But when they split platforms to iOS and MacOS, and iOS became so successful... Well, there's only so much oxygen in a space, and Apple has successfully sucked all the oxygen surrounding them into iOS.
It won't be too long before all MacOS has become is the build platform to build iOS apps on. Kind of like the expensive proprietary development platforms to build Nintendo games on.
"Actually, could you do me a favour, and please return those stolen computers to the University of Newcastle..."
That wouldn't work, and probably would (did) result in some fine hardware being trashed completely. Any crook who gave out their address like that with sense would ditch the hardware in some untracable fashion as soon as off the phone, not return it to the University. A single phone call like that can't be made into enough evidence for a conviction.
It's similar to the dilemma of the 'stolen oboe.' Oboes are quite costly musical instruments (at least good ones are) and come in cases very similar to clarinet cases. To a boneheaded thief they probably even look like a clarinet. But high quality oboes are much more rare than clarinets, and thus much harder for a thief to fence. If an expensive oboe is stolen even in a large metro area it's much more likely to be noticed on the used market than a clarinet. It's folklore with musicians that 'stolen oboes end up in a dumpster' which is a horrible tragedy, because they're beautifully crafted instruments.
My Minnesota "Permanent Driver's Learning Permit" didn't have a picture on it, but I used it for years as an ID, along with my Student ID. Back in the 70's Minnesota DL's didn't have pictures. When I went a year with my paper Drivers Learning Permit without taking the test to get a license, I was issued a plastic ID card with the old-design on it, which didn't expire. It wasn't until years later in 1984, when I actually got a drivers license, (I was 26 before I drove) that I got a State ID with a picture on it.
The story here is that the thief was caught because he couldn't unlock the laptop' and use the printer with the driver on the laptop. I don't know how 'secure' the data on the laptop really was, but it was plenty secured from this particular criminal...
I've lived through the bad times of Windows/386 and ME, and the good times of NT 3.51 and 2K.
First off, he's just 'name dropping' Windows versions. Nobody who actively used NT 3.51 would ever have 'lived through' Windows ME. I know, because I 'lived' through NT 3.51 to 4.0, and from there to Windows 2000. The 'NT' line of Windows is what the grown-ups used, and it was intolerable to slip back into a low-end DOS-based kludge. NT wasn't wonderful by any stretch of the imagination, in fact 4.0 was a step back from 3.51 in a number of core areas.
This guy sounds right from the start like somebody rattling off a 'history of Microsoft' fable.
But you can't deny that while Jobs is no geek, he has a vision of an ideal computing experience, and many of the past three decades' computer revolutions, particularly in the domain of user-friendliness, can be directly traced to him.
Sure you can. There are a ton of other people who've worked at Apple and produced all that cool stuff. Jobs rides along on top and takes more of the credit than he is entitled to. And that's simply the way it has been for years and years and years. There were some interim CEOs who nearly took the company under, but that isn't to say that Jobs should take all the credit for being slightly less horrible managers than they were.
I've worked at companies with Jobs-type people in high management. They walk into a technical meeting and totally fuck over any progress being made with disruptive ego-strutting bullshit. It is to the credit of the talented people at Apple that they've done so well with a guy like that riding up on top.
I'd be fired if I delivered a product that required regular updates, yet the software that goes on my hardware has an update plan at delivery.
Naw, you wouldn't be 'fired' for delivering hardware with flaws in it. They'd just issue a software patch to work around the problem. Like they do, regularly, all the time, right now.
But carry on exclusively blaming the 'software' for all the updates and bugfixes. . .
How did you upgrade a Palm III to PalmOS 4? Mine are all up to 3.5 but I had to do some finagling to get them all 'current' there, now that Palm offers the 3.3 upgrade but has completely removed the availability of the 3.5 upgrade.
