Is "if it didn't cost lots more than a more powerful x86 machine" a nitpick?
Nope. If you can't afford a Mac (or have other things you want to do with your money), that's your call.
I've generally found that, on the high end, Macs are priced quite competitively. Also, their laptops have generally been good deals for most of the history of the company.
However, the cheapest new Mac can't compete, in terms of raw power per dollar, to a good home-built budget box. If you are shopping in the under-$1000 range, and $ for ! is your only consideration, then buying a PC is a no-brainer.
I was complaining about people who whine about stupid nitpicks (such as the original/. posting for this article), and try to tell everybody that they would buy a mac if it were only not for that one thing, which is almost always untrue. Usually, they dislike Macs for various other zealotry-related and/or finacial reasons, and are offering excuses to cover for that fact.
What I want is a single processor 1GHz unit with no display with the ability to upgrade ram, hd, and potentially the video card for around $1000.
Now that the dual-head towers have been out, finding a used single-chip G4 for about a grand should be trivial.
Going to eBay was your first mistake. I've seen used computers and parts sell on that site for more than the cost of new. I would say you should start with the used Mac vendors (yes, some of them are rip-off artists, but not all), and also look at various Mac on-line classifieds.
I've got an old "blue&white" G3 tower at home (with a G4 500 CPU dropped into it) which runs OS X just fine. You could probably find one just like it for about $650, if you look around.
Anyway, guys like you are not "part of the problem." Not wanting to pay the cost of a Mac is not an unreasonable nitpick. It's an actual obstacle which I can respect. It's the people that say inane comments like "too bad the Dual G4 Tower comes with a one-button mouse, or I would buy it," that I was ripping. Most of the posters of comments like that don't even have $1600 in the bank, let alone a willingness to ever spend it on a new Macintosh. It gets old.
Wow, removing that stupid favorites heart and changing scroll arrows is really some serious tweaking.
If you read the article, the lost "tweaking" which Apple is alledged to be "closing" from third-party apps really goes no deeper than that. Minor UI tweaks was all Kaliedescope was ever really capable of.
It's the Linux zealots (and I use that word quite deliberately) who will never, ever even consider trying a Mac. Their objections, which usually are of the form "Mac OS X is proprietary," have little to do with the technical, ergonomic, or aesthetic merits of the Mac, which means they reject the Mac without even considering it.
I dunno... While some Linux "zealots" might honestly give you Stallmanist reasons for dissing the Mac, I suspect a lot of them stick with Linux for the "free, as in beer" aspect of their favorite platform.
After all, if somebody can slap a system together from $200 of spare parts, load a free OS on it, and accomplish everything that they want to do, how compelling would you really expect that person to find a $1200 iMac?
I'm fine with somebody who wants to be a Linux advocate/zealot/luser/whatever, I use Linux myself on my main web server. I just wish that more of them could admit that the main drive for avoiding Macs is the desire to save a few bucks, rather than some bizarre perception of a lack of mouse buttons, or feigned moral indignation about Apple not being Open enough.
I have 10.2 on my iBook, and I am able to tweak many, many functions to my heart's content. The first thing I did was get rid of that stupid "favorites" heart in the top of the finder window. Removing that button (and adding other finder tools to the top bar) was as simple as drag and drop. Resizing or relocating the dock, and changing its behavior is also simplicity itself. Don't like the funky way Macs have the scroll arrows grouped at the bottom-right corner? You can set it to the traditional layout with a few quick mouse-clicks.
What is really going on in this article is the owner of the company that makes Kaleidoscope (a third-party UI tweaking program for older flavors of Mac OS) has been rendered obsolete, not by Mac breaking Kali's tools with updates... which often happened with versions 7-9 of MacOS, but because OS X is already tweakable enough withough their app.
Damn, I am so sick of so many people, especially on/. say "I would totally buy a Mac if it weren't for nitpick $FOO."
Nearly everybody must realize by now that such statements are usually a load of shit. Most of you will never buy a Mac, or switch to a Linux desktop, no matter what, because Windows is all you know, and all you care to know. You don't want to invest the added cost of a Mac (or the added effort of Linux) to discover if their virtues are worth it. You are lazy and groping for excuses.
