Yeah, and a $2 matte piece of plastic is just as good as matte, acid-evaporated glass (or whatever the hell they do)...
Come on, grow a clue: any film laid over a display reduces the light output, muddies the colors, and almost certainly scratches the display by sandwiching dust against the display glass.
Since when does ugly mean 'business looks'? MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, svelte, good-looking machines that are actually designed before being built; I didn't know that meant non-business. For my part, when I see a Windows user, I assume incompetence and sub-middle management, MacBook Pro users I allow myself a bit of hope that they have a clue, quite often I'm pleasantly surprised.
Yeah, hate to tell you, most slashdotters *were* this kid. If you weren't, consider for a moment that you spent way too much time being popular and not nearly enough time burning your hands with soldering irons and reading Radio Shack's electronics books- go read wired instead.
I was more competent with computers than any friends I had back in the C64/Apple ][ days, and yeah I was about 12. Schools didn't have them, but I was running my school's networks as soon as they *had* networks when I was about 16ish, and the rest is history.
Honestly I really miss the days before "IT" was an industry and before these damned cert's. Now, every weenie and his brother after quick cash goes and reads a few books and gets their MCSE and despite not truly understanding subnet masks, masquerading, latency, or collisions, gets a job building networks that I, or someone else with clue, eventually comes along and fixes.
I'd take a natural 12-year old geek over a "thoroughly-trained" MCSE any day.
I'm also a little distressed that this kid is called a network admin when it seems that his main accomplishment is cleaning up M$'s piece-of-crap operating systems.
The difference is like a $4.99 audio cable from WalMart and a $54.99 cable with shielding and gold-plated connectors.
The WalMart special will always win the masses who are fine with 95% success. Any professional will tell you that 4.99% pushing reliability to 99.99% is worth every penny of the $50 you spend.
USB is a generic consumer protocol for general utility, ask any secretary about how USB thumb drives are the best things since the invention of the weekend. FIrewire (and firewire 800, now) is the only general-use port any professional with any clue will use for audio, video, external drives, scanners, etc.. (Fiber-channel and other niche equipment not withstanding.)
CNet unfortunately shows their colors with this article. They are sadly, pure consumer, both their readers and writers. No pro trusts USB for anything but powering toys from Think Geek.
As has been pointed out in passing, there's one way to deal with this, boycott U2. I'm sorry it happened to them, but yep, its over for me. U2 has been added to the media axis-of-evil in my book.
Back in the day, making copies of vinyl records was near impossible, making copies of tapes was easier, but degraded, now with CD's and computers, its trivial. So U2's solution? Burn the innovators!
I have no problem with artists being paid. I have a problem attacking innovators whose improvements accidentally break the coincidental copy-protection that existed for years.
Welcome to my black-list you ignorant paranoid luddites.
As Engadget does too often for my taste, the review misses the point of this product entirely. Please pull your head out of the tech-sheets long enough to look at the thing as a 'product' not a 'laptop'
The MacBook Air is not for old-school hardware-centric geeks. Its not for 'road warriors'. In fact, I think the crafty (doubtless purposeful) acronym "MBA" should tell you alot. This product is designed for management types, social types, the fringe of the tech-savvy users. I will go so far as to say if you don't love the MBA, you're not in the the target market group. All the MBA nay-sayers remind me of film critics panning a movie like StarWars saying how trite, contrived, overstated, and juvenile it is. The fact is that for millions (billions?) of people, StarWars is the magnum opus of film. If you don't agree, you're not wrong, worse you're just he wrong reviewer, and too tunnel-visioned to realize it.
This article actually comes closest to the truth by repeating itself on how solid the keyboard/engineering 'feels'. Bingo! Two points. (I'd have to see the audio port in question- that sounds like a possible legitimate problem.) But look, the target market doesn't care about how much gigahurtses or how many RAMS it has... The target market for the MBA cares about looking really good at client meeting and having a beautiful, dependable machine. And by this measure, the MBA solidly delivers.
The only competent criticism I've seen from this review (or really from any review) is the lack of 3G/Edge built in for always-on internet. While I'm sure it would be a great boost to the product and the image of the MBA to have it, I say with almost certainty that this was an issue with the carriers, not Apple's engineers.
