...as stupid as having to push the start button to shut down windows.
It wasn't until I got to reading folks talking about Windows in public forums that it even occurred to me how silly this was. I have to admit, it is an oxymoron and all. Thing is, I never for a moment had a problem with figuring out how to shut down a Win95 box. I certainly had other things to learn when I first started using it, but once I saw the Start menu for the first time I simply acknowledged that was where the bulk of the system activities were going to take place. Also, ya kinda have to be blind to miss the whole "Shut Down" thing when you go into use the Start menu for other stuff.
You actually would select the disc or drive and choose File > Put Away.
Again, this wouldn't have had any bearing on reality to me. I didn't want to "Put Away" the CD, I wanted the freaking drawer to EJECT! Ya know, like every cassette player has done since the 70's. Like Windows shows when you right-click (that's for them mice things with more than one orthopedic button) on it. You may have seen something very similar to context sensitive menus as Apple added this into OS 8.5 to mimic Win95.
Macs also haven't had printer ports for years. What you're talking about is an easy networking system that used the printer port before Ethernet was cheap enough. There is no equivalent generic PC system to compare it to. These days, and for the last three plus years at least, every Mac sold has Ethernet, and many have gigabit Ethernet.
I know what the term Printer port means, and the G3 desktops still have them. Whether the port is there or not, Appletalk STILL reverts to it whenever it finds itself unable to flood the LAN it's connected to with broadcasts. I also know that this isn't just a point of confusion with this here Windows user, as I have needed to point this out to Mac users who couldn't figure out why they couldn't get their network going again.
Apple invented overlapping windows, pull-down menus, pop-up menus, drag and drop, double-clicking, resizable windows, and more.
And outside the halls of Apple stuff like maximizing, minimizing, task bars, resizing from multiple points on a window, actively changable drag and drop menus (Win98's start menu for example), web browsers, file managers, and thousands of other things that Apple had nothing to do with while the zealots point at everything that moves and scream how Apple invented them. I'm not opposed to giving credit where it's due, but I won't budge an inch of revisionist silliness of the "one true faith".
Macs haven't had floppy drives for years
Oh boy, this one I sure know. Although the G3 series still had them, the newer boxes dropped them. This caused me all kinds of fun as I needed to perform a Quark Express install on a laptop without said floppy. Quark uses a floppy diskette as part of it's install. So I ended up spending $90 for a freaking floppy drive! Yeah, $90 was as cheap as I could find one on short notice. Oh, but I'm sure the quality of that drive far exceeded the $15 one they were selling for PC's.
tell me why AVI is now an "unsupported format" over at Microsoft?
First off, AVI files still play just fine with MS Media Player. Secondly, it's compression sucks compared to ASF or MPG, so why bother with it? For that matter, why do we continue to bother with the still overly bloated Quicktime?
You'll probably find that most of the bad things that you've heard are untrue or taken out of context.
It's very difficult to take personal experience out of context. These aren't things I've "heard", but rather what I've had to deal with in supporting these unstable as hell machines. At most I've seen the few that I still support run for about 6 months before requiring yet another full system install. Hell, I've still got Win95 boxes going on PC's I cobbled together from spare parts over 3 years ago. Can't exactly cobble together parts for a Mac now can ya? Jobs made damn sure of that.
The people who are running Apple right now really, really know what they are doing.
Yeah, they're spending more money for less of a computer that runs about 1/3 the software and only a tiny fraction of the available hardware. What hardware there is out there is damn near always more expensive, much like my floppy story. Sorry, can't write me off as just someone who "hasn't seen the visions of truth" because I've been to the alter, and wasn't impressed.
Okay, let me explain what he meant by that. You see, open source is better than closed source. Then if you close the open source that's better than open source because it's closed, which is... ummm... better than clos...
ARRRRGH! Oh God My Head!
(Note to self: Really need to avoid trying to make sense of this man)
(Additional note: At 2 5/8 this stock still has room to sell short)
When these products hit the market, they had nothing new. Zero. Nada. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
Not quite. You see, the one HUGE difference in what Microsoft did was to actually bring a lot of these concepts and ideas together for everyone. Not just the folks that could afford a $2,000 Mac, or those that worked with way over priced versions of Unix. Unlike all that came before them, MS actually put together something that the majority of end users could actually use and afford.
Their marketing department isn't that good. There's a reason why 90% of the desktops running or doing so on Windows. You can run McDonalds analogies against this all you like, that's just the way it is.
Prior art nullifying the patent. At least that's the concept of how to fight it. Nothing at all to do with whether or not they tried to enforce infringement.
They have every right to. These themes blatantly copy Apple's designs. They don't accidentally look similar. Who'd be naive enough to think this wouldn't lead to trouble?
Funny, one of the default KDE themes is Win98 and I haven't heard about Microsoft suing anyone over this.
Woops, forgot my zealot pills. Everything Apple good, everything MS bad. Ahhh, it's all coming into focus now. Goooo Steve!
I ask you, what about iDVD? What about Altivec code?
Ummm, what about it?
What about making Unix plug and play?
Hmmm, seemed like my RedHat 6.0 did a fair amount of that on boot. FreeBSD 4.2 was pretty darn good at picking up all my devices as well.
Hell, even making Unix so that you can install it on a machine with literally four clicks of a mouse button is pretty impressive. The last time I had to install IRIX, I was at it for hours.
How many clicks is it for a default RedHat install anyway? I can do a FreeBSD install with a couple of down arrows and the enter key a couple of times. Seems like most Unix systems these days don't have the problems of Irix.
What about iMovie?
