Re:My iBook died two months ago...
on
New Apples Next Week
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Will be?
All serious PPC development has ground to a complete halt. Anyone who says differently is either delusional or trying to keep people from leaving the platform.
Are you seriously trying to say that all new OSX software developed NOW will only be supported on the latest platform?
Jeebus, you know nothing about making software. I work at a software company, and if we ignored even 3 year old platforms, we'd be making very little money. Developers would love to dump the mature/legacy architectures, but that's what people use... and that's why developers are often not heads of companies. Only rich geeks or idiots keep buying the latest and greatest.. the rest of us buy the latest once in a while, but for the most part use devices for 3-7 years.
When installing the OS, MAKE SURE that right before you finally install that you click customize and uncheck all the languages and printer options you don't need.
Any way to do this after the fact? My sister keeps complaining that her drive is too full, it might help if she didn't have all the langs builtin:-)
As a noted Apple apologist, I'd like to say: this is completely impossible. The P-M is much faster than a G4 of the same or even greater clockspeed... in fact probably on par with an Athlon 64 for non-64bit operations.
Now, all those nice virii/spyware/company anti-virus-defense cruft that your Windows box will attract... now that may make it seem like the Mac with the G4 is much faster:-)
The phone can't ring if the phone doesn't exist.Add a fax/printer to your phone line. It REALLY dissuades those fucking auto-call devices when they get the fax tone. I have a fax/print/scan/copy device that also doubles as a spam-blocker... talk about multifunction:-)
Firefox is not free either, because I must buy hardware to run it on.
Actually you don't. There is a portable version of firefox. Simply put it on a usb flash drive (I have one sitting on my iPod Shuffle, along with some music) or even burn it to a CD, and you can use firefox wherever you take the drive or CD. No hardware license neccessary:-) I'm not sure you can even have this kind of secure, roaming profile with IE.
I get 7 hours on my p4-m notebook.
so I'm thinking they may see an increase.
I call bullshit. Do you really mean a Pentium4-Mobile? I have one of these lap-scorchers, and aside from being hot as hell, the usable battery life with full speed stepdown + minimum brightness + no wifi is like 2.5 hours.
You could have meant a Pentium-M processor... if so, I'd still like to know which one you have because I've only heard of 4 hours usable on average, 5 max, unless you have some godlike battery (6+ Ah, etc)
Historically, they were allies with the anti-WinTel PowerPC platform, but now, with IBM still as a Big Iron vendor and Apple's emergence as a possible supercomputer clsuter provider (a la BigMac), I think they saw a natural business conflict... Apple's supercompute cost was a fraction of IBMs, using the *same architecture*!! Also, given the problems with the G5, it was clear that the relationship was on the rocks.
Apple and Intel strategically have very little issues (aside from Intel's current partner Microsoft... but that's another story)
It's a failure because Intel shrunk the market,. and doesn't sell any chips. Reducing competition is only half the battle.
GP poster was trying to say, that for Intel, shrinking the 64 bit market was a strategic goal. Why?
If you as a purchaser of servers really didn't need 64 bit, and could do with many 32 bit machines, guess who you're buying from now
After some time, when noone is around, Intel comes by and re-invents 64 bit (and everyone adores them for it)... this part of the plan was majorly fux0red by AMD64, tho.
Like Microsoft, Intel is big... they can/will kill a market if it kills of competitors... and they have been known to use these kind of tactics before. Why do you think every new version of windows has approx. the same functionality but requires double the resources? AMD/VIA own the low-end market, so its best to keep the market moving upscale.
Sparc, as far as I can see, drastically outsells Itanium.
PocketPC:
2. It looks better, more modern, than PalmOS. Support for Clear Type.
PalmOS:
11. Palm devices are usually more stylish than PocketPCs.
So which really matters? Modern vs. Stylish? WTF?
