is that many people were sold it years ago. They bought a package including 10 client licenses that cost a reasonable amount of money.
Nobody told them how expensive Exchange really was, and in a sense it didn't matter because there was nobody around to enforce the rules. The reseller was happy, since he got money for Exchange and for his installation. The customer was happy because the cost was reasonable. And Microsoft was happy because they got another suck...er customer.
Now Microsoft wants to enforce the rules (see the Business Software Alliance and the like). They figure that since people are now dependent on Exchange, they will pay up or face stiff fines.
There's a word for that type of marketing, and it's not pretty.
I'm using Linux on the desktop to post this message.
Every time I open up a new Linux distro, it looks just like Windows. Yes, it can be changed, if you want to take a lot of time to figure out a lot of software. The problem is that I have work to do, and posts to write, and so on, so I don't have time to monkey with my system to that extent.
I run Enlightenment with the Irix imitation theme. I found that most of the themes that were unique looking were tiring to use because of funky fonts and a bizarre Science Fiction movie look that just doesn't feel right in an office environment.
MacOS X looks stunning right out of the box.
I was relying on the statements of others in this topic when talking about driver problems, so you could be right at this point. Likewise with application software, since I pretty much use xemacs/emacs, gcc and Mozilla/Netscape/IE/OmniWeb.
And yet, with all this mud slung at my opinions, your last paragraph makes me think that at bottom, you agree with me. From the perspective of an end user who doesn't want to spend a lot of time tinkering, MacOS X is better. The time spent trying to get Linux to look and work good would more than pay for the difference in price between a white box system running Linux and a dual 1.25ghz PowerMac G4. At least if you're at my rate.
Not anymore. As of the latest version (I think it's 4.5), there's feature parity across platforms.
As a slick general purpose computing platform, MacOS X is tough to beat, and it's enormous savings over Irix.
I have an Irix workstation, and it's a really sweet box, but the OS has fallen behind in a lot of respects. I've played around a little with the Maya Personal Learning Edition on my Mac G4/450 dual processor system (a hopelessly obsolete one now) and it actually runs pretty fast.
To summarize:
LINUX:
* Few software options for general purpose stuff * The fastest, cheapest hardware * You might have horrible driver problems. * No Photoshop/Illustrator/etc * A drab user interface experience, based largely on Windows
IRIX
* Best performance with Maya * No general purpose software at all, other than Netscape mail. * Photoshop and Illustrator are generations old, and horribly expensive to boot. * A carefully crafted interface I still enjoy working in, but showing its age
MACOS X
* Almost as much general purpose software as Windows * Excellent support for all video editing and compositing software - Discreet, Final Cut Pro, etc. Thanks to FCP, this is arguably better than Windows * A slick up to the minute interface you'll really enjoy using
I don't think system performance is going to be much of an issue, but I don't know much about the respective speeds of the platforms. But I can say you'll have the most fun on MacOS X.
The fine print says that the PowerBook won't continue to run during a battery change if you have over 512mb RAM.
I wonder if the PowerBook is more active during sleep with MacOS X than 9. For instance, if there was a cron job that triggers during sleep, does the system wake up enough to execute it?
If you run a company that doesn't have a huge number of absentee workers, there should be little difference in practice between the number of people connecting and the number of people who are authorized to connect. As long as you check for mail every few minutes, you're connected, after all.
I'd love to find something to replace Exchange with at my company, but you'd have to dump the per seat licensing entirely for me to be able to get the big boss interested. And it would have to look exactly like Exchange to Outlook (including Outlook forms) and our phone system (which sends voice mails through it).
If anyone knows of a product that compatible, I'd be really interested in seeing it.
I don't have much hard experience on multiple monitors, but I've tried setups both in the Apple Store and on one Windows machine that's set up that way in one office.
This particular Windows machine was set up to be a "control center" to run a whole bunch of browser-based applications together. I found that in practice it's very confusing to administrate, since Windows counts it as a huge screen, and there seems to be a bit of drop-off at the edges. So whenever dialogue boxes appear in the middle of the screen, they are split evenly between the two monitors and parts of them don't seem to make it (they drop into the gap between screens). Worse yet, they often cannot be moved, which makes entering data a royal pain.