Finally a smidge about the tech: 2gb isn't enough for you? 2gb is overkill except for hardcore adobe geeks. I'm pleased they put that much in. MacBooks ship with 1gb, and almost nobody ever goes over 2gb. Remember, this is OSX, not Windows. Ethernet, HD, processor: all are ample for the aforementioned target market. No optical drive? for what? Who actually installs software after you buy the machine? Oh, I get one for $99? Should I buy two incase I need to install the software again? Are you familiar with the target market yet? This is a laptop for people who don't like computers, to love.
I've got a better idea; lets just make it illegal for anyone to be smarter than anyone else, that way we can protect StupidPeople from anyone who could do anything remotely intelligent and take advantage of their pea brains. Oh wait, I think Kurt Vonnegut already sketched this out. Way to go FUD-mongering luddite sheeple. If you haven't read Harrison Bergeron, I highly recommend it, its the eventual conclusion of this kind of thinking. One round of lobotomies, coming up!
Answer: making quality products instead of marketing vehicles.
But in all seriousness, Apple has (with a couple of over-emphasized exceptions) put out well-balanced, well-made hardware, model after model. Apple buys quality components, they don't skimp to get $400 desktops on the market sporting their logo that end up on home shopping network at 3am. The company's quality-design-over-marketing approach continues to baffle the PC industry and its amazing to me.
Interview goes like this: Hi, I'm a StupidPerson(tm). I protested something I didn't understand to puke FUD to the masses. Now I learned a couple facts (wow! facts are cool!) and now I'm going to make money and sell a book about me not being (as) stupid anymore. Buy lots of copies guys!
(and re: nuclear waste, they're called breeder reactors guys learn some before thinking about being anti-nuke)
I hate to be the bleeding-heart liberal here, but I can see this expanding quickly into Matrix-like farms of captive dogs (birds? cats? -whatever has the best performance/cost ratio I'd think) who are fed thousands of images a day to sort-for-food.
I can imagine these facilities as being very out-of-country and very sub-par in terms of quality of life. The truth is that neural nets are just better at some types of analysis than others, and animals are a really really cheap form of self-contained, self-ordering neural nets with zero development cost.
Lets hope (strong)AI research gets up to speed before we see fidonet take on a new sinister meaning.
While there are others in the world, lets face it, we're talking about Apple fans... While there are 'fanboys' who follow the company blindly, these are in the minority.
I'm getting sick and tired of the stereotyping of Apple pundits as fanboys. Lets get some facts straight about me, and I think the majority of Apple fans reading Slashdot:
1. We are technically savvy.
2. We know the face of the technology today and what products are being offered in the marketplace.
3. We use Apple's products because they range from equal to much better than the products of other companies.
4. We are harder on Apple as a company than non-fans simply because our criticism is more informed.
5. The only 'psychology' of our platform-choice is that of wanting machines that work elegantly and efficiently. It's no deeper than that.
6. Before using the term 'fanboy' to describe anyone who chooses to champion Apple and its products, I ask that you buy a Mac, and use one for a month. The vast majority of flame-spreaders out there either haven't used OS X or used it with the mindset that anything that wasn't exactly like Windows was 'wrong'.
7. For the record, I hate being the underdog. I think most other Apple users do too. Instead of asking "why we like being the underdog", how about asking "why do so many people use a platform that puts them in the position as the underdog", maybe there's a reason, and maybe it isn't psychological, maybe its technical.
Mobile phone towers are many, many times more total output. Yes, both transmit in the microwave spectrum, but the 'notch' in the microwave spectrum that resonates water (and thereby heats your food, cooks your brain) is extremely tight (2.45 Ghz). If you're above it or below it, the water molecules in your body (or food) simply won't vibrate/resonate and there's no heating. And yeah, people use 'radiation' all the time to invoke the panic of ionizing nuclear radiation (bad) with electromagnetic radiation (mostly harmless). (Meanwhile these same people go suntan in the name of health, basking in the glow of an unshielded fusion reactor. Yay humanity.)...People who live by the sword get shot by those who dont.
Yep, basically one word: Windows.