Also the reviewer seems to be biased towards PocketPCs since he ignores the fact that PalmOS supports MS Office better than the PocketPC (a la Documents toGo) Also notice the link to PocketPC freeware at the bottom of the page, but no similar link to PalmOS freeware (which there is more of!).
Does no one at Motorola have spell check turned on?
More likely: they want the product trademark to have name recognition of a dictionary word (think: "windows"), but without the downsides (ie, loss of trademark status due to common usage). Besides, I think it's at least different than coming up with a pseudo-word as a product name like many car names (think: "Integra"), and you'll have your own search keyword (ie, RAZR won't compete with razor vendors on google results).
And that's better than the Open Source business plan, how?
1. Steal/Copy Idea
2. ???
3. Profit
Dude, wtf are you talking about? Open Source is not about profit... sure, you can make one if you replace ??? with services/etc. but profit is not strived for or even wanted in some OS products.
Is it immoral if I don't block the ads but simply ignore them?
The semantic difference is that the advertiser doesn't pay the site if you simply block the ad. What you make of this is up to you. For me, I block ads that are are either annoying (stupid rotating/flashing image ads) or have disturbing content. Otherwise, I live with them, or use "nuke anything" to wipe out the item after load.
On the one hand, you trust your friends, so things your friends clicked on might be interesting for you to know about. On the other hand, friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations since your friends often have different interests from you.
Exactly. Trust involves two aspects: competence, and compassion. Friends are often compassionate, but may not neccessarily be competant in the interests you have (ie, none of my "friends" are on in my basketball weekend group). Likewise, those guys in the bball group are not necc. guys I'd like to hang out and have beers with. But perhaps compassion can be had online, specifically for your combined interests? Some blogs have very active communities where friendships develop...
Howdy, I'm the editor in chief of Mobile Magazine and some of your complaints have a bit of merit, and obviously we'd love to do an even better job of this next year.
Thanx for the politeness. I'm glad to see that people don't necessarily get defensive when valid complaints are voiced.
1) It is extrememly hard to "break" a computer in such a way that it is a) fixable via phone and b) something that could conceivably be blamed on the computer and not, say, a third-party application. What problems would you suggest we introduce?
Hmm... how about basic hardware issues (like, my keyboard is broken, or i get random spots on my monitor) or OS issues (like, I lost my files, or why is the system slow at times)
3) You have to create different problems for Apple. There's just no way around it. The Mac problem IS a real problem -- it was based on a problem our art director had only a few months earlier.
No, what it shows is that you guys have very little Mac experience. If you had enough sample usage, I'm sure you could come up with mor reasonable complaints than "booting off a network drive..." WTH? I've never done this with a mac or windows box.
5) Consumer Reports gave Apple its high rating in June 2004 (if I'm reading their website properly... it has some broken pages). Last year we also gave Apple high marks, but their support has dropped catastrophically since then.
I'm sorry, please send URLs to reference where "their support has dropped catastrophically since then". You get broken links because you're not a subscriber. If you don't provide sources for assertions like this, they're effectively irrelevant.
In rating 10 companies, our writer spent some 13 hours on the phone making 30 calls. Should he have spent 130 hours making 300 calls? You'd be shocked how similar the experience you'll find in one call to the next even in just the 3 calls. I have little doubt that the next 7 calls would be just as terrible for our losers.
No, you should a) either have more raters, or specifically lay out your equation for determining your values. A good way some review sites do this is by segmenting their grade by sections (holdtime rating, knowledeability rating, friendliness, etc). That way, I can refigure what is important to me (ie, knowledgeable reps are usually not an issue, if they are professional and actually listen to me).
There has of course always been a fascination by many folks with power and "shiny things", but if we are to proceed beyond vanity and self obsessed cultivation of what others find attractive or desirable to find truth, we need to cultivate new generations of people interested in seeking the scientific and mathematical explanations of the universe.
