Spoken like someone who gets their news from Slashdot, zealously uses and advocates Linux, and doesn't own a Mac.
Their OS releases are not 'updates', they bring significant new functionality while evolving an already great code base. They only APPEAR to be 'incremental' because of their versioning scheme, but each release packs in more upgrade than any corresponding major version upgrade of windows.
And you have to also bear in mind that Apple's target demographic doesn't give a crap about a few bucks here and there. They're not after YOU, they're not trying to capture the low end $500 dell market, or the "build your own and run Linux" market, nor are they trying to capture the "$3000 gaming rig j00 g0t pwned" market.
They're after the upper middle demographic who has money to burn and wants quality at any price. People who aren't going to feel nickeled and dimed over 30 bucks. People who are far more interested in getting reliable quality stuff than saving a few bucks.
I would not call myself a fanboy, I just really like my Mac. (But I'm not trying to have sex with it, like this guy.) It's my "I'm home from work, not the network admin anymore today, and just not going to have a fight with my computer tonight" machine. I bought it because I wanted something less aggravating than windows, at any price. This is exactly the same reason why I sleep on a Tempurpedic and drive a BMW... quality and reliability are more important to me than paying a little more.
People like me are Apple's target demographic, and we just don't think they're being at all unreasonable about their pricing for the quality of product that they put out. Especially compared to all the other total shit hardware and software out there.
It's boring to say 'firefox 3' and more fun to say 'gran paradiso'.
Not even because it's fun. Try reading the Mozilla forums sometime.
The browsers are given development codenames to SIGNIFICANTLY differentiate the development nightly/alpha/beta releases from the blessed official version releases. They don't want Grandpa Joe Sixpack coming along to download this "FoxFire thingy" he heard his kids talk about and accidently wind up with Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1, (which may or may not work as advertised because, well, it's an alpha) when he's obviously not interested in a development release.
Another reason is that it's less confusing and ambiguous, especially when you have multiple versions of Firefox. It's easy to get confused about which feature went into which product when you have "Firefox 1.0", "Firefox 1.5", "Firefox 2.0", "Firefox 3.0" and so forth. At least from a developer perspective, there's more uniqueness to "Phoenix", "Deer Park", "Bon Echo", and "Gran Paradiso" releases from the associated mental imagery.
But keeping them distinct and less noticable from the end user perspective is the most important reason.
They just got every egomaniac out there to carry around yet another 'MINI' branded keyfob on his keychain and show it off to friends, thus greatly improving their word-of-mouth brand recognition. And they've managed to make (some) people WANT to look at 'MINI' branded billboards.
Windows Fiji will feature a more powerful sidebar, Monaco, a music authoring tool similar to Apple's Garageband, default playback of HD-DVD, more advanced Speech Recognition, and new themes, icons, wallpapers, games, and minor tweaks to almost everything. While in Windows Vienna the current interface will be completely stripped, no more explorer shells, and taskbars. No start menu. Probably no toolbars, or menus and Speech Recognition will become a major input device. One thing is for certain, Vienna won't be just an operating system, but a new generation in computing.
So Fiji is going to rip off all the cool features of Leopard and incorporate into Vista while Vienna aims to be the next generation of computing. Why does this sound so familiar... oh wait....:)
And didn't we just recently have an article on stupid movie uses of computers that blasted the "talking computer" from Star Trek as being a completely useless interface? So why is this a good thing?
But it's also Microsoft. "2003" was codespeak for 2007, so "2008" means 2015 or something... and all the cool new features will be dropped for reasons of infeasibility anyway.
As the movies have taught us, when an ice shelf snaps the entire northern hemisphere freezes solid. All y'all up there in the northlands are f**ked. And where I live in San Diego, housing costs will soar.:)
This isn't Free Software Happy Land, though, we're talking about businesses. Personally I think that adopting Linux should also come with adopting some of its philosophies...
That's an idealistic view, and completely out of whack for most people. Remember that most businesses (at least in the US) are small businesses, meaning that the IT person usually wears other hats. That IT person is more likely to be a Mom or Pop type who just wants the damn thing to work and doesn't want to go fiddling with source. The moment they upgrade and there's bustage, if they don't switch outright then they're going to make a mental note that it fucked up the business for a week and the next time there's upgrading to be done, they're going to consider something with better backwards compatibility, ie Windows Server or something.