Microsoft fanboys take a chair, please. Microsoft has single-handedly changed the image of computers from a 1950s/60's/70's "modern marvel" into a troublesome piece of shit. I love my computer(s), and I know many who do, the funny thing is that there's a strong correlation between Windows use and perception that computers "suck".
Put simply, because of Microsoft people do not trust their computers. People need to feel secure to adopt new things, and Microsoft has never provided this.
John Dvorak is advising Apple to cease all efforts on the iPod, citing the portable music player business as a 'buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies.' With Apple's image as a 'hot company that can do no wrong' on the line, Dvorak warns that the extremely fad-prone marketplace for portable music players will quickly turn the 'hot' iPod passe'. Unless the company has several new models in the pipeline to release after the original offering, he says, they're likely to fail. 'If it's smart it will call the iPod a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.'
When the iPod was released, the market was dominated by a some gee-whizmo MP3 players and lots and lots of CD-players. Nothing like the iPod was available. This is almost the exact same conditions that exist in the cell phone market. What Dvorak (and many others) are missing is that the iPhone can be called 'just another phone' as much as the iPod can be called 'just another MP3 player'. Apple makes new(ish) technology accessible, period. The cell phones today; for all of their features buried deep down in clunky menus, aren't accessible. Everyone remember how well the Diamond Rio's UI worked? The iPhone will be a huge success, not because its a great cell phone, but because its a step above. Its not a competitor, instead, like the iPod, its a market-killer.
Does our favorite Seattle coffee company know about the lunar base and that these 6-month shifts will be more that 4 blocks from 'the mermaid'? Get them a memo, stat!
Honestly I'm getting really miffed at Slashdot running a story every time some cheezy app comes out for windows that gives some fragment of the Macintosh (or BeOS, NeXT, Linux, et al) functionality to the opressed Microsoft prolitariate. Here, run this story: "Full Macintosh Functionality Avaliable to Windows Users at Local Apple Stores". Seriously folks, live file searching, system-wide spell check, bindable machine control, all this and more is what Mac users expect and receive every single day from their computers without any software installs. This site is about innovation, not catch-up.
Read what the card does before nay-saying. It goes like this, the Windows TCP stack is *so* bad (how bad is it??) that by running a network stack in a dedicated little linux distro and handing the pre-chewed packets to the PCI bus, you actually get faster throughput than if windows handled the packets. While there's a small advantage in offloading the processing load, the real edge is that Linux has a much more effecient network stack than that of windows. This leaves one wondering how much more performance improvement we could get by tearing away more and more functions from this sad OS or just installing a better OS from the begining. (Free advice to game makers, save your customers the $200 and put out a Linux version first.)
Part of this also has to do with the operating system; OSX antialiases everything you see on screen, greatly reducing the windows-reasons for insanely high resolution. Apple is all about overall-experience, not specs. In this case, more resoultion can be handy for some applications but more resolution also means more stuck pixels and higher graphics-processor demands, etc. Apple's resolutions aren't 'poor' by a long shot, but instead a 'balanced' spec overall.
You know... there was a time where this article on/. would have been titled "from the I-don't-know-Jack department..." and would have been shown as a humerous example of cluelessness, but somehow the readership (and editors?!) have become techno-groupies instead of geeks-of-clue. (ex: one of the items is that 'the game won't work on a pc 100% of the time' - if you're in this category, find another forum and *leave* slashdot, kkthx bye) Get together or become the next Wired.
If you haven't see it; see it. This is David Cronenberg's statement on video games, reality, and, yes, video game controllers... The movie, (and game in the movie) is eXistenZ.
A user isn't alone in their efforts to understand any modern technical system. In fact, there is an army of user-interface designers trying very hard to make this 'simple and straightforwards' to reduce the number of tech-support calls. Any computer, toaster, or VCR that's half-well-designed wants to be understood, if you'll forgive my personification.
So... Don't fight them! More often than not, people have assumed a machine/task is difficult long before making an attempt (and indirectly working with the army of engineers helping them).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and a $2 matte piece of plastic is just as good as matte, acid-evaporated glass (or whatever the hell they do)...
Come on, grow a clue: any film laid over a display reduces the light output, muddies the colors, and almost certainly scratches the display by sandwiching dust against the display glass.
