It's only a "mistake" when they stop making so much money. They're doing just fine now, thankyouverymuch... or do you think BMW and Porsche are in trouble because they don't make those crappy little $15k econoboxes that sell so well? Apple may only have 20% of the market, BUT IT'S THE BEST 20%!
Also: Have you SEEN the PC industry lately? Ask IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, and Gateway how well being "not Apple" has done for them. Hint: most are out of the business, one way or another, and Dell was pretty close for a while. Will be interesting to see how they do now.
I'm not saying Apple will be #1 forever -- NO ONE stays at the top forever -- but they're doing just fine, in case you hadn't noticed.
I (I'm not the parent) just switched to T-Mo this month from AT&T. Yes, my bill will go down when I'm done paying for my phone. I'm getting 2.5 GB of 4G data WITH tethering, NO overage fees (instead, I get dropped to 2G speeds if I go over), and unlimited text & voice. Even with the phone payments I'm paying about $20 less than I was for 3 lines, and when they're paid off, I'll be paying a solid third less than I was, saving $50/mo. And I had just about the smallest plan possible on AT&T: 550 shared minutes, unlimited texting, 200 MB data per month for $15, and $15 for each data overage. Tethering, if I wanted it, would have REQUIRED a better plan AND a $20/mo tethering fee. SUCK IT, AT&T! Oh, and all that without a 2-year contract. And they won't charge each time I want to change phones, versus AT&T's $36 fee for that privilege.
Not an employee or shill, just a happy customer.
One minor quibble: when I signed up (I tested with an old phone first to make sure there was good signal at my house, work, etc.) it was $50/mo for the first phone, $30 for the next, and $10 for each additional. Upon buying my new phones, I was told I was required to get a 4G plan on any phone that supports it at $60 / $40 / $20, which I do not see in print ANYWHERE so I might argue that at some point. Oh, and the girl signed me up for "jump" (at $10 per phone per month) but they took that off when I pointed it out next time I was in the store.
See? Even with all that, STILL better than AT&T.:-)
"Galaxy Nexus, which first launched two years ago, falls outside of the 18-month update window when Google and others traditionally update devices."
LOL. "... and others"? What "others"? MS has a bad record here recently (Windows Phone 7 & 7.5; too early to say how 8 will go), Apple averages about THREE years, and who else is there?
Maybe compared to the fact that most OEMs who sell Android phones give ZERO updates... I guess that's an improvement.
Yeah, well, Microsoft also bugs me whenever I click a link in Outlook that leads to a file on my company's SharePoint site. A/V on the server, A/V on every desktop, and I have to click "Yes, I really want this file" every single time.
A friend of mine has an attractive wife. Her mom had a document needed to be faxed. Neither had a fax machine so the mom told the daughter to take it to Office Depot and fax. I don't know if the mom mis-spoke or if the girl had a blonde moment (or both) but in any case, she went to Home Depot instead and asked the guy at the customer service counter to fax it. The guy was like "Um, we don't usually do this, but OK."
Now, can you let me choose for myself which filetypes are safe or not? For my job, I have to download many PDFs (up to 100 at a time) and Chrome asks me EVERY... SINGLE... FUCKING... TIME "This type of file can harm your computer. Do you want to keep <filename> anyway?"
LISTEN IDIOT: These PDFs come from a trusted source. Yes, I have to download them. No, I don't want to view them in the browser right this second. Also, I'm on a Mac, and also also, I don't use Acrobat, and also also also, this is my work machine, and IF anything would happen to it, I'd let I.T. blow it away and re-image it if needed. LET ME DOWNLOAD THE GODDAMN FILE. Every few months I search to see if there's a way to disable this, and so far I've come up empty.
Needless to say, I don't use Chrome for this part of my job.
> if the buzz level of step 2 was low enough, continue to insist that > product N is absolutely without fault, until it's time to release > revision N+1, where the problem will silently be fixed, with > absolutely no acknowledgement that the change was made to > address any particular issue. If the buzz level of step 2 is high > enough, Apple will then offer repair replacement, sometimes > even for otherwise-out-of-warranty hardware.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
A friend of mine has yet another example: she's having trouble having a kid and some things she wants to try aren't covered. But if someone smokes their whole life and develops health problems because of that, they're covered!
All I have is an Apple IIc, with tiny matching CRT -- but the video out is plain-old composite, so it works fine on a multi-input 20" Dell LCD, which is kinda neat.:-) As much as I like it, I have no real use for it, and even less room. Been meaning to get around to finding a good home for it. The only reason I still have it is that it's tucked away nicely at the moment.