Umm, what about it. You're talking about this as though nobody in the history of software prior to Apple ever wrote video editing applications. Next...
What about Firewire?
Now this might have been a really great thing. Even Intel and Microsoft were behind it big time, until they got the word from Apple about the high licensing fees. This prompted Intel to drop support and pay out big bucks for their own R&D, and for MS to just drop out entirely. Yet again, another good idea down the arrogance shooter.
BTW, I know Apple finally loosened the licensing situation quite a bit. The damage was done, the world moved on, and once again Apple is left with a technology that only they will support. This will insure the prices stay stupid high.
Theres quite a bit of technology just in those products listed there man.
Yup, there sure is. You can even give credit to Apple for some of it... even some they didn't goof up on the biz side. On the flip side, care to rattle off some of the Microsoft product line, and the wide variety of things they've got going? Hey now, MS Bob doesn't count!:)
emachines even went so far as running ads for the eOne in MacWarehouse catalogs
Really? Which month? I've got a stack of old MacWarehouse catalogs here and I don't recall seeing that.
The thing looked nearly identical to the iMac, it was almost absurd.
Sorry, the iMac still looks like a TRS-80 Model III made out of plexiglass to me. Take away the floppies on the right and add a hockey puck mouse... Shazzam!
The G4 powerbook looks completely unique, in it's own class
Ever got your paws on one of these? That curved handle along the top is also made of the same plastic, with no where near the kind of strength it should have for a machine of it's weight. I have to wonder how much Apple charges for replacements:) I'll grant you, they do look nice and all. Still, form should follow function when it comes to a computer case.
Kind of interesting in contrast to the G3 tower, which I rather liked the look of. That thing was so over engineered that you'd expect it to survive a 2 story drop. The case alone must have been something like $200 to manufacture. You'd have to get a hard look on the inside to get what I'm talking about.
eMachines didn't do that. Nor are any of the skinmkers. They're mearly taking apples idea's and repackaging them as their own without actually adding anything to them
Ohhh, so if you ADD something to it, then you're not stealing. Gotcha. So if KDE or Gnome users manage to totally recreate the look of the MacOS using only the templating tools that's not adding anything. Ummm, so what exactly is Apple "adding" to this equation again? Wait, I know... Lawsuits!
Millions of users are familar with the "look and feel" of MacOS and as a result, that "look and feel" is an incentive for consumers to purchase Apple products.
If their super innovative "Look&Feel"TM can be replicated with a desktop theme, paint me unimpressed. Furthermore, not one ounce of sympathy for a product that empty.
Then again, I don't know who in their right mind would WANT a Win95 look and feel.
Ohh, maybe about 90% of the computer buying populace. From the looks of the latest Mac OS "innovations", Apple. From the looks of the top desktop platforms for *nix, apparently KDE and Gnome which both resemble 95 far more than the Mac desktop in their default configs.
Sure, it's based on a quality Macintosh design
Huh? I find this myth more disturbing the more I hear it. I work with Macs quite a bit, and I still find them horribly non-intuitive. Awful keyboard support for handling windows and menus, and if someone hadn't have told me, I would have NEVER guessed to put a CD or network share into the trash to unmount them. Don't forget to keep a paperclip around to poke out the magic hole WHEN the darn thing locks due to not having anything resembling protected memory. Need Mr. Paperclip to get my floppy out ya know.
My personal favorite is Appletalk though. For you non-Mac folks, happen to know what happens when you disconnect this broadcasting beast from your network? Well, it reverts all your networking connections to the PRINTER port. No, it doesn't tell you that it did that. That truly is the mark of a great interface!
Ever go and actually try to read any of the help documentation? Heck, how about even using the Apple web site to ask a question. On both counts, Microsoft, Linux, and the BSD's beat the snot outta old Crazy Job's company. Another great mark of an interface!
Oh sure, I'm going to be marked as a troll for not tossing in the anti-MS fud. Fact is, Win95 left the MacOS in the dust at the time of it's shipping. I'd even go so far as saying that Win98 improved on this, except for the awful decision to integrate IE into everything... ack! Both KDE and Gnome still lag behind the old Win95 interface, while at the same time are showing rapid improvement as well as being easier to use and set up than any MacOS I've seen to date. Go ahead, try to maximize or even minimize a window on a Mac. Go on, push that single mouse button REAL hard.
MacOS 8 started adding Win95 stuff all over. Wonder where ya got "Sticky Menus" or "Network Browser"? Where in the world did they get the idea of having both scroll buttons at the bottom of the window??? Damn sure looks like KDE 1.2 to me, but I know it can't be. Apple is the only true innovator in the industry. Every zealot tells me so.
Yes, Win95 borrows graphical elements from the Mac, and several other GUI platforms. So? Pretty much every GUI following Parc has done the same. That, and Windows is the OS that really brought the personal computer to the masses... a feat that Apple never approached due to over pricing and a continued blind arrogance.
It's really only a matter of time before Jobs goes and loses touch with reality again. He's only ever been able to maintain for a year or two at best. Eventually, the over rated arrogance will be put to rest... and MS won't be interested in bailing them out a second time.
Thanks for the link. Too bad the official site didn't provide some clue as to the name change. Guess they're too busy trying to figure out how to liquidate assets.
What annoyed me was that Gumbel guy went on about how these military guys made some sacrifice for their country.
Yes we did. Good God, don't they teach any kind of history at those grad schools? Were you so insulated as to not have seen any news, or were you too busy getting drunk?
What's REALLY sad is how folks such as yourself will go watch a movie about those events and assume it's an accurate telling of the history. I suppose reading a book or even a web page would be too much to ask.
