I didn't say that Apple did NOT have an approved hardware list. I just explained that having one is some sort of protection against user complaints when they try to add a piece of hardware that doesn't ultimately work.
Why don't you read a little before you respond? Better yet, read the whole thread.
You amuse me. Dumping the classic apps is exactly what Apple has been trying to do.
How much noise have people been making about this or that app soon to be released native for OS X?
You can ignore reality, but the fact is that most people, most computer buyers, are not willing to pay a large premium for the kind of quality and aesthetics that Apple provides in its hardware.
Dell's equipment may not be as slick as Apple's, but it works really well, and they've been selling the hell out of them for years. And like it or not, MS has made good progress with its OSs. I'm no MS fan, but XP is "good enough" for the buying public, just like PCs are good enough.
Your argument about other doomed OSs has no relevance. BeOS died from lack of apps, not because it was based on Intel platform.
You sound like yet-another-rabid-Machead. If Apple didn't want to support every peripheral in the world, they could produce an approved hardware list. Microsoft did that for NT, and other OS vendors do that for Linux. And anyway, nowdays it's largely up to the hardware vendors to write the drivers for the OS. All Apple would have to do is review/approve/certify them.
Regarding reliability, despite my dislike for MS, I have to say my office development machine (running XP Pro on a Dell P4 workstation) runs flawlessly. I never reboot it, at least not often enough to even remember. It's up for at least 30+ days at a time. Of course, my RedHat 9.0 running on the Dell P4 workstation beside it stays up even longer, but it doesn't see as much day to day use.
So basically you're full of FUD, and you can't accept that Apple is not known for being smart about business.
You're right about one thing, I am wasting my "genius" responding to people like you.
You call $14M profit on $1.475B well run? That's less than 1% profit. And that's also less than half the profit they made the same quarter the previous year....
Since the iMac stopped being a hot item, Apple has been stalled.
Then Apple went on the rampage against its non-corporate retailers. I can't find the link, but it happened.
Apple is like the entrepreneur... great at coming up with ideas and getting them rolling, but horrible in followthrough.
I like the new Mac, based on what I've read, but that doesn't make me feel any better about Apple's future. I think, like some others have suggested, that Apple needs to stick to just OS and perhaps some apps, and let someone else do the hardware. And good grief, move to Intel/AMD.
I liked what he said, except for where he was touting the Hotmail spam blocking efforts.
It really doesn't matter how much spam they are blocking. If I continue to get 100+ spam a day, then their spam blocking is worthless. And I do, and it is.
Spam sucks, indeed, but a new threat looms, and that's spyware. Every non-technical person I come across has their machines crammed full of spyware crap. Machines creep along, popups appear all the time, and other strange things happen. Most users are clueless. They'll just end up buying a new machine because their "PC is too slow".
I believe Microsoft is largely to blame for this with Internet Explorer. Many users have default settings that do not prompt or reject downloads of unsigned ActiveX objects. So Gator slips right in. And they don't have prompt/reject set for running unsigned scripts.
This is one reason people need to switch to Mozilla. But I digress...
All of your points are reasonable, but you fail to comment about the single-threaded, highly optimized (for this test) malloc that Apple used.
SSE2/Altivec/HT/etc. aside, there's no way someone is going to have their Mac perform like the benchmark shows, because they won't be running apps/OS built with this malloc.
The malloc thing is where Apple shows that they were indeed purely out to cheat. Maybe the other cases were reasonable, but this malloc point makes it obvious their ultimate intentions.
And since I'm replying to an "interesting" post, mine may not be flagged FLAIMBAIT... maybe:)
Computers are a tool. In this setting, they'll be a distraction. They're not going to make a very non-technical class like this more interesting. They'll just provide an outlet for disinterested people to keep themselves busy.
Back in my day, we used books and notebooks. When it came time to write a paper (a formal effort, not a weblog), we did use a computer. But that was not during class.
