The third era is MacOS X. The big issue now is that low-end PCs can do everything I need, and low-end PCs are insanely cheap, so why buy a mac?
Uuhh...because I want to?
I've noticed on/. that there are people who like linux, and people who like Mac. And the reasons for this are different and have changed over time. I've used ubuntu, and even found recently the two floppy disks I used to install Linux 0.11 on -- well boot up anyways. In those days getting it to install on a hard drive was a real days work.
I suspect that there is a segment of/. geekdom that doesn't care about whatever it is that OS X brings to the user. They don't care about usability, they don't care about how nice it looks, they don't care about how it all just works. Its simply not important to them. And they come up with posts like yours and talk about the price, as if this was the only thing to compare. As if PCs and Macs are all equal. And really, they're not. In fact I recently had the pleasure of using a Mac with Parallels, and was pretty delighted with how well Windows ran in Mac OS X. Pretty sweet actually.
But I KNOW there is another segment of/. geekdom -- including me -- that just love the way the whole OS X thing works. We may or may not have been Mac fans before (and there's alot to dislike about the Mac lineup -- the entire iBook G3 line up and motherboard failures I'm looking at you, as well as the latest stuff about the Nvidia chipsets on the MacBook Pro), Mac OS X is just pretty sweet. For us. Those that like it. So why buy a Mac?
Clever! Because chickens are representative of all birds, just like, for example, macaques are representative of all primates. You can easily generalize the intelligence and self awareness of a human by looking at one of those little monkies can't you?
And even if you do stumble into that grade two logic trap, how would you interpret this:
I agree with the above poster who basically says you're out of date. Little logic exercises hardly prove your point. Alive is fast becoming an irrelevant concept at the level viruses and other phages.
From everyone's perspective, having repairs done in larger part replacements are much better. There is one flaw with your statement. The large replaced part isn't just thrown away, but rather can be refurbished.
Right, just like all the iBook G3 motherboards that were replaced with more defective G3 motherboards that were replaced with more defective G3 motherboards....ad nausium? As far as anyone can tell, none of the motherboards were reflowed to fix the chip problem. Looks, ironically, like the Nvidia problem with the G84 and G86 GPU is going to cause the a similar problem on the MBPs. Good luck with that. I'd say major land fill issue.
At least with the old PowerBooks, you could replace things piece by piece as they were modular...
Right. Because when Jobs arrived and consolidated all the product lines into the User+Laptop (iMac + iBook) and PowerUser+Laptop (Power Mac + Power Book), this was definately not a roadmap. And just because after they had the G4s + Cubes + G5s + Intels and so on means they were just sitting around randomly making computers without any thought towards the future right? Just like say, Dell or Asus.
I think people get kind of confused when they see things like the iPod, and forget that while Apple is certainly not just a "computer" company anymore, even having just dropped the actual word "computer" from their name, they wouldn't be any worse off if they had just stuck to making computers. And for the most part that is still most of what they do. iPods and iPhones bring in more cash. But I don't think anyone imagines somehow that they're getting a Mac JUST BECAUSE it will integrate with their iPhone and or iPod.
HaHa! I like this one. Have anything to back that up? Any lab results from your experiements in alternate realities where Apple has decoupled their OS from the hardware and achieved phonomenal success?
Apple sells mostly hardware. The software is really nothing but a strategy tool to help them sell more hardware. We've been going over this many, many times on/., you may have read this. By opening up OS X to generic PCs, they'd be opening themselves up to huge headaches. The experience most likely wouldn't be the same. By coupling it with their hardware they can control the experience and the quality. And by not opening up to generic PCs they don't have to waste endless resources for customer support, and driver development, and 3rd party for hardware relationships, and so on and so forth. It would be a tremendous loss of focus for the OS X group, and might lead down the dark path of Vista.
And anyways how much do they really make off of OS X? After piracy and what not, I rather doubt it would be as much as selling laptops.
Well to be fair to me, I had considered putting a smiley after "happy now", because it was a little snarkey comment that was mostly there for humor. But no one ever seems to use them on slashdot.
"or even your own LEGALLY COPYRIGHTED drum/beat/synthesizer loops"
Why would you need soundcard drivers to record something you already have as a file?
Well if you knew anything about recording home audio on a PC, you'd quickly come across situations where it's useful. Stereo Mix is great for rerouting sound in between applications as well, so long as you're not too concerned about quality. I use it sometimes for streaming media. Things like justin.tv and so on all use the same basic technology which assumes that you have a web cam and a microphone. There's no other way to send your own audio. However if you want to place sound files or synth output (and yes I do have them, and I do perform live with them) or whatever from your machine into your broadcast, you have to use Stereo Mix basically to reroute out of application and into the "input" side of the streaming client.
