Dude, some U.K lawyers are on line 3 for you. Something about "Suing his talkative ass into Hades" and "revealing sensitive trade secrets" or something like that.
I'll just put myself on the waiting list for the audio book at the library. I have this thing called "patience" that allows me to enjoy "delayed gratification." More people should try it. Of course, given the popularity of patience and delayed gratification in the USA, you;d think it required 20 years of Buddhists meditation training.
OK, I was at the "Serenity" screening a few weeks ago, but that's different. My wife got the tickets from a friend of ours who was stalking Fandango to find the link to buy tickets online.
Sadly, the fact that both companies make what amount to toys would mean Mattel would probably have good reason for a trademark lawsuit, and they'd have good reason to stand on.
Remember, the question of the consumer being confused is a central factor in any trademark dispute. That's why the company that sells Microsoft toilet paper remains in business, because even Microsoft's legal department can't do anything about it.
However, Apple using a variation on toy maker's name, that'd be like a Linux distro calling itself Micr0soft.
Or, you can click on the link, and hold it down for two seconds which will give you a contextual menu to do exactly everything you could do with a right click. Any more pearls of wisdom?
Well, that worthless tip doesn't help with the third mouse button, does it now?
If I tap out "Shave and a haircut" does it emulate a third button?
Just because you use it doesn't mean everyone else should be forced to.
So, because all Apple users won't use it leave it out? Don't offer a two button or three button trackpad on laptops AN AN OPTION because the average Apple user is too stupid to know how to use the extra buttons?
Sorry, I have no interest in an OS that removes options just because Steve Jobs can't figure out how to use them. Go ahead and make them options, make me have to turn on the advanced features, but offer those features damn it.
Yet Microsoft has crippled their command line environment, and I'm afraid that Linux can hardly be referred to as "elegant" from an end-user perspective
Tools seem inelegant to those who know not how to use them.
I'm not saying that the OS should be designed so you HAVE To use a command line, just give me the option. Do you have any idea how much easier it is to administer even a Windows server with Secure Shell instead of Terminal Services, VNC or PC Anywhere?
How about copying Tetrabytes of data from one server to another, which I have to do on a regular basis as part of my job? If you use a GUI, you have a lot of waiting around. The command line tools for moving data around are far more flexible. If I need to copy just the 900 GB that's been added since the last update, I can do that with a single command line in Windows or Linux. Until Mac was built on top of a decent operating system (BSD) and had a decent command line, the kind of data transfers I have to do would require hours of work by hand, third party applications or applescript.
I'm sorry, but if you honestly think a command line is a bad idea, then you've already demonstrated that you don't do a lot of the things that require more advanced tools.
The dumbed down Apple interfaces are good enough for you. Glad to hear it. You shouldn't have to learn to program to use your computer. Apple makes a nice entry level computer, and it can do a lot of the things that most computer need.
But a Mac would be a pathetic joke for my line of work. It's less of a joke now that it's Unix based, but there's a lot of NeXt crap that needs to go before it's worth my time, and a lot of things that just can't be cone from a command line.
Knowing how to do various things from the command line is a great benefit. Even when you have to use Terminal Services, it's generally a hell of a lot faster to log in, open a command prompt, and do what you need to do as opposed to opening a window, waiting 30 seconds, opening another window, waiting 30 seconds and so on for ten minutes just to get to an interface to check a setting.
Please, try to know *anything* about a subject before sounding off like an expert. I know it's hard, but you could at least try.
I'm sorry you're upset by my having seen your toy computer for what it is, but to tell the simple truth, it's clear you just don't have computing needs that are sufficiently advanced to encounter many of the brain dead ways in which Max is castrated. You're also so brain washed by the Mac marketing machine and the "cult of Mac" that you can't examine your OS objectively.
I'm looking up possible solutions to an SQL problem during lunch. I'm eating with one hand, while using the mouse with the other. Before my hand became occupied with food, I used it to type some search terms into Google.
I now want to skim through the first 20 or so hits on both Google and Google groups.
On Windows or Linux, I fire up my favorite web browser with tab support, and middle click on the relevant links. By the time I finish clicking, the first few links have loaded. I go skim through each page, looking for something that's helpful.
On a MAC laptop without an external mouse, I have to put the food down and hold down the Option key to do what evolved operating systems simply give you a button to do.
The simple fact of the matter is, Mac is using the "Better UI design" claim to cover up the use of inferior hardware. Their marketing has been so effective that Mac users have actually convinced themselves that having fewer features and more restrictions is somehow better. This isn't even feature bloat we're talking about here, but useful features that Apple just can't be bothered to actually make easy.
