*MUST* every pro-apple zealot say the same stuff over and over? All of you feel compelled to make the same basic arguments:
1) The luxury car analogy - I admit, this argument sounds good. After all, this recasts the situation in a much more favorable light. However the fact is, Apple was once the ONLY choice. They dominated the entire market and now they are but a tiny niche (shrinking according to polls) in the PC world. "Dead", in this case, is a relative term. They've gone from king of the hill to bottom of the heap. Had Mercedes-Benz done the same thing, people would say Mercedes-benz was dead. . ..
2) "Wintel, Wintel, Wintel!" - This drives me crazy. I hate how you think you can argue Mac Superiority over the PC by marrying WIndows with the intel platform. As though windows were the only option. . . But you know what? If it comes down to it, and I only have a choice of windows or Mac OS, I'd still pick windows; at least that way I could play some games. ..
3) The Better engineering argument - All mac users can't help but wave wildly and point out how much better the macintosh is engineered. Why, its built from the ground up to be better!!
And you know what? They're right. The macintosh is beter designed. The RISC architecture is superior to Intel's. But who cares?
None of that MATTERS. Because no one buys Macs, they don't make enough of the chips to produce them at reasonable cost and thus for the price of a 2 ghz Apple, you can get a MUCH higher clock speed PC which is guarenteed to outperform it -- despite all of it's 'hackish' engineering.
The better machine may have lost, but living in the past isn't gonna change that.
-----------------------
I'm sorry, but I can't help how I feel. I'm not trying to troll anyone. Just glance at my karma if you don't believe me. I just call them how I see them -- and I'm sick of the same old arguments out of the pro-mac camp.
It still cracks me up when people say "Apple is dead" or "Apple is dying". How can a company that has been turning out profits for quarter after consecutive quarter be "dead"? A company that continues to set standards in the industry be labeled as "dead" is silly to me.
Its funny, you said the exact same thing I said, only you used nicer, fluffier language and you get modded up, while I get modded way down.
If you read my commment, you'll see I did not claim "apple was dead" I said that the "apple computing platform" was dead. I clearly stated that the company itself was doing just fine (turning a profit even).
I know this analogy is overused, but is BMW dead? Because they sure don't command 95% of the industry. Poor BMW.
Speaking of BMW, the difference is that BMW never dominated the market. They were never a major player, much less the ONLY player. If BMW had fallen from 95% of the market to only 5%, I think people would be saying "BMW is dead" too.
As for BMW analogy, I would argue that BMW, much like apple, occupies a very specific niche market. They do well in THAT market, but in the real world, they simply do cannot compete (nor do they really even try) with others.
Dead. They're not dead people. They're a company that is alive and well. No they don't own the "market", but just because McDonald's sells more fries than anyone else doesn't make them better either. They are alive and well, still doing R&D, still innovating, still giving shareholders value for their stock.
I'm sorry, but you apple zealots are the worst kind of zealots. I knew that would happen when I posted the comment, but like I said, nothing I say at this point can really hurt my karma, so who cares. I'm not gonna sugar-coat everything just becuase some people can't think rationally in response to simple facts/opinions that they find unpleasant.
The problem with your response is that you read my comment, you saw that I wasn't highly praising apple (and thus was immediately labeled 'anti-apple') and immediately fired off a response that, in reality, says much the same thing I said initially: Apple as a company will live on, but as a computing platform, they will forever be resigned to a niche market.
I'm sorry, but my karma is already plenty healthy, so I have to come right out and be honest, even though I'm certained to be modded down as flamebait:
Apple as a platform isn't just dying, it's already dead. Apple as a company is not. Apple occupies a comfortable niche in the computer market because of its dedicated following and strong video processing capabillities. As long as this remains true, apple will continue to profit and continue to stick around.
However, as a platform, it is long dead. Remember back when Apple dominated the pc market? They were the first company and had the upper-hand. All they had to do was cling to their market share like Microsoft does now. But they didn't fight dirty enough and now they lack the leverage they need to ever reclaim it, no matter how super-special their latest offering might be (and btw, I'm sorry, but for my money, I still I get way more value out of intel or amd's latest offering than Apple's).
Apple no longer even dominates the educational market like it used to. No *serious* gamer uses one, and don't get me started on the desktop market.
Apple isn't dying; it's already dead. A band of dedicated followers and their continued innovation in other fields (think ipod/itunes) will continue to keep apple alive as a company, but I strongly doubt it will ever be taken seriously as a computing platform again.
It was my understanding that the SCO only claimed IP infringement by the 2.4/2.5 kernels of linux. Wouldn't that exclude earlier tivo models from their claims?
