I'm neither proud nor ashamed of my background; I'm simply milking it for laughs. After all, what one does is what matters, not where one comes from.
The cheerful tone is very much an expression of my personality. I like being cheerful. I don't like today's gloomy conformity where everyone in California with a web page slinks around wearing black and saying George W Bush was the worst President in world history, worse even than Hitler.
That being said, I appreciate your taking the time to speak your mind about it.
Wow, that's pretty strong language there. Felony? I'm not sure if there's any such thing; I'm certainly not going to condemn Bill Gates or the KDE folks to long prison sentences for their colour scheme, however depressing it may be.
(I might condemn Bill for writing lousy software, but that's another argument entirely).
Do you have any suggestions for improvement of my scheme? I like greens, so if you hate them we're pretty much on different wavelengths (literally!). But if you have better ideas, I'd love to hear them. Honestly.
I think your main gripe is that you can't afford one.
I recommend hitting up eBay. In the next few months, with HD cameras coming up and people anxious to switch, I think you'll see a glut of used XL1s on the market.
I recommend you buy one instead of staying jealous and resentful.
One thing for sure: Being jealous and resentful didn't make a single film. Only hard work does that:-).
I don't see my comment as being hypocritical; after all, I didn't rag on him for shooting Digital8, I criticised him for chopping off heads. I wouldn't rag on someone who uses what he can find to produce as good a thing as he, she or it can.
As a hobbyist, the XL1 is about as good as it gets, at least until HD becomes a bit more mainstream. (I really don't like JVC's HD camcorder, which I have seen).
For the kind of filming I do, with something like a 100:1 shooting ratio, Super-16 is prohibitively expensive. The films I make would simply not be made if I used that, and since I'm glad I've made them, I'm glad I'm on DV.
I suppose I'll be modded down for this, but I have karma to burn.
There's something about those screenshots - maybe it's the font, or perhaps it's that gloomy gus gray look that should have gone out the door with Windows 2000 - that practically screams "amateurish"!
I'm not saying that the KDE folks haven't done a pretty cool job on the guts, and I'm not saying that a lot of hard work hasn't gone into what I saw in the screen shots... but guys, take a look at MacOS X to see how it should really be done.
Yes, I know you can't copy MacOS X, but you might think about using colours that strike a nice balance between Gloomy Gus of Windows 2000 and the Clippy-style forced cheer of XP.
And get rid of that awful wanna-be Helvetica font. The first time I saw it, I knew it wasn't love. Now that I've sat through several pages of screen shots with it, I darn well know it's not love, and I know why a really good font designer is well worth his paycheck.
You're getting a lot closer than you were a year or two ago, and that's great. But don't say you've surpassed the commercial alternatives until you can beat 'em for looks, because that's what we're staring at 10 hours a day.
It's a lot less trivial than it, well, looks.
D
Re:In response to "What more could a cheap ..."
on
Build Your Own Steadicam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, what I noticed was that he really, really loves chopping people's heads off, which might not be the most brainy scheme for an actual production.
That nonwithstanding, this is still a pretty cool idea. I may ask my shop guy to give it a try since it would be really cool to have that for my XL1 - and he's right, these things really are pretty pricey.
Could you (or someone else) explain why the license is non-transferable when it comes with the computer and becomes worthless with the computer?
Does this mean that if I have an old machine and I sell it, I still own its licenses and the successor owner doesn't?
Could I then buy a new machine without an OS and legally install Windows 2000 on it if my old machine had Windows 2000?
I don't understand what's wrong with the common-sense idea that an operating system license always goes with the computer when sold unless other arrangements are made.
Of course the solution for this is easy: Don't buy them. Buy the physical CD.
I wanted Norah Jones' new CD after listening to it in iTunes, but didn't want to pay the inflated price. I'll probably buy it retail eventually, but Apple and the record label lost themselves an immediate sale by not pricing it at $9.99.
When an entirely virtual product is more expensive than the physical one, something's absurd. I'd rather have the physical one in those situations, and I'm willing to stick to my guns.
If enough people act like I am doing, this pricing movement will die. It's all within our collective power to change it.
Probably, but if you're a Windows user and curious about this one application, you can use IE strictly for that. I use Safari on my Macs, but I would pull up IE to try something like this.
I appear to have been quite rightly slapped in the face. Not sure where I saw "one hour" there. I must have needed a LOT more caffeine this morning!
Nonetheless, it is double the time for twice the money, which hardly sounds like a winning travel solution. Also, note how short the distance is.