The "aesthetic" is always more important that actual utility with Apple. If the feature would save the average user time, but require something that doesn't fit Steve's vision of what the OS should "look" like, the feature just doesn't happen.
Don't give me that "Better UI design" crap. Scroll wheels and three mouse buttons are damn useful things, and anyone running around saying otherwise is just kidding themselves. It's the whole "I can't have it so I'll mock it," mentality.
Keep in mind, we're talking about a company that took until version Ten to add a command line to the consumer OS.
Hardly a sign of an advanced OS in my opinion, given how much faster and more elegant a command line can be.
Personally, I'm a fan of the nearly 100% backward compatibility offered by Playstation and Gameboy. Partial compatibility isn't of much use to me if I still have to keep the old system lying around for two or three obscure games I happen to love.
That seems like a nice, sensible answer, at least for the popular games that came form a publisher that's still around and has the appropriate deals with Microsoft to distribute the patches. It also assumes the code will run with a recompile and some testing, something we all know just ain't so in the real world.
Good point. It's rather careless of me to use the acronym for a hardware network address to refer to a toy computer. We are talking about hardware that ships with only one mouse button, apparently under the assumption that their users aren't smart enough to figure out what to do with two or three.
I'm not talking about Apple II emulators. I'm talking about G4 optimized apps in "Classic Mode" in OS X, which for all intents and purposes runs Mac OS 9.2. Try to install Mac OS 9.2 on an Apple II and let me know how it goes.
The additional performance hit will come from the hardware emulation on top of the software emulation.
Here's an example: If you want to play Starcraft under Linux, you have to use WINE. WINE does not emulate all the hardware, but provides a Windows API on Linux. You get near native performance. This is comparable to how Classic Mode runs on Mac OS X. The entire computer is not being emulated, just the APIs and environment. The code is still executing on raw the CPU itself, and not going through an virtual CPU.
Now take a look at things like Cherry OS or VMWare. Look at the performance hit from having to emulate the hardware. You're looking at losing 2/3rds of your CPU cycles to emulating a CPU. A Classic Mode application running on Intel Hardware will probably be going at about 1/3 the speed it would have been under OSX on a PPC processor.
I'm concerned with the applications that are a major drag on current G4 and G5 systems, and Next Year's Intel hardware will still be running them at a painfully slow speed. We're talking abut a couple of years before the Intel hardware can run a G4 Classic Mode application at speeds comparable to current Apple hardware.
Emulation always gets harder when you have to emulate the CPU as well as everything else.
Keep in mind, I'm discussing corporate beliefs, NOT reality.
What a company believes to be true will motivate it's actions, not what's actually true.
When Microsoft though the Internet was irrelevant, they acted accordingly. If Apple sees Linux as a threat, they will act accordingly, even if Linux isn't a threat.
Dude, I have sources. It's not FUD, it's what Microsoft has been announcing all along. There are major architecture changes taking place (Video card and processor for example), and they won't be able to either emulate or embed the original XBOX hardware on the new XBOX.
To quote the article linked above:
The problem, it says, is down to hardware incompatibility - since the current Xbox uses an Intel processor, but the 360 will use IBM's PowerPC architecture, while NVIDIA's graphics solution is being replaced with an ATI one.
On the flip side:
Sony and Nintendo have already confirmed that their next-gen consoles - the PS3 and Revolution - will play all the games in their respective back catalogues, offering consumers a huge choice of titles at launch.
Here's the deal, MS will be recompiling a lot of games to run on the new hardware. Why they expect this to work without any problems I don't know. They're switching processors for crying out loud. How do they plan to get these recompiled games out to customers without charging them for a new copy, they haven't said. They've made a lot of promises about things just "working" but the fact that at the very least a recompile is necessary means at the moment they're spewing a lot of vapor and marketing but not any substance.
Apple did everything ti could to kill the old architecture. What better way to force people to upgrade to OS X software than make it impossible to run "Classic Mode" applications without the performance hit from running a PPC emulator on Intel?
And think about this, IBM is a major force behind Linux. What's an OS that's a threat to Apple? Gee, you think the FREE Unix based OS with the most momentum could be a threat? In which case, why on Earth would they want to pay money to IBM, a company contributing vast swaths of code to Linux, one of Apple's competitors, and an OS it's trying to steal developers FROM.
And by the way, this switch makes it easier to lure Linux and BSD developers away from their OS of choice.