Just fess up. You don't like Macs, you don't want a Mac, you will not buy a Mac. That's fine. Use whatever the fuck you want, just stop with the constant whining about features that you (or some underpaid web journalist) think are missing from the platform.
Just for the record, I'm pulling for your question to be chosen. I would hate to see a chance for the/. community to interview a heavey-hitter like Cerf sqandered with bullshit questions about Al Gore (which we all know the answer to), or RIAA/MPAA/DRM questions.
IMHO, All the YRO stuff should be considered "off topic" here. Asking the godfather of TCP/IP questions about intellectual property law is about as useful as asking Alec Baldwin about foreign policy. I'm sure he has an opinion, but isn't it much more sensible to use this forum to ask him about stuff he's an expert at? If he wanted to rant about how spiffy he thinks Al Gore was, or his opinions of Jack Valente, he could just log on to/. and post them in a related thread.
I used to set up newbies on PC's, but I got really tired of getting phone calls all the damned time.
"I can't get my scanner drivers to work" "My modem keeps disconnecting" "What does 'registry error' mean?" "The PC says it was not shut down properly every time I boot it up, even though I used that shut-down command like you said."
Now I set newbie friends and family members up on the Mac. I spend a few minutes setting it up with them, and about a half hour showing them how to use it, and they are off to the races. Not only the the Mac-using newbies have fewer problems than the ones I helped get PC's, but instead of calling me with a question, they use e-mail. It's like the Mac has actually made them smarter users.
[logo]
My name is David, and I am a perl hacker.
Re:Hmph....looks interesting...
on
Hacker Culture
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Interesting, yes, although I found the blurb, "truly marks the entry of the 'hacker' into the realm of academia" kind of puzzling. Didn't hackers come from the realm of academia in the first place? The first hackers were, after all, kids in places like UC Berkely and MIT.
The speed limit in Atlanta, for all practical purposes, is effectively 90, because the cops are not really pulling people over for driving over 70 in that particular town. Also, if you keep it up like that, 90 may eventually become the actual speed limit.
In Minnesota, the speed limit was begrudgingly raised to 65 when the federal law was relaxed, but people in rural areas were still driving faster than that, so it was raised to 70 out in rural areas... a perfect example of what Cringely was talking about. Since the limits were adjusted, you don't see the kind of rampant speeding Atlanta has up in Minneapolis. Most people are now content with the limits we have, and generally stay within 5 MPH of them.
Okay, re-reading my own post, I see how the phrase "during the Carter years" might have set you off. I tend to think of the energy crisis of the 70's as "the Carter Years", even though that particular albatross applied to Nixon and Ford as well. Mainly because Carter was so ineffective in dealing with it.
In fairness, it was during the Carter years that the federal speed limit guideline (which was supposed to be a temporary measure) became entrenched as a legacy program that would not die for decades.
Anyway, yes that was Nixon's asinine idea. It still comes in second to Carter's proposal of hiking coal-burning by 10% a year (compounded over 10 years, no less!) on the list of dumb oil-saving plans.
Actually, speed limits did change because everybody was driving faster.
During the Carter years, the Federal government declared that America had to conserve oil, so states who did not enforce a 55 MPH speed limit on the highways would not receive their usual federal funding for the interstates. (In terms of really asinine oil-saving measuers of the 70's, this actually came in second, behind President Carter's suggestion that we ramp up the use of coal.)
The law became a joke, as most traffic in most states moved at about 65 MPH on the highway, and there were even cases of police asking law-abiding drivers to "keep up with the flow of traffic." In one state, they would let you purchase pre-paid speeding ticket books, so if you got pulled over, you could just hand the cop on of your cupons, and drive on.
Letter-writing and lobbying never would have changed the nation-wide 55 if the overwhelming majority of people were not already ignoring the law entirely, making it unenforcable.
Short answer : because noone will want to be the first.