Since when does ugly mean 'business looks'? MacBook Pros are certainly sleek, svelte, good-looking machines that are actually designed before being built; I didn't know that meant non-business. For my part, when I see a Windows user, I assume incompetence and sub-middle management, MacBook Pro users I allow myself a bit of hope that they have a clue, quite often I'm pleasantly surprised.
Step 1: packet sniff
Step 2: get creative with myspace pages of offending locker-stuffers
Step 3: laugh inside
Step 4: rinse/repeat as necessary with email, school blackboard, etc.
Yeah, hate to tell you, most slashdotters *were* this kid. If you weren't, consider for a moment that you spent way too much time being popular and not nearly enough time burning your hands with soldering irons and reading Radio Shack's electronics books- go read wired instead.
I was more competent with computers than any friends I had back in the C64/Apple ][ days, and yeah I was about 12. Schools didn't have them, but I was running my school's networks as soon as they *had* networks when I was about 16ish, and the rest is history.
Honestly I really miss the days before "IT" was an industry and before these damned cert's. Now, every weenie and his brother after quick cash goes and reads a few books and gets their MCSE and despite not truly understanding subnet masks, masquerading, latency, or collisions, gets a job building networks that I, or someone else with clue, eventually comes along and fixes.
I'd take a natural 12-year old geek over a "thoroughly-trained" MCSE any day.
I'm also a little distressed that this kid is called a network admin when it seems that his main accomplishment is cleaning up M$'s piece-of-crap operating systems.
The difference is like a $4.99 audio cable from WalMart and a $54.99 cable with shielding and gold-plated connectors.
The WalMart special will always win the masses who are fine with 95% success. Any professional will tell you that 4.99% pushing reliability to 99.99% is worth every penny of the $50 you spend.
USB is a generic consumer protocol for general utility, ask any secretary about how USB thumb drives are the best things since the invention of the weekend.
FIrewire (and firewire 800, now) is the only general-use port any professional with any clue will use for audio, video, external drives, scanners, etc.. (Fiber-channel and other niche equipment not withstanding.)
CNet unfortunately shows their colors with this article. They are sadly, pure consumer, both their readers and writers. No pro trusts USB for anything but powering toys from Think Geek.
As has been pointed out in passing, there's one way to deal with this, boycott U2. I'm sorry it happened to them, but yep, its over for me. U2 has been added to the media axis-of-evil in my book.
Back in the day, making copies of vinyl records was near impossible, making copies of tapes was easier, but degraded, now with CD's and computers, its trivial. So U2's solution? Burn the innovators!
I have no problem with artists being paid. I have a problem attacking innovators whose improvements accidentally break the coincidental copy-protection that existed for years.
Welcome to my black-list you ignorant paranoid luddites.
As Engadget does too often for my taste, the review misses the point of this product entirely. Please pull your head out of the tech-sheets long enough to look at the thing as a 'product' not a 'laptop'
The MacBook Air is not for old-school hardware-centric geeks. Its not for 'road warriors'. In fact, I think the crafty (doubtless purposeful) acronym "MBA" should tell you alot. This product is designed for management types, social types, the fringe of the tech-savvy users. I will go so far as to say if you don't love the MBA, you're not in the the target market group. All the MBA nay-sayers remind me of film critics panning a movie like StarWars saying how trite, contrived, overstated, and juvenile it is. The fact is that for millions (billions?) of people, StarWars is the magnum opus of film. If you don't agree, you're not wrong, worse you're just he wrong reviewer, and too tunnel-visioned to realize it.
This article actually comes closest to the truth by repeating itself on how solid the keyboard/engineering 'feels'. Bingo! Two points. (I'd have to see the audio port in question- that sounds like a possible legitimate problem.) But look, the target market doesn't care about how much gigahurtses or how many RAMS it has... The target market for the MBA cares about looking really good at client meeting and having a beautiful, dependable machine. And by this measure, the MBA solidly delivers.
The only competent criticism I've seen from this review (or really from any review) is the lack of 3G/Edge built in for always-on internet. While I'm sure it would be a great boost to the product and the image of the MBA to have it, I say with almost certainty that this was an issue with the carriers, not Apple's engineers.
