition's vile performance.
Unless they can find a technology that would really make it great, I just don't see Steve taking that risk. I wouldn't if I were him.
I think Apple's GUI is way too high-overhead for a portable device, so I think the desirablity of such in embedded environments would be questionable at best.
Notice what a hard time Nokia had with its tablet running Linux. It was widely panned as underpowered, and an equivalent MacOS X-powered device would run into the same problems.
Well, I have never, in my entire life, been able to afford a new car of the type I would like.
So I buy used Mercedes, like my 1991 420 SEL. It's pretty safe to say that if I buy a car today it will probably be a 1997 or so S-Class. Thus, I'm going from a car with plenty of gizmos for its day to a car with even more gizmos. My income hasn't changed, but as I get older I can still afford a Mercedes about 10 years or so older than the current date. The date advances, so I get newer cars.
I'm not saying the situation you mention never happens, but I think it's pretty rare. People who can't afford to replace their car tend to just make their old car work longer, and of course by defintion they're used to their old car.
That being said, I think my crucial observation is that they gave people a BMW 3-series to drive, which is a car that's notorious for bad handling. If you give a Chevy driver an older BMW without at least some extra instruction, you're likely to see trouble. (The new BMWs, of course, have the gizmos and therefore are far safer than the old ones).
The real test would be to match them up - if someone drives up in a Chevy Malibu, you give him a Cavalier from 10 years ago and see how he does.
Maybe this isn't so bad because if I buy a car, it's generally going to be newer than the one it replaces, and so it will have more gizmos, not fewer.
Only enthusiasts are likely to drive BMWs like the one described in the article. I seem to remember the 3-series had a reputation in those days for being a fun to drive but tricky to handle car. These randomly selected drivers are likely to not know how to drive such a car properly, since they have never owned one.
I thought traction control was still pretty exclusive to high-end cars. ABS, of course, is just about everywhere. I transitioned to a car with ABS but I must be among one of the few who can safely drive without it, because I very rarely feel it trigger, even when braking relatively hard.
There may be psychological factors involved in this study that make it unduly alarmist. When you take drivers and unleash them on a track, I'm betting their competitive instincts override their caution. They know, after all, that if they did spin out, the track is designed to be safe under those conditions. So if the drivers were not told the point of the study, they might have thrown caution to the wind and behaved very differently from normal.
A more interesting study (albiet a more boring one to conduct) would be to see how our accident rate has declined over the years with the gizmos coming into effect. Has anyone done something like that? Have accident rates declined thanks to the gizmos, or do they just offer a false sense of security?
Just in case someone has interesting insights on this question, I'm going to answer.
When I tried using my external FireWire 400 drive to edit video on either my G4/450 dual processor or my G4/400 TiBook, I was able to capture video OK but when I tried playing it back it was jerky to the point of unusability.
As far as FireWire 400 versus 800 goes, I'm afraid the egos of users may get in the way of common sense. Sure FireWire 800 didn't actually improve performance that much, but it felt good to be cutting edge with your fancy new LaCie drive with FireWire 800. I'm afraid this, and not real capacity, may be the actual issue here.
Maybe the next generation of PowerBooks will have Fibre Channel adapters? That seems like the next logical step.
Or, better yet, a new 17" PowerBook with the whole case filled with 120gb drives (or whatever the maximum capacity is by then). I'd say you should be able to squeeze 3-4 drives in this case and that would be enough for all but the most demanding remote production applications. Of course that would require a mammoth battery too, but of course the drives would only spin up when they were being actively used.
I love this machine - for the project I'm doing now it's nearly ideal - but I do salivate at the dual core processors on the new model. I doubt that it would benchmark all that much faster, but being able to process photos and video in the background while doing other work would make it well worth the price.
I suspect you're being sarcastic, but to make things a little clearer, it's worth noting that as long as Google's user interface was done in GT/GTK it's not really feasible to fix the flaws without either rewriting Google Earth entirely, or fixing GT/GTK for the Mac.
Sadly, I don't see that as being likely, unless someone takes this message as a challenge and goes to work:-).