When I first moved to LA, I took public transit until the contracting company I worked for insisted that I get a car. My income and opportunities increased enormously since then.
So although my details wound up being embarassingly wrong, my basic point stands.
In housing terms, California housing prices make it an entirely different proposition - housing is absurdly expensive anywhere. I could have had a house on "the flats" where public transit is genuinely viable, for around $350k or I could have spent $428k on the house I actually bought. Not much of a premium for the beauty of the hills. Of course since property values have zoomed out of sight; my house is now worth more than $500k. I find it hard to believe myself, but there you are. Out where you are, you'd laugh out loud at it; minimal yard, 1000 square feet, on a hill with a greenbelt-style view.
Housing 25 miles away from work would have meant horribly impractical commute times, and the price difference would have been just about enough to pay for the wear and tear on my car created by a commute of that duration. And the area I'm in wouldn't be nearly as nice.
Still, you're lucky to even have the option of $20,000 housing. Here in LA, even the worst slums (gunfire in the streets, etc) start at $103k and run rapidly up to $200k.
Okay, since my public transport agency was kind enough to send me a free pass so I could try it out, let's try using public transport in my area.
First, I couldn't use my own address because it's high up in the hills and is nowhere near any public transit. In fact, the streets near my home are so narrow no bus could get through even if it needed to. So if I love my hillside lifestyle, which I do, I simply can't use public transit at all. Traffic density on my street is about one car every ten minutes.
But let's say I'm on the closest major street, which is about a five minute drive from me. I want to go to my work, which would take appoximately 10 minutes via car. It would also cost $2.50 each way, or $5 a day.
Here's the route. If you're too lazy to click on the link, be aware that it would take one hour and 20 minutes to get to my work. That's EIGHT TIMES what it takes by car.
I drive a gas-guzzler car that gets about 14 miles per gallon. It's a Mercedes sedan with leather seating and good handling. I enjoy driving it down the beautiful leafy hillside roads of my community. It's about three miles to work. At $2.50 a gallon (premium fuel, you know), it would cost about $1.07 to go to work and back every day.
Clearly, public transport doesn't work in my community. And the only way it would work, is if we all lived in massive, ugly apartment buildings on the same streets. Now, I don't know about you, but I really, really don't like massive, ugly apartment buildings.
So what's the solution? Live close to your work. As already noted, I have a ten minute commute each way, with no traffic congestion whatsoever, even though I live in a busy Los Angeles suburb which has huge amounts of commercial activity.
It's not perfection but I can't think of a better alternative that would work for me. The only real flaw is that I really lucked out in buying my house three months ago; I could not have afforded its value today (!).
The highway budget is largely paid for through gas taxes, so as long as you're paying them, you're already paying real costs.
The mass transit budget, on the other hand, amounts to a subsidy of several dollars per ride for Metro-style systems.
The real issue, though, is quality of life. If you're spending four hours a day travelling to work, and you could spend 40 minutes a day instead, I think almost any sane person would choose the car as long as the cost was in any way affordable.
If you value your time as low as $10 an hour, that means you're spending about $40 a day in public transit instead of around $6 a day. Multiply those out over a year and you're talking about $10,200 for public transit versus $1,530 for the car. Can you run a car for under the difference between $10,200 and $1,530? Well, yes.
Granted, this $10 an hour isn't revenue you can actually get if you forego public transport. But if you have some project you're doing in your spare time, and it enables you to actually have spare time, clearly it's well worth it.
The benefits of capitalism happen to include the mass availability of computers and high-speed networking, so I wouldn't complain too much about it.
The only alternative to capitalism is rationing, otherwise known as the government deciding what products you should have, and handing them over.
I've been fascinated by the idea of an economy without money, but even in Communist Russia, there was always money - you just couldn't buy anything with it.
Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best system we've been able to come up with.
So you can cancel on a monthly/weekly/daily basis, just like your phone service.
But then I can't play any music anymore. So as long as I spend $10 a month or less on music (i.e. buying one album a month), I'm significantly better off with the purchase model. If I buy loads of music every month, then I'd be worse off, but only if I consistently did it each and every month for the rest of my life, which seems unlikely.
Judging by how well (ahem) my cellphone works up in the hills where I live - and how well other people's cellphones work even in the flats - I'd say those days are quite a ways away.
After all, people still get wired cable TV and DSL. I think it will be a long time before wireless is mature enough to do what you want it to.
First, I don't like committing myself to monthly payments for the rest of my life.