Yep. This is also why Cringely wrote this article, instead of actually doing what he suggests. He's hoping his words will inspire somebody else to step up and follow through on his plan. Do you care about the DMCA enough to risk multiple years in jail to get it changed? No? Neither does Cringlely, and neither do most of us.
Bigger runs hotter less battery life (even with two batteries loaded in) two pounds heavier (even with one battery) no built-in WiFi antenna bigger pixels (the screen is bigger, but the same resolution not as durable
In other words, that's an inferior laptop for about the same price. Nice try.
Yes, but he did list three world-class orchestras. I would put Philly, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Chicago in that list, too. If it comes from any of those orchestras, it is most likely not without merit.
Actually the IBM G3 chips in the current iBooks are quite zippy, for a laptop chip. The key is, you want to make sure you have enough memory installed so it does not start HD swapping while you are working. I have the 700MHz iBook with some extra RAM, and it compares favorably to my old G4 500 desktop PC.
Oh, and having Jaguar installed on it instead of 10.1.5 makes a big difference, too. 10.2 makes the iBook fast enough that it's become a full-time desktop replacement for me... the old G4 is now a dedicated box for my music studio.
The truth is that unless someone gets me a "good price" on the hardware there's no chance that I'll get OSX.
IIRC, iBooks start at $1100 (USD) from Apple's own on-line store. There you go.
I have yet to find a Windows Laptop that can match the functionality, durability, portability, screen quality, battery life (important one there), and hardware features of my $1500 CRDW/DVD iBook for under 2 large.
You can argue that Apple charges more than the Windows world for destop PC's, and you would be correct. But Powerbooks & iBooks have always been sweet deals.
Carbon is designed to provide a gentle migration path for developers transitioning from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X.
Yep. Note, they don't say that it's providing a migration to Cocoa. Once an app has been Carbonized, the migration is done; it's an OS X app.
Cocoa is the best way to write a new app from the ground up, but look at how many "old" apps there are out there who would not want to do that: Photoshop, Office, Pagemaker, Quark, etc., all apps that have been or will be written in Carbon for the OS X version. Since most of the most popular apps for OS X are ones that previously existed for OS 9, there's actually more Carbon software out there than Cocoa.
The G4 chip is not really all that much more expensive than an Intel chip. The cost difference of Macs comes entirely from the fact that Apple builds in much, much higher profit margins on their systems than commodity Windows PC makers, who are constantly chopping each other off at the knees for that little sliver of market share. Why do you think so many PC makers have been bought out or closed while "beleagured" Apple is still going strong?
An x86-based LCD iMac would still cost about $1300, because Apple has determined that people will pay that much for them. It's a huge seller at that price.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. If you can't afford a Mac (or have other things you want to do with your money), that's your call.
I've generally found that, on the high end, Macs are priced quite competitively. Also, their laptops have generally been good deals for most of the history of the company.
However, the cheapest new Mac can't compete, in terms of raw power per dollar, to a good home-built budget box. If you are shopping in the under-$1000 range, and $ for ! is your only consideration, then buying a PC is a no-brainer.
I was complaining about people who whine about stupid nitpicks (such as the original /. posting for this article), and try to tell everybody that they would buy a mac if it were only not for that one thing, which is almost always untrue. Usually, they dislike Macs for various other zealotry-related and/or finacial reasons, and are offering excuses to cover for that fact.
Now that the dual-head towers have been out, finding a used single-chip G4 for about a grand should be trivial.
Going to eBay was your first mistake. I've seen used computers and parts sell on that site for more than the cost of new. I would say you should start with the used Mac vendors (yes, some of them are rip-off artists, but not all), and also look at various Mac on-line classifieds.
I've got an old "blue&white" G3 tower at home (with a G4 500 CPU dropped into it) which runs OS X just fine. You could probably find one just like it for about $650, if you look around.
Anyway, guys like you are not "part of the problem." Not wanting to pay the cost of a Mac is not an unreasonable nitpick. It's an actual obstacle which I can respect. It's the people that say inane comments like "too bad the Dual G4 Tower comes with a one-button mouse, or I would buy it," that I was ripping. Most of the posters of comments like that don't even have $1600 in the bank, let alone a willingness to ever spend it on a new Macintosh. It gets old.