Couple of disclaimers before I get into this. First off, I didn't see the TV show in question. Secondly, I am a Gulf War veteran. Went over with the 1st TAC Fighter Wing out of Virginia with the very first deployments that occurred in August prior to actual combat.
I just love it when folks get themselves thinking they understand something about foriegn affairs and economics start talking about this war. You evidently don't quite appreciate just how important either oil or Saudi is to us.
Whether we like it or not, our entire way of life today is heavily dependant on a steady flow of oil. It affects pretty much every means of transportation, which in turn effects the cost of food and pretty much any other thing you might purchase. Ask anyone living in the north eastern part of the United States what happens to their quality of life when they can't afford heating oil. At a high enough cost, people die. When food is priced beyond the reach of the poor, people die. It sucks; our use of oil as a primary means for power is just stupid; but that's the reality in which we entered that war.
As to the political reasons, we weren't going there to protect Kuwait. We were there to protect Saudi. Aside from the bulk of the oil fields that the US buys from being there, this is the hub of the entire Islamic world. 2 of the 3 holy places in Islam sit within the borders of Saudi. They had a couple of thousand troops sitting at their northern border heavily armed. Had we let that area of the world go to a wacko like Saddam, do you honestly think we'd continue to be a player there politically? This is especially important to note as we continue our efforts to negotiate peace treaties.
Yes, we greedy American types went to fight a war about oil. Hell, I went to go fight a war about oil. And for that, the trucks that bring the food to your local grocery store can afford the gas to do so. Your momma can afford to actually by that food, and put the gas in the SUV that brought it home. Bunch of greedy capitalists.
Now they have to sell you a lifestyle adjunct... anybody else noticed the philosophical tripe that is advertising today?
Nope. Going now on the second year of my forgetting to pay my cable bill on time. Haven't had any kind of broadcast tv into the house since then. This xmas I got an MP3 car stereo, so now I don't even listen to the radio very often. My only outlet to popular media is through the Internet, where I can damn well decide how to block the non-stop advertisements.
What's really amazing is how little you actually miss by not watching TV all the time. Oh sure, I can't talk about a game involving 2 teams I have no emotional or geographic connection to, but somehow I still get by.
Over at my local Fry's recently I was checking what all was going on in the Linux software section. This once growing area of their store is starting to recede somewhat. Anyhow, spotted a boxed copy of Applix Office on the shelf for right around $100. I was pretty impressed with what I read on the box, so I decided to find out more about it.
When I got home I popped on over to the Applix web site. No mention of their making an office suite anywhere that I could find. I thought that maybe I had picked up on a different company, so I went to the search engines. Nope, right company, just no mention of an office suite anywhere.
Needless to say, I made no further attempt to go hunting down info. I may lay down $40 for some app that's a one time good deal, but when the price goes into the triple digits I'm going to want some support and upgrade options for down the road.
Well, there's all that and the fact that this company that is supposedly selling Unix products is hosting on a Windows box. That's just got to throw some warning flags right there.
Got a few problems with some of your statements that being the good troll that I am I thought I'd take a bit of a stab at.
Without Apple, M$ would be a lot stronger than they are now.
On this, I personally believe the exact opposite is true. MS is never better at what they do then when they have strong competition. Had there not been this MacOS out there with a strong GUI I don't believe that Win95 would have been half as good as what it was. Yes, it borrowed a good bit from the Mac side, but it also added a lot of new features that Macs didn't see for another 2 years.
would Photoshop be around if it wasn't for Apple?
The answer to this is both yes and no. The original authors of Photoshop were certainly inspired by the early GUI of the MacOS. On the other hand, when these same guys tried bringing what they had done to Apple, Apple wanted no part of it. Them folks that made the drivers for laser printers finally decided to invest... you know, Adobe. To be fair, Apple had a graphics editing app already and they were concerned that having two of them would have too much internal competition.
Regardless of what their machines are capable of or whether or not their current OS crashes more than Doze, we owe a great deal to this company.
I know it's an old argument and all, but we really owe a LOT to Xerox, even if they didn't realize what the heck they had done. Apple stole idea from Xerox, and put their own twist on it. MS did the same from Apple. Today we're watching folks like KDE and Gnome go through a similar process. So much for the wonders of copyright:)
As for the sites starting to be MS only, did anyone notice that all of a sudden a lot of amateur pages are done using Frontpage?
Kinda back to the #1 application on my wish list for *nix. A decent GUI HTML editor. Man, if I could get a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver and Homesite for my FreeBSD box, NT would be something I'd only use on occasion. No, Emacs is not a solution for anyone but the most hardcore of the Meta-Esc-Esc-Ctrl-X F crowd... ack!
So long as MS is putting out this cheap and easy to use editor, they'll be controlling the kind of code that is produced. The browser issue is only half the equation.
...I was reading about this new browser rendering platform that Netscape was working on. It was going to be fully standards compliant, and highly configurable. Sounded like a great concept for leveling out the playing field for browsers so no one company could control the standards.
What we got was Netscape 6, and 3 years of "it's only beta software" excuses from Mozilla. Heck, even in tonight's build (yeah, I still bother to look at them once in a while) there's yet another table layout problem. For crying out loud, I'm not talking about XML, CSS, or even DOM issues. I'm talking about freaking standard HTML tables!
This evening I was working on fixing a Mac all up with a new OS load and installing the software this user needs. While getting everything tweaked in I got my first look at IE 5.0 for the Mac. Rarely, and I mean rarely, am I impressed with stuff on the Mac platform. I just sat there and played with this thing for about an hour. Aside from the fast rendering and the stuff I'm used to seeing on the Win version, the feature set was outstanding. That, and with the fonts loaded up from IE, the pages looked exactly like they do on Windows.