Finally a smidge about the tech: 2gb isn't enough for you? 2gb is overkill except for hardcore adobe geeks. I'm pleased they put that much in. MacBooks ship with 1gb, and almost nobody ever goes over 2gb. Remember, this is OSX, not Windows. Ethernet, HD, processor: all are ample for the aforementioned target market. No optical drive? for what? Who actually installs software after you buy the machine? Oh, I get one for $99? Should I buy two incase I need to install the software again? Are you familiar with the target market yet? This is a laptop for people who don't like computers, to love.
I've got a better idea; lets just make it illegal for anyone to be smarter than anyone else, that way we can protect StupidPeople from anyone who could do anything remotely intelligent and take advantage of their pea brains. Oh wait, I think Kurt Vonnegut already sketched this out. Way to go FUD-mongering luddite sheeple. If you haven't read Harrison Bergeron, I highly recommend it, its the eventual conclusion of this kind of thinking. One round of lobotomies, coming up!
Answer: making quality products instead of marketing vehicles.
But in all seriousness, Apple has (with a couple of over-emphasized exceptions) put out well-balanced, well-made hardware, model after model. Apple buys quality components, they don't skimp to get $400 desktops on the market sporting their logo that end up on home shopping network at 3am. The company's quality-design-over-marketing approach continues to baffle the PC industry and its amazing to me.
Interview goes like this: Hi, I'm a StupidPerson(tm). I protested something I didn't understand to puke FUD to the masses. Now I learned a couple facts (wow! facts are cool!) and now I'm going to make money and sell a book about me not being (as) stupid anymore. Buy lots of copies guys!
(and re: nuclear waste, they're called breeder reactors guys learn some before thinking about being anti-nuke)
I hate to be the bleeding-heart liberal here, but I can see this expanding quickly into Matrix-like farms of captive dogs (birds? cats? -whatever has the best performance/cost ratio I'd think) who are fed thousands of images a day to sort-for-food.
I can imagine these facilities as being very out-of-country and very sub-par in terms of quality of life. The truth is that neural nets are just better at some types of analysis than others, and animals are a really really cheap form of self-contained, self-ordering neural nets with zero development cost.
Lets hope (strong)AI research gets up to speed before we see fidonet take on a new sinister meaning.
While there are others in the world, lets face it, we're talking about Apple fans... While there are 'fanboys' who follow the company blindly, these are in the minority.
I'm getting sick and tired of the stereotyping of Apple pundits as fanboys. Lets get some facts straight about me, and I think the majority of Apple fans reading Slashdot:
1. We are technically savvy.
2. We know the face of the technology today and what products are being offered in the marketplace.
3. We use Apple's products because they range from equal to much better than the products of other companies.
4. We are harder on Apple as a company than non-fans simply because our criticism is more informed.
5. The only 'psychology' of our platform-choice is that of wanting machines that work elegantly and efficiently. It's no deeper than that.
6. Before using the term 'fanboy' to describe anyone who chooses to champion Apple and its products, I ask that you buy a Mac, and use one for a month. The vast majority of flame-spreaders out there either haven't used OS X or used it with the mindset that anything that wasn't exactly like Windows was 'wrong'.
7. For the record, I hate being the underdog. I think most other Apple users do too. Instead of asking "why we like being the underdog", how about asking "why do so many people use a platform that puts them in the position as the underdog", maybe there's a reason, and maybe it isn't psychological, maybe its technical.
Mobile phone towers are many, many times more total output. Yes, both transmit in the microwave spectrum, but the 'notch' in the microwave spectrum that resonates water (and thereby heats your food, cooks your brain) is extremely tight (2.45 Ghz). If you're above it or below it, the water molecules in your body (or food) simply won't vibrate/resonate and there's no heating. And yeah, people use 'radiation' all the time to invoke the panic of ionizing nuclear radiation (bad) with electromagnetic radiation (mostly harmless). (Meanwhile these same people go suntan in the name of health, basking in the glow of an unshielded fusion reactor. Yay humanity.) ...People who live by the sword get shot by those who dont.
