What's wrong with their laptops? Well, I won't go through my list of gripes with my Macbook Pro again, unless you really want me to, but it's a lot more expensive than comparable Wintel laptops... or anemic compared to comparably priced models.
As for the Macbook... for $1200, I expect a real GPU. The Intel integrated GPU is a joke... my work-provided laptop has the same CPU and GPU as the regular Macbook (in fact where I know the parts it's pretty much identical across the board), and for anything using 3d it's almost as bad as my first generation Mac mini. And my work laptop listed for around $700 when they ordered it for me.
That would be the "build your own logging road" approach. I mean, yes, Gnome makes a really pretty logging road if you're looking for a system that's copying bad ideas from Windows, and I really enjoy hacking through the jungle with machete and gdb myself, but it's got a long way to go for "Joe Consumer".
You're making the same mistake as the other fella. You're trying to overgeneralize, trying to make one product some kind of symbol of the company. It ain't so.
Older Macs that are no longer supported by Apple software updates are (for now anyway) still supported by some Linux distros.
Well, until the Mac mini came out my primary desktop was a "beige G4"... a G3 upgraded with a cheap G4/533 card, 768M of RAM, a Radeon 9200 video card, IDE controller, 10/100 ethernet... if you have a newer Mac and no other use for the old one I suppose that's a reasonable use for it, but I wasn't talking about that situation, I was talking about Apple's market share and what you buy the Mac to run.
I think the poster you replied to was talking about contributing to, not merely about profiting from OSS.
I guess you haven't actually looked at what's ON the Apple open source site, or you're talking about the Webkit tempest-in-a-teapot... where Apple was already doing everything they needed to, but they went out of their way to cooperate, set up an open repository for Webkit, and basically responded better that a lot of honest-to-Stallman open source projects have when they've been criticized.
Same with Apple products (ipod and iphone)... what's your point?
I don't buy those products. I don't have an iPod Touch or an iPhone or a Zune. I have a cheap Samsung cellphone that's just as locked down, but I sure wouldn't have spent hundreds of dollars on one. I prefer Microsoft keyboards and mice to Apple keyboards and mice. I don't buy brand names, I buy products.
The point is Microsoft doesn't have a locked down and rigid approach to using their software.
Sure they do. It's in a different area than Apple, but if you start messing around and replacing parts of the Vista kernel you'll eventually hit a "tilt switch" and it'll stop working. Apple ships the sources to almost all the kernel, and don't have anything even close to the tilt switches and time bombs and heavy-handed copy protection in Vista, or even XP.
The "MS is worse" line
What "MS is worse" line?
you can't deflect criticism by saying it's ok because someone else does it...
I'm not "deflecting criticism", I'm pointing out that you're in the same trap no matter what company you pick.
Look, the problem is that you're looking at companies as if which company you do business with is a huge ethical or moral decision or something.
The problem isn't that Apple is evil, or Microsoft is evil, or Google is evil, the problem is that corporations are amoral. They're legally required to be. They all screw somebody, some of the time. Buying a product from a company isn't picking sides. Even working for a company isn't picking sides. There's no sides to pick.
To me Apple looks like this: "OS X is decent and they've been reasonably open with it so far, the hardware is anemic and I wish I didn't have to put up with it... c'est la vie, the iPod sucks (yes, really, I hate the click-wheel), their keyboards suck, their displays are decent, their mice are horrible...", and Microsoft looks like this: "Windows is a toxic swamp of badly designed APIs, their mice are pretty good, their keyboards are decent, Excel is pretty good but Word is horrible and the rest of Office is just mediocre crap, Outlook and IE are the biggest virus distribution system in the world, and I wish they'd really unleash Microsoft Research...", and so on.
You can't say ANY organization as big as these can be characterized by ANY simple sentence.
Neither does Apple. Microsoft makes game consoles and music players, and neither of those are upgradable at all.
The last video card I bought to upgrade my Mac was $150, by the way. The last one I bought for my Wintendo was $250.
If you ask me or most folks to think of an example of really asshole-ish hardware locking they're probably gonna mention iPhone bricking.
I don't have an iPhone, but I sure wouldn't risk trying to hack my Samsung phone. Callphones are just like that, unless you get a real smartphone like a Treo.
Hey, what do you think about Microsoft kicking everyone who bought into "Plays for Sure" in the nuts when they came out with the Zune?
I never said Apple had a "my way or the highway" approach
Oh, you're not that Anonymous Coward. Sorry, if you don't agree with the guy I was responding to... well... hmmm... what's the point then?