If they can keep decent battery life, I see this as a perfect chunk of camping hardware. It would still be cool in the office though. You could get a decent coffee maker attachment for your iPod!
Of course the filters for the iFrenchPress would be three times as expensive as filters for a regular coffee maker, even though the only difference is the Apple logo, but because it's an iProduct, people will eat it up.
Then some competitors came along and the non-Intel processors running Windows carved out a large enough market share to justify splitting the terms off into ChipZilla and Wintendo.
Now, we have MAC going Intel. What the HELL do we call this?
And all this time I thought putting the "Intel Inside" stickers on the MACs when I was in in college was a cruel gag done to piss off the MAC users. Not I'm a bloomin' prophet.
It's too bad they didn't go with AMD processors instead. Then the iPod could have doubled as a hot plate / coffee warmer. That would be a useful technology fusion if you ask me. Far better than a crappy cell phone in an iPod!
Microsoft's anti-spy ware devision is headed by a MAC user! You see, MAC zealots have infiltrated the Microsoft hierarchy, and are plotting it's downfall from within.
As a matter of fact, this is a pervasive presence, weaving into all levels of the company.
Think about it. Doesn't Clippy make much more sense as MAC sabotage than as an actual feature? No doubt someone floated a mock up with the note, "Looks just like something I saw at the last MAC expo."
Architecture changes that mean the XBOX II won't be able to run XBOX games, the endless delays in Longhorn, the XP default theme, the differences between XP Home and XP Pro, these are all contributed by MAC users who are gradually whittling away Microsoft from within.
And because Microsoft has been shamelessly copying the MAC for so long, all they have to do is float the rumor that MAC is going to do something, and Microsoft programmers and management throw themselves into trying to replicate it, or at least toss together a half asses rip-off of the feature / technology.
The LAST thing I need to happen to my kid sister's computer is for the anti-spyware tool to install Debian in place of Windows. Most users can't handle that kind of sudden change.
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Dude, some U.K lawyers are on line 3 for you. Something about "Suing his talkative ass into Hades" and "revealing sensitive trade secrets" or something like that.
I'll just put myself on the waiting list for the audio book at the library. I have this thing called "patience" that allows me to enjoy "delayed gratification." More people should try it. Of course, given the popularity of patience and delayed gratification in the USA, you;d think it required 20 years of Buddhists meditation training.
OK, I was at the "Serenity" screening a few weeks ago, but that's different. My wife got the tickets from a friend of ours who was stalking Fandango to find the link to buy tickets online.
Here's anther spoiler.
The "Defense Against the Dark Arts" professor is one of the villains.
I like it, I like it.
Sadly, the fact that both companies make what amount to toys would mean Mattel would probably have good reason for a trademark lawsuit, and they'd have good reason to stand on.
Remember, the question of the consumer being confused is a central factor in any trademark dispute. That's why the company that sells Microsoft toilet paper remains in business, because even Microsoft's legal department can't do anything about it.
However, Apple using a variation on toy maker's name, that'd be like a Linux distro calling itself Micr0soft.
Yin, Yang, universal balance and all that.
Or, you can click on the link, and hold it down for two seconds which will give you a contextual menu to do exactly everything you could do with a right click. Any more pearls of wisdom?
Well, that worthless tip doesn't help with the third mouse button, does it now?
If I tap out "Shave and a haircut" does it emulate a third button?
Just because you use it doesn't mean everyone else should be forced to.
So, because all Apple users won't use it leave it out? Don't offer a two button or three button trackpad on laptops AN AN OPTION because the average Apple user is too stupid to know how to use the extra buttons?
Sorry, I have no interest in an OS that removes options just because Steve Jobs can't figure out how to use them. Go ahead and make them options, make me have to turn on the advanced features, but offer those features damn it.
Yet Microsoft has crippled their command line environment, and I'm afraid that Linux can hardly be referred to as "elegant" from an end-user perspective
Tools seem inelegant to those who know not how to use them.
I'm not saying that the OS should be designed so you HAVE To use a command line, just give me the option. Do you have any idea how much easier it is to administer even a Windows server with Secure Shell instead of Terminal Services, VNC or PC Anywhere?
How about copying Tetrabytes of data from one server to another, which I have to do on a regular basis as part of my job? If you use a GUI, you have a lot of waiting around. The command line tools for moving data around are far more flexible. If I need to copy just the 900 GB that's been added since the last update, I can do that with a single command line in Windows or Linux. Until Mac was built on top of a decent operating system (BSD) and had a decent command line, the kind of data transfers I have to do would require hours of work by hand, third party applications or applescript.