How exactly do they get MATRIX from Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange? There are about twenty things wrong with that.
For starters, it stands for MATIE. Which, if you think about it, would make peoples reactions to the project all the more apt sounding (Argh! MATIE!). Which brings me to yet another interesting point, where on earth did they get the "R" in matrix. I can kinda see taking the second character of exchange as the "x", making it x-change or something equally stupid, but I can't for the life of me figure out where they snagged an "R" from.
Second of all, shouldn't multi-state be hyphonated like anti-terrorism is? This seeems like a conveinant misuses of punctuation. Would it really have ruined their day just to call it MSATIE instead of MATRIX? Did they truly need that extra layer of irony built into the name?
The linux vulnerabillities you describe seem rather petty compared to the windows ones. . . I'm much more worried about a buffer overflow that gives someone complete control over my box than a nuissance DOS attack. . .
There's really nothing that obliges you to return the camera to Ritz to have the pictures developped is there? It seems to me you could just find a way to modify the camera so you dont' need ritz to download your pictures and then you'd have a 11 dollar 2 megapixel digital camera that you could use as many times as you wanted (rather tahn returning it to ritz where they'd simply resell it).
The only flaw with this theory is that they've likely got the pictures stored in some proprietary manner that makes it difficult to extract the images for the average consumer.
So wait? Anyone with the abillity to log RFID signals, and correspond each glasses unique id to the drinker, can then tell how much beer I've had to drink? No sir, I do not like it! The privacy implications are dire.
Alot of people are acting as though this particular bug is no big deal and isn't worthy of being posted on the main page. But consider this, how many people are running thier browsers with the default configurations? And Both IE and Mozilla will automatically play MIDI files embedded in webpages with this configurations. So this exploit could theoretically allow any website you visit to run arbitrary code on your system. . . I'd say that's pretty serious.
More than likely, Kazaa users spend more, on the average, on cd's than non-kazaa users. Granted, there are some inviduals who'll download everything and never buy a single CD, but these are the type who wouldn't have bought the cd anyways -- they'd have just copied a friends.
I honestly believe that the majority of file-swappers spend MORE money on cd's than they would otherwise.
These ARE thier customers that they are suing . ..or at least most of them are.
So heres a silly question. If I'm a sci-fi writer, and I describe a non-existant device in such away that it CAN Be engineered from my description, could that count as prior art in a patent dispute?
I mean, I know it seems silly. But if a sci-fi writer did come up with the idea first, should NASA get all the glory for making it real?
I don't know. . . Maybe that's a dumb thought. ..It's too early in the morning.
Re:Slashdot Promotes Piracy?!
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I suppose I could make two arguments: 1) The SPA no longer exists and thus cannot give permission to do anything. The copyright is now held by some other group that does the same thing (in otherwords, they changed their name).
2) Clearly slashdot has posted that for ridicule, not for "promoting the ethical and legal use of software.".
3) Last but not least, "copy this video for the NON-PROFIT purpose". Last time I checked, Slashdot, despite the.org, is not technically a non-profit orginization. Slashdot has posted this video as content on thier site, which is arguably for the purpose of generating hits and thusly advertising revenue and subscription sales.
Ok..so thats a stretch.
Like I said before, I didn't see that. . .
Re:Slashdot Promotes Piracy?!
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OK, I didn't see that disclaimer (was it editted in or something?). My fault. I probably jumped the gun on this post. But It is true that they STILL sell that video. I can't imagine anyone acutally buy's it though. . .
Slashdot Promotes Piracy?!
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In case Slashdot is not aware, the afforementioned SPA video is STILL sold for 20 dollars a pop and, as far as I know, all copyrights on it are still held by the orginization that replaced the SPA (whatever its called, no one cares). In other words, Slashdot is directly linking (via bittorrent, which I suppose you could argue is not a DIRECT LINK) to copyrighted materials. Since when has Slashdot supported theft of intellectual property?
That's 1.18 Billion *TAX FREE* thanks to Bush's latest tax break. Thank god! I was so worried about Bill Gate's financial well-being. I'm so glad the President was there to ensure that the rich and wealthy stay rich and wealthy with as little effort as possible.
Did they just use whatever they had lying around? Seems to me that if you were gonna benchmark apples fastest, you'd pit it against intel (or amd)'s fastest. I would have expected to see some 3ghz processors (which are still cheaper than G5 2 ghz processors) in the test.
It's nice to see that Apple will finally have some decent power to back them up, but I have STRONG doubts about their "Fastest PC in the world" claim. If a single 2 ghz g5 more or less keeps pace with a 2.66 ghz intel chip, I fail to see how dual 2 ghz system would outperform a dual 3 ghz (or faster)intel-based system.