Strangely enough, this is true even if I voluntarily spend more each month at the iTunes music store than I would pay in the monthly fee. I still want the right to be able to stop spending money if I so wish.
My other major objection is that I have a feeling my favourite artists might get shafted, while Britney Spears and her minders get most of the bucks. Think about proposals for taxes on CDs, where the tax money goes to the best-selling artists, not the ones you're actually playing.
Or are they actually going to hook something up to my portable music player that will report the number of times I've played each song to the mother ship, so they can approportion some puny percentage of that $10 to the artist? That's hardly less objectionable, is it?
D
Well, some people worked pretty hard ...
on
Mac Contest Roundup
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
but the main thing I brought back from this is how great the original is.
I looked at every theme, and there seem to be three tendancies:
One is to make it bright, gaudy and hard on the eyes;
The other is to make it so dark it's hard on the eyes. Some of these look very nice, but I wouldn't want to risk my continued vision on them.
And the last set simply makes them as much as possible like things that already exist, which shows a fatal lack of imagination.
It's obviously a lot harder to invent a good visual look than one might think, but for the time being, I'm sticking with what Steve provided me with, with a newer, renewed respect for how hard his designers' jobs are. I even have a little sympathy for his allegedly fascist desire to prohibit the development of themes for MacOS X entirely.
MacOS X isn't slow on modern hardware; it zips away quite nicely on all my Macs. (PowerMac G5/2ghz DP, PowerMac 1.25ghz DP, PowerBook G4 1ghz). I think nowadays even iBooks and iMacs aren't any slower than my PowerBook.
You are right about Linux and cut and paste; this goes double if you don't have a three-button mouse. I loved my TrackPoint keyboard but it has only two mouse buttons and that actually made it impossible to paste! (For some reason EmulateThreeButtons doesn't seem to solve this problem, probably because it's akward to press two buttons at once on the TrackPoint). The solution is to use the terminal with a menu instead of the one without, but that still seemed to goof up much of the time.
Another thing about MacOS X is that I really love the fonts. At the time I switched, the state of font handling in Linux was just plain abysmal. The only good-looking fonts were the ones created out of some kind of Middle Earth aesthetic. Yes, they were good looking, but almost impossible to read:-(.
I just love using Optima with MacOS X. I just wish emacs could display with it. I've tried a whole bunch of emacs versions, and there seems to be nothing but fixed-width fonts for me unless I use xemacs under X with its horrid fonts:-(.
At home, it's the G5. At work, it's the G4. In between, it's the PowerBook.
People can make fun of me all they want, but I really think the nicer look and feel in MacOS X makes me a lot happier and more productive. When you stare at a screen all day, it really should be the best-looking screen money can buy.
And, of course, it's just super nice to be compatible with the rest of the business world, with Office, without feeling you've totally sold out to MS. In terms of visual attractiveness, there's just no contest between MacOS X Office and the rather drab Office XP.
It's too bad discriminating Unix-lovers isn't a bigger market. My Apple stock investment, which I made because I thought a lot of people would join me in the Mac world, pushing up demand, has actually been saved by the iPod.
I was actually referring to the Apple stores in the context of a great place to check your email:-).
I think my argument stands, for that reason in any event.
Apple customers love Apple stores. (I know because I'm one of them, and because I always see them full of people). I don't see that changing, and so I see the chain continuing to grow. It definitely fulfulls a need.
Apple tried for a big push into CompUSA and Best Buy, and they found that most salespeople preferred to sell PCs because it was easier for them. In addition, all the Macs (and PCs, for that matter) in those stores became horribly thrashed very quickly.
They did retail because nobody else does retail well, and Steve Jobs sensed an opportunity.
He was right, of course, but I think the love felt by the Apple customer base for their highly-differentiated product is the primary reason the stores are successful.
Apple retail stores. Plush locations, great computers, and salespeople who stay out of your way if you're using the systems to surf the web or read mail. Everything is always in absolutely immaculate shape, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice job! Interesting. (I'm playing with it on my staging system now).
What about the top and bottom (red and blue) segments? How would you suggest retaining some contrast while making them less jarring to the reader?
Many thanks for the effort - warmly appreciated.
D
I'm neither proud nor ashamed of my background; I'm simply milking it for laughs. After all, what one does is what matters, not where one comes from.
The cheerful tone is very much an expression of my personality. I like being cheerful. I don't like today's gloomy conformity where everyone in California with a web page slinks around wearing black and saying George W Bush was the worst President in world history, worse even than Hitler.