As much as it's fun to make fun of him now, there are 2 things to remember: 1) Apple was in pretty bad shape in 1997 -- a year before the iMac, 4 years before the iPod. 2) He's the CEO of the competition -- what would you expect him to say? "They're in trouble, but Steve is a great guy, he's done some creative things in the past, they should stay the course, work hard on making great products, and maybe someday they'll wipe up the floor with us!"
It's not like he's the only CEO to ever do this.
Exhibit A:
Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.
"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."
Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."
His complaints about the iPhone were somewhat valid at the time, but 1) he forgot that people WILL pay for a good product, and 2) if he wasn't aware of how Apple refined the iPod over the previous six years -- making it better and cheaper every year -- he's dumb as a rock. Oh wait, he was aware:
Business Week: How much money will you lose per Zune?
Ballmer: None. Apple put the hammer down there, dropped the price down to $249. If they had been $299, it would have been nicer. They have the advantage of scale. So we're at $249, too. We don't make a lot of money, not to start out.
So I just mark that down to "standard CEO bluster." Or maybe he really was that stupid.
You know how people are always saying things like "brown is the new black", "orange is the new pink", "40 is the new 30", etc? Well, RTFS is the new RTFA.
There are many reasons why this won't work, or won't work well. For one thing, there is no wasted space inside a modern smartphone. Fitting every component into its own rectangular plastic case would roughly double the volume of a modern phone.
Sizing of components is another issue. You can't have an arbitrary number of arbitrarily-sized components always add up to a perfect rectangle. Take ten basic Lego bricks of varying sizes, and see how many ways you can make a perfect rectangle -- and how many ways you can't.
Now, put various numbers of electrical leads on each and see how much harder it gets. Battery, CPU, input device, speaker, camera, screen, etc., will all have drastically different numbers of pins needed. It's a neat idea but NO WAY is it going to happen as shown in the video.
That's because they're using javascript to show you the URL you'll wind up at, but they bounce you through their own click-logger first. Like I said, "it should do exactly ONE thing: show the exact, complete URL of a link you're hovering over" -- which is to say, do NOT be altered by javascript or anything else.
Step 1: ALWAYS SHOW THE FUCKING STATUS BAR! (Firefox, Safari.) And make it the whole width of the window. (Chrome) And it should do exactly ONE thing: show the exact, complete URL of a link you're hovering over.
That is all.
Actually, wait, it isn't. Step 2: ALWAYS SHOW THE ENTIRE URL IN THE URL BAR -- INCLUDING the protocol and all the other ugly bits. In one color text. Again, as much as the width of the window will allow you to see. MAYBE put the main domain in bold so it looks like www.bankofamerica.ihaxxoryou.com/give/me/your/money. But let me turn that off if I know what I'm doing.
And 95% of everything else in webOS was a direct ripoff of what Apple had done in (as it was known then) iPhone OS. Fans tend to overlook that little detail. Seriously, it was embarrassing watching this the first time -- watching Matias Duarte act like what he was showing was new. (19:30: "To scroll through my contact list, I just give it a flick...") Between that, and watching Jon Rubinstein wishing he could be Steve Jobs (I'm going to swoop in and save this company!) it was downright painful to watch.
I've told him many times that he should use a word processor, but he just doesn't understand. I tell him time and again where the office program is, and when prodded to try it, he still hunts through Firefox's menus trying to find the office program. The closest he gets to using a word processor is an input box in Firefox, which causes other problems. The worst is that it is too easy to lose a document.
Sounds like your dad would be a good candidate for Google Docs. - runs in a browser - autosaves continually If you don't want his documents in google docs (either because they're The Man, or it's The Cloud, or both), roll your own with jquery and a rich-text editor like CKEditor or TinyMCE.
> Thunderbolt is headed the way of Firewire, fast.
You mean it's useful, and it'll be around for a dozen years or so? Fine by me. Working in a largely Mac shop, FireWire was damn handy. It was MUCH faster than USB for many years, you could boot from a FW drive, and Target Disk Mode was a gift from the heavens (though it made its debut with SCSI on a PowerBook, IIRC) which took things to the logical extreme: you could put Mac #1 into TDM and then boot Mac #2 from Mac #1's drive. SO USEFUL. And we were doing that back in 1998.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only a "mistake" when they stop making so much money. They're doing just fine now, thankyouverymuch... or do you think BMW and Porsche are in trouble because they don't make those crappy little $15k econoboxes that sell so well? Apple may only have 20% of the market, BUT IT'S THE BEST 20%!
Also: Have you SEEN the PC industry lately? Ask IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, and Gateway how well being "not Apple" has done for them. Hint: most are out of the business, one way or another, and Dell was pretty close for a while. Will be interesting to see how they do now.