The analogy to your view would imply that just because I drive a car, I'm interested in doing the maintenance myself.
If you use Windows, do you automatically share Redmond's philosophies? I didn't think so, or you wouldn't be reading Slashdot. So why should Linux users necessarily share Linux's philosophies?
I've given up trying to educate my parents. It's easier to take a few simple precautions and not explain.
1) Get a hardware firewall/NAT router. This is a given if they have multiple machines, but for even one machine the hardware firewall protects against most active inbound attacks.
2) Set them up with Firefox and remove all program shortcuts to IE. (Or at least hide them real good.) Ditto for Thunderbird and Outlook [Express] respectively.
3) Windows needs to be configured to automatically apply updates and reboot without user intervention.
4) Set up an antivirus/antispyware program configured to do (at least) weekly checks and automatically nuke anything it finds without asking for approval. Also have it configured to update automatically.
5) When the system does develop a problem due to "unauthorized" downloading, tell your parents how busy you are and how it'll be a few days before you can come over (or upstairs) and fix it. I find that keeping my parents afraid of inconvenience works better than trying to keep them afraid of making me angry (because no matter how much I yell, it doesn't matter). When they can't get their shit done, and they can't blame anyone else, they learn to think before they act.
My parents live on the East Coast and I live on the West Coast, so getting over to their place to fix their computer is a logistical nightmare. If they hose it to a point where I can't fix it via Remote Assistance, then they're fucked until I can find time to fly out there and fix it (generally not a high scheduling priority), or convince one of my friends back home to do it. (My friends are rarely willing, they have their own parental nightmares to deal with.) So the best solution to making them think before they act is to make them afraid of the downtime.
I'm going to rush right out and buy Symantec Antivirus for my Mac, because I'm scared now! Proof of concept means it actually works in the real world, right???
Sorry dude, I wish I had mod points to give you. Everyone ignores the fact that opening the kernel to the AV vendors means it's open to everyone else too... so it's just another attack vector. Sigh.
I also should have clarified in my example, not understanding a medical term that you heard on tv or the radio. Of course you'd ask a doctor to explain what it meant, just as you'd ask the network administrator fixing your computer what a podcast is when he casually mentions it.
I meant when the dissemination of the terminology is separated from the ability to casually inquire...e.g. tv, web page, newspaper, etc.
No, but googling one of these terms can be considered a form of asking what it means.
My point was that we sympathize with people who complain that there's too many terms, instead of expecting them to make at least some interrogatory effort to learn the terms. Whether they query another person or google is really immaterial, I was just emphasizing that google doesn't even require the effort of getting off the couch.
There will always be a percentage of the population that just doesn't understand. When you don't understand a medical term, you can google it. When you don't understand a "geek" term, you can still google it. Unless you've been living under a rock and don't know what the verb "to google" implies.
Just imagine... in the past, not understanding a medical term meant you had to get up and go to the library and find the medical dictionary in the reference section and look up what you wanted to know. It was a hassle. These days you don't even have to get off your couch to use Google, there is no hassle, it's a question of being too lazy or stupid.
The difference is, in our culture it's totally acceptable to say "I don't know what that newfangled thing is." and your ignorance is commiserated with instead of deprecated. We celebrate laziness and idiocy instead of telling them to "look it up, google it, it's even in the dictionary!".
I think the bigger problem is not so much the explosion of terminology, but that we celebrate such mediocrity.
I've done a lot of research on Skype lately. If you're running as a supernode, it only uses about 6k of bandwidth up and down, it doesn't monopolize your network connection.
And if you want to make sure you'll never be a supernode, just make sure you're behind a firewall/NAT. The criteria for being a supernode are fast processor, available memory, and fast UNFIREWALLED connection. It's very easy to make sure you're not a supernode by using a firewall. It's really not that big a deal, and certainly not worth being up in arms against.
If you want to be pissed off about Skype, there's bigger things to worry about. Among those:
Closed protocol RC4 obfuscation layer so that we can't see what's being transmitted Binary with anti-debugging techniques so we can't see what it's doing And so forth...
The Democrats have stopped every effort to require any type of identification as proof that you have the name you say you have.
Amen. In the 2004 election, I went to my precinct in San Diego. When they didn't ask the person in line in front of me for ID, I was appalled. So I just held out my ID instead of telling them my name.