I also use all three OS's, and don't really consider myself zealot of any of them, although I find my iBook to be downright spiffy.
Also, as for calling me a Luddite... I don't think it means what you think it means.
If you read the article, the lost "tweaking" which Apple is alledged to be "closing" from third-party apps really goes no deeper than that. Minor UI tweaks was all Kaliedescope was ever really capable of.
I dunno... While some Linux "zealots" might honestly give you Stallmanist reasons for dissing the Mac, I suspect a lot of them stick with Linux for the "free, as in beer" aspect of their favorite platform.
After all, if somebody can slap a system together from $200 of spare parts, load a free OS on it, and accomplish everything that they want to do, how compelling would you really expect that person to find a $1200 iMac?
I'm fine with somebody who wants to be a Linux advocate/zealot/luser/whatever, I use Linux myself on my main web server. I just wish that more of them could admit that the main drive for avoiding Macs is the desire to save a few bucks, rather than some bizarre perception of a lack of mouse buttons, or feigned moral indignation about Apple not being Open enough.
I guess Apple won't be calling me to be a poster boy for how great the iBook keyboard is anytime soon.
I have 10.2 on my iBook, and I am able to tweak many, many functions to my heart's content. The first thing I did was get rid of that stupid "favorites" heart in the top of the finder window. Removing that button (and adding other finder tools to the top bar) was as simple as drag and drop. Resizing or relocating the dock, and changing its behavior is also simplicity itself. Don't like the funky way Macs have the scroll arrows grouped at the bottom-right corner? You can set it to the traditional layout with a few quick mouse-clicks.
What is really going on in this article is the owner of the company that makes Kaleidoscope (a third-party UI tweaking program for older flavors of Mac OS) has been rendered obsolete, not by Mac breaking Kali's tools with updates... which often happened with versions 7-9 of MacOS, but because OS X is already tweakable enough withough their app.
Nearly everybody must realize by now that such statements are usually a load of shit. Most of you will never buy a Mac, or switch to a Linux desktop, no matter what, because Windows is all you know, and all you care to know. You don't want to invest the added cost of a Mac (or the added effort of Linux) to discover if their virtues are worth it. You are lazy and groping for excuses.
Just fess up. You don't like Macs, you don't want a Mac, you will not buy a Mac. That's fine. Use whatever the fuck you want, just stop with the constant whining about features that you (or some underpaid web journalist) think are missing from the platform.
IMHO, All the YRO stuff should be considered "off topic" here. Asking the godfather of TCP/IP questions about intellectual property law is about as useful as asking Alec Baldwin about foreign policy. I'm sure he has an opinion, but isn't it much more sensible to use this forum to ask him about stuff he's an expert at? If he wanted to rant about how spiffy he thinks Al Gore was, or his opinions of Jack Valente, he could just log on to /. and post them in a related thread.
"I can't get my scanner drivers to work"
"My modem keeps disconnecting"
"What does 'registry error' mean?"
"The PC says it was not shut down properly every time I boot it up, even though I used that shut-down command like you said."
Now I set newbie friends and family members up on the Mac. I spend a few minutes setting it up with them, and about a half hour showing them how to use it, and they are off to the races. Not only the the Mac-using newbies have fewer problems than the ones I helped get PC's, but instead of calling me with a question, they use e-mail. It's like the Mac has actually made them smarter users.
[logo]
My name is David, and I am a perl hacker.
Interesting, yes, although I found the blurb, "truly marks the entry of the 'hacker' into the realm of academia" kind of puzzling. Didn't hackers come from the realm of academia in the first place? The first hackers were, after all, kids in places like UC Berkely and MIT.
In Minnesota, the speed limit was begrudgingly raised to 65 when the federal law was relaxed, but people in rural areas were still driving faster than that, so it was raised to 70 out in rural areas... a perfect example of what Cringely was talking about. Since the limits were adjusted, you don't see the kind of rampant speeding Atlanta has up in Minneapolis. Most people are now content with the limits we have, and generally stay within 5 MPH of them.