I'm not saying Apple will be #1 forever -- NO ONE stays at the top forever -- but they're doing just fine, in case you hadn't noticed.
I (I'm not the parent) just switched to T-Mo this month from AT&T. Yes, my bill will go down when I'm done paying for my phone. I'm getting 2.5 GB of 4G data WITH tethering, NO overage fees (instead, I get dropped to 2G speeds if I go over), and unlimited text & voice. Even with the phone payments I'm paying about $20 less than I was for 3 lines, and when they're paid off, I'll be paying a solid third less than I was, saving $50/mo. And I had just about the smallest plan possible on AT&T: 550 shared minutes, unlimited texting, 200 MB data per month for $15, and $15 for each data overage. Tethering, if I wanted it, would have REQUIRED a better plan AND a $20/mo tethering fee. SUCK IT, AT&T! Oh, and all that without a 2-year contract. And they won't charge each time I want to change phones, versus AT&T's $36 fee for that privilege.
Not an employee or shill, just a happy customer.
One minor quibble: when I signed up (I tested with an old phone first to make sure there was good signal at my house, work, etc.) it was $50/mo for the first phone, $30 for the next, and $10 for each additional. Upon buying my new phones, I was told I was required to get a 4G plan on any phone that supports it at $60 / $40 / $20, which I do not see in print ANYWHERE so I might argue that at some point. Oh, and the girl signed me up for "jump" (at $10 per phone per month) but they took that off when I pointed it out next time I was in the store.
See? Even with all that, STILL better than AT&T. :-)
"Galaxy Nexus, which first launched two years ago, falls outside of the 18-month update window when Google and others traditionally update devices."
LOL. "... and others"? What "others"? MS has a bad record here recently (Windows Phone 7 & 7.5; too early to say how 8 will go), Apple averages about THREE years, and who else is there?
Maybe compared to the fact that most OEMs who sell Android phones give ZERO updates... I guess that's an improvement.
That's Doctor Moore to you, bub. :-)
Yeah, well, Microsoft also bugs me whenever I click a link in Outlook that leads to a file on my company's SharePoint site. A/V on the server, A/V on every desktop, and I have to click "Yes, I really want this file" every single time.
I still think it's cheesy to use a brand-name food as the OS name, instead of a generic name.
Otherwise, looks neat. :-)
A friend of mine has an attractive wife. Her mom had a document needed to be faxed. Neither had a fax machine so the mom told the daughter to take it to Office Depot and fax. I don't know if the mom mis-spoke or if the girl had a blonde moment (or both) but in any case, she went to Home Depot instead and asked the guy at the customer service counter to fax it. The guy was like "Um, we don't usually do this, but OK."
Now, can you let me choose for myself which filetypes are safe or not? For my job, I have to download many PDFs (up to 100 at a time) and Chrome asks me EVERY... SINGLE... FUCKING... TIME "This type of file can harm your computer. Do you want to keep <filename> anyway?"
LISTEN IDIOT: These PDFs come from a trusted source. Yes, I have to download them. No, I don't want to view them in the browser right this second. Also, I'm on a Mac, and also also, I don't use Acrobat, and also also also, this is my work machine, and IF anything would happen to it, I'd let I.T. blow it away and re-image it if needed. LET ME DOWNLOAD THE GODDAMN FILE. Every few months I search to see if there's a way to disable this, and so far I've come up empty.
Needless to say, I don't use Chrome for this part of my job.
> $1000 for a track being played 24/7? No wonder
> artists all think Spotify is a sick joke.
Old news. Check out this chart from 3 years ago.
Another fun fact: Spotify has 20 million songs. Twenty percent of them -- four million songs -- have never been played.
> Which is a vulnerability of your employees
> allowing access to some stranger...
I work in an office with over 500 employees. Do you think I know everyone who works in security, telecom, and I.T.?
> if the buzz level of step 2 was low enough, continue to insist that
> product N is absolutely without fault, until it's time to release
> revision N+1, where the problem will silently be fixed, with
> absolutely no acknowledgement that the change was made to
> address any particular issue. If the buzz level of step 2 is high
> enough, Apple will then offer repair replacement, sometimes
> even for otherwise-out-of-warranty hardware.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
A friend of mine has yet another example: she's having trouble having a kid and some things she wants to try aren't covered. But if someone smokes their whole life and develops health problems because of that, they're covered!
All I have is an Apple IIc, with tiny matching CRT -- but the video out is plain-old composite, so it works fine on a multi-input 20" Dell LCD, which is kinda neat. :-) As much as I like it, I have no real use for it, and even less room. Been meaning to get around to finding a good home for it. The only reason I still have it is that it's tucked away nicely at the moment.