Aside from occasionally checking out a Mozilla build, the only real competition I see going up against IE is KDE's Konqueror. I don't think the KDE folks have a perfect replacement for IE yet, but by gosh they sure are getting there faster than anyone else on the playing field. Unfortunately with it's being tied to just Unix it's influence on web standards is directly tied to the success for Linux and BSD's at the desktop. By the time either get enough market share at that level MS will be the web standard. That's on the very loose assumption that they're not already.
Sorry about being so hard on Mozilla and all. I just feel like the project and their promises really let us all down. Even if a super bitchin' Moz 1.0 does result from all that effort, the world has long since moved on.
Just a quick correction here. UPS and US Postal both have very cross platform API's that can access their servers across the net for shipping calculation. Both can be accessed with http calls from darn near any server side language.
It's only FedEx that requires you to run their software on only the platforms that they have decided to support. Worse yet, you pretty much need root rights in order to install the damn things, so forget about using their crap on a shared account.
UPS uses an http Get string sent along with the header to send in weight and zone info. You then get back a formatted html page that can be parsed. I personally used cURL being called from PHP to make this one happen. Best of all, once you've got everything tweaked in, you don't even have to identify that you're an authorized user to the server. It is a VERY sweet setup.
US Postal uses an XML exchange. Toss a formatted XML document, with your account info, weight, and zip codes, and you get back an XML document to parse all out. Again, cURL is a great way to make this exchange happen in the backend. Once the exchange occurs, I parsed this out with PHP and had all the info I needed. Their docs have Perl, VB, and Java examples too.
On top of all that, cURL will also run on an NT machine, as I got to helping a bud of mine implement this with ASP. I think he went and used some DLL file that did pretty much the same kind of thing, as it was easier to code for in ASP. Thing is, it was very doable.
It is the responsibility of the government through the police force and justice system to protect its citizens.
Just curious where you base this bit of fantasy? Since when in either Canada or the US is it the responsibility of the government to "protect" it's citizens from each other? Unless there's been some new bit of legislation sprung forth while I wasn't watching, there are no, zero, none, naddah responsibilities for a government to protect you from anything.
What a governmental body can do is punish, or remove from society, some person who has violated a law. That's pretty much it, except for the overly rare occurance in which a police officer happens upon a crime in progress. Even in those cases that's purely a moment of opportunity, not an actual responsibility of the police force to be there.
While you go about dreaming up 9mm's being sold at 7-11's, you might also want to consider a bit of reality in there as you produce your opinion.
With my very first look into the world of *nix being RedHat, I can really appreciate the wish to simplify just where in the heck you configure things. A lot of folks here are suggesting that what you are describing is NT, which I couldn't disagree with more. NT's configuration can be as scattered, if not more so, than Linux. Folks here are talking about the registry like it's the only place you can tweak things. Apparently they've never looked at the massive amount of scattered.ini files.
In my mind when I think about centralizing configurations into logical places, FreeBSD wins hands down.
Everything system related
/etc
Stuff that you installed
/usr/local/etc
User customization
/usr/home/~
Sweet, simple, and by gosh it works. I hear folks ask, just as I did a while back, what is so different about FreeBSD from Linux. A lot of it is simplicity and logical planning of how, where and why things go where they do. I realize that RedHat has some logic to where things go, but for months I couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason to it.
Quite simply, there is an OS that has a logical design to where all the configurations go. What doesn't exist is either a GUI or Console based interface giving a user a sort of one stop shop to all those config files. Ye olde LinuxConf was trying to head down that road, but last I checked with that thing you could read the entire O'Reilly Samba book before that darn thing actually loaded up to tweak on it. That's assuming that it doesn't crash on you first.
What really is needed is two things. First, some kind of component based API that can translate the individual config files out there to some kind of standard chit chat. Secondly, a number of front ends for this at least supporting console, GTK, and QT based systems. Plug the Apache component in, tell the API where to find the httpd.conf file, and tweak in a graphical view in KDE. We definitely aren't there with that yet to be sure.
I'm using a nightly build of Moz myself, but in seeing your reply I just had to add one tid bit. You'll need to give the "asswipe" 3-4 years to complete writing it, with no realistic end in site. It's just plain depressing.
When I got to reading the linked article it got me to thinking about a story that ran in Wired's print magazine called "Bright Switch".
Either in this article, or one of the others in this same issue, they get into talking about using this optical filtering technique to be used for things like clothing, replacement for paint, and even a way to stop earthquakes.
Mind you, a lot of this is theoretical stuff about using this crystaline stuff as a filtering mechanism. It still makes for an interesting read, and it appears to be a similar concept to what this thread is supposed to be talking about.
Initially the installation was pretty clever. The fella doing that port missed some of the configs like GIF support and such for QT. A lot of that has been fixed up now, and the installation is pretty much working as well as MouseDown has stated. It is quite a long compile since nobody has posted binaries for any of the BSD's.
I've got this on a k6-450, and it runs really sweet. Konqueror has been working great, and looks a LOT better than NS. KNodes, the Usenet reader, looks to be a nice app, but crashes a lot under KDE 2.0. Supposedly this has been corrected for 2.0.1 though.
In short, if you're looking to get a desktop environment going on a BSD box, I'd highly recommend KDE 2.0 for ya. Been all good stuff so far under FreeBSD 4-Stable.
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...as stupid as having to push the start button to shut down windows.