Three here. OK, I started with an Apple motherboard, but I had to get a third-party processor, replace the RAM, add cache, video cards, case... XPostFacto let me install OS X on "unsupported" Macs. 7600 upgraded to a G3/400, G3 upgraded to a G4/533, and another G3 upgrade for my daughter. After Apple abandoned the headless desktop in '97 I didn't have much alternative but extreme upgrading until the Mac mini came along.
Apart from the Mac Pro, which costs as much as a decent used car, it's definitely in need of iron supplements. You don't buy Macs because the hardware is good, you buy Macs because the software is so good that you're willing to put up with the hardware.
OK, there's a few Apple geeks on slashdot who pipe up and claim to be running Windows or Linux exclusively on their Mac hardware, but even on slashdot that gets you funny looks. There's way more slashdot traction from running OS X on Thinkpads and the like.
Make application development a breeze. Windows has given away free Visual Studio express editions that can enable developers to program next generation WPF applications for free.
It doesn't run on my Mac or my UNIX boxes. I have to buy Windows to run Visual Studio, like I have to buy OS X to run XCode, and I have to buy Linux... well, OK, I don't have to buy Linux.
XCode comes only if you buy the expensive Mac.
But XCode is included in the cheaper Macs, too, and frankly I don't really WANT to know about the sexual problems of my IDE.
Apple's is the anti-3rd party OS. It's not fun to develop for.
Compared to what? What problems do *you* have with OS X? If you're writing UNIX software, it's just like any other UNIX and better than most. What do you mean by "fun"? You get to shoot bugs with a laser rifle and watch them splat?
You upgraded the video card in your XBox or your Zune, or other Microsoft hardware? I mean, I like my Microsoft mouse and keyboard (and they work just fine on my Mac, there was no explosion when I plugged them in) but I don't think they even have video cards.
Microsoft doesn't sell personal computers, but when they DO sell hardware they're even more tightly locked up than Apple. And their OS is pretty tightly loked up. Try and poke around in the Vista kernel and see how fast you can hit a tilt switch. Try to poke around in the OS X kernel... well, Apple ships source for most of it.
Yes, I'd rather run OS X on a Thinkpad, but maybe I'd like to run XBox Live on a Thinkpad as well.
As for Stardock, you think there's no third-party products to customize OS X?
I don't think I've run into anyone outside slashdot who bought a Mac but didn't run OS X on it. Given the high cost, marginal hardware, and oddball design of Apple's hardware it still seems weird to get anything less than the whole ball of wax.
But I'd also be interested in actual figures for "Joe Consumer".
Oh no, it's all there, still tracking the latest release of OS X.
Damn, you scared me for a second...
(yes, I know they're only 99.44% pure and hold out a few kernel components, but "even more protective" than Microsoft? Give me a rotating plaid gold-decked break!)
There are a number of algorithms they could use to block spammers without blocking things that look like spam. But... I've got a pretty low false positive rate on my own spam at home, much better than Google's, probably because I care about false positives more than they do. So my concern is not so much whether they can do a better job, but whether they will care to.
to do so you'll need to dedicate about 5 minutes to internet searches to find the free tools to do things like restoring normal menus and the XP style buttons
I spent half an hour trying to find all the hooks necessary to defang it... not just the UI elements, but also the deeper issues I commented on... and to restore the classic Windows appearance. Perhaps, since then, people have created more tools... but I wasn't able to take care of more than a fraction of the problems... but even if it's possible to restore a more professional environment now, it's certainly more than the equivalent of going from XP to XP SP2, which was the comparison I was objecting to!
Perhaps you could put up a FAQ listing the steps you took?
And, honestly, it's a bigger change than going from 2000 to XP: Most of the new user interface elements in XP, you see, can be eliminated without third-party software by changing Microsoft's settings. Classic toolbar, classic start menu, classic browser windows, classic desktop theme, classic control panel. I don't even *know* what the '"common tasks" crap' in XP is, apparently my initial poking around managed to hide it completely.
When you run an application from Windows Explorer, it is normally run with its current directory set to the directory that the executable is located in. The vulnerability exposed by the "carpet bombing" attack involved attacking Internet Explorer, because Internet Explorer runs with its current directory set to the desktop... not the directory containing the IE executable. There is no obvious reason why IE does this, nor any reason I can come up with for Microsoft not to change it.
So far as I know, the only application that normally runs with its current directory on the desktop (and is thus a potential target for any successful exploit of this issue) is Internet Explorer.
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with their laptops? Well, I won't go through my list of gripes with my Macbook Pro again, unless you really want me to, but it's a lot more expensive than comparable Wintel laptops... or anemic compared to comparably priced models.