Why has Linux/Unix (other than the Mac) been stuck with such ugly tools, anyway? Do open source people not care about how things look? Or is it just too time-consuming to make things look right?
Nothing says that these are not planned products, just that they didn't come out at Macworld.
If we see new iBooks and they are the same form factor as the old iBooks, then I'd say you have a point.
If the next revision of a Mac Mini has no PVR, then again you are right.
But we don't know since we have not encountered the next revision of either product. It will come up soon enough, I'm sure. It does seem logical to conclude that since the iMacs have dual core processors, the Mac Mini certainly might have them (in other words, they are not being reserved for the PowerMacs).
I think what's going on here is that Apple didn't want anything to take from the announcement of iLIfe (which obviously sells well or it wouldn't have gotten so much time there) and from the drama of the new Intel products.
Once that's done, another dramatic presentation is going to deal with the PVR (if it exists) and the iBooks. It's a matter of spreading out his message to make sure we're all hanging on our seats with anticipation. Steve is a master manipulator of this kind of thing.
Incidentally, their report on Final Cut Pro 6 said it would come out at NAB in April (if my memory serves), and I'm sure it will because Final Cut has roughly annual releases that occur at NAB. Of course I didn't need a rumor site to tell me that, but it was interesting to see what they think is going to be announced.
One exciting conclusion I can draw from all this is that the new PowerMacs will probably be all dual dual core processors or stronger, or they would not have let that technology into iMacs. I think that's pretty exciting, don't you?
I had trouble editing video on a PowerBook with FireWire 400 and a PowerMac G4. When I upgraded to a PowerMac G5, using its FireWire 400, the problem disappeared. So my point is that differences that people attribute to using a slow interface are actually due to a slow processor. This is probably what Apple discovered in testing. I doubt that they simply abandoned FireWire 800 customers without some thought.
I seem to recall, in fact, that even FireWire 400 data rates were substantially faster than most disk drives and so it should matter little to nothing if you're using FireWire 400 or 800 in that application.
It seems intiutive that the new PowerBooks are likely to be very similar in speed to the PowerMacs we have now, with the exception of the Quad-G5. I guess any "Mac Pro" models (since the word Power is said to be dead) are going to have to be pretty powerful to surpass their portable brothers.
It's looking like quite the exciting year. I hope they create a 17" Intel PowerBook - I just got a 17" PowerBook and really love the big theatrical screen experience, so I would be loath to return to a 15" model even to get the promised 4x speed increases.
I'm pretty happy with my purchase, which is less than a month old, even though it's now theoretically "obsolete". If they'd introduced a 17" MacBook, I would probably be a lot grumpier.
Although I do all my pro video work on a PowerMac, Apple has very heavily advertised PowerBooks for field video work. Literature for Final Cut Pro has included shots of it running on the PowerBook for quite some time, as the ultimate mobile video solution.
So I think this will actually disappoint many people.
However, I will note that my problems with video capture using FireWire 400 vanished when I went from a G4/dual 450mhz to a G5 dual 2ghz. This implies that perhaps the CPU is more important than bus speed in capture, and that would make FireWire 800 pretty much irrelevent. It's very possible that this system will capture video just fine even on an external drive thanks to the fast CPU.
I think those of us who edit video on our PowerBooks - which may include me due to an upcoming trip - are going to be awfully happy with dual cores. The new Intel PowerBook is probably going to be almost as fast as the G5 dual 2ghz system that is my current video workstation.
For that matter, the new iMacs are likely to outrun all current PowerMacs but the dual dual core. That's bound to be a bit of a marketing problem.
I think the reality is that people will always judge people about how they have affected them personally, because let's face it, the most important person in your life is you.
I think few are willing to admit, as I am, that this is true, because it "feels wrong" to care more about you than millions of people dying. But it's true, because your life is yours, and your friends are yours, and even your computing community aka Slashdot is yours. Millions of people in Africa have no connection to you at all. If it's any consolation, they're not thinking about you either, and they wouldn't care if you died in some mega-version of Hurricane Katrina.
