What the hell is this woman doing with a laptop, much less thousands of pounds (or kilos) of steel killing machine if she manages to pop the the trunk (or boot) while in a car wash. I don't know that I'd trust her with a burnt out match.
'Course, we people like that at my work as well. For some reason, they all seem to earn a lot more than I do.
To us techs at school, it's pretty funny, after a while. My favorite, here at my college is when seniors come in, during the last semester. They have to turn in a writing portfolio of about 10 different types of papers. Easiest thing to do is just use stuff you've writen the last 4 years. Seems like there's at least one student each year who says "all my papers are on this floppy and it doesn't work".
Of course, we take it back to our office, confirm it's dead, shake it, open up the little door and look at the cookie, and then give them 'the lecture'. Always good for a laugh, after the goob has left.
You can take two people with similar build, place them into identical outfits and one can look much worse than the other. A lot has to do with how you carry yourself and how comfortable you are with what you're wearing. Another thing that effects this is that most people who look good in what they wear seem to be more aware of how they look while geeks tend to dress and forget. Having a geek wife, I've seen her wear the same outfit out shopping or at a casual get together. Out shopping, she isn't paying attention to herself and looks geeky. Around people she's interested in, she seems to be more 'together' with her look. She was a professional dancer for 20 years, so it may be that she just puts herself onstage at times and the rest of the time, doesn't care.
Hebrew is the only ancient language to still be in daily use. How many computer languages and protocols will survive 2500+ years and still be in regular use by millions of users?
Microsoft also has a *serious* NIH syndrome when it comes to anything Apple-based
You mean like windowing GUIs and such?
*cough-Apple source code-cough*
What happened was that Apple went totally USB, dropping it's ADB Bus (keyboards, mice, input, etc.), it's serial ports (printers, modems) and it's SCSI port (scanners, external storage) in favor of USB. This forced periphial manufacurers to make all sorts of USB devices. Before this, while there were USB cards available for PCs, no one was using them as there was really nothing to plug into them.
It now seems that Apple's trying to push Bluetooth. The problem is that Apple is not getting totally behind Bluetooth the way they did with USB. I just ordered a mid-range G5 (single 1.8GHz processor) and Bluetooth was still optional. They want an extra $50 for it. I suppose it costs them something for licensing but that seems a bit excessive for a premier workstation.
Follow the link to the article where they test the G5s and then to the last page with the chart. At the bottom, they explain that MacWorld tested the G5s and PC World tested the AMDs.
As to my bias, I'm known as the Mac Guy at my college. Ya' gotta' shoot straight in these discussions. Can't wait for my G5 to show up.
I just pulled 20 of them from a lab last month as we replaced them with new Dells. They were running OS 9.0.4, 40 MB RAM, 2GB HD, 233GHz G3 upgrade processor. They were used by the Math department (Mathematica 4, various stat software), Fine Arts (Photoshop 6, Illustrator 8), and Biology departments (genotyping software). The biggest trouble we had with the Macs were the hard drives and monitors failing. The room was poorly ventilated and would heat up with 20 monitors going. Can't imagine what it's like now with all the PIVs in there. Not my problem as I'm the Mac Guy.
As for the PPCs, a bio professor purchased 8 of them to run his genotyping software. It was cheaper than finding or getting a PC version of the software. I gave him a bunch of extra hard drives, processors and monitors and said they're his responsibility. As for the rest, they'll be stripped of parts and eBay'd soon.
Since my USB scanner went tits up, I've set up my Quadra 650 with my old HP Scanjet 3 scsi scanner. I can't get any OSX drivers for it so out came the Quadra. It has 64MB RAM, 512k VRAM, 10MB ethernet-built in, 1GB HD (SCSI), NuBus video card and dual monitors and an external 512MB LaCie Joule Drive (love the hot swappable tower). It's running OS 7.6.1 as 8 was kinda' flakey on it. It has Photoshop 2.5, Quark 3.11, and Illustrator 5.5. This setup is extremely stable, if a little slow for heavy Photoshop or Illustrator work. Yes, I could have pulled out a beige G3, but I knew this box had the software installed and would be able to scan within minutes of startup. In the last 6 months, it hasn't had a glitch, though I only power it up a couple times a month. It did cost me $2300 new and has received about another grand in upgrades (RAM was expensive back then) but I'd say I've got my money out of it. It was my primary Mac up until my beige G3 is 98 or 99.