If you have that many old machines, I have another option for you...
I used to have a dual-PPro. I wish I still had it, but for a different reason.
As much as it's fun to make fun of him now, there are 2 things to remember: 1) Apple was in pretty bad shape in 1997 -- a year before the iMac, 4 years before the iPod. 2) He's the CEO of the competition -- what would you expect him to say? "They're in trouble, but Steve is a great guy, he's done some creative things in the past, they should stay the course, work hard on making great products, and maybe someday they'll wipe up the floor with us!"
It's not like he's the only CEO to ever do this.
Exhibit A:
Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.
"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."
Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."
-- SGI founder & chairman Jim Clark in Wired, 1994
Exhibit B: Steve Ballmer laughing at the iPhone
His complaints about the iPhone were somewhat valid at the time, but 1) he forgot that people WILL pay for a good product, and 2) if he wasn't aware of how Apple refined the iPod over the previous six years -- making it better and cheaper every year -- he's dumb as a rock. Oh wait, he was aware:
Business Week: How much money will you lose per Zune?
Ballmer: None. Apple put the hammer down there, dropped the price down to $249. If they had been $299, it would have been nicer. They have the advantage of scale. So we're at $249, too. We don't make a lot of money, not to start out.
So I just mark that down to "standard CEO bluster." Or maybe he really was that stupid.
You know how people are always saying things like "brown is the new black", "orange is the new pink", "40 is the new 30", etc? Well, RTFS is the new RTFA.
There are many reasons why this won't work, or won't work well. For one thing, there is no wasted space inside a modern smartphone. Fitting every component into its own rectangular plastic case would roughly double the volume of a modern phone.
Sizing of components is another issue. You can't have an arbitrary number of arbitrarily-sized components always add up to a perfect rectangle. Take ten basic Lego bricks of varying sizes, and see how many ways you can make a perfect rectangle -- and how many ways you can't.
Now, put various numbers of electrical leads on each and see how much harder it gets. Battery, CPU, input device, speaker, camera, screen, etc., will all have drastically different numbers of pins needed. It's a neat idea but NO WAY is it going to happen as shown in the video.
That's because they're using javascript to show you the URL you'll wind up at, but they bounce you through their own click-logger first. Like I said, "it should do exactly ONE thing: show the exact, complete URL of a link you're hovering over" -- which is to say, do NOT be altered by javascript or anything else.
Step 1: ALWAYS SHOW THE FUCKING STATUS BAR! (Firefox, Safari.) And make it the whole width of the window. (Chrome) And it should do exactly ONE thing: show the exact, complete URL of a link you're hovering over.
That is all.
Actually, wait, it isn't. Step 2: ALWAYS SHOW THE ENTIRE URL IN THE URL BAR -- INCLUDING the protocol and all the other ugly bits. In one color text. Again, as much as the width of the window will allow you to see. MAYBE put the main domain in bold so it looks like www.bankofamerica.ihaxxoryou.com/give/me/your/money. But let me turn that off if I know what I'm doing.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bing
And 95% of everything else in webOS was a direct ripoff of what Apple had done in (as it was known then) iPhone OS. Fans tend to overlook that little detail. Seriously, it was embarrassing watching this the first time -- watching Matias Duarte act like what he was showing was new. (19:30: "To scroll through my contact list, I just give it a flick...") Between that, and watching Jon Rubinstein wishing he could be Steve Jobs (I'm going to swoop in and save this company!) it was downright painful to watch.
I've told him many times that he should use a word processor, but he just doesn't understand. I tell him time and again where the office program is, and when prodded to try it, he still hunts through Firefox's menus trying to find the office program. The closest he gets to using a word processor is an input box in Firefox, which causes other problems. The worst is that it is too easy to lose a document.
Sounds like your dad would be a good candidate for Google Docs.
- runs in a browser
- autosaves continually
If you don't want his documents in google docs (either because they're The Man, or it's The Cloud, or both), roll your own with jquery and a rich-text editor like CKEditor or TinyMCE.
> ... and my SL DVD is sitting nearby so I can get straight
> back to where I am if it all goes horribly wrong.
You don't have a time machine drive? :-)
> Thunderbolt is headed the way of Firewire, fast.
You mean it's useful, and it'll be around for a dozen years or so? Fine by me. Working in a largely Mac shop, FireWire was damn handy. It was MUCH faster than USB for many years, you could boot from a FW drive, and Target Disk Mode was a gift from the heavens (though it made its debut with SCSI on a PowerBook, IIRC) which took things to the logical extreme: you could put Mac #1 into TDM and then boot Mac #2 from Mac #1's drive. SO USEFUL. And we were doing that back in 1998.