MacOS X (as seen in the Apple store) handles this much better, but it's still fairly confusing in practice. You can see this with their store display of a PowerBook G4 hooked up to a Cinema Display. I would suggest that if you have an Apple Store in your area, you might want to try checking it out. Unfortunately, the menu bar is on the top of only one of the screens, with the Dock [like the Windows taskbar] at the bottom of the other, which again can be confusing. But it's a lot better than the Windows approach, since they are still treated as multiple monitors, and dialogue boxes appear in the center of the individual monitors, not split between them.
So if you can develop with Macs, that's the way to go since the setup is so much more intelligent than with Windows.
The presence of more screen real estate is undeniably addictive, and I'm sure I'd get used to it if I actually wound up working with that kind of setup on a daily basis. But I think a single high-resolution monitor would be a better way to go if you can afford it. I have a SGI 1600SW monitor and the extra resolution (1600x1024) is well worth the cost. When I visit the Apple Store, I drool over the new Cinema HD Display (1920x1200-odd). If you can afford that, I'd highly recommend it.
For development, I don't think there's any contest between LCDs and CRTs. Buy the LCD because it's a lot sharper than the CRT, doesn't flicker and won't degrade over time.
Just because an administration is, on the main, corrupt and incompetent, does not mean that every idea coming out of it is inherently bad.
And certainly whitehouse.gov is and was a good idea, regardless of the party running it.
I'm not going to say Clinton is a good and honest man - he is not - but to criticise this fellow just because he worked for the administration is a bit low.
However, searching Google for SearchKing digs up the dirt on SearchKing before linking to the site itself. (In fact, I don't see a link to anything on searchking.com on the first page).
Not to say that I sympathise with SearchKing. Their practices are clearly in conflict with providing quality search results, so they richly deserved to be slapped.
Actually, I've been pricing entry level laptops for my company, and imagine my surprise when I found the iBook cheaper than the competition.
This is for our new outside sales force, so style is legitimately more important than substance. An iBook is undeniably stylish, and at $1,195 pretty reasonable. Compare that to the Sony subnotebook, which costs $1,699, or even the entry-level ThinkPad at $1,300-odd.
I may just wind up getting my company to purchase Macs for the first time, since the software the salespeople use is browser-based anyway.
I suppose it depends on your definition of working better. I will admit I never used the video editing software on BeOS, although I've used the operating system itself and liked it. But I really doubt that anything for the BeOS would even come close in quality to Final Cut Pro or After Effects.
It might well be that a BeOS version of Final Cut Pro could have been better, or at least faster, than the MacOS X version. But MacOS X just has more of a critical mass in terms of applications, and sadly that cannot be ignored.
If it weren't for that critical mass effect, I daresay we'd have a very different - and higher quality - selection of operating systems today.
I have to admit that the BeOS aesthetic experience never came even close to MacOS X, and that's something that's hard to let go of once you've experienced - even if it is sluggish, it's so nice to look at that it's easy to forgive.
Maybe I'm just not the speed addict most of you folks are...
Aside from the hype, it seems to me that there are a couple of things that make a lot of sense.
* The T/Mobile plan at $39.95 a month includes UNLIMITED data access - plans for previous units do not. This, of course, enormously increases the utility of the unit. After a year, your included bandwidth goes down, but it's still one heck of a deal compared to anything else out there.
* The Danger handheld includes a spiffy keyboard, which is probably a lot easier to deal with than Graffiti.
* The shape and size appear to excite a lot of people.
So there are rational reasons to like this unit. I think I'll wait for the colour screen, though; I hate looking at monochrome.
I believe that at about the time they proposed going to Windows NT systems, they produced a road map that had them pulling out of MIPS processors entirely, and phasing out Irix.
I love Irix, although I've switched most of my computing over to MacOS X nowadays. Irix does desperately need updating, but if you need X-Windows, Irix is by far the coolest implementation of same.