In fairness, it was during the Carter years that the federal speed limit guideline (which was supposed to be a temporary measure) became entrenched as a legacy program that would not die for decades.
Anyway, yes that was Nixon's asinine idea. It still comes in second to Carter's proposal of hiking coal-burning by 10% a year (compounded over 10 years, no less!) on the list of dumb oil-saving plans.
It was actually imposed by the Nixon administration in response to the 1973 oil embargo.
I didn't say the speed limit thing was Carter's, just the coal-burning ramp-up. Read my post again, and try not be be so knee-jerk.
Damn, it's like walking on egg-shells with some people.
During the Carter years, the Federal government declared that America had to conserve oil, so states who did not enforce a 55 MPH speed limit on the highways would not receive their usual federal funding for the interstates. (In terms of really asinine oil-saving measuers of the 70's, this actually came in second, behind President Carter's suggestion that we ramp up the use of coal.)
The law became a joke, as most traffic in most states moved at about 65 MPH on the highway, and there were even cases of police asking law-abiding drivers to "keep up with the flow of traffic." In one state, they would let you purchase pre-paid speeding ticket books, so if you got pulled over, you could just hand the cop on of your cupons, and drive on.
Letter-writing and lobbying never would have changed the nation-wide 55 if the overwhelming majority of people were not already ignoring the law entirely, making it unenforcable.
Yep. This is also why Cringely wrote this article, instead of actually doing what he suggests. He's hoping his words will inspire somebody else to step up and follow through on his plan. Do you care about the DMCA enough to risk multiple years in jail to get it changed? No? Neither does Cringlely, and neither do most of us.
Hmmm... Brundlefly?
runs hotter
less battery life (even with two batteries loaded in)
two pounds heavier (even with one battery)
no built-in WiFi antenna
bigger pixels (the screen is bigger, but the same resolution
not as durable
In other words, that's an inferior laptop for about the same price. Nice try.
Yes, but he did list three world-class orchestras. I would put Philly, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Chicago in that list, too. If it comes from any of those orchestras, it is most likely not without merit.
Actually the IBM G3 chips in the current iBooks are quite zippy, for a laptop chip. The key is, you want to make sure you have enough memory installed so it does not start HD swapping while you are working. I have the 700MHz iBook with some extra RAM, and it compares favorably to my old G4 500 desktop PC.
Oh, and having Jaguar installed on it instead of 10.1.5 makes a big difference, too. 10.2 makes the iBook fast enough that it's become a full-time desktop replacement for me... the old G4 is now a dedicated box for my music studio.
IIRC, iBooks start at $1100 (USD) from Apple's own on-line store. There you go.
I have yet to find a Windows Laptop that can match the functionality, durability, portability, screen quality, battery life (important one there), and hardware features of my $1500 CRDW/DVD iBook for under 2 large.
You can argue that Apple charges more than the Windows world for destop PC's, and you would be correct. But Powerbooks & iBooks have always been sweet deals.
Tomorrow on DIY: How to make a working automobile, starting with nothing but a brand new Nissan Maxima.
Friday on DIY: How to make a Pizza with nothing but a phone and $15.
Yep. Note, they don't say that it's providing a migration to Cocoa. Once an app has been Carbonized, the migration is done; it's an OS X app.
Cocoa is the best way to write a new app from the ground up, but look at how many "old" apps there are out there who would not want to do that: Photoshop, Office, Pagemaker, Quark, etc., all apps that have been or will be written in Carbon for the OS X version. Since most of the most popular apps for OS X are ones that previously existed for OS 9, there's actually more Carbon software out there than Cocoa.
The G4 chip is not really all that much more expensive than an Intel chip. The cost difference of Macs comes entirely from the fact that Apple builds in much, much higher profit margins on their systems than commodity Windows PC makers, who are constantly chopping each other off at the knees for that little sliver of market share. Why do you think so many PC makers have been bought out or closed while "beleagured" Apple is still going strong?
An x86-based LCD iMac would still cost about $1300, because Apple has determined that people will pay that much for them. It's a huge seller at that price.
They're not. Both were introduced at the same time, and both are part of Apple's immediate future.