It wasn't until I got to reading folks talking about Windows in public forums that it even occurred to me how silly this was. I have to admit, it is an oxymoron and all. Thing is, I never for a moment had a problem with figuring out how to shut down a Win95 box. I certainly had other things to learn when I first started using it, but once I saw the Start menu for the first time I simply acknowledged that was where the bulk of the system activities were going to take place. Also, ya kinda have to be blind to miss the whole "Shut Down" thing when you go into use the Start menu for other stuff.
So much fun in this post, where to start?
You actually would select the disc or drive and choose File > Put Away.
Again, this wouldn't have had any bearing on reality to me. I didn't want to "Put Away" the CD, I wanted the freaking drawer to EJECT! Ya know, like every cassette player has done since the 70's. Like Windows shows when you right-click (that's for them mice things with more than one orthopedic button) on it. You may have seen something very similar to context sensitive menus as Apple added this into OS 8.5 to mimic Win95.
Macs also haven't had printer ports for years. What you're talking about is an easy networking system that used the printer port before Ethernet was cheap enough. There is no equivalent generic PC system to compare it to. These days, and for the last three plus years at least, every Mac sold has Ethernet, and many have gigabit Ethernet.
I know what the term Printer port means, and the G3 desktops still have them. Whether the port is there or not, Appletalk STILL reverts to it whenever it finds itself unable to flood the LAN it's connected to with broadcasts. I also know that this isn't just a point of confusion with this here Windows user, as I have needed to point this out to Mac users who couldn't figure out why they couldn't get their network going again.
Apple invented overlapping windows, pull-down menus, pop-up menus, drag and drop, double-clicking, resizable windows, and more.
And outside the halls of Apple stuff like maximizing, minimizing, task bars, resizing from multiple points on a window, actively changable drag and drop menus (Win98's start menu for example), web browsers, file managers, and thousands of other things that Apple had nothing to do with while the zealots point at everything that moves and scream how Apple invented them. I'm not opposed to giving credit where it's due, but I won't budge an inch of revisionist silliness of the "one true faith".
Macs haven't had floppy drives for years
Oh boy, this one I sure know. Although the G3 series still had them, the newer boxes dropped them. This caused me all kinds of fun as I needed to perform a Quark Express install on a laptop without said floppy. Quark uses a floppy diskette as part of it's install. So I ended up spending $90 for a freaking floppy drive! Yeah, $90 was as cheap as I could find one on short notice. Oh, but I'm sure the quality of that drive far exceeded the $15 one they were selling for PC's.
tell me why AVI is now an "unsupported format" over at Microsoft?
First off, AVI files still play just fine with MS Media Player. Secondly, it's compression sucks compared to ASF or MPG, so why bother with it? For that matter, why do we continue to bother with the still overly bloated Quicktime?
You'll probably find that most of the bad things that you've heard are untrue or taken out of context.
It's very difficult to take personal experience out of context. These aren't things I've "heard", but rather what I've had to deal with in supporting these unstable as hell machines. At most I've seen the few that I still support run for about 6 months before requiring yet another full system install. Hell, I've still got Win95 boxes going on PC's I cobbled together from spare parts over 3 years ago. Can't exactly cobble together parts for a Mac now can ya? Jobs made damn sure of that.
The people who are running Apple right now really, really know what they are doing.
Yeah, they're spending more money for less of a computer that runs about 1/3 the software and only a tiny fraction of the available hardware. What hardware there is out there is damn near always more expensive, much like my floppy story. Sorry, can't write me off as just someone who "hasn't seen the visions of truth" because I've been to the alter, and wasn't impressed.
Okay, let me explain what he meant by that. You see, open source is better than closed source. Then if you close the open source that's better than open source because it's closed, which is... ummm... better than clos...
ARRRRGH! Oh God My Head!
(Note to self: Really need to avoid trying to make sense of this man)
(Additional note: At 2 5/8 this stock still has room to sell short)
When these products hit the market, they had nothing new. Zero. Nada. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
Not quite. You see, the one HUGE difference in what Microsoft did was to actually bring a lot of these concepts and ideas together for everyone. Not just the folks that could afford a $2,000 Mac, or those that worked with way over priced versions of Unix. Unlike all that came before them, MS actually put together something that the majority of end users could actually use and afford.
Their marketing department isn't that good. There's a reason why 90% of the desktops running or doing so on Windows. You can run McDonalds analogies against this all you like, that's just the way it is.
Howabout BT and hyperlinks then?
Prior art nullifying the patent. At least that's the concept of how to fight it. Nothing at all to do with whether or not they tried to enforce infringement.
They have every right to. These themes blatantly copy Apple's designs. They don't accidentally look similar. Who'd be naive enough to think this wouldn't lead to trouble?
Funny, one of the default KDE themes is Win98 and I haven't heard about Microsoft suing anyone over this.
Woops, forgot my zealot pills. Everything Apple good, everything MS bad. Ahhh, it's all coming into focus now. Goooo Steve!
Okay, I'll bite on to some of the questions.
:)
I ask you, what about iDVD? What about Altivec code?
Ummm, what about it?
What about making Unix plug and play?
Hmmm, seemed like my RedHat 6.0 did a fair amount of that on boot. FreeBSD 4.2 was pretty darn good at picking up all my devices as well.
Hell, even making Unix so that you can install it on a machine with literally four clicks of a mouse button is pretty impressive. The last time I had to install IRIX, I was at it for hours.
How many clicks is it for a default RedHat install anyway? I can do a FreeBSD install with a couple of down arrows and the enter key a couple of times. Seems like most Unix systems these days don't have the problems of Irix.
What about iMovie?