The girl said "I don't need your ID, just your name." I said "no, I want you to verify my identity before you give away my vote to someone who isn't me." She said "I'm not allowed to look at ID." I said "of course, because we wouldn't want the illegal mexicans without ID to have a problem voting."
When I called the San Diego voter affairs office to complain, they said this was just SOP. Our tax dollars at work...
Today Virgin Atlantic strongly expressed its lack of desire to continue to do business with frequent business travelers by making their lives more difficult.
Not that any of the road warriors in my company regularly fly on Virgin Atlantic, but it's already landed on our corporate "we'd prefer you didn't use this airline/car rental/hotel/etc for business travel" list.
This seems to be a simple concept, if you make it hard for business travelers to get work done, they'll travel with someone else who won't get in their way. I don't understand why an airline doesn't get this.
But OSX doesn't require activation, so you can use it on multiple computers.
Let's assume you have three computers in your mom's basement. Microsoft will shit themselves if you don't pay for three copies of XP. (Not that they'd know because you got it from a torrent, but play ball with me on that.) Assuming XP Pro, since it's the only one that doesn't suck ass, 3 x $300 == $900.
Assume you bought OSX 10.0. 10.1 was free. 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 cost money too. But you only need one copy. 120 (10.0) + 120 (.2) + 120 (.3) + 120 (.4) = $480.
Hm. On a single computer, OSX is cheaper. On THREE computers, OSX is cheaper. BY HALF. Even with three upgrades. Oh, and those upgrades? They're the full version, not the crippled 'upgrade' version MS is happy to sell you for 100 bucks less.
Granted the apple hardware costs more, but it doesn't suck. (Rev.A notwithstanding.) And macs come with lots of useful software on them which would cost you hundreds more for your windows machine. But OSX is vastly superior to XP.
(Yes yes, I know linux is free. Not the point of my comparison.)
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like someone who gets their news from Slashdot, zealously uses and advocates Linux, and doesn't own a Mac.
Their OS releases are not 'updates', they bring significant new functionality while evolving an already great code base. They only APPEAR to be 'incremental' because of their versioning scheme, but each release packs in more upgrade than any corresponding major version upgrade of windows.
And you have to also bear in mind that Apple's target demographic doesn't give a crap about a few bucks here and there. They're not after YOU, they're not trying to capture the low end $500 dell market, or the "build your own and run Linux" market, nor are they trying to capture the "$3000 gaming rig j00 g0t pwned" market.
They're after the upper middle demographic who has money to burn and wants quality at any price. People who aren't going to feel nickeled and dimed over 30 bucks. People who are far more interested in getting reliable quality stuff than saving a few bucks.
I would not call myself a fanboy, I just really like my Mac. (But I'm not trying to have sex with it, like this guy.) It's my "I'm home from work, not the network admin anymore today, and just not going to have a fight with my computer tonight" machine. I bought it because I wanted something less aggravating than windows, at any price. This is exactly the same reason why I sleep on a Tempurpedic and drive a BMW... quality and reliability are more important to me than paying a little more.
People like me are Apple's target demographic, and we just don't think they're being at all unreasonable about their pricing for the quality of product that they put out. Especially compared to all the other total shit hardware and software out there.
It's boring to say 'firefox 3' and more fun to say 'gran paradiso'.
Not even because it's fun. Try reading the Mozilla forums sometime.
The browsers are given development codenames to SIGNIFICANTLY differentiate the development nightly/alpha/beta releases from the blessed official version releases. They don't want Grandpa Joe Sixpack coming along to download this "FoxFire thingy" he heard his kids talk about and accidently wind up with Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1, (which may or may not work as advertised because, well, it's an alpha) when he's obviously not interested in a development release.
Another reason is that it's less confusing and ambiguous, especially when you have multiple versions of Firefox. It's easy to get confused about which feature went into which product when you have "Firefox 1.0", "Firefox 1.5", "Firefox 2.0", "Firefox 3.0" and so forth. At least from a developer perspective, there's more uniqueness to "Phoenix", "Deer Park", "Bon Echo", and "Gran Paradiso" releases from the associated mental imagery.
But keeping them distinct and less noticable from the end user perspective is the most important reason.
They just got every egomaniac out there to carry around yet another 'MINI' branded keyfob on his keychain and show it off to friends, thus greatly improving their word-of-mouth brand recognition. And they've managed to make (some) people WANT to look at 'MINI' branded billboards.