I'd like to see something a bit more up to date, at least with thinner window borders and a close-box. But compared to Linux as I've seen it, it does have first-rate usability. Compared to MacOS X, though, it's dropped way behind.
Is there any way on the MacOS X PDF reader, or Acrobat for that matter, to display the document as a single scrolling page of text?
It drives me nuts to browse by paper page, since inevitablby my screen is just a shade shorter than a complete page, and so I have to scroll down to the rest of page 1 and then move to page 2. It's an incredibly akward way to read.
I sent a reply suggesting this about a minute before I noticed you'd already done it. Forgive me, I got up revoltingly early this morning.
But that is, in fact, exactly what I want. I really, really hate listening to voice mails.
Unless they're from my girlfriend, that is. Her voice is special. But for everyone else, well, I'd much rather read what they have to say than hear it.
Incidentally, this might be getting closer than we think. Some modern phone systems now do voice recognition so you can speak the name of the person you want instead of going through endless menus, and they actually work pretty well. So hopefully it won't be more than a few years before we can have a workplace entirely free of the voice mail scourge.
I have a system like this at my company. It relies on Outlook and is a hideous bear to maintain for a variety of reasons I won't bother to get into.
But it is a lot more convenient than playing messages through the phone.
What I want is a system that takes a voice message and translates it into text, so I don't have to listen to it; I can read, as others have said, about ten times faster than people can talk.
There actually is a MacOS X native version of emacs, but it's not quite there - it doesn't quite have the right look and feel. I forget the reasons, but I stopped using it and returned to the terminal.
What I really want is xemacs, with variable width fonts and a better user interface, but so far there doesn't seem to be any Aqua version. And the X version simply reminds me of how horrid X fonts are whenever I see it:-(.
One reason, which I will agree is a little bizarre, is how ugly Linux fonts look. I know I can theoretically, with enormous difficulty, get them to look at least slightly better than they do, but that would take time I simply do not have.
Out of the box, MacOS fonts make ordinary text look like a printed, typeset document instead of something barely readable.
The other advantage is mainstream applications; I have never really warmed to the GIMP; I prefer Photoshop. I can get it and it looks and works great on MacOS X. Likewise with some super-complex applications like Final Cut Pro and After Effects, which are highly unlikely to get Linux equivalents. For completeness, I'll add Office, even though I rarely use it.
When you spend half your life in front of a computer, it becomes surprisingly important to make it look great. And if you don't like the Windows hegemony but want to be able to use mainstream applications, the Mac is your only choice.
If I understood the article correctly, Factorium is a way of handling a single sign on in a more distributed way, possibly sharing the signon database and cryptographic information between machines.
So in theory we could have a single sign on and multiple points of failure.
That being said, there wasn't enough detail in the article for me to know for sure.
I would say a single sign-on is fine for reading articles in the NYT and Wall Street Journal while having only one login, but I feel genuinely uncomfortable about using it for financial information, and extremely uncomfortable about giving it to Microsoft.
I think a lot of people feel the same way, and that's a major reason why Passport failed. Microsoft was unable to sign up any banks or credit card companies for its service, because they didn't want MS's greedy fingers in their customer databases. The mass of everyday consumers may not be sophisticated enough to distrust Microsoft, but banks are not in that position.
It's part of the giant convergence of information about you.
If you use.net Passport to log in to your phone account, it means your phone account is linked to the Passport, and so all sorts of interesting data mining could be possible between your phone calls, your passport account and your use of other Passport sites.
Frankly, it feels more than a little creepy to me. They will, of course, SAY they don't do anything like this, but just the fact that it's technically possible makes my skin crawl.
I buy as much computer stuff as I can at the local Apple Store, where I get the industry's best service, and prices no different from what I'd pay at such customer service paragons as Fry's or CompUSA.
If there was a premium quality airline with fares that weren't completely out of sight, I'd fly it. In fact, since American created its "More Room" initiative, I have flown no other airline, because it's such a relief to actually be able to use my laptop in flight without strain. An increasing number of people go with private aircraft, which offer the ultimate level of service and the ability to pick your own schedule.