Blame the media. Seriously, we scientists, engineers and mathematicians should hold the media to task for its blatant disregard for truth and justice. When you look at the news and see a bunch of what is essentially staged, opinionated garbage, you figure you might as well watch your favorite fictional show instead, since that's also staged and maybe opinionated, but at least it isn't neccessarily garbage. Remove the fake news and people will start to get interested in things that matter again.
Commendable, to be sure. But do expect nasty visitors when you check out significant amounts of Subcommandante Marcos or even good-old Noam Chomsky.
I doubt buying/borrowing lots of Chomsky is going to earn you a knock on the door... even Chomsky said it himself... all the "moral majority" needs to do is to lambaste and discredit the "extremists". That way, people will self-censor and avoid the literature. No need to remove the extremeists or his readers... just make him/her radioactive in a social and political sense.
I thought it was entirely clear why they didn't open their "specs"
It's not like telling a programmer how to communicate with the underlying hardware is going to tell them how it (the PCB/silicon) was designed
Can you verify this? I'll be honest in saying I have no idea one way or the other, but unless you can give a 100% guarantee that it won't be possible, then you'll have to live with the fact that almost every hardware company does tons of reverse engineering to find out how their competitors do things (unless they're patented... and in the case of usabilty/look/feel, it's hard to patent that). And it works... look at how many knock-offs of generic designs there are out there.
Same thing in the software industry... for example, thought seems like a daunting effort, but SAMBA says to have RE'd the SMB protocol without any internal docs.
So it's possible (to lose your design), and company officers (CxOs) who are BOUND BY CHARTER to maximize the companys profits must say they did appropriate due dilligence to try to prevent any possible "loss". Note, that in FOSS, there is no charter like that, and so you see a lot more "cross pollination". Perhaps the entire future of innovation is bound to places where there is isn't a charter to "maximize profits at all costs"... or investors that are smart enough to let officers do the right thing (yeah, as if that'll ever happen!)
What is required is a VHS+DVD recorder with easy to use interface to transfer VHS to DVD, that'll be the first step to move consumers away from VHS.
Cheap DVD Recorder? Transferring old movies to new format when the consumer could instead have bought the "enhanced" DVD version for another $20 a pop? No, I think the MPAA/etc would like to prevent that as much as possible, since that will usher in a new age of DVD as the new VHS...
No, better to simply allow VHS to exist in all it's current lossy, unmaintainable glory, until Blu-Ray/HD-DVD (with a more secure copy protection) arrive. For the cutting edge who are going to DVDR no matter what, simply offer nice high margin products... but avoid at all costs the VCR/DVDR combo...
I normally respect what Cringely has to say, but on this subject, he's really showing his crack-smoking colors:
Choice exerpts from TFA: If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD
Uh, except that the Cell isn't a general purpose processor (GPP) ? Just because Microsoft used a GPP (Intel P3) on Xbox1, doesn't mean that all future Xboxes are GPPs.
The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn't have matched.
Except that Apple's big beef with IBM wasn't about roadmap, but production capacity. I bet there exist some nice 3.0Ghz+ G5s over at Fishkill, but hell if IBM could get them out of their fab without wasting huge amounts of wafer space...
That's the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill Gates. And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of CEO of the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.
ROFL!!! I guess this was all just a big joke and this is the punchline:-)
You got me this time, Cringely.
[mode="seriously, folks"] He paints a pretty interesting (and amusing) picture, but fails to account for other industry giants like, oh, say... Dell, and... what's the name of that new Chinese company? I'd say this Mac-Tel alliance is definitely something that worries Microsoft, but it's probably more of a "lease with an option to buy" for now... and who knows if Steve is ready to sell... [/mode]
Don't bother correcting me on this, I *know* this isn't a good way of visualizing what they're trying to do, but until I really get to use a system like this myself, on MY files, I doubt I'm really going to get it.