You know you make a good point, and I do appreciate that. You are of course right about the "lab report" and how it ecodes for a number of unspoken assumptions (I was reading some stuff recently about Bohr, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics which addresses this exact same issue) about our experiences.
I would argue though, that those lab experiences are somehow at least repeatable and measurable. By definition this is science. And so while there maybe a number of elements that could be subjective in the chain of the physics lab experiement ("Is red, REALLY red? What if other people see it as blue? What if I see red as pink?", a bit extreme but you see my point), we can all go into the lab and hopefully, with a good experiment, repeat again and again and get the same result again and again, until we all get bored and go home. Or at least a result we can all agree on.
With Hobbs saying that with government you move violence up to the level of the nation state which is better for people, is simply making a blanket generalization that people may not even agree on. It actually sounds a bit cynical and war-mongerish to me. Like somehow violence is always unavoidable and we should just try and move it around different levels of society, instead of actually trying to solve it. And its not even true. If it were true, creating an army would prevent violent crime (because it moved violence from the level of the people up to the level of the state), but it doesn't. In fact all that creating an army really does is encourage the power thirsty to extend their power, because they have this great tool available called an army, and oh well look at all the Nuclear Missles I have, and so lets see how far I can go with this. Who cares if a few people are killed.
And I'm sure some other people would disagree with me on this. And some people might interpret Hobbs differently, and then..etc, etc.
And so now we don't even have a common framework with which to agree on. And now we are well outside the physics lab, where we go in agreeing on "Science" and how to interpret the results of the experiment scientifficly (science is in one way just a kind of intellectual "Standard" that we all use to communicate about the nature of reality).
My point being that Hobbs never had a lab to test any of these things out, nor did he have the standard of science to get results we can all agree on, and so how do we know any of it is even valid or true? It can't be true because he hasn't shown case after case where people agree that its true, and so why even use Hobbs. At least the social sciences try to have a semi-scientiffic approach, using statistics and repeatable experiements and control groups.
God, the Libertarians are out in force today, aren't they?
The guy wasn't saying that scales of economy and competition don't allow us to have innovative products that would otherwise be unavailable due to lack of infrastructure and means.
He wasn't saying, "CAPITALISM BAD!!!"
He was saying that the largest of the large companies, continually exploit their positions and use ruthless tactics, and we continue to reward them by just going and buying their products, or giving them a free pass to continue to act the way they do. Big Oil just being one example.
Despite what you may think, companies ARE self-serving, and to some degree that there are consumers that buy their products is only a side effect of the environment they've been setup in. They are still large power heiarchies who's aim is to put money into people's pockets (shareholders and employees), by whatever means available. This can and often is dangerous.
And anyways there wouldn't be any problem with the guy down the street making anti-biotics so long as he made them to within regulation just like big pharam does. And maybe he'd do a great job with his local lab, and do it with a smile. Large corporate does not mean better quality, and often forget the smile.
The other big success is their constant work on making the entire system architecture better, and basically giving that work to the industry for free.
While I'm sure thats how the script was repeated in Intel, suggesting great generosity ("And we give it away for free!"), what choice did they really have? IBM's whole Micro Channel Architecture fiasco showed what licensing did to adoption of new advances in system architecture and integration.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about exactly. I remember when Bell was more heavily regulated everything WAS cheaper. Now, because of deregulation, I have to pay for the technician to come by and install extra jacks, and I have to pay an insurance for the telco line that runs to my house, because its on my property, and I'm paying around $40 a month for a service that used to cost me $20 in the 1990s. I can't say that the service has improved at all either. So how is it exactly you're saying that people over paid. I mean taxes = bad is a common liberterian position, but please back it up for once.
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The third era is MacOS X. The big issue now is that low-end PCs can do everything I need, and low-end PCs are insanely cheap, so why buy a mac?
Uuhh...because I want to?
I've noticed on /. that there are people who like linux, and people who like Mac. And the reasons for this are different and have changed over time. I've used ubuntu, and even found recently the two floppy disks I used to install Linux 0.11 on -- well boot up anyways. In those days getting it to install on a hard drive was a real days work.