Of course if you or your wife or husband or lover is dying of AIDS and Bill Gates comes up with a cure, you're going to love the man more than you hate his software, however lousy it is.
Overall, Bill Gates is going to feel a lot better about his life if he finds a cure for AIDS. I'm still not going to love him, and I think most Slashdotters, in their hearts, still won't love him. But the rest of the world will and hopefully that will be good enough.
And that, in the end, was my original point.
Oh, and one more thing. Isn't it funny that we're talking as though Bill Gates has found a cure for AIDS, even though he has not? Such is the power of the media. Really, he doesn't deserve the kudos he's getting until the research he's funding actually produces positive results. Maybe that's what's really bothering me about this.
I think almost all the pretty, young girls on the Internet are on it. There would be no more pretty girls if you vaporized all myspace users:-(.
True, it shows a remarkable lack of taste in most pretty young girls' minds, but there are always the rare exceptions.
I admire myspace because it gives people what they really want, not what marketers say they want and not what software developers say they want. They want to be able to use any color in the world and they can. They want to put horrible music up on their profiles and so they can.
"People Power" made myspace and people power can destroy it. It looks like Murdoch's people are sending it straight down the tubes.
I don't see anyone dumping FireWire because millions of people have video cameras compatible with it, and home users want to be able to use iMovie.
They dumped the floppy drive when people were already moving to networks to swap files. There's no equivalent technology waiting in the wings to get video off a MiniDV camera.
You said that he did bad things to the rich and good things for the poor. I was trying to point out that what he did was so universal that it affects the poor as well as the rich. Not as much, perhaps, but it does affect them.
His raids on Internet cafes, forcing them out of business because they're using pirated software, seem to be pretty bad things to do to countries where he does not and will not gain any significant income. His minions have been doing this in the Philippines where the typical cost of an hour of computer time in an Internet cafe is P25 (roughly $0.50) and where drinks cost under P50 (US$1). I don't normally condone piracy and don't use pirated software myself, but if I were him I would not bother to enforce the law in places where survival of any computer-related business is so difficult.
Many Internet cafes in the Philippines are switching to Linux because of this. That's where his unfortunate conduct is going to get a pretty significant payback. But he doesn't think that way; he wants the pirates to be punished so he can squeeze revenue out of a stone.
So don't think Bill Gates is an angel who wants to help the poor. When the poor violate his own self-interest he will go after them as fiercely as anyone else. I find think a little disheartening in view of this big-time charitable reputation he's getting.
Read my sentence more carefully. I said "In the world of Slashdot". This is the world of computer users. About 95% of them are unpleasantly affected, on a daily basis, by errors and problems with Windows code. I would say that way under 1% of the people reading this message will get AIDS, and of them 95% will also be affected by problems with Windows.
There are plenty of poor computer users in the third world, incidentally. Don't insult them by saying that they all are illiterate and live in mud huts and shacks. Many of them do, but not all. The Nigerian scammer whose Outlook Express crashes while he's writing yet another scam email is just as much of a victim of Windows as anyone else. I don't like him since I'm sick of his scams, but I think you get the idea. The lousiness that is Windows reaches all around the plant, from areas where half the population is dying of AIDS to places where it barely exists anywhere.
There's an old newspaper saying that a headline news story is one person dead in your area, 100 people dead in your city, 1,000 dead in your country, or 1,000,000 dead somewhere in the world. It is this way; we think about the issues that interest us where we are.
And there's nothing wrong with that; I'm sure the African on the street thought about as much about our own disasters as, well, as we think about his.
If you look at the Slashdot audience - and not the broader effects in the rest of the world - not even curing AIDS is going to affect as many people positively as the crashes, glitches and everyday lousiness of Microsoft software has affected them negatively.
Now, if he does put up the money to cure AIDS or something comparable, he has done something great to the world, and that's fine - if he does it.
But for now, for most of us, he has created Windows, and Windows has created countless hours of agony among us. Misery encountering constant crashing in Windows 3.1, 95 and 98, and misery encountering endless parades of virii and spyware today.
Within our group here, I doubt that there's anything that can be done by him to improve lives more than they have already been damaged.