You're right, the current speed of hardware has most users (Office, Web, email, IM, music, video) humming along just fine. The same goes for home Mac users. 1 GHZ G4's are plenty fast (I'm still using a 266G3 laptop with OS X 10.2.8). With Mac users having a higher percentage of power users (DTP, video editing, etc.), Apple should have a good replacement market for its G5's.
As to the overall PC market growing, I think it'll still continue to grow here in the US, though slowly. The real growth will be overseas. Europe isn't quite as saturated as the US while Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and, eventually, Africa will start showing large growth in the next decade. I don't expect Apple to grab much more market share than they already have but it'll still be millions of new Mac users.
For all practical purposes, when NeXT was bought by Apple, they came in and soon changed the way Apple was doing things. Job pretty much forced Amelio out and brought in his tech people. Yes, it's still Apple, with NeXT running things.
Apple makes money by getting people to buy boxes with the highest profit margin in the PC industry. They do this by making them fairly tasty to a small group of folks with cash. So far, this has given them a 25 million user market, which is slowly expanding, though not at the rate that the X86 market is expanding. The thing is, it is still growing. Yes, their market share has dwindled, but the market has grown so large, it's not life threatning to them. Same thing goes for developers. It's argued that no one's going to want to develop for a platform with miniscule mindshare. Bullshit! How'd Linux happen, then? As long as there's even 100,000 Mac users, you're going to have developers. It's even more true, now, with OS X, as so much stuff is readily available for porting/compiling.
Even if Apple switched to X86, they would not go and step into the ring, going up against Microsoft and Dell. They'd have propietary logic boards/boxes that would keep people buying their stuff at premium prices. You'd never see OS X able to run on a Lindows machine.
A great example of what happens if you move into the X86 world is both BeOS and NeXT. They both started out making their Motorolla based machines, switched to X86 and then, when selling hardware didn't pan out, became software only companies, duking it out with MS. NeXT was smart enought to go and take over Apple, moving away from X86 while BeOS has whithered on the vine. Personally, I was hoping for Apple to bring BeOS in and use that as their new OS. That could have been interesting.
You can see a couple other hardware companies trying the X86 route as well; Sun and SGI. While they have slightly different market segments, they still face the problems of trying to make money off of software as opposed to hardware in X86 land.
US educational pricing for individual purchasing. Institutional pricing is usually $50-$100 less than these prices. Apple reps will also try and work out even better deals if you're buying 20 or more Macs at a time.
$1,799.00
1.6GHz PowerPC G5 Workstation
800MHz frontside bus
512K L2 cache
256MB DDR333 128-bit SDRAM
Expandable to 4GB SDRAM
80GB Serial ATA
SuperDrive
Three PCI Slots
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem
Discounted from $1,999 retail price
$849.00
1GHz PowerPC G4 eMac
128MB SDRAM
60GB Ultra ATA drive
Combo drive
Discounted from $999 retail price
I'm putting together an order for around 30 Macs for faculty and staff at my college. So far, we're averaging $1035 a Mac. This includes a 256MB third party RAM upgrade (Apple RAM prices suck). Most users are getting eMacs as they only use Office, web browsing, and email apps. A couple of people are getting 1.8GHz G5s and others are getting 1.25GHz G4 towers. The towers are getting 17" Mitsubishi CRTs. The rest of the faculty are getting Dells. I don't know the processor specs but they have 512MB RAM, DVD-ROM/CDRW, 15" LCD (1024x768) for around $1100 per machine.
They kept the Apple cases as they're designed for the cooling the G5s need as well as keeping the cost down. Adding in 4U boxes or whatever it'd take to fit all the fans in the G5 cases would have been really expensive as well as time consuming.
One other plus from eBooks would be the large back catalog being released. I'm still searching eBay, trying to replace my H. Beam Piper collection that I lost in college. Nothing would ever go outa' print!