I'm sorry, but if you honestly think a command line is a bad idea, then you've already demonstrated that you don't do a lot of the things that require more advanced tools.
The dumbed down Apple interfaces are good enough for you. Glad to hear it. You shouldn't have to learn to program to use your computer. Apple makes a nice entry level computer, and it can do a lot of the things that most computer need.
But a Mac would be a pathetic joke for my line of work. It's less of a joke now that it's Unix based, but there's a lot of NeXt crap that needs to go before it's worth my time, and a lot of things that just can't be cone from a command line.
Knowing how to do various things from the command line is a great benefit. Even when you have to use Terminal Services, it's generally a hell of a lot faster to log in, open a command prompt, and do what you need to do as opposed to opening a window, waiting 30 seconds, opening another window, waiting 30 seconds and so on for ten minutes just to get to an interface to check a setting.
Please, try to know *anything* about a subject before sounding off like an expert. I know it's hard, but you could at least try.
I'm sorry you're upset by my having seen your toy computer for what it is, but to tell the simple truth, it's clear you just don't have computing needs that are sufficiently advanced to encounter many of the brain dead ways in which Max is castrated. You're also so brain washed by the Mac marketing machine and the "cult of Mac" that you can't examine your OS objectively.
Actually, I'm not joking.
I'm trying to look at things through the eyes of "I'm the center of the universe" Steve Jobs.
We are talking about a man with an ego larger than Microsoft's finical war chest.
Let's look at a typical scenario.
I'm looking up possible solutions to an SQL problem during lunch. I'm eating with one hand, while using the mouse with the other. Before my hand became occupied with food, I used it to type some search terms into Google.
I now want to skim through the first 20 or so hits on both Google and Google groups.
On Windows or Linux, I fire up my favorite web browser with tab support, and middle click on the relevant links. By the time I finish clicking, the first few links have loaded. I go skim through each page, looking for something that's helpful.
On a MAC laptop without an external mouse, I have to put the food down and hold down the Option key to do what evolved operating systems simply give you a button to do.
The simple fact of the matter is, Mac is using the "Better UI design" claim to cover up the use of inferior hardware. Their marketing has been so effective that Mac users have actually convinced themselves that having fewer features and more restrictions is somehow better. This isn't even feature bloat we're talking about here, but useful features that Apple just can't be bothered to actually make easy.
The "aesthetic" is always more important that actual utility with Apple. If the feature would save the average user time, but require something that doesn't fit Steve's vision of what the OS should "look" like, the feature just doesn't happen.
Don't give me that "Better UI design" crap. Scroll wheels and three mouse buttons are damn useful things, and anyone running around saying otherwise is just kidding themselves. It's the whole "I can't have it so I'll mock it," mentality.
Keep in mind, we're talking about a company that took until version Ten to add a command line to the consumer OS.
Hardly a sign of an advanced OS in my opinion, given how much faster and more elegant a command line can be.
Personally, I'm a fan of the nearly 100% backward compatibility offered by Playstation and Gameboy. Partial compatibility isn't of much use to me if I still have to keep the old system lying around for two or three obscure games I happen to love.
That seems like a nice, sensible answer, at least for the popular games that came form a publisher that's still around and has the appropriate deals with Microsoft to distribute the patches. It also assumes the code will run with a recompile and some testing, something we all know just ain't so in the real world.
Good point. It's rather careless of me to use the acronym for a hardware network address to refer to a toy computer. We are talking about hardware that ships with only one mouse button, apparently under the assumption that their users aren't smart enough to figure out what to do with two or three.
I'm not talking about Apple II emulators. I'm talking about G4 optimized apps in "Classic Mode" in OS X, which for all intents and purposes runs Mac OS 9.2. Try to install Mac OS 9.2 on an Apple II and let me know how it goes.
The additional performance hit will come from the hardware emulation on top of the software emulation.
Here's an example: If you want to play Starcraft under Linux, you have to use WINE. WINE does not emulate all the hardware, but provides a Windows API on Linux. You get near native performance. This is comparable to how Classic Mode runs on Mac OS X. The entire computer is not being emulated, just the APIs and environment. The code is still executing on raw the CPU itself, and not going through an virtual CPU.
Now take a look at things like Cherry OS or VMWare. Look at the performance hit from having to emulate the hardware. You're looking at losing 2/3rds of your CPU cycles to emulating a CPU. A Classic Mode application running on Intel Hardware will probably be going at about 1/3 the speed it would have been under OSX on a PPC processor.