I understand that in the rest of the world, it's a different story thanks to the AIDS epidemics in the third world. But most of us are not in the third world and few of us know anyone who's likely to be impacted by his efforts.
So I think it's OK for us to have a pretty jaundiced view of him, no matter what he does to try and make up for it. He'll get enough plaudits from Time and the third-world citizens who really need his help. I wish them all the best, and hope he does something great for them, but that's not going to make me personally approve of his company or its miserable products.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate this troll. Someone wrote it many years ago with the exact same words only substituting SGI and SGI applications, and I've seen it popping up in random places on Slashdot ever since.
He did not do what he claims.
D
The parent poster is absolutely right.
Artistic women bring joy and warmth to your life.
When you meet one, you'll never forget it.
Hope that helps.
D
You're asking for a girlfriend as Anonymous Coward?
Isn't that a little silly?
D
I don't know if users really find it easiest to use. It's just "what's installed on the computer". I would say that way under 5% of the user community has made any kind of comparison between alternative operating systems and decided, as a personal choice, which one they want to use.
...
I know that after trying MacOS, Linux and various flavors of Windows, I find MacOS X much easier to use than Windows - but at lot of this is just that MacOS X doesn't move their preferences around constantly between OS versions.
In the end, though, my preference for MacOS is more aesthetic than anything else - I like the huge amount of work that's gone into making it slick and designer-friendly. There's also the ability not to have to worry constantly about virii and spyware.
I do think more people would work on spyware for MacOS X if it was more popular, but it's hard for me to believe people haven't done it and are not working on it even in its current state. After all, if someone can get their spyware on the Mac, there are still millions of machines to infect and they might be the only infection on the machine instead of one of fifty or so as in the Windows world.
It's quite possible that Mac users are more knowledgeable about their computers, or at least tasteful enough not to download 600,000,000 free smiley faces with hideous background art including 20 new spyware programs. Or perhaps having to type your password after downloading software gives people an idea that downloading software just might be dangerous
D
It's illegal to work in the Philippines, but it's not illegal to visit the country.
The authorities don't care that you still have a job in the US while you're visiting.
And of course if you are running a business, that's not even a job.
I'm not sure what their attitude towards employing their workers is, but I know that most retirees wind up hiring Filipina maids (as well as marrying Filipina women) and nobody ever gives them any trouble about it.
D
In that scenerio, if you like living in a third-world country, probably you and your employer have both benefitted, since they are still going to pay you far more in local terms than you were paid in the US. You'll look rich, they'll save a lot of money, and everyone wins.
So what's wrong with that again?
The only thing that really loses in that scenerio is the factors that prop up the American cost of living, which bluntly is bloody high compared to the rest of the world.
When I lived in LA, I had a $428,000 house, which I subsequently sold for $500,000. It was one of the cheapest homes in my upper middle class neighborhood.
By paying me, my local employer was really paying for that house, which you could buy for $20,000 elsewhere in the world.
Is he, or I, really gaining big-time by paying for my high cost of living? What does he get out of it? And, more intrigingly, what did I get out of it?
D
I'm putting together a web service type business, and I figure I can outsource myself to the Philippines and save a lot of money thanks to the low cost of living. It might make totally new business models possible, such actually, seriously, being able to make a living of blogging, even if you're not in the top 1% of it, through a combination of the generosity of Google ads and the incredibly low cost of living. Most bloggers who try this are in the high-cost SF Bay Area and bleed money like crazy, but you're just one person and don't have to do that.
It also brings new social opportunities. Third-world chicks dig American guys. You're a millionaire in their eyes, even if you make $1,000 a month. You are also exotic and curious and odd, and that uniqueness is attractive in ways money doesn't completely explain. True, they love you for your money, as well as being you, but that's really no different from how American girls work. The only difference is that you're at the top of the food chain instead of the middle.
The biggest problem, of course, is that your options in getting customers don't include the schmoozing that is so necessary in cases like this. In my case, I have a business partner who's staying in the US and dealing with those things. At the very least, you would need a US bank account to accept money and someone in the US to deposit checks. Most affiliate programs and Google Adwords require US addresses and banks.