In short, high quality and good service are things people are still willing to pay for. A big problem with the airlines is that service on most of them is about equally bad; a flight on Southwest is actually a bit more pleasant than a flight on most other airlines, because the cabin crew will at least make you laugh a time or two.
People don't like paying excessive premiums for service, but it all depends on where you are, what you buy, and how poor the non-premium service is. I'd love to have someone pump my gas for me, for example, but it's not worth 50% more than self-serve.
There was a gas station near where I worked a few years back where homeless people would pump gas for you, and you'd give them a buck or two for their efforts. I actually went out of my way to get gas there, because I loved not having to pump it myself.
At least in my experience, there is a quality difference between Target and department stores; my department store and outlet mall clothing tends to take a lot longer to wear out than Target's stuff, however superficially appealing it is.
Overall, then, I defend higher quality stores. They are a more pleasant experience for the most part, and many of them aren't that much more expensive than their competition. It all depends on the store and the industry.
I do. I use my television as a monitor when I edit videos using Final Cut Pro on my PowerMac. (Which isn't a PC, I suppose, but you get the idea).
Of course the last time I actually watched something I didn't produce on my TV was September 11th, when none of my favourite news sites were working...
Photoshop users, unsurprisingly, appreciate quality aesthetics more than the average Joe.
The Apple user interface is designed to look beautiful. Naturally, people who have chosen to be artistic in their career are drawn to the platform that looks best.
Thus, even though there are no operational differences I know of between Mac and PC photoshop, most people still prefer it on a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
is that many people were sold it years ago. They bought a package including 10 client licenses that cost a reasonable amount of money.
Nobody told them how expensive Exchange really was, and in a sense it didn't matter because there was nobody around to enforce the rules. The reseller was happy, since he got money for Exchange and for his installation. The customer was happy because the cost was reasonable. And Microsoft was happy because they got another suck...er customer.
Now Microsoft wants to enforce the rules (see the Business Software Alliance and the like). They figure that since people are now dependent on Exchange, they will pay up or face stiff fines.
There's a word for that type of marketing, and it's not pretty.
D
I'm using Linux on the desktop to post this message.
Every time I open up a new Linux distro, it looks just like Windows. Yes, it can be changed, if you want to take a lot of time to figure out a lot of software. The problem is that I have work to do, and posts to write, and so on, so I don't have time to monkey with my system to that extent.
I run Enlightenment with the Irix imitation theme. I found that most of the themes that were unique looking were tiring to use because of funky fonts and a bizarre Science Fiction movie look that just doesn't feel right in an office environment.
MacOS X looks stunning right out of the box.
I was relying on the statements of others in this topic when talking about driver problems, so you could be right at this point. Likewise with application software, since I pretty much use xemacs/emacs, gcc and Mozilla/Netscape/IE/OmniWeb.
And yet, with all this mud slung at my opinions, your last paragraph makes me think that at bottom, you agree with me. From the perspective of an end user who doesn't want to spend a lot of time tinkering, MacOS X is better. The time spent trying to get Linux to look and work good would more than pay for the difference in price between a white box system running Linux and a dual 1.25ghz PowerMac G4. At least if you're at my rate.
D
You haven't checked out the cost of Microsoft licensing lately, have you?
"Software Assurance" is making a lot of people pretty upset. As is the per seat cost of programs like Windows servers, Exchange and Outlook.
D
Not anymore. As of the latest version (I think it's 4.5), there's feature parity across platforms.
As a slick general purpose computing platform, MacOS X is tough to beat, and it's enormous savings over Irix.
I have an Irix workstation, and it's a really sweet box, but the OS has fallen behind in a lot of respects. I've played around a little with the Maya Personal Learning Edition on my Mac G4/450 dual processor system (a hopelessly obsolete one now) and it actually runs pretty fast.
To summarize:
LINUX:
* Few software options for general purpose stuff
* The fastest, cheapest hardware
* You might have horrible driver problems.