As for the Macbook... for $1200, I expect a real GPU. The Intel integrated GPU is a joke... my work-provided laptop has the same CPU and GPU as the regular Macbook (in fact where I know the parts it's pretty much identical across the board), and for anything using 3d it's almost as bad as my first generation Mac mini. And my work laptop listed for around $700 when they ordered it for me.
That would be the "build your own logging road" approach. I mean, yes, Gnome makes a really pretty logging road if you're looking for a system that's copying bad ideas from Windows, and I really enjoy hacking through the jungle with machete and gdb myself, but it's got a long way to go for "Joe Consumer".
Who's doing that?
You're making the same mistake as the other fella. You're trying to overgeneralize, trying to make one product some kind of symbol of the company. It ain't so.
Older Macs that are no longer supported by Apple software updates are (for now anyway) still supported by some Linux distros.
Well, until the Mac mini came out my primary desktop was a "beige G4"... a G3 upgraded with a cheap G4/533 card, 768M of RAM, a Radeon 9200 video card, IDE controller, 10/100 ethernet... if you have a newer Mac and no other use for the old one I suppose that's a reasonable use for it, but I wasn't talking about that situation, I was talking about Apple's market share and what you buy the Mac to run.
I think the poster you replied to was talking about contributing to, not merely about profiting from OSS.
I guess you haven't actually looked at what's ON the Apple open source site, or you're talking about the Webkit tempest-in-a-teapot... where Apple was already doing everything they needed to, but they went out of their way to cooperate, set up an open repository for Webkit, and basically responded better that a lot of honest-to-Stallman open source projects have when they've been criticized.
Same with Apple products (ipod and iphone)... what's your point?
I don't buy those products. I don't have an iPod Touch or an iPhone or a Zune. I have a cheap Samsung cellphone that's just as locked down, but I sure wouldn't have spent hundreds of dollars on one. I prefer Microsoft keyboards and mice to Apple keyboards and mice. I don't buy brand names, I buy products.
The point is Microsoft doesn't have a locked down and rigid approach to using their software.
Sure they do. It's in a different area than Apple, but if you start messing around and replacing parts of the Vista kernel you'll eventually hit a "tilt switch" and it'll stop working. Apple ships the sources to almost all the kernel, and don't have anything even close to the tilt switches and time bombs and heavy-handed copy protection in Vista, or even XP.
The "MS is worse" line
What "MS is worse" line?
you can't deflect criticism by saying it's ok because someone else does it...
I'm not "deflecting criticism", I'm pointing out that you're in the same trap no matter what company you pick.
Look, the problem is that you're looking at companies as if which company you do business with is a huge ethical or moral decision or something.
The problem isn't that Apple is evil, or Microsoft is evil, or Google is evil, the problem is that corporations are amoral. They're legally required to be. They all screw somebody, some of the time. Buying a product from a company isn't picking sides. Even working for a company isn't picking sides. There's no sides to pick.
To me Apple looks like this: "OS X is decent and they've been reasonably open with it so far, the hardware is anemic and I wish I didn't have to put up with it... c'est la vie, the iPod sucks (yes, really, I hate the click-wheel), their keyboards suck, their displays are decent, their mice are horrible...", and Microsoft looks like this: "Windows is a toxic swamp of badly designed APIs, their mice are pretty good, their keyboards are decent, Excel is pretty good but Word is horrible and the rest of Office is just mediocre crap, Outlook and IE are the biggest virus distribution system in the world, and I wish they'd really unleash Microsoft Research...", and so on.
You can't say ANY organization as big as these can be characterized by ANY simple sentence.
Not legally. There are people who have, by picking boards with the right characteristics, but it's only legal if you start with an actual Mac.
No microsoft doesn't make video cards,
Neither does Apple. Microsoft makes game consoles and music players, and neither of those are upgradable at all.
The last video card I bought to upgrade my Mac was $150, by the way. The last one I bought for my Wintendo was $250.
If you ask me or most folks to think of an example of really asshole-ish hardware locking they're probably gonna mention iPhone bricking.
I don't have an iPhone, but I sure wouldn't risk trying to hack my Samsung phone. Callphones are just like that, unless you get a real smartphone like a Treo.
Hey, what do you think about Microsoft kicking everyone who bought into "Plays for Sure" in the nuts when they came out with the Zune?
I never said Apple had a "my way or the highway" approach
Oh, you're not that Anonymous Coward. Sorry, if you don't agree with the guy I was responding to... well... hmmm... what's the point then?
How many macs have been built by the owner?
Three here. OK, I started with an Apple motherboard, but I had to get a third-party processor, replace the RAM, add cache, video cards, case... XPostFacto let me install OS X on "unsupported" Macs. 7600 upgraded to a G3/400, G3 upgraded to a G4/533, and another G3 upgrade for my daughter. After Apple abandoned the headless desktop in '97 I didn't have much alternative but extreme upgrading until the Mac mini came along.