Nevertheless, compared to the G4, it does seem that apple is making strides. Congratulations on that.
The timing on this is no coiencedence. For anyone who doesn't know, both Blockbuster and Walmart have JUST started similar services. For the time being, I suspect NetFlix would have had Walmart beat on service (Given that they had more distribution centers and thus less shipping delay.
I'm really quite torn about this. Obviously this patent is crap and had no buisness being issued, but by the same measure, I'm not so sure I wanted to see Walmart use thier deep pockets to dominate/monopolize yet another industry.
The WTO is always rules against protectionist tarrifs and environmental laws. I dont' have the exact statistics with me, but in an INSANELY high number of cases, the WTO has ruled in favor of the country issuing the complaint. Off the top of my head, i'd say its around 90%, but I'm sure someone out there can find the exact number.
I can't see any reason why this would be different. It seems highly likely that the WTO will rule in favor of Korea blocking this particular tariff.
I'm torn on this. I despise the WTO and how they have the power to to step in and tell our democratically elected government what to do, but this might be the one time I'll be glad for their interfering. I gots to have my computer parts on the cheap. . .
SCO's claims today that anybody running AIX is doing so without a license are themselves illegal - they constitute the tort of "injurious falsehood". Watch for IBM to make a counter-claim against SCO on this. Imagine how much IBM could claim to have lost if customers stop using and buying AIX because of this. That's the pecuniary damages. Then there's punitive damages. Idiots.
How sure are you? I remember reading about some robot lawn mower that "digested" lawn clippings using a chemical process in order to provide the power. A self-powering machine doesn't have to disobey the laws of thermodynamics. . .
Odd that Microsoft is simultaneously trying to stop spam sent to Hotmail users, and to make sure that it can send unsolicited commercial email without penalties.
That's not odd at all. That's just how microsoft works. They want to protect their monopoly, and perhaps extend it to new products (Microsoft Brand Penis enlargers anyone?).
Microsoft has never played by the rules before, I don't know why anyone would think they'd start doing it now. . .
Slashdot Mirror
*MUST* every pro-apple zealot say the same stuff over and over? All of you feel compelled to make the same basic arguments:
.
.
1) The luxury car analogy - I admit, this argument sounds good. After all, this recasts the situation in a much more favorable light. However the fact is, Apple was once the ONLY choice. They dominated the entire market and now they are but a tiny niche (shrinking according to polls) in the PC world. "Dead", in this case, is a relative term. They've gone from king of the hill to bottom of the heap. Had Mercedes-Benz done the same thing, people would say Mercedes-benz was dead. . .
2) "Wintel, Wintel, Wintel!" - This drives me crazy. I hate how you think you can argue Mac Superiority over the PC by marrying WIndows with the intel platform. As though windows were the only option. . . But you know what? If it comes down to it, and I only have a choice of windows or Mac OS, I'd still pick windows; at least that way I could play some games. .
3) The Better engineering argument - All mac users can't help but wave wildly and point out how much better the macintosh is engineered. Why, its built from the ground up to be better!!
And you know what? They're right. The macintosh is beter designed. The RISC architecture is superior to Intel's. But who cares?
None of that MATTERS. Because no one buys Macs, they don't make enough of the chips to produce them at reasonable cost and thus for the price of a 2 ghz Apple, you can get a MUCH higher clock speed PC which is guarenteed to outperform it -- despite all of it's 'hackish' engineering.
The better machine may have lost, but living in the past isn't gonna change that.
-----------------------
I'm sorry, but I can't help how I feel. I'm not trying to troll anyone. Just glance at my karma if you don't believe me. I just call them how I see them -- and I'm sick of the same old arguments out of the pro-mac camp.
It still cracks me up when people say "Apple is dead" or "Apple is dying". How can a company that has been turning out profits for quarter after consecutive quarter be "dead"? A company that continues to set standards in the industry be labeled as "dead" is silly to me.
Its funny, you said the exact same thing I said, only you used nicer, fluffier language and you get modded up, while I get modded way down.
If you read my commment, you'll see I did not claim "apple was dead" I said that the "apple computing platform" was dead. I clearly stated that the company itself was doing just fine (turning a profit even).
I know this analogy is overused, but is BMW dead? Because they sure don't command 95% of the industry. Poor BMW.
Speaking of BMW, the difference is that BMW never dominated the market. They were never a major player, much less the ONLY player. If BMW had fallen from 95% of the market to only 5%, I think people would be saying "BMW is dead" too.