I think you really need to look elsewhere for ways to get students interested and involved. Computers will be a mistake.
Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak were reported shroomheads back in the day. In fact, many Silicon Valley people were.
And as for "fastest desktop", how many times have we heard absurd Apple spin about how their machines were faster than Wintel machines? They've been in denial about that subject for years.
That's not to say they don't make neat, useful stuff, but they definitely aren't known for making benchmark-winning machines.
The article now says 6-3 ruling. I presume WP changed the numbers, and the poster isn't to blame.
Anyway, the lawyer for the libraries should have engineered some text in his arguments that would guarantee that case to be blocked by the filters. That could help prove a point, if only after the fact.
At least it would make the court look like the out-of-touch, technically inept folks they are.
One positive note, something I didn't know, the Yahoo article states that library patrons can request that the filter be disabled.
As for needing to hide the eyes of our children, have the justices not seen television lately? Do they not have their own hotmail email accounts? Kids left alone with TV or internet will inevitably get material we don't want them to get. They're much more likely to get it from a source while at home than while at a library. How many kids nowdays spend time in a library?!
In my office of 60 people, most users have MSN as their homepage. They didn't choose that because they like MSN, it's just what IE uses for a start page.
Only a few people have changed their home page. As a result, when the first group wants to search for something, they just type their query into the MSN search box. I bet 1/3 of them don't even realize they could simply type www.google.com in the address bar. I've witnessed some people typing in URLs into the MSN search box, and then going to the first match (which may or may not actually take them to the URL they really wanted to go to.)
So right there, MSN, with the far weaker search engine, has won. And most of these users, age 35 and up, are busy enough with work that they don't experiment with their browsers. They're going to be using whatever search page is presented to them, probably for the rest of their lives.
So whether MS is comparable to Google is irrelevant. One OS/browser/search engine to rule them all...
"I do not favor extreme remedies -- unless no moderate remedies can be found"
Hatch reportedly said that. Ok, so what if destroying a pirate's computer doesn't do the trick? What if they get another computer and pirate more?
Maybe we should execute them... and if we do that, we should do it on national television to set an example.
Now that I have made some fun of the absurd overreaction to copyright violation, I ask this: how many congress people should be fired, or worse for knowingly doing things for personal gain, at the cost of the US people? That's theft of tax money. It's fraud, etc.
Point is, we all know the politicians are effectively paid by corporations to make certain decisions. We also know that we, the public, can't afford to compete with businesses to buy off politicians. I won't rant too much, but we've needed true campaign finance reform for ages. Corporations can't vote, so they shouldn't be able to manipulate government decisions. And we know many of them don't begin to pay the taxes they're theoretically supposed to pay. Yet I do pay my taxes, and when I screwed up one year, I ended up owing a bunch. I'm paying that off.
It comes down to this: our politicians are either ignorant about technology (this is almost universally true), or they are in bed with the corporations who are paying for their re-election campaigns. It's both, of course.
There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, to be able to compete during campaign time, you have to accept as much money from any source who will give it to you. That's the way it works.
I just don't know what more to say about this. It all seems futile. I do think justice, real justice, will be served one way or another. The people in positions of power who abuse those positions usually know what they are doing. They'll remember their deeds on their death beds, and perhaps they'll feel rotted. What a way to die...
As usual, this won't be a question of who as the superior technology or performance. It will be a question of which of the two (MS or Google) can force themselves upon the user first.
Obviously MS can, since it controls the computer. Most users are not technically saavy enough to choose a search engine. Most don't even understand they can type into the address bar.
When they go "onto the internet", they see MSN. MSN is the internet to them, the same way AOL has been the internet to a lot of unfortunate people over the last many years.
Of course, working against MS are the various spyware packages that help the user find things (via popups) that might not have appeared on MSN's search... chuckle.
To summarize, and no offense to non-saavy users (who won't read this anyway), but the sheep will be shepherded right thru MSN as usual.