I'm concerned with the applications that are a major drag on current G4 and G5 systems, and Next Year's Intel hardware will still be running them at a painfully slow speed. We're talking abut a couple of years before the Intel hardware can run a G4 Classic Mode application at speeds comparable to current Apple hardware.
Emulation always gets harder when you have to emulate the CPU as well as everything else.
Keep in mind, I'm discussing corporate beliefs, NOT reality.
What a company believes to be true will motivate it's actions, not what's actually true.
When Microsoft though the Internet was irrelevant, they acted accordingly. If Apple sees Linux as a threat, they will act accordingly, even if Linux isn't a threat.
I'm sure there are many MAC purists out there who would debate that claim with you.
Dude, I have sources. It's not FUD, it's what Microsoft has been announcing all along. There are major architecture changes taking place (Video card and processor for example), and they won't be able to either emulate or embed the original XBOX hardware on the new XBOX.
To quote the article linked above:
On the flip side:
Here's the deal, MS will be recompiling a lot of games to run on the new hardware. Why they expect this to work without any problems I don't know. They're switching processors for crying out loud. How do they plan to get these recompiled games out to customers without charging them for a new copy, they haven't said. They've made a lot of promises about things just "working" but the fact that at the very least a recompile is necessary means at the moment they're spewing a lot of vapor and marketing but not any substance.
Think about this folks.
Apple did everything ti could to kill the old architecture. What better way to force people to upgrade to OS X software than make it impossible to run "Classic Mode" applications without the performance hit from running a PPC emulator on Intel?
And think about this, IBM is a major force behind Linux. What's an OS that's a threat to Apple? Gee, you think the FREE Unix based OS with the most momentum could be a threat? In which case, why on Earth would they want to pay money to IBM, a company contributing vast swaths of code to Linux, one of Apple's competitors, and an OS it's trying to steal developers FROM.
And by the way, this switch makes it easier to lure Linux and BSD developers away from their OS of choice.
Ohhhhh.
The perfect camping hardware.
It's a grill, it's a music player.
What do you call Smores made with an iPod?
iSmore?
iSugar?
If they can keep decent battery life, I see this as a perfect chunk of camping hardware. It would still be cool in the office though. You could get a decent coffee maker attachment for your iPod!
Of course the filters for the iFrenchPress would be three times as expensive as filters for a regular coffee maker, even though the only difference is the Apple logo, but because it's an iProduct, people will eat it up.
Well, drink it up.
First, we had the Wintel monopoly.
Then some competitors came along and the non-Intel processors running Windows carved out a large enough market share to justify splitting the terms off into ChipZilla and Wintendo.
Now, we have MAC going Intel. What the HELL do we call this?
MacTel?
Intelmac?
Apptel?
Intenapple?
What terms can we use now???
And all this time I thought putting the "Intel Inside" stickers on the MACs when I was in in college was a cruel gag done to piss off the MAC users. Not I'm a bloomin' prophet.
It's too bad they didn't go with AMD processors instead. Then the iPod could have doubled as a hot plate / coffee warmer. That would be a useful technology fusion if you ask me. Far better than a crappy cell phone in an iPod!
This all makes sense when you realize one key, critical piece of information.
First, a quote:
Has Microsoft given in to vendors' threats? Or forgotten how badly "adware" damages the Windows experience (ultimately encouraging users to switch to other platforms)?
Now, the key, critical piece of information.
Microsoft's anti-spy ware devision is headed by a MAC user! You see, MAC zealots have infiltrated the Microsoft hierarchy, and are plotting it's downfall from within.
As a matter of fact, this is a pervasive presence, weaving into all levels of the company.
Think about it. Doesn't Clippy make much more sense as MAC sabotage than as an actual feature? No doubt someone floated a mock up with the note, "Looks just like something I saw at the last MAC expo."
Architecture changes that mean the XBOX II won't be able to run XBOX games, the endless delays in Longhorn, the XP default theme, the differences between XP Home and XP Pro, these are all contributed by MAC users who are gradually whittling away Microsoft from within.
And because Microsoft has been shamelessly copying the MAC for so long, all they have to do is float the rumor that MAC is going to do something, and Microsoft programmers and management throw themselves into trying to replicate it, or at least toss together a half asses rip-off of the feature / technology.
The LAST thing I need to happen to my kid sister's computer is for the anti-spyware tool to install Debian in place of Windows. Most users can't handle that kind of sudden change.
They make a great combo when grilled.
Herbal Pineapple extract Spam in 5... 4... 3...