* No Photoshop/Illustrator/etc
* A drab user interface experience, based largely on Windows
IRIX
* Best performance with Maya
* No general purpose software at all, other than Netscape mail.
* Photoshop and Illustrator are generations old, and horribly expensive to boot.
* A carefully crafted interface I still enjoy working in, but showing its age
MACOS X
* Almost as much general purpose software as Windows
* Excellent support for all video editing and compositing software - Discreet, Final Cut Pro, etc. Thanks to FCP, this is arguably better than Windows
* A slick up to the minute interface you'll really enjoy using
I don't think system performance is going to be much of an issue, but I don't know much about the respective speeds of the platforms. But I can say you'll have the most fun on MacOS X.
Hope that helps.
D
How much memory do you have?
The fine print says that the PowerBook won't continue to run during a battery change if you have over 512mb RAM.
I wonder if the PowerBook is more active during sleep with MacOS X than 9. For instance, if there was a cron job that triggers during sleep, does the system wake up enough to execute it?
D
If you run a company that doesn't have a huge number of absentee workers, there should be little difference in practice between the number of people connecting and the number of people who are authorized to connect. As long as you check for mail every few minutes, you're connected, after all.
I'd love to find something to replace Exchange with at my company, but you'd have to dump the per seat licensing entirely for me to be able to get the big boss interested. And it would have to look exactly like Exchange to Outlook (including Outlook forms) and our phone system (which sends voice mails through it).
If anyone knows of a product that compatible, I'd be really interested in seeing it.
D
I don't have much hard experience on multiple monitors, but I've tried setups both in the Apple Store and on one Windows machine that's set up that way in one office.
This particular Windows machine was set up to be a "control center" to run a whole bunch of browser-based applications together. I found that in practice it's very confusing to administrate, since Windows counts it as a huge screen, and there seems to be a bit of drop-off at the edges. So whenever dialogue boxes appear in the middle of the screen, they are split evenly between the two monitors and parts of them don't seem to make it (they drop into the gap between screens). Worse yet, they often cannot be moved, which makes entering data a royal pain.
MacOS X (as seen in the Apple store) handles this much better, but it's still fairly confusing in practice. You can see this with their store display of a PowerBook G4 hooked up to a Cinema Display. I would suggest that if you have an Apple Store in your area, you might want to try checking it out. Unfortunately, the menu bar is on the top of only one of the screens, with the Dock [like the Windows taskbar] at the bottom of the other, which again can be confusing. But it's a lot better than the Windows approach, since they are still treated as multiple monitors, and dialogue boxes appear in the center of the individual monitors, not split between them.
So if you can develop with Macs, that's the way to go since the setup is so much more intelligent than with Windows.
The presence of more screen real estate is undeniably addictive, and I'm sure I'd get used to it if I actually wound up working with that kind of setup on a daily basis. But I think a single high-resolution monitor would be a better way to go if you can afford it. I have a SGI 1600SW monitor and the extra resolution (1600x1024) is well worth the cost. When I visit the Apple Store, I drool over the new Cinema HD Display (1920x1200-odd). If you can afford that, I'd highly recommend it.
For development, I don't think there's any contest between LCDs and CRTs. Buy the LCD because it's a lot sharper than the CRT, doesn't flicker and won't degrade over time.
Hope that helps.
D
Just because an administration is, on the main, corrupt and incompetent, does not mean that every idea coming out of it is inherently bad.
And certainly whitehouse.gov is and was a good idea, regardless of the party running it.
I'm not going to say Clinton is a good and honest man - he is not - but to criticise this fellow just because he worked for the administration is a bit low.
D
However, searching Google for SearchKing digs up the dirt on SearchKing before linking to the site itself. (In fact, I don't see a link to anything on searchking.com on the first page).
Not to say that I sympathise with SearchKing. Their practices are clearly in conflict with providing quality search results, so they richly deserved to be slapped.
D
Actually, I've been pricing entry level laptops for my company, and imagine my surprise when I found the iBook cheaper than the competition.
This is for our new outside sales force, so style is legitimately more important than substance. An iBook is undeniably stylish, and at $1,195 pretty reasonable. Compare that to the Sony subnotebook, which costs $1,699, or even the entry-level ThinkPad at $1,300-odd.