To join in the fray of this SCO ball of shit, and worse, to be perceived as joining in on the SCO side, is suicidal. It's not _as_ suicidal as what SCO is doing, but it clearly screams, "HEY LOOK AT US, WE'RE HAS-BEENS".
Sun had their day in the, em, sun a long time ago, and they've done very little since then to reassert themselves as leaders in the computing world.
Java is the only thing I think Sun can be credited with in the last few years, and even that is debatable.
But hey, we shouldn't be too hard on Scott, he doesn't have many examples of good CEOs to observe.
They simply spotted a trend, and suggested that BECAUSE of it (because of the use of Beowulf clusters of Linux machines), the focus of research should be on large data storage.
There would be a spike of traffic, since every spam would generate a challenge, but that would roll off in reasonable time as spamming became a less attractive marketing tactic.
everyone's challenge-response system will be different and incompatible
How hard is "Did you send this? Reply if you sent it." ? Seems like the only variance would be whether you reply, or whether you click a special link. You don't have to be a rocket ship, you know.
spammers will figure out how to reply to them
I'd like to see how they do that. Short of logging into my hotmail and yahoo accounts and manually replying, they couldn't do it.
For all but the order confirmation and mailing list cases, challenge-response is quite workable. For the latter two cases, I recommend special email accounts. I create an email account for each mailing list I join, and I have another account I use when ordering products online.
I have two children under the age of 4, plus a puppy.
The children can play in the back yard, with the puppy, and be supervised by my wife from the kitchen and dining areas. She's able to do what she needs, and they're able to play and enjoy the outdoors.
Parks don't allow that convenience, nor do they allow the puppy to run free.
I have mixed feelings about cars. Traffic does suck, and honestly if I could be a passenger in a safe vehicle (train?) for the same length commute, I would.
Building bigger roads can help cars only to a certain extent. You reach a point of diminishing returns. Just look at LA. Of course, if people knew how to drive, and followed the guide that faster traffic should be on the left, it would help. However, there are a few things that just can't be solved.
For example, a road at near saturation can be moving along at the speed limit, but once 2 or 3 cars in a group brake moderately (for whatever reason--perhaps two of them want to swap lanes, but they haven't worked out how to do it), they create a slow spot in the road at that point.
Now the traffic that was moving 55mph is now moving 40mph from the point where the people first slowed down, to some point off in the distance behind them. And until there is a gap in traffic, that speed cannot increase! The reason is that once a slow spot is created, there is now a backlog of people who are already going slow. Once they reach the front edge of the slow spot, they can't accelerate back to 55 instantly. Thus, it takes a gap in traffic (ie, lower traffic saturation) for speed to increase become uniform at the previous 55.
Making wider roads only helps to a point. Onramps and offramps work against wider roads, since it means more people will be disrupting the flow of traffic.
Personally, I'd like to see more companies building their offices further from the center of town. Then people could conceivably live near their offices, yet still have a nice lawn.
Also, people need to freaking move sometimes. The people who have 1 hour + commutes really should consider moving closer or changing jobs. There are far too many people who live in Fort Worth that drive to Dallas every day (and vice versa). They should just move! Heck, when I was a contractor I moved every 6 months.
Slashdot Mirror
Could it be Nielsen doesn't have the best numbers?
From their press release, I can't tell how they arrived at their numbers.
I also wonder about their "unique visitor" term.
It seems to me that file sharing admins would have a pretty good idea of the traffic on their networks.
Hard to really know what's going on with so little information.
I believe the word "secure" meant "well established, healthy".
But hey, you got an opportunity to strut, and show some linkage!
I wonder how newspapers get away with being so obviously biased against the blind...
And radio stations are completely leaving out the deaf audience.
Nike doesn't make shoes that fit people who have no legs.
The list goes on.
I didn't say that Apple did NOT have an approved hardware list. I just explained that having one is some sort of protection against user complaints when they try to add a piece of hardware that doesn't ultimately work.