I suspect that there is a segment of /. geekdom that doesn't care about whatever it is that OS X brings to the user. They don't care about usability, they don't care about how nice it looks, they don't care about how it all just works. Its simply not important to them. And they come up with posts like yours and talk about the price, as if this was the only thing to compare. As if PCs and Macs are all equal. And really, they're not. In fact I recently had the pleasure of using a Mac with Parallels, and was pretty delighted with how well Windows ran in Mac OS X. Pretty sweet actually.
But I KNOW there is another segment of /. geekdom -- including me -- that just love the way the whole OS X thing works. We may or may not have been Mac fans before (and there's alot to dislike about the Mac lineup -- the entire iBook G3 line up and motherboard failures I'm looking at you, as well as the latest stuff about the Nvidia chipsets on the MacBook Pro), Mac OS X is just pretty sweet. For us. Those that like it. So why buy a Mac?
Well because I want to. Thats why.
Clever! Because chickens are representative of all birds, just like, for example, macaques are representative of all primates. You can easily generalize the intelligence and self awareness of a human by looking at one of those little monkies can't you?
And even if you do stumble into that grade two logic trap, how would you interpret this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybVb3t560oY
?
Looks like something is going on there, irregardless of what your "automatic vision systems" teacher seems to think of them.
Wow its days like this I wish I could bank mod points, so I could mod an unconscionable fuck like you down.
I agree with the above poster who basically says you're out of date. Little logic exercises hardly prove your point. Alive is fast becoming an irrelevant concept at the level viruses and other phages.
Libertarians out in force again!
Because the other solution, which makes more sense is to regulate what has always basically been a crown corporation market.
From everyone's perspective, having repairs done in larger part replacements are much better. There is one flaw with your statement. The large replaced part isn't just thrown away, but rather can be refurbished.
Right, just like all the iBook G3 motherboards that were replaced with more defective G3 motherboards that were replaced with more defective G3 motherboards ....ad nausium? As far as anyone can tell, none of the motherboards were reflowed to fix the chip problem. Looks, ironically, like the Nvidia problem with the G84 and G86 GPU is going to cause the a similar problem on the MBPs. Good luck with that. I'd say major land fill issue.
At least with the old PowerBooks, you could replace things piece by piece as they were modular...
Right. Because when Jobs arrived and consolidated all the product lines into the User+Laptop (iMac + iBook) and PowerUser+Laptop (Power Mac + Power Book), this was definately not a roadmap. And just because after they had the G4s + Cubes + G5s + Intels and so on means they were just sitting around randomly making computers without any thought towards the future right? Just like say, Dell or Asus.
I think people get kind of confused when they see things like the iPod, and forget that while Apple is certainly not just a "computer" company anymore, even having just dropped the actual word "computer" from their name, they wouldn't be any worse off if they had just stuck to making computers. And for the most part that is still most of what they do. iPods and iPhones bring in more cash. But I don't think anyone imagines somehow that they're getting a Mac JUST BECAUSE it will integrate with their iPhone and or iPod.
That doesn't quite rhyme though. You could try something else in stead like Hector the Destructor Vector.
You forgot to mention the electricity we got last year! It's totally awesome!
HaHa! I like this one. Have anything to back that up? Any lab results from your experiements in alternate realities where Apple has decoupled their OS from the hardware and achieved phonomenal success?
Apple sells mostly hardware. The software is really nothing but a strategy tool to help them sell more hardware. We've been going over this many, many times on /., you may have read this. By opening up OS X to generic PCs, they'd be opening themselves up to huge headaches. The experience most likely wouldn't be the same. By coupling it with their hardware they can control the experience and the quality. And by not opening up to generic PCs they don't have to waste endless resources for customer support, and driver development, and 3rd party for hardware relationships, and so on and so forth. It would be a tremendous loss of focus for the OS X group, and might lead down the dark path of Vista.
And anyways how much do they really make off of OS X? After piracy and what not, I rather doubt it would be as much as selling laptops.
..or expensive.
Well to be fair to me, I had considered putting a smiley after "happy now", because it was a little snarkey comment that was mostly there for humor. But no one ever seems to use them on slashdot.
Hurray for rewire!
"or even your own LEGALLY COPYRIGHTED drum/beat/synthesizer loops"
Why would you need soundcard drivers to record something you already have as a file?
Well if you knew anything about recording home audio on a PC, you'd quickly come across situations where it's useful. Stereo Mix is great for rerouting sound in between applications as well, so long as you're not too concerned about quality. I use it sometimes for streaming media. Things like justin.tv and so on all use the same basic technology which assumes that you have a web cam and a microphone. There's no other way to send your own audio. However if you want to place sound files or synth output (and yes I do have them, and I do perform live with them) or whatever from your machine into your broadcast, you have to use Stereo Mix basically to reroute out of application and into the "input" side of the streaming client.