I'm a supporter of Baen books. I just don't see the big publishing houses following his methods anytime soon. It'll most likely be a 50-100 year evolution with places like Baen Books gradually replacing and out selling the bigger houses. The conservative inertia of big business is mindblowing.
Apple's supposed to be announcing the Windows client in a week or two. After that, they have to work with other country's copyright laws before they can allow d/l's to other countries. As to restrictions on the files, it's highly doubtful that the big publishers are going to release their stuff without some form of DRM. Plain txt files are a thing of Usenet.
What Apple does have going for it is that theirs is the least painful of the legal alternatives vs. selection. Apple also has huge marketing weight. If they can get a few of the big publishers to sign on to a scheme of theirs, it'll likely be picked up on in the general mind share out there.
As an example, when I was at a family funeral a few weeks ago, up in the mountains of New Mexico, I had family members there asking me about online music and such. Some of them didn't have computers and the ones that did hadn't known about it. The buzz that Apple's generated via iTunes has managed to reach even my back woods relatives. 'Course, trying to explain different file formats, Usenet, etc. was difficult but a few will figure it out.
Check out a used Newton. They have larger screens than Palms, can sync to Mac or PC and you can find USB adapters out there. The later versions (2000, 2001) are best but they run for $40-$80. 120 and 130's go for $10 on up. The 2K Newtons can also go online, surf the web, ftp, email, etc. They can take compact flash memory cards via PC card adapter (same as a laptop) as well as 802.11b cards. The battery life is around 5 days for mine, unless I'm using wireless. Then it goes down.
Where's Apple with an eBook solution. Once they do something, their Mac faithful will at least try it out, exposing a lot of potential customers to something new. Apple would probably figure out a good way to do eBooks, make some money at and keep it from being a pain in the ass, they way they did for music files.
They already have an iBook so I can't imagine what they'd call such a service.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell is this woman doing with a laptop, much less thousands of pounds (or kilos) of steel killing machine if she manages to pop the the trunk (or boot) while in a car wash. I don't know that I'd trust her with a burnt out match. 'Course, we people like that at my work as well. For some reason, they all seem to earn a lot more than I do.
To us techs at school, it's pretty funny, after a while. My favorite, here at my college is when seniors come in, during the last semester. They have to turn in a writing portfolio of about 10 different types of papers. Easiest thing to do is just use stuff you've writen the last 4 years. Seems like there's at least one student each year who says "all my papers are on this floppy and it doesn't work". Of course, we take it back to our office, confirm it's dead, shake it, open up the little door and look at the cookie, and then give them 'the lecture'. Always good for a laugh, after the goob has left.
You can take two people with similar build, place them into identical outfits and one can look much worse than the other. A lot has to do with how you carry yourself and how comfortable you are with what you're wearing. Another thing that effects this is that most people who look good in what they wear seem to be more aware of how they look while geeks tend to dress and forget. Having a geek wife, I've seen her wear the same outfit out shopping or at a casual get together. Out shopping, she isn't paying attention to herself and looks geeky. Around people she's interested in, she seems to be more 'together' with her look. She was a professional dancer for 20 years, so it may be that she just puts herself onstage at times and the rest of the time, doesn't care.
I thought that was just her name for my 'Little Geek'?
revived to daily use, I guess. I was amazed, taking Biblical Hebrew, how close it was to modern Hebrew. Biblical Greek was something else.
Hebrew is the only ancient language to still be in daily use. How many computer languages and protocols will survive 2500+ years and still be in regular use by millions of users?
Microsoft also has a *serious* NIH syndrome when it comes to anything Apple-based You mean like windowing GUIs and such? *cough-Apple source code-cough*
What happened was that Apple went totally USB, dropping it's ADB Bus (keyboards, mice, input, etc.), it's serial ports (printers, modems) and it's SCSI port (scanners, external storage) in favor of USB. This forced periphial manufacurers to make all sorts of USB devices. Before this, while there were USB cards available for PCs, no one was using them as there was really nothing to plug into them.