Umm, what about it. You're talking about this as though nobody in the history of software prior to Apple ever wrote video editing applications. Next...
What about Firewire?
Now this might have been a really great thing. Even Intel and Microsoft were behind it big time, until they got the word from Apple about the high licensing fees. This prompted Intel to drop support and pay out big bucks for their own R&D, and for MS to just drop out entirely. Yet again, another good idea down the arrogance shooter.
BTW, I know Apple finally loosened the licensing situation quite a bit. The damage was done, the world moved on, and once again Apple is left with a technology that only they will support. This will insure the prices stay stupid high.
Theres quite a bit of technology just in those products listed there man.
Yup, there sure is. You can even give credit to Apple for some of it... even some they didn't goof up on the biz side. On the flip side, care to rattle off some of the Microsoft product line, and the wide variety of things they've got going? Hey now, MS Bob doesn't count!
emachines even went so far as running ads for the eOne in MacWarehouse catalogs
:) I'll grant you, they do look nice and all. Still, form should follow function when it comes to a computer case.
Really? Which month? I've got a stack of old MacWarehouse catalogs here and I don't recall seeing that.
The thing looked nearly identical to the iMac, it was almost absurd.
Sorry, the iMac still looks like a TRS-80 Model III made out of plexiglass to me. Take away the floppies on the right and add a hockey puck mouse... Shazzam!
The G4 powerbook looks completely unique, in it's own class
Ever got your paws on one of these? That curved handle along the top is also made of the same plastic, with no where near the kind of strength it should have for a machine of it's weight. I have to wonder how much Apple charges for replacements
Kind of interesting in contrast to the G3 tower, which I rather liked the look of. That thing was so over engineered that you'd expect it to survive a 2 story drop. The case alone must have been something like $200 to manufacture. You'd have to get a hard look on the inside to get what I'm talking about.
eMachines didn't do that. Nor are any of the skinmkers. They're mearly taking apples idea's and repackaging them as their own without actually adding anything to them
Ohhh, so if you ADD something to it, then you're not stealing. Gotcha. So if KDE or Gnome users manage to totally recreate the look of the MacOS using only the templating tools that's not adding anything. Ummm, so what exactly is Apple "adding" to this equation again? Wait, I know... Lawsuits!
Millions of users are familar with the "look and feel" of MacOS and as a result, that "look and feel" is an incentive for consumers to purchase Apple products.
If their super innovative "Look&Feel"TM can be replicated with a desktop theme, paint me unimpressed. Furthermore, not one ounce of sympathy for a product that empty.
Then again, I don't know who in their right mind would WANT a Win95 look and feel.
Ohh, maybe about 90% of the computer buying populace. From the looks of the latest Mac OS "innovations", Apple. From the looks of the top desktop platforms for *nix, apparently KDE and Gnome which both resemble 95 far more than the Mac desktop in their default configs.
Sure, it's based on a quality Macintosh design
Huh? I find this myth more disturbing the more I hear it. I work with Macs quite a bit, and I still find them horribly non-intuitive. Awful keyboard support for handling windows and menus, and if someone hadn't have told me, I would have NEVER guessed to put a CD or network share into the trash to unmount them. Don't forget to keep a paperclip around to poke out the magic hole WHEN the darn thing locks due to not having anything resembling protected memory. Need Mr. Paperclip to get my floppy out ya know.
My personal favorite is Appletalk though. For you non-Mac folks, happen to know what happens when you disconnect this broadcasting beast from your network? Well, it reverts all your networking connections to the PRINTER port. No, it doesn't tell you that it did that. That truly is the mark of a great interface!
Ever go and actually try to read any of the help documentation? Heck, how about even using the Apple web site to ask a question. On both counts, Microsoft, Linux, and the BSD's beat the snot outta old Crazy Job's company. Another great mark of an interface!
Oh sure, I'm going to be marked as a troll for not tossing in the anti-MS fud. Fact is, Win95 left the MacOS in the dust at the time of it's shipping. I'd even go so far as saying that Win98 improved on this, except for the awful decision to integrate IE into everything... ack! Both KDE and Gnome still lag behind the old Win95 interface, while at the same time are showing rapid improvement as well as being easier to use and set up than any MacOS I've seen to date. Go ahead, try to maximize or even minimize a window on a Mac. Go on, push that single mouse button REAL hard.
MacOS 8 started adding Win95 stuff all over. Wonder where ya got "Sticky Menus" or "Network Browser"? Where in the world did they get the idea of having both scroll buttons at the bottom of the window??? Damn sure looks like KDE 1.2 to me, but I know it can't be. Apple is the only true innovator in the industry. Every zealot tells me so.
Yes, Win95 borrows graphical elements from the Mac, and several other GUI platforms. So? Pretty much every GUI following Parc has done the same. That, and Windows is the OS that really brought the personal computer to the masses... a feat that Apple never approached due to over pricing and a continued blind arrogance.
It's really only a matter of time before Jobs goes and loses touch with reality again. He's only ever been able to maintain for a year or two at best. Eventually, the over rated arrogance will be put to rest... and MS won't be interested in bailing them out a second time.
Thanks for the link. Too bad the official site didn't provide some clue as to the name change. Guess they're too busy trying to figure out how to liquidate assets.
What annoyed me was that Gumbel guy went on about how these military guys made some sacrifice for their country.
Yes we did. Good God, don't they teach any kind of history at those grad schools? Were you so insulated as to not have seen any news, or were you too busy getting drunk?
What's REALLY sad is how folks such as yourself will go watch a movie about those events and assume it's an accurate telling of the history. I suppose reading a book or even a web page would be too much to ask.