Trust me, I have Tiger running on a new iMac.... and I don't really use spotlight all that much...yet. I still have my "downloads" directory and "documents" directories and such. I wish I could get my damn VPN working so I could do work on that machine and it's beautiful display and OS instead of my windows laptop:-)
I think your fears are well founded (too much faith is required otherwise), and that's why spotlight and the whole "smart folder" concept is still in it's infancy. Thunderbird, OSX and gMail still have some work to do in getting peopel used to the concept, and I'm guessing in about a year or so, ther'll be a good enough "best practice" set of features that M$ can steal^H^H^H^H^H^Hinnovate and put into their Longhorn OS (which will take yet another year to develop/test).
Me must give up our freedoms to keep our freedoms. Hah, I'll take rampant terrorism over THEIR brand of freedom.
Don't fret, $CITIZEN, with their plan you'll get the best of both worlds... Freedom++ as well as rampant terrorism. Have you noticed that the ever since the War on Terrorism (tm), that world terrorism has been on the rise? Sounds just like the catastrophic success of the War on (some) Drugs (tm) and crime levels.
In fact, one might say that the WoSD was just a precursor for the WoT... I wonder what version 3.0 is going to be like.. War on Anger (tm)? War on Sex (tm)?
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All serious PPC development has ground to a complete halt. Anyone who says differently is either delusional or trying to keep people from leaving the platform.
Are you seriously trying to say that all new OSX software developed NOW will only be supported on the latest platform?
Jeebus, you know nothing about making software. I work at a software company, and if we ignored even 3 year old platforms, we'd be making very little money. Developers would love to dump the mature/legacy architectures, but that's what people use... and that's why developers are often not heads of companies. Only rich geeks or idiots keep buying the latest and greatest.. the rest of us buy the latest once in a while, but for the most part use devices for 3-7 years.
Any way to do this after the fact? My sister keeps complaining that her drive is too full, it might help if she didn't have all the langs builtin :-)
As a noted Apple apologist, I'd like to say: this is completely impossible. The P-M is much faster than a G4 of the same or even greater clockspeed... in fact probably on par with an Athlon 64 for non-64bit operations.
Now, all those nice virii/spyware/company anti-virus-defense cruft that your Windows box will attract... now that may make it seem like the Mac with the G4 is much faster :-)
The phone can't ring if the phone doesn't exist.Add a fax/printer to your phone line. It REALLY dissuades those fucking auto-call devices when they get the fax tone. I have a fax/print/scan/copy device that also doubles as a spam-blocker... talk about multifunction :-)
Actually you don't. There is a portable version of firefox. Simply put it on a usb flash drive (I have one sitting on my iPod Shuffle, along with some music) or even burn it to a CD, and you can use firefox wherever you take the drive or CD. No hardware license neccessary :-) I'm not sure you can even have this kind of secure, roaming profile with IE.
The Handicapper General would like to remind you of your required "equality" education ...
I call bullshit. Do you really mean a Pentium4-Mobile? I have one of these lap-scorchers, and aside from being hot as hell, the usable battery life with full speed stepdown + minimum brightness + no wifi is like 2.5 hours.
You could have meant a Pentium-M processor... if so, I'd still like to know which one you have because I've only heard of 4 hours usable on average, 5 max, unless you have some godlike battery (6+ Ah, etc)
Apple and Intel strategically have very little issues (aside from Intel's current partner Microsoft... but that's another story)
GP poster was trying to say, that for Intel, shrinking the 64 bit market was a strategic goal. Why?
Sparc, as far as I can see, drastically outsells Itanium.
Yeah, and what is Sun trading at these days?
2. It looks better, more modern, than PalmOS. Support for Clear Type.
PalmOS:
11. Palm devices are usually more stylish than PocketPCs.
So which really matters? Modern vs. Stylish? WTF?
Also the reviewer seems to be biased towards PocketPCs since he ignores the fact that PalmOS supports MS Office better than the PocketPC (a la Documents toGo)
Also notice the link to PocketPC freeware at the bottom of the page, but no similar link to PalmOS freeware (which there is more of!).