Why don't you read a little before you respond? Better yet, read the whole thread.
You amuse me. Dumping the classic apps is exactly what Apple has been trying to do.
How much noise have people been making about this or that app soon to be released native for OS X?
You can ignore reality, but the fact is that most people, most computer buyers, are not willing to pay a large premium for the kind of quality and aesthetics that Apple provides in its hardware.
Dell's equipment may not be as slick as Apple's, but it works really well, and they've been selling the hell out of them for years. And like it or not, MS has made good progress with its OSs. I'm no MS fan, but XP is "good enough" for the buying public, just like PCs are good enough.
Your argument about other doomed OSs has no relevance. BeOS died from lack of apps, not because it was based on Intel platform.
You sound like yet-another-rabid-Machead. If Apple didn't want to support every peripheral in the world, they could produce an approved hardware list. Microsoft did that for NT, and other OS vendors do that for Linux. And anyway, nowdays it's largely up to the hardware vendors to write the drivers for the OS. All Apple would have to do is review/approve/certify them.
Regarding reliability, despite my dislike for MS, I have to say my office development machine (running XP Pro on a Dell P4 workstation) runs flawlessly. I never reboot it, at least not often enough to even remember. It's up for at least 30+ days at a time. Of course, my RedHat 9.0 running on the Dell P4 workstation beside it stays up even longer, but it doesn't see as much day to day use.
So basically you're full of FUD, and you can't accept that Apple is not known for being smart about business.
You're right about one thing, I am wasting my "genius" responding to people like you.
Indeed... but wouldn't it be nice to not have to fix their machine in the first place? :)
I'd rather be educating them on how to use it than cleaning up poop.
Since the iMac stopped being a hot item, Apple has been stalled.
Then Apple went on the rampage against its non-corporate retailers. I can't find the link, but it happened.
Apple is like the entrepreneur... great at coming up with ideas and getting them rolling, but horrible in followthrough.
I like the new Mac, based on what I've read, but that doesn't make me feel any better about Apple's future. I think, like some others have suggested, that Apple needs to stick to just OS and perhaps some apps, and let someone else do the hardware. And good grief, move to Intel/AMD.
I liked what he said, except for where he was touting the Hotmail spam blocking efforts.
It really doesn't matter how much spam they are blocking. If I continue to get 100+ spam a day, then their spam blocking is worthless. And I do, and it is.
Spam sucks, indeed, but a new threat looms, and that's spyware. Every non-technical person I come across has their machines crammed full of spyware crap. Machines creep along, popups appear all the time, and other strange things happen. Most users are clueless. They'll just end up buying a new machine because their "PC is too slow".
I believe Microsoft is largely to blame for this with Internet Explorer. Many users have default settings that do not prompt or reject downloads of unsigned ActiveX objects. So Gator slips right in. And they don't have prompt/reject set for running unsigned scripts.
This is one reason people need to switch to Mozilla. But I digress...
All of your points are reasonable, but you fail to comment about the single-threaded, highly optimized (for this test) malloc that Apple used.
SSE2/Altivec/HT/etc. aside, there's no way someone is going to have their Mac perform like the benchmark shows, because they won't be running apps/OS built with this malloc.
The malloc thing is where Apple shows that they were indeed purely out to cheat. Maybe the other cases were reasonable, but this malloc point makes it obvious their ultimate intentions.
So yesterday I was modded as Flaimbait for suggesting the new Mac wasn't actually the fastest desktop in the world.
So here's a big Told-You-So to the modders.
And why is this benchmark cheating not a surprise? They've been fudging facts for years.
Now what gets me is why companies do this? Don't they know they'll be discovered? Unbelievable.
Rofl!
:)
Now that WILL get your students' attention
And since I'm replying to an "interesting" post, mine may not be flagged FLAIMBAIT... maybe :)
Computers are a tool. In this setting, they'll be a distraction. They're not going to make a very non-technical class like this more interesting. They'll just provide an outlet for disinterested people to keep themselves busy.