Yep, basically one word: Windows. Microsoft fanboys take a chair, please. Microsoft has single-handedly changed the image of computers from a 1950s/60's/70's "modern marvel" into a troublesome piece of shit. I love my computer(s), and I know many who do, the funny thing is that there's a strong correlation between Windows use and perception that computers "suck". Put simply, because of Microsoft people do not trust their computers. People need to feel secure to adopt new things, and Microsoft has never provided this.
John Dvorak is advising Apple to cease all efforts on the iPod, citing the portable music player business as a 'buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies.' With Apple's image as a 'hot company that can do no wrong' on the line, Dvorak warns that the extremely fad-prone marketplace for portable music players will quickly turn the 'hot' iPod passe'. Unless the company has several new models in the pipeline to release after the original offering, he says, they're likely to fail. 'If it's smart it will call the iPod a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.'
When the iPod was released, the market was dominated by a some gee-whizmo MP3 players and lots and lots of CD-players. Nothing like the iPod was available. This is almost the exact same conditions that exist in the cell phone market. What Dvorak (and many others) are missing is that the iPhone can be called 'just another phone' as much as the iPod can be called 'just another MP3 player'. Apple makes new(ish) technology accessible, period. The cell phones today; for all of their features buried deep down in clunky menus, aren't accessible. Everyone remember how well the Diamond Rio's UI worked? The iPhone will be a huge success, not because its a great cell phone, but because its a step above. Its not a competitor, instead, like the iPod, its a market-killer.
Revenue kit for the enterprising city:
1. pick a major company.
2. accuse them of a bomb scare.
3. wait for payoff check.
great precedent guys...
Does our favorite Seattle coffee company know about the lunar base and that these 6-month shifts will be more that 4 blocks from 'the mermaid'? Get them a memo, stat!
Honestly I'm getting really miffed at Slashdot running a story every time some cheezy app comes out for windows that gives some fragment of the Macintosh (or BeOS, NeXT, Linux, et al) functionality to the opressed Microsoft prolitariate. Here, run this story: "Full Macintosh Functionality Avaliable to Windows Users at Local Apple Stores". Seriously folks, live file searching, system-wide spell check, bindable machine control, all this and more is what Mac users expect and receive every single day from their computers without any software installs. This site is about innovation, not catch-up.
Read what the card does before nay-saying. It goes like this, the Windows TCP stack is *so* bad (how bad is it??) that by running a network stack in a dedicated little linux distro and handing the pre-chewed packets to the PCI bus, you actually get faster throughput than if windows handled the packets.
While there's a small advantage in offloading the processing load, the real edge is that Linux has a much more effecient network stack than that of windows.
This leaves one wondering how much more performance improvement we could get by tearing away more and more functions from this sad OS or just installing a better OS from the begining.
(Free advice to game makers, save your customers the $200 and put out a Linux version first.)
Part of this also has to do with the operating system; OSX antialiases everything you see on screen, greatly reducing the windows-reasons for insanely high resolution. Apple is all about overall-experience, not specs. In this case, more resoultion can be handy for some applications but more resolution also means more stuck pixels and higher graphics-processor demands, etc. Apple's resolutions aren't 'poor' by a long shot, but instead a 'balanced' spec overall.
You know... there was a time where this article on /. would have been titled "from the I-don't-know-Jack department..." and would have been shown as a humerous example of cluelessness, but somehow the readership (and editors?!) have become techno-groupies instead of geeks-of-clue. (ex: one of the items is that 'the game won't work on a pc 100% of the time' - if you're in this category, find another forum and *leave* slashdot, kkthx bye) Get together or become the next Wired.
If you haven't see it; see it. This is David Cronenberg's statement on video games, reality, and, yes, video game controllers... The movie, (and game in the movie) is eXistenZ.
A user isn't alone in their efforts to understand any modern technical system. In fact, there is an army of user-interface designers trying very hard to make this 'simple and straightforwards' to reduce the number of tech-support calls. Any computer, toaster, or VCR that's half-well-designed wants to be understood, if you'll forgive my personification.
So... Don't fight them! More often than not, people have assumed a machine/task is difficult long before making an attempt (and indirectly working with the army of engineers helping them).
Yeah, the company was called Centraal, the product was "RealNames" or whatever - they were right back then in the middle of the .com bubble. Morons.