I had lost my paid-for 3.5 upgrade executable, and had only one Palm III running the 3.5 OS. I found that a developer's 'Palm Emulator' would allow me to download the ROM image off the Palm III running 3.5, which I then finagled the 3.3 upgrade program into putting on the Palms.
I'd be interested in knowing how to get 4.0 on my fleet of III's. And details of what the advantages of 4.0 would be, of course...
It doesn't have to be a metal case to be damned solid. The Palm III is in a hard plastic case that is very, very solid. I'm a holdout who refuses to upgrade. In fact, I have 'hunkered down' by buying a bunch of backup Palm III devices on eBay. They go for generally under $10 these days, and I've still never worn one out. I expect to be using the Palm III twenty years from now.
That's really weird, because my PalmOS device never looses any data at all, and it's all shared in RAM. And I have been using a PalmOS device continuously since about 1998.
It sounds like Windows CE just isn't 'there' and hasn't ever really been 'there' at all. I guess they're just not capable of writing solid code, and had to change their hardware scheme to make up for it.
The total footprint includes the monitor. And you were somehow implying the size of the Mac Mini can be compared to that of the iMac without considering the additional footprint of the monitor. Which adds considerably to the space the Mac Mini takes up on your desktop. Making it 'larger' than the iMac.
I hope that Leopard works as advertised and Apple advertises it well. It has the potential to really clean MS clock.
Only if consumers can go into a big box store and buy an install CD to put it on their current hardware.
Apple doesn't have the sales nor the production or shipping infrastructure to 'replace' the huge install base of PC clones out there in the world. Until they give it up and quit selling an overpriced dongle to enable their OS, they'll continue to be a niche player. That is, in any place where they compete with Microsoft. They can and do compete readily in a certain sense with any other single PC vendor.
Come on, Apple. You dropped 'computer' from your company name. Focus on selling iPods if you need to feel like a hardware vendor. Give up all the 'Ferrari' and 'BMW' hype about your hardware; it's the same commodity stuff built in the same plants as everybody else's PC hardware.
Is the monitor you have plugged into your Mac Mini smaller than your clock radio, too?
I have a few of those little 9" VGA 'Point of Sale' monitors on the test bench that I use occasionally to set up or test a system, but I sure wouldn't want to stare at one for hours a day...
Don't interfere with his 'Porsche' metaphor, dammit. He's depressed enough that he spent so much on a PC without much to differentiate it from his brother in law's Dell.
This 'marvelous synergy' theory of Apple's founding really doesn't cut it. It's a good mythology to base a whole lot of marketing on though. Woz was technically 'there' and came up with a good design. The other guy was a huckster and got it going commercially. And he's rolled the returns for being at the right time and place for decades now. I don't think 'uncannily correct' enters into it. But then I'm not part of the chorus of admirers, either. And I'm not that fond of marketing types.
I'm not sure why everybody automatically leaps to FPGAs. There are lots of cool chips and ideas for how to do neat stuff with them.
My latest project was extremely low-tech but has been useful. I wanted a small timer to time the 2 minutes that each apple tree gets watered out in the field. I used one of the cheapest PIC microcontrollers, a little 8-pin bugger that cost me about $0.40. All self contained so you just hook power and ground to it and it does it's work, I wrote the code for it to blink an LED once per second for 120 seconds then go to micro-low-power shutdown. The pushbutton to start the timer is connected to the hardware interrupt to wake it up from sleep.
That's a decidedly low-end project, but it's just a small example. What I want to do next is design and implement a simple two wire networking protocol so I can program a bunch of PICs to intercommunicate, then scatter them around the house for various functions.
The sky is the limit, and you can do cool and powerful things with FPGAs, but let's not forget that the entry cost for hardware/firmware/software hacking is measured in single dollars these days.
Also, the 'barrier to entry' for fiddling around with computers and electronics is radically lower now than it was in the past. You can build your own circuit to program PIC controllers, for example, for under fifty dollars easily. The controllers themselves are in the $1-6 range apiece. If you want to mess with 'robotics' there are mounds of salvage hardware out there to be had for free. The average discarded diskette drive or CD-ROM drive, for instance, has actuators and stepper motors better than anything any of us dreamed of getting ahold of back in 1980.