It now seems that Apple's trying to push Bluetooth. The problem is that Apple is not getting totally behind Bluetooth the way they did with USB. I just ordered a mid-range G5 (single 1.8GHz processor) and Bluetooth was still optional. They want an extra $50 for it. I suppose it costs them something for licensing but that seems a bit excessive for a premier workstation.
Hey, where'd my radiator go?
My radiator is aluminum.
Follow the link to the article where they test the G5s and then to the last page with the chart. At the bottom, they explain that MacWorld tested the G5s and PC World tested the AMDs.
As to my bias, I'm known as the Mac Guy at my college. Ya' gotta' shoot straight in these discussions. Can't wait for my G5 to show up.
The PowerMac 6100 came out in 1994.
I just pulled 20 of them from a lab last month as we replaced them with new Dells. They were running OS 9.0.4, 40 MB RAM, 2GB HD, 233GHz G3 upgrade processor. They were used by the Math department (Mathematica 4, various stat software), Fine Arts (Photoshop 6, Illustrator 8), and Biology departments (genotyping software). The biggest trouble we had with the Macs were the hard drives and monitors failing. The room was poorly ventilated and would heat up with 20 monitors going. Can't imagine what it's like now with all the PIVs in there. Not my problem as I'm the Mac Guy.
As for the PPCs, a bio professor purchased 8 of them to run his genotyping software. It was cheaper than finding or getting a PC version of the software. I gave him a bunch of extra hard drives, processors and monitors and said they're his responsibility. As for the rest, they'll be stripped of parts and eBay'd soon.
Since my USB scanner went tits up, I've set up my Quadra 650 with my old HP Scanjet 3 scsi scanner. I can't get any OSX drivers for it so out came the Quadra. It has 64MB RAM, 512k VRAM, 10MB ethernet-built in, 1GB HD (SCSI), NuBus video card and dual monitors and an external 512MB LaCie Joule Drive (love the hot swappable tower). It's running OS 7.6.1 as 8 was kinda' flakey on it. It has Photoshop 2.5, Quark 3.11, and Illustrator 5.5. This setup is extremely stable, if a little slow for heavy Photoshop or Illustrator work. Yes, I could have pulled out a beige G3, but I knew this box had the software installed and would be able to scan within minutes of startup. In the last 6 months, it hasn't had a glitch, though I only power it up a couple times a month. It did cost me $2300 new and has received about another grand in upgrades (RAM was expensive back then) but I'd say I've got my money out of it. It was my primary Mac up until my beige G3 is 98 or 99.
I think someone has slashdotted Slashdot. Bummer!
You're right, the current speed of hardware has most users (Office, Web, email, IM, music, video) humming along just fine. The same goes for home Mac users. 1 GHZ G4's are plenty fast (I'm still using a 266G3 laptop with OS X 10.2.8). With Mac users having a higher percentage of power users (DTP, video editing, etc.), Apple should have a good replacement market for its G5's.
As to the overall PC market growing, I think it'll still continue to grow here in the US, though slowly. The real growth will be overseas. Europe isn't quite as saturated as the US while Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and, eventually, Africa will start showing large growth in the next decade. I don't expect Apple to grab much more market share than they already have but it'll still be millions of new Mac users.
For all practical purposes, when NeXT was bought by Apple, they came in and soon changed the way Apple was doing things. Job pretty much forced Amelio out and brought in his tech people. Yes, it's still Apple, with NeXT running things.
OS X=Frosting on cake.
Apple makes money by getting people to buy boxes with the highest profit margin in the PC industry. They do this by making them fairly tasty to a small group of folks with cash. So far, this has given them a 25 million user market, which is slowly expanding, though not at the rate that the X86 market is expanding. The thing is, it is still growing. Yes, their market share has dwindled, but the market has grown so large, it's not life threatning to them. Same thing goes for developers. It's argued that no one's going to want to develop for a platform with miniscule mindshare. Bullshit! How'd Linux happen, then? As long as there's even 100,000 Mac users, you're going to have developers. It's even more true, now, with OS X, as so much stuff is readily available for porting/compiling.
Even if Apple switched to X86, they would not go and step into the ring, going up against Microsoft and Dell. They'd have propietary logic boards/boxes that would keep people buying their stuff at premium prices. You'd never see OS X able to run on a Lindows machine.