LOL... i swear, i'd mod you +6 if i could. :)
Windows Fiji will feature a more powerful sidebar, Monaco, a music authoring tool similar to Apple's Garageband, default playback of HD-DVD, more advanced Speech Recognition, and new themes, icons, wallpapers, games, and minor tweaks to almost everything.
:)
While in Windows Vienna the current interface will be completely stripped, no more explorer shells, and taskbars. No start menu. Probably no toolbars, or menus and Speech Recognition will become a major input device. One thing is for certain, Vienna won't be just an operating system, but a new generation in computing.
So Fiji is going to rip off all the cool features of Leopard and incorporate into Vista while Vienna aims to be the next generation of computing. Why does this sound so familiar... oh wait....
And didn't we just recently have an article on stupid movie uses of computers that blasted the "talking computer" from Star Trek as being a completely useless interface? So why is this a good thing?
But it's also Microsoft. "2003" was codespeak for 2007, so "2008" means 2015 or something... and all the cool new features will be dropped for reasons of infeasibility anyway.
As the movies have taught us, when an ice shelf snaps the entire northern hemisphere freezes solid. All y'all up there in the northlands are f**ked. And where I live in San Diego, housing costs will soar. :)
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm..... universal donut....
*drool*
This isn't Free Software Happy Land, though, we're talking about businesses. Personally I think that adopting Linux should also come with adopting some of its philosophies...
That's an idealistic view, and completely out of whack for most people. Remember that most businesses (at least in the US) are small businesses, meaning that the IT person usually wears other hats. That IT person is more likely to be a Mom or Pop type who just wants the damn thing to work and doesn't want to go fiddling with source. The moment they upgrade and there's bustage, if they don't switch outright then they're going to make a mental note that it fucked up the business for a week and the next time there's upgrading to be done, they're going to consider something with better backwards compatibility, ie Windows Server or something.
The analogy to your view would imply that just because I drive a car, I'm interested in doing the maintenance myself.
If you use Windows, do you automatically share Redmond's philosophies? I didn't think so, or you wouldn't be reading Slashdot. So why should Linux users necessarily share Linux's philosophies?
When we go download copies of the ultimate edition, we gotta make sure we don't download a beta, er i mean release candidate, er... nevermind.
Seriously... anyone know the build id?
I've given up trying to educate my parents. It's easier to take a few simple precautions and not explain.
1) Get a hardware firewall/NAT router. This is a given if they have multiple machines, but for even one machine the hardware firewall protects against most active inbound attacks.
2) Set them up with Firefox and remove all program shortcuts to IE. (Or at least hide them real good.) Ditto for Thunderbird and Outlook [Express] respectively.
3) Windows needs to be configured to automatically apply updates and reboot without user intervention.
4) Set up an antivirus/antispyware program configured to do (at least) weekly checks and automatically nuke anything it finds without asking for approval. Also have it configured to update automatically.
5) When the system does develop a problem due to "unauthorized" downloading, tell your parents how busy you are and how it'll be a few days before you can come over (or upstairs) and fix it. I find that keeping my parents afraid of inconvenience works better than trying to keep them afraid of making me angry (because no matter how much I yell, it doesn't matter). When they can't get their shit done, and they can't blame anyone else, they learn to think before they act.
My parents live on the East Coast and I live on the West Coast, so getting over to their place to fix their computer is a logistical nightmare. If they hose it to a point where I can't fix it via Remote Assistance, then they're fucked until I can find time to fly out there and fix it (generally not a high scheduling priority), or convince one of my friends back home to do it. (My friends are rarely willing, they have their own parental nightmares to deal with.) So the best solution to making them think before they act is to make them afraid of the downtime.
I'm going to rush right out and buy Symantec Antivirus for my Mac, because I'm scared now! Proof of concept means it actually works in the real world, right???
</sarcasm>
LOL -- I wish I could mod that higher than +5 :)
Sorry dude, I wish I had mod points to give you. Everyone ignores the fact that opening the kernel to the AV vendors means it's open to everyone else too... so it's just another attack vector. Sigh.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! :)
I just wanna see the exploding nipples!
And when you drive into it, it opens up a wormhole to.... Santa Clara, CA.
Hm... and it'll do double duty solving transportation problems too!
Nature does all of these things without following a single blueprint.
nit: I'd call DNA a blueprint. But that's just me.