Does no one at Motorola have spell check turned on?
More likely: they want the product trademark to have name recognition of a dictionary word (think: "windows"), but without the downsides (ie, loss of trademark status due to common usage). Besides, I think it's at least different than coming up with a pseudo-word as a product name like many car names (think: "Integra"), and you'll have your own search keyword (ie, RAZR won't compete with razor vendors on google results).
You forgot the addendum: "in spite of their shortsighted government".
1. Steal/Copy Idea
2. ???
3. Profit
Dude, wtf are you talking about? Open Source is not about profit... sure, you can make one if you replace ??? with services/etc. but profit is not strived for or even wanted in some OS products.
Yeah, I know, YHBT and all.
Welcome to Bush's pwnership society. Seems like whether you support right or left-based politics, the way things go, the corporations win every time.
The semantic difference is that the advertiser doesn't pay the site if you simply block the ad. What you make of this is up to you. For me, I block ads that are are either annoying (stupid rotating/flashing image ads) or have disturbing content. Otherwise, I live with them, or use "nuke anything" to wipe out the item after load.
Exactly. Trust involves two aspects: competence, and compassion. Friends are often compassionate, but may not neccessarily be competant in the interests you have (ie, none of my "friends" are on in my basketball weekend group). Likewise, those guys in the bball group are not necc. guys I'd like to hang out and have beers with. But perhaps compassion can be had online, specifically for your combined interests? Some blogs have very active communities where friendships develop...
No, you see... Jobs himself is listed as a brand, just he's a bit lower on the list (below #20) :-)
Thanx for the politeness. I'm glad to see that people don't necessarily get defensive when valid complaints are voiced.
1) It is extrememly hard to "break" a computer in such a way that it is a) fixable via phone and b) something that could conceivably be blamed on the computer and not, say, a third-party application. What problems would you suggest we introduce?
Hmm... how about basic hardware issues (like, my keyboard is broken, or i get random spots on my monitor) or OS issues (like, I lost my files, or why is the system slow at times)
3) You have to create different problems for Apple. There's just no way around it. The Mac problem IS a real problem -- it was based on a problem our art director had only a few months earlier.
No, what it shows is that you guys have very little Mac experience. If you had enough sample usage, I'm sure you could come up with mor reasonable complaints than "booting off a network drive..." WTH? I've never done this with a mac or windows box.
5) Consumer Reports gave Apple its high rating in June 2004 (if I'm reading their website properly... it has some broken pages). Last year we also gave Apple high marks, but their support has dropped catastrophically since then.
I'm sorry, please send URLs to reference where "their support has dropped catastrophically since then". You get broken links because you're not a subscriber. If you don't provide sources for assertions like this, they're effectively irrelevant.
In rating 10 companies, our writer spent some 13 hours on the phone making 30 calls. Should he have spent 130 hours making 300 calls? You'd be shocked how similar the experience you'll find in one call to the next even in just the 3 calls. I have little doubt that the next 7 calls would be just as terrible for our losers.
No, you should a) either have more raters, or specifically lay out your equation for determining your values. A good way some review sites do this is by segmenting their grade by sections (holdtime rating, knowledeability rating, friendliness, etc). That way, I can refigure what is important to me (ie, knowledgeable reps are usually not an issue, if they are professional and actually listen to me).
Blame the media. Seriously, we scientists, engineers and mathematicians should hold the media to task for its blatant disregard for truth and justice. When you look at the news and see a bunch of what is essentially staged, opinionated garbage, you figure you might as well watch your favorite fictional show instead, since that's also staged and maybe opinionated, but at least it isn't neccessarily garbage. Remove the fake news and people will start to get interested in things that matter again.
I doubt buying/borrowing lots of Chomsky is going to earn you a knock on the door... even Chomsky said it himself... all the "moral majority" needs to do is to lambaste and discredit the "extremists". That way, people will self-censor and avoid the literature. No need to remove the extremeists or his readers... just make him/her radioactive in a social and political sense.