A great example of what happens if you move into the X86 world is both BeOS and NeXT. They both started out making their Motorolla based machines, switched to X86 and then, when selling hardware didn't pan out, became software only companies, duking it out with MS. NeXT was smart enought to go and take over Apple, moving away from X86 while BeOS has whithered on the vine. Personally, I was hoping for Apple to bring BeOS in and use that as their new OS. That could have been interesting.
You can see a couple other hardware companies trying the X86 route as well; Sun and SGI. While they have slightly different market segments, they still face the problems of trying to make money off of software as opposed to hardware in X86 land.
Damnit, I just took a shower. Now I have to go do something else.
US educational pricing for individual purchasing. Institutional pricing is usually $50-$100 less than these prices. Apple reps will also try and work out even better deals if you're buying 20 or more Macs at a time.
$1,799.00
1.6GHz PowerPC G5 Workstation
800MHz frontside bus
512K L2 cache
256MB DDR333 128-bit SDRAM
Expandable to 4GB SDRAM
80GB Serial ATA
SuperDrive
Three PCI Slots
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem
Discounted from $1,999 retail price
$849.00
1GHz PowerPC G4 eMac
128MB SDRAM
60GB Ultra ATA drive
Combo drive
Discounted from $999 retail price
I'm putting together an order for around 30 Macs for faculty and staff at my college. So far, we're averaging $1035 a Mac. This includes a 256MB third party RAM upgrade (Apple RAM prices suck). Most users are getting eMacs as they only use Office, web browsing, and email apps. A couple of people are getting 1.8GHz G5s and others are getting 1.25GHz G4 towers. The towers are getting 17" Mitsubishi CRTs. The rest of the faculty are getting Dells. I don't know the processor specs but they have 512MB RAM, DVD-ROM/CDRW, 15" LCD (1024x768) for around $1100 per machine.
They kept the Apple cases as they're designed for the cooling the G5s need as well as keeping the cost down. Adding in 4U boxes or whatever it'd take to fit all the fans in the G5 cases would have been really expensive as well as time consuming.
One other plus from eBooks would be the large back catalog being released. I'm still searching eBay, trying to replace my H. Beam Piper collection that I lost in college. Nothing would ever go outa' print!
I'm a supporter of Baen books. I just don't see the big publishing houses following his methods anytime soon. It'll most likely be a 50-100 year evolution with places like Baen Books gradually replacing and out selling the bigger houses. The conservative inertia of big business is mindblowing.
Apple's supposed to be announcing the Windows client in a week or two. After that, they have to work with other country's copyright laws before they can allow d/l's to other countries. As to restrictions on the files, it's highly doubtful that the big publishers are going to release their stuff without some form of DRM. Plain txt files are a thing of Usenet.
What Apple does have going for it is that theirs is the least painful of the legal alternatives vs. selection. Apple also has huge marketing weight. If they can get a few of the big publishers to sign on to a scheme of theirs, it'll likely be picked up on in the general mind share out there.
As an example, when I was at a family funeral a few weeks ago, up in the mountains of New Mexico, I had family members there asking me about online music and such. Some of them didn't have computers and the ones that did hadn't known about it. The buzz that Apple's generated via iTunes has managed to reach even my back woods relatives. 'Course, trying to explain different file formats, Usenet, etc. was difficult but a few will figure it out.
Check out a used Newton. They have larger screens than Palms, can sync to Mac or PC and you can find USB adapters out there. The later versions (2000, 2001) are best but they run for $40-$80. 120 and 130's go for $10 on up. The 2K Newtons can also go online, surf the web, ftp, email, etc. They can take compact flash memory cards via PC card adapter (same as a laptop) as well as 802.11b cards. The battery life is around 5 days for mine, unless I'm using wireless. Then it goes down.
Where's Apple with an eBook solution. Once they do something, their Mac faithful will at least try it out, exposing a lot of potential customers to something new. Apple would probably figure out a good way to do eBooks, make some money at and keep it from being a pain in the ass, they way they did for music files.
They already have an iBook so I can't imagine what they'd call such a service.