As for BMW analogy, I would argue that BMW, much like apple, occupies a very specific niche market. They do well in THAT market, but in the real world, they simply do cannot compete (nor do they really even try) with others.
Dead. They're not dead people. They're a company that is alive and well. No they don't own the "market", but just because McDonald's sells more fries than anyone else doesn't make them better either. They are alive and well, still doing R&D, still innovating, still giving shareholders value for their stock.
I'm sorry, but you apple zealots are the worst kind of zealots. I knew that would happen when I posted the comment, but like I said, nothing I say at this point can really hurt my karma, so who cares. I'm not gonna sugar-coat everything just becuase some people can't think rationally in response to simple facts/opinions that they find unpleasant.
The problem with your response is that you read my comment, you saw that I wasn't highly praising apple (and thus was immediately labeled 'anti-apple') and immediately fired off a response that, in reality, says much the same thing I said initially: Apple as a company will live on, but as a computing platform, they will forever be resigned to a niche market.
I'm sorry, but my karma is already plenty healthy, so I have to come right out and be honest, even though I'm certained to be modded down as flamebait:
.
Apple as a platform isn't just dying, it's already dead. Apple as a company is not. Apple occupies a comfortable niche in the computer market because of its dedicated following and strong video processing capabillities. As long as this remains true, apple will continue to profit and continue to stick around.
However, as a platform, it is long dead. Remember back when Apple dominated the pc market? They were the first company and had the upper-hand. All they had to do was cling to their market share like Microsoft does now. But they didn't fight dirty enough and now they lack the leverage they need to ever reclaim it, no matter how super-special their latest offering might be (and btw, I'm sorry, but for my money, I still I get way more value out of intel or amd's latest offering than Apple's).
Apple no longer even dominates the educational market like it used to. No *serious* gamer uses one, and don't get me started on the desktop market.
Apple isn't dying; it's already dead. A band of dedicated followers and their continued innovation in other fields (think ipod/itunes) will continue to keep apple alive as a company, but I strongly doubt it will ever be taken seriously as a computing platform again.
Bring on the flames. .
It was my understanding that the SCO only claimed IP infringement by the 2.4/2.5 kernels of linux. Wouldn't that exclude earlier tivo models from their claims?
How exactly do they get MATRIX from Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange? There are about twenty things wrong with that.
For starters, it stands for MATIE. Which, if you think about it, would make peoples reactions to the project all the more apt sounding (Argh! MATIE!). Which brings me to yet another interesting point, where on earth did they get the "R" in matrix. I can kinda see taking the second character of exchange as the "x", making it x-change or something equally stupid, but I can't for the life of me figure out where they snagged an "R" from.
Second of all, shouldn't multi-state be hyphonated like anti-terrorism is? This seeems like a conveinant misuses of punctuation. Would it really have ruined their day just to call it MSATIE instead of MATRIX? Did they truly need that extra layer of irony built into the name?
The linux vulnerabillities you describe seem rather petty compared to the windows ones. . . I'm much more worried about a buffer overflow that gives someone complete control over my box than a nuissance DOS attack. . .
Why does it say "lunix" instead of "linux". Surely theres some clever joke there that I just don't get. . .
There's really nothing that obliges you to return the camera to Ritz to have the pictures developped is there? It seems to me you could just find a way to modify the camera so you dont' need ritz to download your pictures and then you'd have a 11 dollar 2 megapixel digital camera that you could use as many times as you wanted (rather tahn returning it to ritz where they'd simply resell it).
The only flaw with this theory is that they've likely got the pictures stored in some proprietary manner that makes it difficult to extract the images for the average consumer.
So wait? Anyone with the abillity to log RFID signals, and correspond each glasses unique id to the drinker, can then tell how much beer I've had to drink? No sir, I do not like it! The privacy implications are dire.
Alot of people are acting as though this particular bug is no big deal and isn't worthy of being posted on the main page. But consider this, how many people are running thier browsers with the default configurations? And Both IE and Mozilla will automatically play MIDI files embedded in webpages with this configurations. So this exploit could theoretically allow any website you visit to run arbitrary code on your system. . . I'd say that's pretty serious.
More than likely, Kazaa users spend more, on the average, on cd's than non-kazaa users. Granted, there are some inviduals who'll download everything and never buy a single CD, but these are the type who wouldn't have bought the cd anyways -- they'd have just copied a friends.
.or at least most of them are.
I honestly believe that the majority of file-swappers spend MORE money on cd's than they would otherwise.
These ARE thier customers that they are suing . .
So heres a silly question. If I'm a sci-fi writer, and I describe a non-existant device in such away that it CAN Be engineered from my description, could that count as prior art in a patent dispute?