The thing I remember from 1977 is wanting to build my own computer, but not even being able to afford the books on the topic. That was when I was a dishwasher making under $3 an hour and lived in a rented $42/month room. The Bugbooks and other important books on microprocessors were all in the $30-50 range. At least that's how I remember it. All I could afford was a cheap programmable calculator (an SR-56) that I bought with most of the money I got from HS graduation.
I think I am not alone in expressing the sentiment that what Woz has become since then is something to be proud of. He hasn't become a megalomaniac. He seems to be fairly happy in life.
IMO what the other Apple founder has become is a lot less appealing.
the only defense from this is to have projects with a diverse and distributed developer base( not everyone in one company ) and/or angeles who fork the project and fund a good number of developers to pick up the project and move it forward while making sure they are involved and committed to the project.
Which brings to my mind the idea that Microsoft could purchase hAndover.net or VAwhatever, or whatever they're now calling the parent company of Slashdot and Sourceforge. Think about it. If Microsoft bought Sourceforge, they could shut down the 'project website' and distribution network of a huge quantity of Open Source projects. I have always felt nervous about the whole Sourceforge 'bring your projects over here so it's all centrally located and centrally vulnerable' approach that the SourceForge/VAwhatever folks have encouraged.
I remember 'registering' Real Player back in the 90's so they sent me a CD-ROM with the 'paid for' version that had a 'record' button (for those really, really rare instances where a server allowed you to record the stream.)
Slashdot Mirror
Take the hard drive out of it and bring it to the Model Shop.
Use the metal cutting bandsaw to saw it in half.
Don't use the wood/plastic bandsaw, because you'll piss off the guy that has to replace the blade.
Apple was pretty much on permanent deathwatch.
But when they split platforms to iOS and MacOS, and iOS became so successful... Well, there's only so much oxygen in a space, and Apple has successfully sucked all the oxygen surrounding them into iOS.
It won't be too long before all MacOS has become is the build platform to build iOS apps on. Kind of like the expensive proprietary development platforms to build Nintendo games on.
No, that's a Denial Of Service system. A prankster just has to type ten words and the whole database is wiped.
Be at least fair about it. There are some IT people out there who could pass at a party.
I think there are, anyways. Theoretically...
It was a specialized stolen printer, a kind intended to print government IDs. I don't think it was like your deskjet.
"Actually, could you do me a favour, and please return those stolen computers to the University of Newcastle..."
That wouldn't work, and probably would (did) result in some fine hardware being trashed completely. Any crook who gave out their address like that with sense would ditch the hardware in some untracable fashion as soon as off the phone, not return it to the University. A single phone call like that can't be made into enough evidence for a conviction.
It's similar to the dilemma of the 'stolen oboe.' Oboes are quite costly musical instruments (at least good ones are) and come in cases very similar to clarinet cases. To a boneheaded thief they probably even look like a clarinet. But high quality oboes are much more rare than clarinets, and thus much harder for a thief to fence. If an expensive oboe is stolen even in a large metro area it's much more likely to be noticed on the used market than a clarinet. It's folklore with musicians that 'stolen oboes end up in a dumpster' which is a horrible tragedy, because they're beautifully crafted instruments.
My Minnesota "Permanent Driver's Learning Permit" didn't have a picture on it, but I used it for years as an ID, along with my Student ID. Back in the 70's Minnesota DL's didn't have pictures. When I went a year with my paper Drivers Learning Permit without taking the test to get a license, I was issued a plastic ID card with the old-design on it, which didn't expire. It wasn't until years later in 1984, when I actually got a drivers license, (I was 26 before I drove) that I got a State ID with a picture on it.