There, found you a legitimate use happy now?
Probably Bollo from the Mighty Boosh.
You know you make a good point, and I do appreciate that. You are of course right about the "lab report" and how it ecodes for a number of unspoken assumptions (I was reading some stuff recently about Bohr, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics which addresses this exact same issue) about our experiences.
I would argue though, that those lab experiences are somehow at least repeatable and measurable. By definition this is science. And so while there maybe a number of elements that could be subjective in the chain of the physics lab experiement ("Is red, REALLY red? What if other people see it as blue? What if I see red as pink?", a bit extreme but you see my point), we can all go into the lab and hopefully, with a good experiment, repeat again and again and get the same result again and again, until we all get bored and go home. Or at least a result we can all agree on.
With Hobbs saying that with government you move violence up to the level of the nation state which is better for people, is simply making a blanket generalization that people may not even agree on. It actually sounds a bit cynical and war-mongerish to me. Like somehow violence is always unavoidable and we should just try and move it around different levels of society, instead of actually trying to solve it. And its not even true. If it were true, creating an army would prevent violent crime (because it moved violence from the level of the people up to the level of the state), but it doesn't. In fact all that creating an army really does is encourage the power thirsty to extend their power, because they have this great tool available called an army, and oh well look at all the Nuclear Missles I have, and so lets see how far I can go with this. Who cares if a few people are killed.
And I'm sure some other people would disagree with me on this. And some people might interpret Hobbs differently, and then..etc, etc.
And so now we don't even have a common framework with which to agree on. And now we are well outside the physics lab, where we go in agreeing on "Science" and how to interpret the results of the experiment scientifficly (science is in one way just a kind of intellectual "Standard" that we all use to communicate about the nature of reality).
My point being that Hobbs never had a lab to test any of these things out, nor did he have the standard of science to get results we can all agree on, and so how do we know any of it is even valid or true? It can't be true because he hasn't shown case after case where people agree that its true, and so why even use Hobbs. At least the social sciences try to have a semi-scientiffic approach, using statistics and repeatable experiements and control groups.
God, the Libertarians are out in force today, aren't they?
The guy wasn't saying that scales of economy and competition don't allow us to have innovative products that would otherwise be unavailable due to lack of infrastructure and means.
He wasn't saying, "CAPITALISM BAD!!!"
He was saying that the largest of the large companies, continually exploit their positions and use ruthless tactics, and we continue to reward them by just going and buying their products, or giving them a free pass to continue to act the way they do. Big Oil just being one example.
Despite what you may think, companies ARE self-serving, and to some degree that there are consumers that buy their products is only a side effect of the environment they've been setup in. They are still large power heiarchies who's aim is to put money into people's pockets (shareholders and employees), by whatever means available. This can and often is dangerous.
And anyways there wouldn't be any problem with the guy down the street making anti-biotics so long as he made them to within regulation just like big pharam does. And maybe he'd do a great job with his local lab, and do it with a smile. Large corporate does not mean better quality, and often forget the smile.
Sure. Conversely then, Hobbs shouldn't be stating in "no uncertain terms" like it is the result of a lab experiment. That was kind of my point. .o.
I'd like to see the lab where he did all his scientific experiments on this stuff.
...which satellite was that? I mean there are so many orbiting Mars....
The other big success is their constant work on making the entire system architecture better, and basically giving that work to the industry for free.
While I'm sure thats how the script was repeated in Intel, suggesting great generosity ("And we give it away for free!"), what choice did they really have? IBM's whole Micro Channel Architecture fiasco showed what licensing did to adoption of new advances in system architecture and integration.
While I love this version of events, according to Wikipedia that whole bit of it that you've just described is filed under conspiracy theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jennifer
"This is a great discovery. There is nothing at all to worry about." said the oddly-behaving scientist who discovered the sled dog.
Another major role for Christpher Lloyd. He's like the Christopher Walkin of sci-fi.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about exactly. I remember when Bell was more heavily regulated everything WAS cheaper. Now, because of deregulation, I have to pay for the technician to come by and install extra jacks, and I have to pay an insurance for the telco line that runs to my house, because its on my property, and I'm paying around $40 a month for a service that used to cost me $20 in the 1990s. I can't say that the service has improved at all either. So how is it exactly you're saying that people over paid. I mean taxes = bad is a common liberterian position, but please back it up for once.
I think he meant to ask that in terms of Space Shuttles per Stadium.
How was this in any way flamebait?