.It's too early in the morning.
I mean, I know it seems silly. But if a sci-fi writer did come up with the idea first, should NASA get all the glory for making it real?
I don't know. . . Maybe that's a dumb thought. .
I suppose I could make two arguments:
.org, is not technically a non-profit orginization. Slashdot has posted this video as content on thier site, which is arguably for the purpose of generating hits and thusly advertising revenue and subscription sales.
1) The SPA no longer exists and thus cannot give permission to do anything. The copyright is now held by some other group that does the same thing (in otherwords, they changed their name).
2) Clearly slashdot has posted that for ridicule, not for "promoting the ethical and legal use of software.".
3) Last but not least, "copy this video for the NON-PROFIT purpose". Last time I checked, Slashdot, despite the
Ok..so thats a stretch.
Like I said before, I didn't see that. . .
OK, I didn't see that disclaimer (was it editted in or something?). My fault. I probably jumped the gun on this post. But It is true that they STILL sell that video. I can't imagine anyone acutally buy's it though. . .
In case Slashdot is not aware, the afforementioned SPA video is STILL sold for 20 dollars a pop and, as far as I know, all copyrights on it are still held by the orginization that replaced the SPA (whatever its called, no one cares). In other words, Slashdot is directly linking (via bittorrent, which I suppose you could argue is not a DIRECT LINK) to copyrighted materials. Since when has Slashdot supported theft of intellectual property?
That's 1.18 Billion *TAX FREE* thanks to Bush's latest tax break. Thank god! I was so worried about Bill Gate's financial well-being. I'm so glad the President was there to ensure that the rich and wealthy stay rich and wealthy with as little effort as possible.
Did they just use whatever they had lying around? Seems to me that if you were gonna benchmark apples fastest, you'd pit it against intel (or amd)'s fastest. I would have expected to see some 3ghz processors (which are still cheaper than G5 2 ghz processors) in the test.
It's nice to see that Apple will finally have some decent power to back them up, but I have STRONG doubts about their "Fastest PC in the world" claim. If a single 2 ghz g5 more or less keeps pace with a 2.66 ghz intel chip, I fail to see how dual 2 ghz system would outperform a dual 3 ghz (or faster)intel-based system.
Nevertheless, compared to the G4, it does seem that apple is making strides. Congratulations on that.
The timing on this is no coiencedence. For anyone who doesn't know, both Blockbuster and Walmart have JUST started similar services. For the time being, I suspect NetFlix would have had Walmart beat on service (Given that they had more distribution centers and thus less shipping delay.
I'm really quite torn about this. Obviously this patent is crap and had no buisness being issued, but by the same measure, I'm not so sure I wanted to see Walmart use thier deep pockets to dominate/monopolize yet another industry.
The WTO is always rules against protectionist tarrifs and environmental laws. I dont' have the exact statistics with me, but in an INSANELY high number of cases, the WTO has ruled in favor of the country issuing the complaint. Off the top of my head, i'd say its around 90%, but I'm sure someone out there can find the exact number.
I can't see any reason why this would be different. It seems highly likely that the WTO will rule in favor of Korea blocking this particular tariff.
I'm torn on this. I despise the WTO and how they have the power to to step in and tell our democratically elected government what to do, but this might be the one time I'll be glad for their interfering. I gots to have my computer parts on the cheap. . .
SCO's claims today that anybody running AIX is doing so without a license are themselves illegal - they constitute the tort of "injurious falsehood". Watch for IBM to make a counter-claim against SCO on this. Imagine how much IBM could claim to have lost if customers stop using and buying AIX because of this. That's the pecuniary damages. Then there's punitive damages. Idiots.
Sir! That's slander. .
I'm beginning to suspect that Microsoft's intentions might not be entirely honorable. . .
How sure are you? I remember reading about some robot lawn mower that "digested" lawn clippings using a chemical process in order to provide the power. A self-powering machine doesn't have to disobey the laws of thermodynamics. . .
Actually I believe it was 16 females and 7 males. . .
:)
Didn't *you* pay attention?
No no, becuase you see, the 5 thousand dollar version only has a range of 100 miles or so. The extra $995,000 is money well spent.
Odd that Microsoft is simultaneously trying to stop spam sent to Hotmail users, and to make sure that it can send unsolicited commercial email without penalties.
That's not odd at all. That's just how microsoft works. They want to protect their monopoly, and perhaps extend it to new products (Microsoft Brand Penis enlargers anyone?).
Microsoft has never played by the rules before, I don't know why anyone would think they'd start doing it now. . .