I may just wind up getting my company to purchase Macs for the first time, since the software the salespeople use is browser-based anyway.
D
I suppose it depends on your definition of working better. I will admit I never used the video editing software on BeOS, although I've used the operating system itself and liked it. But I really doubt that anything for the BeOS would even come close in quality to Final Cut Pro or After Effects.
...
It might well be that a BeOS version of Final Cut Pro could have been better, or at least faster, than the MacOS X version. But MacOS X just has more of a critical mass in terms of applications, and sadly that cannot be ignored.
If it weren't for that critical mass effect, I daresay we'd have a very different - and higher quality - selection of operating systems today.
I have to admit that the BeOS aesthetic experience never came even close to MacOS X, and that's something that's hard to let go of once you've experienced - even if it is sluggish, it's so nice to look at that it's easy to forgive.
Maybe I'm just not the speed addict most of you folks are
D
I'm a Southern California Linux user, but thanks to the SoCal love of superficial beauty, I've been moving my personal stuff to MacOS X.
:-).
So there
I'd still be curious to go, though - this is the first time any sort of Linux event has been in my neck of the woods.
D
Aside from the hype, it seems to me that there are a couple of things that make a lot of sense.
* The T/Mobile plan at $39.95 a month includes UNLIMITED data access - plans for previous units do not. This, of course, enormously increases the utility of the unit. After a year, your included bandwidth goes down, but it's still one heck of a deal compared to anything else out there.
* The Danger handheld includes a spiffy keyboard, which is probably a lot easier to deal with than Graffiti.
* The shape and size appear to excite a lot of people.
So there are rational reasons to like this unit. I think I'll wait for the colour screen, though; I hate looking at monochrome.
D
I believe that at about the time they proposed going to Windows NT systems, they produced a road map that had them pulling out of MIPS processors entirely, and phasing out Irix.
I love Irix, although I've switched most of my computing over to MacOS X nowadays. Irix does desperately need updating, but if you need X-Windows, Irix is by far the coolest implementation of same.
I'd like to see something a bit more up to date, at least with thinner window borders and a close-box. But compared to Linux as I've seen it, it does have first-rate usability. Compared to MacOS X, though, it's dropped way behind.
D
Is there any way on the MacOS X PDF reader, or Acrobat for that matter, to display the document as a single scrolling page of text?
It drives me nuts to browse by paper page, since inevitablby my screen is just a shade shorter than a complete page, and so I have to scroll down to the rest of page 1 and then move to page 2. It's an incredibly akward way to read.
Anyone find a decent solution to this?
D
I sent a reply suggesting this about a minute before I noticed you'd already done it. Forgive me, I got up revoltingly early this morning.
But that is, in fact, exactly what I want. I really, really hate listening to voice mails.
Unless they're from my girlfriend, that is. Her voice is special. But for everyone else, well, I'd much rather read what they have to say than hear it.
Incidentally, this might be getting closer than we think. Some modern phone systems now do voice recognition so you can speak the name of the person you want instead of going through endless menus, and they actually work pretty well. So hopefully it won't be more than a few years before we can have a workplace entirely free of the voice mail scourge.
D
I have a system like this at my company. It relies on Outlook and is a hideous bear to maintain for a variety of reasons I won't bother to get into.
But it is a lot more convenient than playing messages through the phone.
What I want is a system that takes a voice message and translates it into text, so I don't have to listen to it; I can read, as others have said, about ten times faster than people can talk.
D
There actually is a MacOS X native version of emacs, but it's not quite there - it doesn't quite have the right look and feel. I forget the reasons, but I stopped using it and returned to the terminal.
:-(.
What I really want is xemacs, with variable width fonts and a better user interface, but so far there doesn't seem to be any Aqua version. And the X version simply reminds me of how horrid X fonts are whenever I see it
D
One reason, which I will agree is a little bizarre, is how ugly Linux fonts look. I know I can theoretically, with enormous difficulty, get them to look at least slightly better than they do, but that would take time I simply do not have.