Couple of disclaimers before I get into this. First off, I didn't see the TV show in question. Secondly, I am a Gulf War veteran. Went over with the 1st TAC Fighter Wing out of Virginia with the very first deployments that occurred in August prior to actual combat.
I just love it when folks get themselves thinking they understand something about foriegn affairs and economics start talking about this war. You evidently don't quite appreciate just how important either oil or Saudi is to us.
Whether we like it or not, our entire way of life today is heavily dependant on a steady flow of oil. It affects pretty much every means of transportation, which in turn effects the cost of food and pretty much any other thing you might purchase. Ask anyone living in the north eastern part of the United States what happens to their quality of life when they can't afford heating oil. At a high enough cost, people die. When food is priced beyond the reach of the poor, people die. It sucks; our use of oil as a primary means for power is just stupid; but that's the reality in which we entered that war.
As to the political reasons, we weren't going there to protect Kuwait. We were there to protect Saudi. Aside from the bulk of the oil fields that the US buys from being there, this is the hub of the entire Islamic world. 2 of the 3 holy places in Islam sit within the borders of Saudi. They had a couple of thousand troops sitting at their northern border heavily armed. Had we let that area of the world go to a wacko like Saddam, do you honestly think we'd continue to be a player there politically? This is especially important to note as we continue our efforts to negotiate peace treaties.
Yes, we greedy American types went to fight a war about oil. Hell, I went to go fight a war about oil. And for that, the trucks that bring the food to your local grocery store can afford the gas to do so. Your momma can afford to actually by that food, and put the gas in the SUV that brought it home. Bunch of greedy capitalists.
Now they have to sell you a lifestyle adjunct... anybody else noticed the philosophical tripe that is advertising today?
Nope. Going now on the second year of my forgetting to pay my cable bill on time. Haven't had any kind of broadcast tv into the house since then. This xmas I got an MP3 car stereo, so now I don't even listen to the radio very often. My only outlet to popular media is through the Internet, where I can damn well decide how to block the non-stop advertisements.
What's really amazing is how little you actually miss by not watching TV all the time. Oh sure, I can't talk about a game involving 2 teams I have no emotional or geographic connection to, but somehow I still get by.
Over at my local Fry's recently I was checking what all was going on in the Linux software section. This once growing area of their store is starting to recede somewhat. Anyhow, spotted a boxed copy of Applix Office on the shelf for right around $100. I was pretty impressed with what I read on the box, so I decided to find out more about it.
When I got home I popped on over to the Applix web site. No mention of their making an office suite anywhere that I could find. I thought that maybe I had picked up on a different company, so I went to the search engines. Nope, right company, just no mention of an office suite anywhere.
Needless to say, I made no further attempt to go hunting down info. I may lay down $40 for some app that's a one time good deal, but when the price goes into the triple digits I'm going to want some support and upgrade options for down the road.
Well, there's all that and the fact that this company that is supposedly selling Unix products is hosting on a Windows box. That's just got to throw some warning flags right there.
...more often than Shaft smacks hoes.
I've just got to figure out a way to work that phrase into my daily vocabulary. What a visual!
Got a few problems with some of your statements that being the good troll that I am I thought I'd take a bit of a stab at.
:)
Without Apple, M$ would be a lot stronger than they are now.
On this, I personally believe the exact opposite is true. MS is never better at what they do then when they have strong competition. Had there not been this MacOS out there with a strong GUI I don't believe that Win95 would have been half as good as what it was. Yes, it borrowed a good bit from the Mac side, but it also added a lot of new features that Macs didn't see for another 2 years.
would Photoshop be around if it wasn't for Apple?
The answer to this is both yes and no. The original authors of Photoshop were certainly inspired by the early GUI of the MacOS. On the other hand, when these same guys tried bringing what they had done to Apple, Apple wanted no part of it. Them folks that made the drivers for laser printers finally decided to invest... you know, Adobe. To be fair, Apple had a graphics editing app already and they were concerned that having two of them would have too much internal competition.
Regardless of what their machines are capable of or whether or not their current OS crashes more than Doze, we owe a great deal to this company.
I know it's an old argument and all, but we really owe a LOT to Xerox, even if they didn't realize what the heck they had done. Apple stole idea from Xerox, and put their own twist on it. MS did the same from Apple. Today we're watching folks like KDE and Gnome go through a similar process. So much for the wonders of copyright
As for the sites starting to be MS only, did anyone notice that all of a sudden a lot of amateur pages are done using Frontpage?
Kinda back to the #1 application on my wish list for *nix. A decent GUI HTML editor. Man, if I could get a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver and Homesite for my FreeBSD box, NT would be something I'd only use on occasion. No, Emacs is not a solution for anyone but the most hardcore of the Meta-Esc-Esc-Ctrl-X F crowd... ack!
So long as MS is putting out this cheap and easy to use editor, they'll be controlling the kind of code that is produced. The browser issue is only half the equation.
...I was reading about this new browser rendering platform that Netscape was working on. It was going to be fully standards compliant, and highly configurable. Sounded like a great concept for leveling out the playing field for browsers so no one company could control the standards.
What we got was Netscape 6, and 3 years of "it's only beta software" excuses from Mozilla. Heck, even in tonight's build (yeah, I still bother to look at them once in a while) there's yet another table layout problem. For crying out loud, I'm not talking about XML, CSS, or even DOM issues. I'm talking about freaking standard HTML tables!