In the Philippines, you come in on a tourist visa and can renew it for up to 12 months. At that point you have to leave the country for 24 hours. Most people doing this take one day vacations in nearby Hong Kong, Singapore or Taiwan.
Make sure you have very carefully researched the cost of living in your chosen area. You can usually bring in your laptop computer, but parts and service for it may be scarce. Computers and other electronics can cost double or triple what they do in the US thanks to stiff tariffs and corruption. On the other hand if you're stopped by a cop, you pay PHP500 ($10) and you can go on your merry way without the slightest stain on your driving record.
Bear in mind that costs are lower, but not evenly so. Used cars in the Philippines cost maybe 40% more than they do in the US, because there are a lot of import duties. You can get cheap native made cars but you probably won't like them. Gas in the Philippines cost slightly less than the US, thanks to lower taxes, but it's still expensive. On the other hand, a high-rise apartment in Manila's most expensive elite area goes for about PHP60,000 ($1,000) a month. You can get housing in major cities for PHP7000 (about $125). True, it lacks a bath tub or hot water, but the water's lukewarm anyway.
DSL Internet, in areas that support it, is about $50 a month. Everyone uses cellphones and they're all on prepaid plans which are very cheap. Despite this, most people in the Philippines use text messaging because it's even cheaper.
So why did I choose the Philippines? Amazingly low cost of living, for one thing. Most people speak a bastardized version of English, so the language isn't a big problem. And of course it's a tropical island which means I can enjoy going swimming and boating.
So if you've always wanted to be your own boss, and have a good business plan you can execute, going to a third world country might just be the way to do it.
But beware: You won't be able to make money there yourself. Skilled workers go begging at P200 ($4) a day. And even technical workers don't fare much better, from what I've been told. The key in going to a third-world country is to keep some reasonable fraction of your first-world income.
I'm in the final phases of my research and will be visiting the Philippines in February. (All of this information is from my pre-trip research.) I plan to blog during my trip showing my reactions to real life there. Watch amazing.com (which will be changing radically soon) for details.
D
The same dual CPU system worked great in video editing as long as I was using internal drives. It was when I went to external drives that there was a problem. The system had 1.5gb RAM. Mail and Safari were usually running, but I seem to remember shutting them down and finding that it didn't affect the results.
... except when he used an external drive. Even though the Protools instruction manual tells you to use an external drive instead of the system disk, I found that copying the data from the external drive to the system disk solved the problem, just as it did when I ran Final Cut Pro on it years ago.
I recently loaned that system to a music composer using Protools who needed a machine. I figured the low CPU performance would be compensated for by the Protools hardware, and so it proved
So there seems to be something about external drive support on at least that particular Mac model that gave it hideous performance problems, even on expensive LaCie drives.
Hope that was interesting.
D
I'd love an Apple-branded phone; I do trust Steve to give me the best experience, as he has in the past.
That being said, I'm amazed at the talk of Apple setting up its own cellphone network. As far as I can tell, huge companies work very hard to create a decent quality cellphone signal and yet they fall on their faces all the time. Even Verizon, said to have the best service, is still not all that great.
I don't see Apple killing their hard-earned image by running a cellphone network that's bound to not even be as good as the competition's vile performance.
Unless they can find a technology that would really make it great, I just don't see Steve taking that risk. I wouldn't if I were him.
D
I think Apple's GUI is way too high-overhead for a portable device, so I think the desirablity of such in embedded environments would be questionable at best.
Notice what a hard time Nokia had with its tablet running Linux. It was widely panned as underpowered, and an equivalent MacOS X-powered device would run into the same problems.
D
Well, I have never, in my entire life, been able to afford a new car of the type I would like.
So I buy used Mercedes, like my 1991 420 SEL. It's pretty safe to say that if I buy a car today it will probably be a 1997 or so S-Class. Thus, I'm going from a car with plenty of gizmos for its day to a car with even more gizmos. My income hasn't changed, but as I get older I can still afford a Mercedes about 10 years or so older than the current date. The date advances, so I get newer cars.