The story here is that the thief was caught because he couldn't unlock the laptop' and use the printer with the driver on the laptop. I don't know how 'secure' the data on the laptop really was, but it was plenty secured from this particular criminal...
First off, he's just 'name dropping' Windows versions. Nobody who actively used NT 3.51 would ever have 'lived through' Windows ME. I know, because I 'lived' through NT 3.51 to 4.0, and from there to Windows 2000. The 'NT' line of Windows is what the grown-ups used, and it was intolerable to slip back into a low-end DOS-based kludge. NT wasn't wonderful by any stretch of the imagination, in fact 4.0 was a step back from 3.51 in a number of core areas.
This guy sounds right from the start like somebody rattling off a 'history of Microsoft' fable.
But you can't deny that while Jobs is no geek, he has a vision of an ideal computing experience, and many of the past three decades' computer revolutions, particularly in the domain of user-friendliness, can be directly traced to him.
Sure you can. There are a ton of other people who've worked at Apple and produced all that cool stuff. Jobs rides along on top and takes more of the credit than he is entitled to. And that's simply the way it has been for years and years and years. There were some interim CEOs who nearly took the company under, but that isn't to say that Jobs should take all the credit for being slightly less horrible managers than they were.
I've worked at companies with Jobs-type people in high management. They walk into a technical meeting and totally fuck over any progress being made with disruptive ego-strutting bullshit. It is to the credit of the talented people at Apple that they've done so well with a guy like that riding up on top.
I'd be fired if I delivered a product that required regular updates, yet the software that goes on my hardware has an update plan at delivery.
Naw, you wouldn't be 'fired' for delivering hardware with flaws in it. They'd just issue a software patch to work around the problem. Like they do, regularly, all the time, right now.
But carry on exclusively blaming the 'software' for all the updates and bugfixes. . .
How did you upgrade a Palm III to PalmOS 4? Mine are all up to 3.5 but I had to do some finagling to get them all 'current' there, now that Palm offers the 3.3 upgrade but has completely removed the availability of the 3.5 upgrade.
I had lost my paid-for 3.5 upgrade executable, and had only one Palm III running the 3.5 OS. I found that a developer's 'Palm Emulator' would allow me to download the ROM image off the Palm III running 3.5, which I then finagled the 3.3 upgrade program into putting on the Palms.
I'd be interested in knowing how to get 4.0 on my fleet of III's. And details of what the advantages of 4.0 would be, of course...
It doesn't have to be a metal case to be damned solid. The Palm III is in a hard plastic case that is very, very solid. I'm a holdout who refuses to upgrade. In fact, I have 'hunkered down' by buying a bunch of backup Palm III devices on eBay. They go for generally under $10 these days, and I've still never worn one out. I expect to be using the Palm III twenty years from now.
That's really weird, because my PalmOS device never looses any data at all, and it's all shared in RAM. And I have been using a PalmOS device continuously since about 1998.
It sounds like Windows CE just isn't 'there' and hasn't ever really been 'there' at all. I guess they're just not capable of writing solid code, and had to change their hardware scheme to make up for it.
The total footprint includes the monitor. And you were somehow implying the size of the Mac Mini can be compared to that of the iMac without considering the additional footprint of the monitor. Which adds considerably to the space the Mac Mini takes up on your desktop. Making it 'larger' than the iMac.
I hope that Leopard works as advertised and Apple advertises it well. It has the potential to really clean MS clock.
Only if consumers can go into a big box store and buy an install CD to put it on their current hardware.
Apple doesn't have the sales nor the production or shipping infrastructure to 'replace' the huge install base of PC clones out there in the world. Until they give it up and quit selling an overpriced dongle to enable their OS, they'll continue to be a niche player. That is, in any place where they compete with Microsoft. They can and do compete readily in a certain sense with any other single PC vendor.