Out of the box, MacOS fonts make ordinary text look like a printed, typeset document instead of something barely readable.
The other advantage is mainstream applications; I have never really warmed to the GIMP; I prefer Photoshop. I can get it and it looks and works great on MacOS X. Likewise with some super-complex applications like Final Cut Pro and After Effects, which are highly unlikely to get Linux equivalents. For completeness, I'll add Office, even though I rarely use it.
When you spend half your life in front of a computer, it becomes surprisingly important to make it look great. And if you don't like the Windows hegemony but want to be able to use mainstream applications, the Mac is your only choice.
Long may it live!
D
If I understood the article correctly, Factorium is a way of handling a single sign on in a more distributed way, possibly sharing the signon database and cryptographic information between machines.
So in theory we could have a single sign on and multiple points of failure.
That being said, there wasn't enough detail in the article for me to know for sure.
I would say a single sign-on is fine for reading articles in the NYT and Wall Street Journal while having only one login, but I feel genuinely uncomfortable about using it for financial information, and extremely uncomfortable about giving it to Microsoft.
I think a lot of people feel the same way, and that's a major reason why Passport failed. Microsoft was unable to sign up any banks or credit card companies for its service, because they didn't want MS's greedy fingers in their customer databases. The mass of everyday consumers may not be sophisticated enough to distrust Microsoft, but banks are not in that position.
D
It's part of the giant convergence of information about you.
.net Passport to log in to your phone account, it means your phone account is linked to the Passport, and so all sorts of interesting data mining could be possible between your phone calls, your passport account and your use of other Passport sites.
If you use
Frankly, it feels more than a little creepy to me. They will, of course, SAY they don't do anything like this, but just the fact that it's technically possible makes my skin crawl.
D
I buy as much computer stuff as I can at the local Apple Store, where I get the industry's best service, and prices no different from what I'd pay at such customer service paragons as Fry's or CompUSA.
If there was a premium quality airline with fares that weren't completely out of sight, I'd fly it. In fact, since American created its "More Room" initiative, I have flown no other airline, because it's such a relief to actually be able to use my laptop in flight without strain. An increasing number of people go with private aircraft, which offer the ultimate level of service and the ability to pick your own schedule.
In short, high quality and good service are things people are still willing to pay for. A big problem with the airlines is that service on most of them is about equally bad; a flight on Southwest is actually a bit more pleasant than a flight on most other airlines, because the cabin crew will at least make you laugh a time or two.
People don't like paying excessive premiums for service, but it all depends on where you are, what you buy, and how poor the non-premium service is. I'd love to have someone pump my gas for me, for example, but it's not worth 50% more than self-serve.
There was a gas station near where I worked a few years back where homeless people would pump gas for you, and you'd give them a buck or two for their efforts. I actually went out of my way to get gas there, because I loved not having to pump it myself.
At least in my experience, there is a quality difference between Target and department stores; my department store and outlet mall clothing tends to take a lot longer to wear out than Target's stuff, however superficially appealing it is.
Overall, then, I defend higher quality stores. They are a more pleasant experience for the most part, and many of them aren't that much more expensive than their competition. It all depends on the store and the industry.
D
You mean a television near your PC, right?
...
I do. I use my television as a monitor when I edit videos using Final Cut Pro on my PowerMac. (Which isn't a PC, I suppose, but you get the idea).
Of course the last time I actually watched something I didn't produce on my TV was September 11th, when none of my favourite news sites were working
D
Somehow I don't think the number of available applications for Windows has anything to do with the Registry.
It has a lot to do with Microsoft's ability to sell and market their stuff. Network effects take it over from there, love it or hate it.
D
Photoshop users, unsurprisingly, appreciate quality aesthetics more than the average Joe.
:-).
The Apple user interface is designed to look beautiful. Naturally, people who have chosen to be artistic in their career are drawn to the platform that looks best.
Thus, even though there are no operational differences I know of between Mac and PC photoshop, most people still prefer it on a Mac.
Try one and see for yourself
D