I'm not saying the situation you mention never happens, but I think it's pretty rare. People who can't afford to replace their car tend to just make their old car work longer, and of course by defintion they're used to their old car.
That being said, I think my crucial observation is that they gave people a BMW 3-series to drive, which is a car that's notorious for bad handling. If you give a Chevy driver an older BMW without at least some extra instruction, you're likely to see trouble. (The new BMWs, of course, have the gizmos and therefore are far safer than the old ones).
The real test would be to match them up - if someone drives up in a Chevy Malibu, you give him a Cavalier from 10 years ago and see how he does.
D
Sure you can access the source, to the extent you would want to for embedded environments, anyway.
MacOS X rests above the open source Darwin project, so if you want to make Darwin embedded, go right ahead.
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Maybe this isn't so bad because if I buy a car, it's generally going to be newer than the one it replaces, and so it will have more gizmos, not fewer.
Only enthusiasts are likely to drive BMWs like the one described in the article. I seem to remember the 3-series had a reputation in those days for being a fun to drive but tricky to handle car. These randomly selected drivers are likely to not know how to drive such a car properly, since they have never owned one.
I thought traction control was still pretty exclusive to high-end cars. ABS, of course, is just about everywhere. I transitioned to a car with ABS but I must be among one of the few who can safely drive without it, because I very rarely feel it trigger, even when braking relatively hard.
There may be psychological factors involved in this study that make it unduly alarmist. When you take drivers and unleash them on a track, I'm betting their competitive instincts override their caution. They know, after all, that if they did spin out, the track is designed to be safe under those conditions. So if the drivers were not told the point of the study, they might have thrown caution to the wind and behaved very differently from normal.
A more interesting study (albiet a more boring one to conduct) would be to see how our accident rate has declined over the years with the gizmos coming into effect. Has anyone done something like that? Have accident rates declined thanks to the gizmos, or do they just offer a false sense of security?
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Just in case someone has interesting insights on this question, I'm going to answer.
When I tried using my external FireWire 400 drive to edit video on either my G4/450 dual processor or my G4/400 TiBook, I was able to capture video OK but when I tried playing it back it was jerky to the point of unusability.
As far as FireWire 400 versus 800 goes, I'm afraid the egos of users may get in the way of common sense. Sure FireWire 800 didn't actually improve performance that much, but it felt good to be cutting edge with your fancy new LaCie drive with FireWire 800. I'm afraid this, and not real capacity, may be the actual issue here.
Maybe the next generation of PowerBooks will have Fibre Channel adapters? That seems like the next logical step.
Or, better yet, a new 17" PowerBook with the whole case filled with 120gb drives (or whatever the maximum capacity is by then). I'd say you should be able to squeeze 3-4 drives in this case and that would be enough for all but the most demanding remote production applications. Of course that would require a mammoth battery too, but of course the drives would only spin up when they were being actively used.
I love this machine - for the project I'm doing now it's nearly ideal - but I do salivate at the dual core processors on the new model. I doubt that it would benchmark all that much faster, but being able to process photos and video in the background while doing other work would make it well worth the price.
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I suspect you're being sarcastic, but to make things a little clearer, it's worth noting that as long as Google's user interface was done in GT/GTK it's not really feasible to fix the flaws without either rewriting Google Earth entirely, or fixing GT/GTK for the Mac.
:-).
Sadly, I don't see that as being likely, unless someone takes this message as a challenge and goes to work
Why has Linux/Unix (other than the Mac) been stuck with such ugly tools, anyway? Do open source people not care about how things look? Or is it just too time-consuming to make things look right?
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Nothing says that these are not planned products, just that they didn't come out at Macworld.
If we see new iBooks and they are the same form factor as the old iBooks, then I'd say you have a point.
If the next revision of a Mac Mini has no PVR, then again you are right.
But we don't know since we have not encountered the next revision of either product. It will come up soon enough, I'm sure. It does seem logical to conclude that since the iMacs have dual core processors, the Mac Mini certainly might have them (in other words, they are not being reserved for the PowerMacs).