Come on, Apple. You dropped 'computer' from your company name. Focus on selling iPods if you need to feel like a hardware vendor. Give up all the 'Ferrari' and 'BMW' hype about your hardware; it's the same commodity stuff built in the same plants as everybody else's PC hardware.
Is the monitor you have plugged into your Mac Mini smaller than your clock radio, too?
I have a few of those little 9" VGA 'Point of Sale' monitors on the test bench that I use occasionally to set up or test a system, but I sure wouldn't want to stare at one for hours a day...
Don't interfere with his 'Porsche' metaphor, dammit. He's depressed enough that he spent so much on a PC without much to differentiate it from his brother in law's Dell.
This 'marvelous synergy' theory of Apple's founding really doesn't cut it. It's a good mythology to base a whole lot of marketing on though. Woz was technically 'there' and came up with a good design. The other guy was a huckster and got it going commercially. And he's rolled the returns for being at the right time and place for decades now. I don't think 'uncannily correct' enters into it. But then I'm not part of the chorus of admirers, either. And I'm not that fond of marketing types.
I'm not sure why everybody automatically leaps to FPGAs. There are lots of cool chips and ideas for how to do neat stuff with them.
My latest project was extremely low-tech but has been useful. I wanted a small timer to time the 2 minutes that each apple tree gets watered out in the field. I used one of the cheapest PIC microcontrollers, a little 8-pin bugger that cost me about $0.40. All self contained so you just hook power and ground to it and it does it's work, I wrote the code for it to blink an LED once per second for 120 seconds then go to micro-low-power shutdown. The pushbutton to start the timer is connected to the hardware interrupt to wake it up from sleep.
That's a decidedly low-end project, but it's just a small example. What I want to do next is design and implement a simple two wire networking protocol so I can program a bunch of PICs to intercommunicate, then scatter them around the house for various functions.
The sky is the limit, and you can do cool and powerful things with FPGAs, but let's not forget that the entry cost for hardware/firmware/software hacking is measured in single dollars these days.
Also, the 'barrier to entry' for fiddling around with computers and electronics is radically lower now than it was in the past. You can build your own circuit to program PIC controllers, for example, for under fifty dollars easily. The controllers themselves are in the $1-6 range apiece. If you want to mess with 'robotics' there are mounds of salvage hardware out there to be had for free. The average discarded diskette drive or CD-ROM drive, for instance, has actuators and stepper motors better than anything any of us dreamed of getting ahold of back in 1980.
The thing I remember from 1977 is wanting to build my own computer, but not even being able to afford the books on the topic. That was when I was a dishwasher making under $3 an hour and lived in a rented $42/month room. The Bugbooks and other important books on microprocessors were all in the $30-50 range. At least that's how I remember it. All I could afford was a cheap programmable calculator (an SR-56) that I bought with most of the money I got from HS graduation.
I think I am not alone in expressing the sentiment that what Woz has become since then is something to be proud of. He hasn't become a megalomaniac. He seems to be fairly happy in life.
IMO what the other Apple founder has become is a lot less appealing.
the only defense from this is to have projects with a diverse and distributed developer base( not everyone in one company ) and/or angeles who fork the project and fund a good number of developers to pick up the project and move it forward while making sure they are involved and committed to the project.
Which brings to my mind the idea that Microsoft could purchase hAndover.net or VAwhatever, or whatever they're now calling the parent company of Slashdot and Sourceforge. Think about it. If Microsoft bought Sourceforge, they could shut down the 'project website' and distribution network of a huge quantity of Open Source projects. I have always felt nervous about the whole Sourceforge 'bring your projects over here so it's all centrally located and centrally vulnerable' approach that the SourceForge/VAwhatever folks have encouraged.
A Hercules card is an upgrade, you know. The original MDA card had the character set in a ROM and had no graphics at all.
I remember 'registering' Real Player back in the 90's so they sent me a CD-ROM with the 'paid for' version that had a 'record' button (for those really, really rare instances where a server allowed you to record the stream.)
Is Real Player still around???