That being said, I appreciate your taking the time to speak your mind about it.
D
Wow, that's pretty strong language there. Felony? I'm not sure if there's any such thing; I'm certainly not going to condemn Bill Gates or the KDE folks to long prison sentences for their colour scheme, however depressing it may be.
(I might condemn Bill for writing lousy software, but that's another argument entirely).
Do you have any suggestions for improvement of my scheme? I like greens, so if you hate them we're pretty much on different wavelengths (literally!). But if you have better ideas, I'd love to hear them. Honestly.
D
Why the hostility towards the XL1?
:-).
I think your main gripe is that you can't afford one.
I recommend hitting up eBay. In the next few months, with HD cameras coming up and people anxious to switch, I think you'll see a glut of used XL1s on the market.
I recommend you buy one instead of staying jealous and resentful.
One thing for sure: Being jealous and resentful didn't make a single film. Only hard work does that
D
I don't see my comment as being hypocritical; after all, I didn't rag on him for shooting Digital8, I criticised him for chopping off heads. I wouldn't rag on someone who uses what he can find to produce as good a thing as he, she or it can.
As a hobbyist, the XL1 is about as good as it gets, at least until HD becomes a bit more mainstream. (I really don't like JVC's HD camcorder, which I have seen).
For the kind of filming I do, with something like a 100:1 shooting ratio, Super-16 is prohibitively expensive. The films I make would simply not be made if I used that, and since I'm glad I've made them, I'm glad I'm on DV.
D
I suppose I'll be modded down for this, but I have karma to burn.
... but guys, take a look at MacOS X to see how it should really be done.
There's something about those screenshots - maybe it's the font, or perhaps it's that gloomy gus gray look that should have gone out the door with Windows 2000 - that practically screams "amateurish"!
I'm not saying that the KDE folks haven't done a pretty cool job on the guts, and I'm not saying that a lot of hard work hasn't gone into what I saw in the screen shots
Yes, I know you can't copy MacOS X, but you might think about using colours that strike a nice balance between Gloomy Gus of Windows 2000 and the Clippy-style forced cheer of XP.
And get rid of that awful wanna-be Helvetica font. The first time I saw it, I knew it wasn't love. Now that I've sat through several pages of screen shots with it, I darn well know it's not love, and I know why a really good font designer is well worth his paycheck.
You're getting a lot closer than you were a year or two ago, and that's great. But don't say you've surpassed the commercial alternatives until you can beat 'em for looks, because that's what we're staring at 10 hours a day.
It's a lot less trivial than it, well, looks.
D
Actually, what I noticed was that he really, really loves chopping people's heads off, which might not be the most brainy scheme for an actual production.
That nonwithstanding, this is still a pretty cool idea. I may ask my shop guy to give it a try since it would be really cool to have that for my XL1 - and he's right, these things really are pretty pricey.
D
What if, when I sell my computer, I sign an agreement:
/s/
I do hereby transfer all rights I have in the Windows software license contained on this machine.
David H Dennis
I would think that as long as those rights exist, I should have a right to hand them to someone else.
How can the law vaporize those rights? That seems like something so patently unfair as to not work even for lawyers.
D
Could you (or someone else) explain why the license is non-transferable when it comes with the computer and becomes worthless with the computer?
Does this mean that if I have an old machine and I sell it, I still own its licenses and the successor owner doesn't?
Could I then buy a new machine without an OS and legally install Windows 2000 on it if my old machine had Windows 2000?
I don't understand what's wrong with the common-sense idea that an operating system license always goes with the computer when sold unless other arrangements are made.
D
Of course the solution for this is easy: Don't buy them. Buy the physical CD.
I wanted Norah Jones' new CD after listening to it in iTunes, but didn't want to pay the inflated price. I'll probably buy it retail eventually, but Apple and the record label lost themselves an immediate sale by not pricing it at $9.99.
When an entirely virtual product is more expensive than the physical one, something's absurd. I'd rather have the physical one in those situations, and I'm willing to stick to my guns.
If enough people act like I am doing, this pricing movement will die. It's all within our collective power to change it.
D
Probably, but if you're a Windows user and curious about this one application, you can use IE strictly for that. I use Safari on my Macs, but I would pull up IE to try something like this.
D
Hey, I would have tried it if it was available for MacOS X.
Even if I had to use Internet Explorer, which I haven't used in months.
We minority platform users are probably around 10% of Slashdot users, so we really count for a project like this.