I also should have clarified in my example, not understanding a medical term that you heard on tv or the radio. Of course you'd ask a doctor to explain what it meant, just as you'd ask the network administrator fixing your computer what a podcast is when he casually mentions it.
I meant when the dissemination of the terminology is separated from the ability to casually inquire...e.g. tv, web page, newspaper, etc.
No, but googling one of these terms can be considered a form of asking what it means.
My point was that we sympathize with people who complain that there's too many terms, instead of expecting them to make at least some interrogatory effort to learn the terms. Whether they query another person or google is really immaterial, I was just emphasizing that google doesn't even require the effort of getting off the couch.
There will always be a percentage of the population that just doesn't understand. When you don't understand a medical term, you can google it. When you don't understand a "geek" term, you can still google it. Unless you've been living under a rock and don't know what the verb "to google" implies.
Just imagine... in the past, not understanding a medical term meant you had to get up and go to the library and find the medical dictionary in the reference section and look up what you wanted to know. It was a hassle. These days you don't even have to get off your couch to use Google, there is no hassle, it's a question of being too lazy or stupid.
The difference is, in our culture it's totally acceptable to say "I don't know what that newfangled thing is." and your ignorance is commiserated with instead of deprecated. We celebrate laziness and idiocy instead of telling them to "look it up, google it, it's even in the dictionary!".
I think the bigger problem is not so much the explosion of terminology, but that we celebrate such mediocrity.
I've done a lot of research on Skype lately. If you're running as a supernode, it only uses about 6k of bandwidth up and down, it doesn't monopolize your network connection.
And if you want to make sure you'll never be a supernode, just make sure you're behind a firewall/NAT. The criteria for being a supernode are fast processor, available memory, and fast UNFIREWALLED connection. It's very easy to make sure you're not a supernode by using a firewall. It's really not that big a deal, and certainly not worth being up in arms against.
If you want to be pissed off about Skype, there's bigger things to worry about. Among those:
Closed protocol
RC4 obfuscation layer so that we can't see what's being transmitted
Binary with anti-debugging techniques so we can't see what it's doing
And so forth...
Yeah, with Apple having ONLY 75% of the market share for portable music players, I'm sure they're just absolutely terrified.
The Democrats have stopped every effort to require any type of identification as proof that you have the name you say you have.
Amen. In the 2004 election, I went to my precinct in San Diego. When they didn't ask the person in line in front of me for ID, I was appalled. So I just held out my ID instead of telling them my name.
The girl said "I don't need your ID, just your name."
I said "no, I want you to verify my identity before you give away my vote to someone who isn't me."
She said "I'm not allowed to look at ID."
I said "of course, because we wouldn't want the illegal mexicans without ID to have a problem voting."
When I called the San Diego voter affairs office to complain, they said this was just SOP. Our tax dollars at work...
Today Virgin Atlantic strongly expressed its lack of desire to continue to do business with frequent business travelers by making their lives more difficult.
Not that any of the road warriors in my company regularly fly on Virgin Atlantic, but it's already landed on our corporate "we'd prefer you didn't use this airline/car rental/hotel/etc for business travel" list.
This seems to be a simple concept, if you make it hard for business travelers to get work done, they'll travel with someone else who won't get in their way. I don't understand why an airline doesn't get this.
But OSX doesn't require activation, so you can use it on multiple computers.
Let's assume you have three computers in your mom's basement. Microsoft will shit themselves if you don't pay for three copies of XP. (Not that they'd know because you got it from a torrent, but play ball with me on that.)
Assuming XP Pro, since it's the only one that doesn't suck ass, 3 x $300 == $900.
Assume you bought OSX 10.0. 10.1 was free. 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 cost money too. But you only need one copy.
120 (10.0) + 120 (.2) + 120 (.3) + 120 (.4) = $480.
Hm. On a single computer, OSX is cheaper. On THREE computers, OSX is cheaper. BY HALF. Even with three upgrades. Oh, and those upgrades? They're the full version, not the crippled 'upgrade' version MS is happy to sell you for 100 bucks less.
Granted the apple hardware costs more, but it doesn't suck. (Rev.A notwithstanding.) And macs come with lots of useful software on them which would cost you hundreds more for your windows machine. But OSX is vastly superior to XP.
(Yes yes, I know linux is free. Not the point of my comparison.)