It's not like telling a programmer how to communicate with the underlying hardware is going to tell them how it (the PCB/silicon) was designed
Can you verify this? I'll be honest in saying I have no idea one way or the other, but unless you can give a 100% guarantee that it won't be possible, then you'll have to live with the fact that almost every hardware company does tons of reverse engineering to find out how their competitors do things (unless they're patented... and in the case of usabilty/look/feel, it's hard to patent that). And it works... look at how many knock-offs of generic designs there are out there.
Same thing in the software industry... for example, thought seems like a daunting effort, but SAMBA says to have RE'd the SMB protocol without any internal docs.
So it's possible (to lose your design), and company officers (CxOs) who are BOUND BY CHARTER to maximize the companys profits must say they did appropriate due dilligence to try to prevent any possible "loss". Note, that in FOSS, there is no charter like that, and so you see a lot more "cross pollination". Perhaps the entire future of innovation is bound to places where there is isn't a charter to "maximize profits at all costs"... or investors that are smart enough to let officers do the right thing (yeah, as if that'll ever happen!)
Cheap DVD Recorder? Transferring old movies to new format when the consumer could instead have bought the "enhanced" DVD version for another $20 a pop? No, I think the MPAA/etc would like to prevent that as much as possible, since that will usher in a new age of DVD as the new VHS...
No, better to simply allow VHS to exist in all it's current lossy, unmaintainable glory, until Blu-Ray/HD-DVD (with a more secure copy protection) arrive. For the cutting edge who are going to DVDR no matter what, simply offer nice high margin products... but avoid at all costs the VCR/DVDR combo...
Choice exerpts from TFA:
If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD
Uh, except that the Cell isn't a general purpose processor (GPP) ? Just because Microsoft used a GPP (Intel P3) on Xbox1, doesn't mean that all future Xboxes are GPPs.
The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn't have matched.
Except that Apple's big beef with IBM wasn't about roadmap, but production capacity. I bet there exist some nice 3.0Ghz+ G5s over at Fishkill, but hell if IBM could get them out of their fab without wasting huge amounts of wafer space...
That's the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill Gates. And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of CEO of the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.
ROFL!!! I guess this was all just a big joke and this is the punchline :-)
You got me this time, Cringely.
[mode="seriously, folks"] ... what's the name of that new Chinese company? I'd say this Mac-Tel alliance is definitely something that worries Microsoft, but it's probably more of a "lease with an option to buy" for now... and who knows if Steve is ready to sell...
He paints a pretty interesting (and amusing) picture, but fails to account for other industry giants like, oh, say... Dell, and
[/mode]
Trust me, I have Tiger running on a new iMac.... and I don't really use spotlight all that much...yet. I still have my "downloads" directory and "documents" directories and such. I wish I could get my damn VPN working so I could do work on that machine and it's beautiful display and OS instead of my windows laptop :-)
I think your fears are well founded (too much faith is required otherwise), and that's why spotlight and the whole "smart folder" concept is still in it's infancy. Thunderbird, OSX and gMail still have some work to do in getting peopel used to the concept, and I'm guessing in about a year or so, ther'll be a good enough "best practice" set of features that M$ can steal^H^H^H^H^H^Hinnovate and put into their Longhorn OS (which will take yet another year to develop/test).
Don't fret, $CITIZEN, with their plan you'll get the best of both worlds... Freedom++ as well as rampant terrorism. Have you noticed that the ever since the War on Terrorism (tm), that world terrorism has been on the rise? Sounds just like the catastrophic success of the War on (some) Drugs (tm) and crime levels.
In fact, one might say that the WoSD was just a precursor for the WoT... I wonder what version 3.0 is going to be like.. War on Anger (tm)? War on Sex (tm)?
I can't wait to find out!!!