I think what's going on here is that Apple didn't want anything to take from the announcement of iLIfe (which obviously sells well or it wouldn't have gotten so much time there) and from the drama of the new Intel products.
Once that's done, another dramatic presentation is going to deal with the PVR (if it exists) and the iBooks. It's a matter of spreading out his message to make sure we're all hanging on our seats with anticipation. Steve is a master manipulator of this kind of thing.
Incidentally, their report on Final Cut Pro 6 said it would come out at NAB in April (if my memory serves), and I'm sure it will because Final Cut has roughly annual releases that occur at NAB. Of course I didn't need a rumor site to tell me that, but it was interesting to see what they think is going to be announced.
One exciting conclusion I can draw from all this is that the new PowerMacs will probably be all dual dual core processors or stronger, or they would not have let that technology into iMacs. I think that's pretty exciting, don't you?
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This is certainly a good summary of why I prefer the Mac to Linux. The Mac is like Linux would be if huge amounts of care were poured into its design.
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I had trouble editing video on a PowerBook with FireWire 400 and a PowerMac G4. When I upgraded to a PowerMac G5, using its FireWire 400, the problem disappeared. So my point is that differences that people attribute to using a slow interface are actually due to a slow processor. This is probably what Apple discovered in testing. I doubt that they simply abandoned FireWire 800 customers without some thought.
I seem to recall, in fact, that even FireWire 400 data rates were substantially faster than most disk drives and so it should matter little to nothing if you're using FireWire 400 or 800 in that application.
It seems intiutive that the new PowerBooks are likely to be very similar in speed to the PowerMacs we have now, with the exception of the Quad-G5. I guess any "Mac Pro" models (since the word Power is said to be dead) are going to have to be pretty powerful to surpass their portable brothers.
It's looking like quite the exciting year. I hope they create a 17" Intel PowerBook - I just got a 17" PowerBook and really love the big theatrical screen experience, so I would be loath to return to a 15" model even to get the promised 4x speed increases.
I'm pretty happy with my purchase, which is less than a month old, even though it's now theoretically "obsolete". If they'd introduced a 17" MacBook, I would probably be a lot grumpier.
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Although I do all my pro video work on a PowerMac, Apple has very heavily advertised PowerBooks for field video work. Literature for Final Cut Pro has included shots of it running on the PowerBook for quite some time, as the ultimate mobile video solution.
So I think this will actually disappoint many people.
However, I will note that my problems with video capture using FireWire 400 vanished when I went from a G4/dual 450mhz to a G5 dual 2ghz. This implies that perhaps the CPU is more important than bus speed in capture, and that would make FireWire 800 pretty much irrelevent. It's very possible that this system will capture video just fine even on an external drive thanks to the fast CPU.
I think those of us who edit video on our PowerBooks - which may include me due to an upcoming trip - are going to be awfully happy with dual cores. The new Intel PowerBook is probably going to be almost as fast as the G5 dual 2ghz system that is my current video workstation.
For that matter, the new iMacs are likely to outrun all current PowerMacs but the dual dual core. That's bound to be a bit of a marketing problem.
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I think the reality is that people will always judge people about how they have affected them personally, because let's face it, the most important person in your life is you.
I think few are willing to admit, as I am, that this is true, because it "feels wrong" to care more about you than millions of people dying. But it's true, because your life is yours, and your friends are yours, and even your computing community aka Slashdot is yours. Millions of people in Africa have no connection to you at all. If it's any consolation, they're not thinking about you either, and they wouldn't care if you died in some mega-version of Hurricane Katrina.
Of course if you or your wife or husband or lover is dying of AIDS and Bill Gates comes up with a cure, you're going to love the man more than you hate his software, however lousy it is.
Overall, Bill Gates is going to feel a lot better about his life if he finds a cure for AIDS. I'm still not going to love him, and I think most Slashdotters, in their hearts, still won't love him. But the rest of the world will and hopefully that will be good enough.
And that, in the end, was my original point.