Apple hardware is hardly anemic
Apart from the Mac Pro, which costs as much as a decent used car, it's definitely in need of iron supplements. You don't buy Macs because the hardware is good, you buy Macs because the software is so good that you're willing to put up with the hardware.
OK, there's a few Apple geeks on slashdot who pipe up and claim to be running Windows or Linux exclusively on their Mac hardware, but even on slashdot that gets you funny looks. There's way more slashdot traction from running OS X on Thinkpads and the like.
Make application development a breeze. Windows has given away free Visual Studio express editions that can enable developers to program next generation WPF applications for free.
It doesn't run on my Mac or my UNIX boxes. I have to buy Windows to run Visual Studio, like I have to buy OS X to run XCode, and I have to buy Linux... well, OK, I don't have to buy Linux.
XCode comes only if you buy the expensive Mac.
But XCode is included in the cheaper Macs, too, and frankly I don't really WANT to know about the sexual problems of my IDE.
Magic isn't supposed to be logical. That's why it's magic. If it was logical it'd be something else. But not magic.
Apple's is the anti-3rd party OS. It's not fun to develop for.
Compared to what? What problems do *you* have with OS X? If you're writing UNIX software, it's just like any other UNIX and better than most. What do you mean by "fun"? You get to shoot bugs with a laser rifle and watch them splat?
I also don't 'get' these numbers.
They're retail numbers?
which OSX distro do you run?
OSX is the FreeBSD desktop distro I run. I stick to the original source tree for servers, though.
You upgraded the video card in your XBox or your Zune, or other Microsoft hardware? I mean, I like my Microsoft mouse and keyboard (and they work just fine on my Mac, there was no explosion when I plugged them in) but I don't think they even have video cards.
Microsoft doesn't sell personal computers, but when they DO sell hardware they're even more tightly locked up than Apple. And their OS is pretty tightly loked up. Try and poke around in the Vista kernel and see how fast you can hit a tilt switch. Try to poke around in the OS X kernel... well, Apple ships source for most of it.
Yes, I'd rather run OS X on a Thinkpad, but maybe I'd like to run XBox Live on a Thinkpad as well.
As for Stardock, you think there's no third-party products to customize OS X?
I don't think I've run into anyone outside slashdot who bought a Mac but didn't run OS X on it. Given the high cost, marginal hardware, and oddball design of Apple's hardware it still seems weird to get anything less than the whole ball of wax.
But I'd also be interested in actual figures for "Joe Consumer".
it makes perfect sense to switch to another company that even more protective of its source
What, something happened to Apple Open Source?
Oh no, it's all there, still tracking the latest release of OS X.
Damn, you scared me for a second...
(yes, I know they're only 99.44% pure and hold out a few kernel components, but "even more protective" than Microsoft? Give me a rotating plaid gold-decked break!)
As opposed to Microsoft's "do it our way or the highway" approach to computing?
There are a number of algorithms they could use to block spammers without blocking things that look like spam. But... I've got a pretty low false positive rate on my own spam at home, much better than Google's, probably because I care about false positives more than they do. So my concern is not so much whether they can do a better job, but whether they will care to.
to do so you'll need to dedicate about 5 minutes to internet searches to find the free tools to do things like restoring normal menus and the XP style buttons
I spent half an hour trying to find all the hooks necessary to defang it... not just the UI elements, but also the deeper issues I commented on... and to restore the classic Windows appearance. Perhaps, since then, people have created more tools... but I wasn't able to take care of more than a fraction of the problems... but even if it's possible to restore a more professional environment now, it's certainly more than the equivalent of going from XP to XP SP2, which was the comparison I was objecting to!
Perhaps you could put up a FAQ listing the steps you took?
And, honestly, it's a bigger change than going from 2000 to XP: Most of the new user interface elements in XP, you see, can be eliminated without third-party software by changing Microsoft's settings. Classic toolbar, classic start menu, classic browser windows, classic desktop theme, classic control panel. I don't even *know* what the '"common tasks" crap' in XP is, apparently my initial poking around managed to hide it completely.
When you run an application from Windows Explorer, it is normally run with its current directory set to the directory that the executable is located in. The vulnerability exposed by the "carpet bombing" attack involved attacking Internet Explorer, because Internet Explorer runs with its current directory set to the desktop... not the directory containing the IE executable. There is no obvious reason why IE does this, nor any reason I can come up with for Microsoft not to change it.
So far as I know, the only application that normally runs with its current directory on the desktop (and is thus a potential target for any successful exploit of this issue) is Internet Explorer.
Damn, I thought they were talking about Project Orion.