This evening I was working on fixing a Mac all up with a new OS load and installing the software this user needs. While getting everything tweaked in I got my first look at IE 5.0 for the Mac. Rarely, and I mean rarely, am I impressed with stuff on the Mac platform. I just sat there and played with this thing for about an hour. Aside from the fast rendering and the stuff I'm used to seeing on the Win version, the feature set was outstanding. That, and with the fonts loaded up from IE, the pages looked exactly like they do on Windows.
Aside from occasionally checking out a Mozilla build, the only real competition I see going up against IE is KDE's Konqueror. I don't think the KDE folks have a perfect replacement for IE yet, but by gosh they sure are getting there faster than anyone else on the playing field. Unfortunately with it's being tied to just Unix it's influence on web standards is directly tied to the success for Linux and BSD's at the desktop. By the time either get enough market share at that level MS will be the web standard. That's on the very loose assumption that they're not already.
Sorry about being so hard on Mozilla and all. I just feel like the project and their promises really let us all down. Even if a super bitchin' Moz 1.0 does result from all that effort, the world has long since moved on.
Just a quick correction here. UPS and US Postal both have very cross platform API's that can access their servers across the net for shipping calculation. Both can be accessed with http calls from darn near any server side language.
It's only FedEx that requires you to run their software on only the platforms that they have decided to support. Worse yet, you pretty much need root rights in order to install the damn things, so forget about using their crap on a shared account.
UPS uses an http Get string sent along with the header to send in weight and zone info. You then get back a formatted html page that can be parsed. I personally used cURL being called from PHP to make this one happen. Best of all, once you've got everything tweaked in, you don't even have to identify that you're an authorized user to the server. It is a VERY sweet setup.
US Postal uses an XML exchange. Toss a formatted XML document, with your account info, weight, and zip codes, and you get back an XML document to parse all out. Again, cURL is a great way to make this exchange happen in the backend. Once the exchange occurs, I parsed this out with PHP and had all the info I needed. Their docs have Perl, VB, and Java examples too.
On top of all that, cURL will also run on an NT machine, as I got to helping a bud of mine implement this with ASP. I think he went and used some DLL file that did pretty much the same kind of thing, as it was easier to code for in ASP. Thing is, it was very doable.
It is the responsibility of the government through the police force and justice system to protect its citizens.
Just curious where you base this bit of fantasy? Since when in either Canada or the US is it the responsibility of the government to "protect" it's citizens from each other? Unless there's been some new bit of legislation sprung forth while I wasn't watching, there are no, zero, none, naddah responsibilities for a government to protect you from anything.
What a governmental body can do is punish, or remove from society, some person who has violated a law. That's pretty much it, except for the overly rare occurance in which a police officer happens upon a crime in progress. Even in those cases that's purely a moment of opportunity, not an actual responsibility of the police force to be there.
While you go about dreaming up 9mm's being sold at 7-11's, you might also want to consider a bit of reality in there as you produce your opinion.
With my very first look into the world of *nix being RedHat, I can really appreciate the wish to simplify just where in the heck you configure things. A lot of folks here are suggesting that what you are describing is NT, which I couldn't disagree with more. NT's configuration can be as scattered, if not more so, than Linux. Folks here are talking about the registry like it's the only place you can tweak things. Apparently they've never looked at the massive amount of scattered .ini files.
In my mind when I think about centralizing configurations into logical places, FreeBSD wins hands down.
Everything system related
/etc
Stuff that you installed
/usr/local/etc
User customization
/usr/home/~
Sweet, simple, and by gosh it works. I hear folks ask, just as I did a while back, what is so different about FreeBSD from Linux. A lot of it is simplicity and logical planning of how, where and why things go where they do. I realize that RedHat has some logic to where things go, but for months I couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason to it.
Quite simply, there is an OS that has a logical design to where all the configurations go. What doesn't exist is either a GUI or Console based interface giving a user a sort of one stop shop to all those config files. Ye olde LinuxConf was trying to head down that road, but last I checked with that thing you could read the entire O'Reilly Samba book before that darn thing actually loaded up to tweak on it. That's assuming that it doesn't crash on you first.
What really is needed is two things. First, some kind of component based API that can translate the individual config files out there to some kind of standard chit chat. Secondly, a number of front ends for this at least supporting console, GTK, and QT based systems. Plug the Apache component in, tell the API where to find the httpd.conf file, and tweak in a graphical view in KDE. We definitely aren't there with that yet to be sure.
I'm using a nightly build of Moz myself, but in seeing your reply I just had to add one tid bit. You'll need to give the "asswipe" 3-4 years to complete writing it, with no realistic end in site. It's just plain depressing.
When I got to reading the linked article it got me to thinking about a story that ran in Wired's print magazine called "Bright Switch".
Either in this article, or one of the others in this same issue, they get into talking about using this optical filtering technique to be used for things like clothing, replacement for paint, and even a way to stop earthquakes.
Mind you, a lot of this is theoretical stuff about using this crystaline stuff as a filtering mechanism. It still makes for an interesting read, and it appears to be a similar concept to what this thread is supposed to be talking about.
Does KDE run well on the BSDs?
Initially the installation was pretty clever. The fella doing that port missed some of the configs like GIF support and such for QT. A lot of that has been fixed up now, and the installation is pretty much working as well as MouseDown has stated. It is quite a long compile since nobody has posted binaries for any of the BSD's.
I've got this on a k6-450, and it runs really sweet. Konqueror has been working great, and looks a LOT better than NS. KNodes, the Usenet reader, looks to be a nice app, but crashes a lot under KDE 2.0. Supposedly this has been corrected for 2.0.1 though.
In short, if you're looking to get a desktop environment going on a BSD box, I'd highly recommend KDE 2.0 for ya. Been all good stuff so far under FreeBSD 4-Stable.