Oh, and one more thing. Isn't it funny that we're talking as though Bill Gates has found a cure for AIDS, even though he has not? Such is the power of the media. Really, he doesn't deserve the kudos he's getting until the research he's funding actually produces positive results. Maybe that's what's really bothering me about this.
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I think almost all the pretty, young girls on the Internet are on it. There would be no more pretty girls if you vaporized all myspace users :-(.
True, it shows a remarkable lack of taste in most pretty young girls' minds, but there are always the rare exceptions.
I admire myspace because it gives people what they really want, not what marketers say they want and not what software developers say they want. They want to be able to use any color in the world and they can. They want to put horrible music up on their profiles and so they can.
"People Power" made myspace and people power can destroy it. It looks like Murdoch's people are sending it straight down the tubes.
I hope Tom cashed the check.
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I don't see anyone dumping FireWire because millions of people have video cameras compatible with it, and home users want to be able to use iMovie.
They dumped the floppy drive when people were already moving to networks to swap files. There's no equivalent technology waiting in the wings to get video off a MiniDV camera.
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You said that he did bad things to the rich and good things for the poor. I was trying to point out that what he did was so universal that it affects the poor as well as the rich. Not as much, perhaps, but it does affect them.
His raids on Internet cafes, forcing them out of business because they're using pirated software, seem to be pretty bad things to do to countries where he does not and will not gain any significant income. His minions have been doing this in the Philippines where the typical cost of an hour of computer time in an Internet cafe is P25 (roughly $0.50) and where drinks cost under P50 (US$1). I don't normally condone piracy and don't use pirated software myself, but if I were him I would not bother to enforce the law in places where survival of any computer-related business is so difficult.
Many Internet cafes in the Philippines are switching to Linux because of this. That's where his unfortunate conduct is going to get a pretty significant payback. But he doesn't think that way; he wants the pirates to be punished so he can squeeze revenue out of a stone.
So don't think Bill Gates is an angel who wants to help the poor. When the poor violate his own self-interest he will go after them as fiercely as anyone else. I find think a little disheartening in view of this big-time charitable reputation he's getting.
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Read my sentence more carefully. I said "In the world of Slashdot". This is the world of computer users. About 95% of them are unpleasantly affected, on a daily basis, by errors and problems with Windows code. I would say that way under 1% of the people reading this message will get AIDS, and of them 95% will also be affected by problems with Windows.
There are plenty of poor computer users in the third world, incidentally. Don't insult them by saying that they all are illiterate and live in mud huts and shacks. Many of them do, but not all. The Nigerian scammer whose Outlook Express crashes while he's writing yet another scam email is just as much of a victim of Windows as anyone else. I don't like him since I'm sick of his scams, but I think you get the idea. The lousiness that is Windows reaches all around the plant, from areas where half the population is dying of AIDS to places where it barely exists anywhere.
There's an old newspaper saying that a headline news story is one person dead in your area, 100 people dead in your city, 1,000 dead in your country, or 1,000,000 dead somewhere in the world. It is this way; we think about the issues that interest us where we are.
And there's nothing wrong with that; I'm sure the African on the street thought about as much about our own disasters as, well, as we think about his.
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If you look at the Slashdot audience - and not the broader effects in the rest of the world - not even curing AIDS is going to affect as many people positively as the crashes, glitches and everyday lousiness of Microsoft software has affected them negatively.
Now, if he does put up the money to cure AIDS or something comparable, he has done something great to the world, and that's fine - if he does it.
But for now, for most of us, he has created Windows, and Windows has created countless hours of agony among us. Misery encountering constant crashing in Windows 3.1, 95 and 98, and misery encountering endless parades of virii and spyware today.
Within our group here, I doubt that there's anything that can be done by him to improve lives more than they have already been damaged.
I understand that in the rest of the world, it's a different story thanks to the AIDS epidemics in the third world. But most of us are not in the third world and few of us know anyone who's likely to be impacted by his efforts.
So I think it's OK for us to have a pretty jaundiced view of him, no matter what he does to try and make up for it. He'll get enough plaudits from Time and the third-world citizens who really need his help. I wish them all the best, and hope he does something great for them, but that's not going to make me personally approve of his company or its miserable products.
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