Back in my day, we used books and notebooks. When it came time to write a paper (a formal effort, not a weblog), we did use a computer. But that was not during class.
I think you really need to look elsewhere for ways to get students interested and involved. Computers will be a mistake.
Hah, ok, gotta respond to my own post here...
Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak were reported shroomheads back in the day. In fact, many Silicon Valley people were.
And as for "fastest desktop", how many times have we heard absurd Apple spin about how their machines were faster than Wintel machines? They've been in denial about that subject for years.
That's not to say they don't make neat, useful stuff, but they definitely aren't known for making benchmark-winning machines.
Flamebait me again, punk.
Steve Jobs must be back in the shrooms again.
Or maybe there was a misprint. Should be:
"Fastest Desktop in My World".
The article now says 6-3 ruling. I presume WP changed the numbers, and the poster isn't to blame.
Anyway, the lawyer for the libraries should have engineered some text in his arguments that would guarantee that case to be blocked by the filters. That could help prove a point, if only after the fact.
At least it would make the court look like the out-of-touch, technically inept folks they are.
One positive note, something I didn't know, the Yahoo article states that library patrons can request that the filter be disabled.
As for needing to hide the eyes of our children, have the justices not seen television lately? Do they not have their own hotmail email accounts? Kids left alone with TV or internet will inevitably get material we don't want them to get. They're much more likely to get it from a source while at home than while at a library. How many kids nowdays spend time in a library?!
In my office of 60 people, most users have MSN as their homepage. They didn't choose that because they like MSN, it's just what IE uses for a start page.
Only a few people have changed their home page. As a result, when the first group wants to search for something, they just type their query into the MSN search box. I bet 1/3 of them don't even realize they could simply type www.google.com in the address bar. I've witnessed some people typing in URLs into the MSN search box, and then going to the first match (which may or may not actually take them to the URL they really wanted to go to.)
So right there, MSN, with the far weaker search engine, has won. And most of these users, age 35 and up, are busy enough with work that they don't experiment with their browsers. They're going to be using whatever search page is presented to them, probably for the rest of their lives.
So whether MS is comparable to Google is irrelevant. One OS/browser/search engine to rule them all...
Hatch reportedly said that. Ok, so what if destroying a pirate's computer doesn't do the trick? What if they get another computer and pirate more?
Maybe we should execute them... and if we do that, we should do it on national television to set an example.
Now that I have made some fun of the absurd overreaction to copyright violation, I ask this: how many congress people should be fired, or worse for knowingly doing things for personal gain, at the cost of the US people? That's theft of tax money. It's fraud, etc.
Point is, we all know the politicians are effectively paid by corporations to make certain decisions. We also know that we, the public, can't afford to compete with businesses to buy off politicians. I won't rant too much, but we've needed true campaign finance reform for ages. Corporations can't vote, so they shouldn't be able to manipulate government decisions. And we know many of them don't begin to pay the taxes they're theoretically supposed to pay. Yet I do pay my taxes, and when I screwed up one year, I ended up owing a bunch. I'm paying that off.
It comes down to this: our politicians are either ignorant about technology (this is almost universally true), or they are in bed with the corporations who are paying for their re-election campaigns. It's both, of course.
There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, to be able to compete during campaign time, you have to accept as much money from any source who will give it to you. That's the way it works.
I just don't know what more to say about this. It all seems futile. I do think justice, real justice, will be served one way or another. The people in positions of power who abuse those positions usually know what they are doing. They'll remember their deeds on their death beds, and perhaps they'll feel rotted. What a way to die...
Most posters here are overlooking the obvious.
As usual, this won't be a question of who as the superior technology or performance. It will be a question of which of the two (MS or Google) can force themselves upon the user first.
Obviously MS can, since it controls the computer. Most users are not technically saavy enough to choose a search engine. Most don't even understand they can type into the address bar.