D
I appear to have been quite rightly slapped in the face. Not sure where I saw "one hour" there. I must have needed a LOT more caffeine this morning!
Nonetheless, it is double the time for twice the money, which hardly sounds like a winning travel solution. Also, note how short the distance is.
When I first moved to LA, I took public transit until the contracting company I worked for insisted that I get a car. My income and opportunities increased enormously since then.
So although my details wound up being embarassingly wrong, my basic point stands.
In housing terms, California housing prices make it an entirely different proposition - housing is absurdly expensive anywhere. I could have had a house on "the flats" where public transit is genuinely viable, for around $350k or I could have spent $428k on the house I actually bought. Not much of a premium for the beauty of the hills. Of course since property values have zoomed out of sight; my house is now worth more than $500k. I find it hard to believe myself, but there you are. Out where you are, you'd laugh out loud at it; minimal yard, 1000 square feet, on a hill with a greenbelt-style view.
Housing 25 miles away from work would have meant horribly impractical commute times, and the price difference would have been just about enough to pay for the wear and tear on my car created by a commute of that duration. And the area I'm in wouldn't be nearly as nice.
Still, you're lucky to even have the option of $20,000 housing. Here in LA, even the worst slums (gunfire in the streets, etc) start at $103k and run rapidly up to $200k.
D
Okay, since my public transport agency was kind enough to send me a free pass so I could try it out, let's try using public transport in my area.
First, I couldn't use my own address because it's high up in the hills and is nowhere near any public transit. In fact, the streets near my home are so narrow no bus could get through even if it needed to. So if I love my hillside lifestyle, which I do, I simply can't use public transit at all. Traffic density on my street is about one car every ten minutes.
But let's say I'm on the closest major street, which is about a five minute drive from me. I want to go to my work, which would take appoximately 10 minutes via car. It would also cost $2.50 each way, or $5 a day.
Here's the route. If you're too lazy to click on the link, be aware that it would take one hour and 20 minutes to get to my work. That's EIGHT TIMES what it takes by car.
I drive a gas-guzzler car that gets about 14 miles per gallon. It's a Mercedes sedan with leather seating and good handling. I enjoy driving it down the beautiful leafy hillside roads of my community. It's about three miles to work. At $2.50 a gallon (premium fuel, you know), it would cost about $1.07 to go to work and back every day.
Clearly, public transport doesn't work in my community. And the only way it would work, is if we all lived in massive, ugly apartment buildings on the same streets. Now, I don't know about you, but I really, really don't like massive, ugly apartment buildings.
So what's the solution? Live close to your work. As already noted, I have a ten minute commute each way, with no traffic congestion whatsoever, even though I live in a busy Los Angeles suburb which has huge amounts of commercial activity.
It's not perfection but I can't think of a better alternative that would work for me. The only real flaw is that I really lucked out in buying my house three months ago; I could not have afforded its value today (!).
D
The highway budget is largely paid for through gas taxes, so as long as you're paying them, you're already paying real costs.
The mass transit budget, on the other hand, amounts to a subsidy of several dollars per ride for Metro-style systems.
The real issue, though, is quality of life. If you're spending four hours a day travelling to work, and you could spend 40 minutes a day instead, I think almost any sane person would choose the car as long as the cost was in any way affordable.
If you value your time as low as $10 an hour, that means you're spending about $40 a day in public transit instead of around $6 a day. Multiply those out over a year and you're talking about $10,200 for public transit versus $1,530 for the car. Can you run a car for under the difference between $10,200 and $1,530? Well, yes.
Granted, this $10 an hour isn't revenue you can actually get if you forego public transport. But if you have some project you're doing in your spare time, and it enables you to actually have spare time, clearly it's well worth it.
D
The benefits of capitalism happen to include the mass availability of computers and high-speed networking, so I wouldn't complain too much about it.
The only alternative to capitalism is rationing, otherwise known as the government deciding what products you should have, and handing them over.
I've been fascinated by the idea of an economy without money, but even in Communist Russia, there was always money - you just couldn't buy anything with it.
Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best system we've been able to come up with.
D
So you can cancel on a monthly/weekly/daily basis, just like your phone service.
But then I can't play any music anymore. So as long as I spend $10 a month or less on music (i.e. buying one album a month), I'm significantly better off with the purchase model. If I buy loads of music every month, then I'd be worse off, but only if I consistently did it each and every month for the rest of my life, which seems unlikely.