When they go "onto the internet", they see MSN. MSN is the internet to them, the same way AOL has been the internet to a lot of unfortunate people over the last many years.
Of course, working against MS are the various spyware packages that help the user find things (via popups) that might not have appeared on MSN's search... chuckle.
To summarize, and no offense to non-saavy users (who won't read this anyway), but the sheep will be shepherded right thru MSN as usual.
That Sun is heading down (just like we all knew).
To join in the fray of this SCO ball of shit, and worse, to be perceived as joining in on the SCO side, is suicidal. It's not _as_ suicidal as what SCO is doing, but it clearly screams, "HEY LOOK AT US, WE'RE HAS-BEENS".
Sun had their day in the, em, sun a long time ago, and they've done very little since then to reassert themselves as leaders in the computing world.
Java is the only thing I think Sun can be credited with in the last few years, and even that is debatable.
But hey, we shouldn't be too hard on Scott, he doesn't have many examples of good CEOs to observe.
Since they can so reliably (?) deduce your speed from your skidmarks, what happens if you completely fail to brake?
No skidmarks, no speed?
At best, the skidmarks might tell your speed when you locked the brakes. How does ABS affect this?
I'm not defending the defendent in the least, but the skidmark measure sounds fishy to me.
They didn't advocate.
They simply spotted a trend, and suggested that BECAUSE of it (because of the use of Beowulf clusters of Linux machines), the focus of research should be on large data storage.
There would be a spike of traffic, since every spam would generate a challenge, but that would roll off in reasonable time as spamming became a less attractive marketing tactic.
How hard is "Did you send this? Reply if you sent it." ? Seems like the only variance would be whether you reply, or whether you click a special link. You don't have to be a rocket ship, you know.
I'd like to see how they do that. Short of logging into my hotmail and yahoo accounts and manually replying, they couldn't do it.
For all but the order confirmation and mailing list cases, challenge-response is quite workable. For the latter two cases, I recommend special email accounts. I create an email account for each mailing list I join, and I have another account I use when ordering products online.
I have two children under the age of 4, plus a puppy.
The children can play in the back yard, with the puppy, and be supervised by my wife from the kitchen and dining areas. She's able to do what she needs, and they're able to play and enjoy the outdoors.
Parks don't allow that convenience, nor do they allow the puppy to run free.
I have mixed feelings about cars. Traffic does suck, and honestly if I could be a passenger in a safe vehicle (train?) for the same length commute, I would.
Building bigger roads can help cars only to a certain extent. You reach a point of diminishing returns. Just look at LA. Of course, if people knew how to drive, and followed the guide that faster traffic should be on the left, it would help. However, there are a few things that just can't be solved.
For example, a road at near saturation can be moving along at the speed limit, but once 2 or 3 cars in a group brake moderately (for whatever reason--perhaps two of them want to swap lanes, but they haven't worked out how to do it), they create a slow spot in the road at that point.
Now the traffic that was moving 55mph is now moving 40mph from the point where the people first slowed down, to some point off in the distance behind them. And until there is a gap in traffic, that speed cannot increase! The reason is that once a slow spot is created, there is now a backlog of people who are already going slow. Once they reach the front edge of the slow spot, they can't accelerate back to 55 instantly. Thus, it takes a gap in traffic (ie, lower traffic saturation) for speed to increase become uniform at the previous 55.
Making wider roads only helps to a point. Onramps and offramps work against wider roads, since it means more people will be disrupting the flow of traffic.
Personally, I'd like to see more companies building their offices further from the center of town. Then people could conceivably live near their offices, yet still have a nice lawn.
Also, people need to freaking move sometimes. The people who have 1 hour + commutes really should consider moving closer or changing jobs. There are far too many people who live in Fort Worth that drive to Dallas every day (and vice versa). They should just move! Heck, when I was a contractor I moved every 6 months.