Judging by how well (ahem) my cellphone works up in the hills where I live - and how well other people's cellphones work even in the flats - I'd say those days are quite a ways away.
After all, people still get wired cable TV and DSL. I think it will be a long time before wireless is mature enough to do what you want it to.
D
I don't like this model for two reasons.
First, I don't like committing myself to monthly payments for the rest of my life.
Strangely enough, this is true even if I voluntarily spend more each month at the iTunes music store than I would pay in the monthly fee. I still want the right to be able to stop spending money if I so wish.
My other major objection is that I have a feeling my favourite artists might get shafted, while Britney Spears and her minders get most of the bucks. Think about proposals for taxes on CDs, where the tax money goes to the best-selling artists, not the ones you're actually playing.
Or are they actually going to hook something up to my portable music player that will report the number of times I've played each song to the mother ship, so they can approportion some puny percentage of that $10 to the artist? That's hardly less objectionable, is it?
D
but the main thing I brought back from this is how great the original is.
I looked at every theme, and there seem to be three tendancies:
One is to make it bright, gaudy and hard on the eyes;
The other is to make it so dark it's hard on the eyes. Some of these look very nice, but I wouldn't want to risk my continued vision on them.
And the last set simply makes them as much as possible like things that already exist, which shows a fatal lack of imagination.
It's obviously a lot harder to invent a good visual look than one might think, but for the time being, I'm sticking with what Steve provided me with, with a newer, renewed respect for how hard his designers' jobs are. I even have a little sympathy for his allegedly fascist desire to prohibit the development of themes for MacOS X entirely.
D
MacOS X isn't slow on modern hardware; it zips away quite nicely on all my Macs. (PowerMac G5/2ghz DP, PowerMac 1.25ghz DP, PowerBook G4 1ghz). I think nowadays even iBooks and iMacs aren't any slower than my PowerBook.
:-(.
:-(.
You are right about Linux and cut and paste; this goes double if you don't have a three-button mouse. I loved my TrackPoint keyboard but it has only two mouse buttons and that actually made it impossible to paste! (For some reason EmulateThreeButtons doesn't seem to solve this problem, probably because it's akward to press two buttons at once on the TrackPoint). The solution is to use the terminal with a menu instead of the one without, but that still seemed to goof up much of the time.
Another thing about MacOS X is that I really love the fonts. At the time I switched, the state of font handling in Linux was just plain abysmal. The only good-looking fonts were the ones created out of some kind of Middle Earth aesthetic. Yes, they were good looking, but almost impossible to read
I just love using Optima with MacOS X. I just wish emacs could display with it. I've tried a whole bunch of emacs versions, and there seems to be nothing but fixed-width fonts for me unless I use xemacs under X with its horrid fonts
D
At home, it's the G5. At work, it's the G4. In between, it's the PowerBook.
People can make fun of me all they want, but I really think the nicer look and feel in MacOS X makes me a lot happier and more productive. When you stare at a screen all day, it really should be the best-looking screen money can buy.
And, of course, it's just super nice to be compatible with the rest of the business world, with Office, without feeling you've totally sold out to MS. In terms of visual attractiveness, there's just no contest between MacOS X Office and the rather drab Office XP.
It's too bad discriminating Unix-lovers isn't a bigger market. My Apple stock investment, which I made because I thought a lot of people would join me in the Mac world, pushing up demand, has actually been saved by the iPod.
D
I was actually referring to the Apple stores in the context of a great place to check your email :-).
I think my argument stands, for that reason in any event.
Apple customers love Apple stores. (I know because I'm one of them, and because I always see them full of people). I don't see that changing, and so I see the chain continuing to grow. It definitely fulfulls a need.
D
Apple tried for a big push into CompUSA and Best Buy, and they found that most salespeople preferred to sell PCs because it was easier for them. In addition, all the Macs (and PCs, for that matter) in those stores became horribly thrashed very quickly.
They did retail because nobody else does retail well, and Steve Jobs sensed an opportunity.
He was right, of course, but I think the love felt by the Apple customer base for their highly-differentiated product is the primary reason the stores are successful.
D
Apple retail stores. Plush locations, great computers, and salespeople who stay out of your way if you're using the systems to surf the web or read mail. Everything is always in absolutely immaculate shape, too.
They really want you to try their machines.
Pretty cool, eh?
D
Actually, the most cheerful checker is a guy, and I'm not gay or bi.
He's just a nice cheerful fellow.
And I don't do IRC. Can't stand the way people write over there.
D