The Intel P4s are something like $600 to the Athlon's $300. You acknowledge that yourself. But I think you misinterpret my words:
"get the fastest processor at the highest price"
I never meant for a buyer to spend the most money possible; that's silly and stupid. Rather take the most the can afford, say $170, and find all the CPUs at that price, and take the highest clocked CPU. This is perfectly valid for x86 CPUs because so much is weighted by clockspeeds, but across the various flavors of AMDs and Intels.
Using SharkyExtreme, $170 gives us an Athlon 950MHz, An Athlon T-bird 1.1GHz, and a P3 850MHz. Guess what? The T-bird wins.
I can see why you can interpret my statement to mean "Buy the most expensive CPU on the market", but with that kind of reasoning, one would buy, san, an SGI P3 Xeon or something!
If you're going to learn a new UI in the first place... or need to buy a new PC... though there's still the curse of less software Macs can finally tap into the whole OS/GNU software thing, because of the BSD underpinnings.
As well as the case that for any real Windows software requirements, there's always VirtualPC + W2k, which may still take less resources and outperform a Windows XP install!
But isn't OS X actually 2 OSes and 2 UIs + a whole slew of *stuff*, to XPs OS + UI + stuff?
Apple has the BSD OS, atop which sits their Aqua UI; then there's their Mac Classic virtual OS and the Classic UI, + a bunch of Unix apps, their mail app, IE, and GNU stuff...
Where Microsoft has it's two UIs, Luna and Classic, their one OS (W2k++), + IE, the photo stuff, and their versions of GNU and Unix apps?
I think Mac OS X gets much smaller without the ~350mb of Classic, doesn't it?
I dunno if the other replies are of this vein, but in y experience there's two pretty reliable ways to do this kind of comparison shopping; either getting the fastest MHz at the price you are willing to pay (say $90, you can get a 500MHz Celeron, a 650MHz Duron, or a 550 MHz Athlon, I'd get the Duron), or you can get the fastest processor at the highest price; 1.12GHz Intel, 1.25GHz AMD, I'd get the AMD Athlon...
It makes sense, because the market uses $$$ as the optimal means of conveying the value of performance!
Who cares? In the PC industry, the people who do these jobs (hint, they're called computer engineers) do it as well (or better) than Apple does it. The only reason that the PC's aren't as high-quality as Macs is because of the limitations in the architecture, not bad build quality.
Who cares? The people who buy the PCs care that they get something well designed. This applies as equally to Macs as to PCs, to cars. It means more to some than to others, but quality is what people pay for!
And thus the real question; are you actually acknowledging that Macs are higher quality than PCs?
Still, if the PC has problems because of limitations in the architecture, that's still a problem. Why is it that Compaq or Dell have not 'engineered' their own solution to overcome these limitations? Macs use the same AGP and PCI busses, memory busses, USB, Firewire, ATA drive specs, video connectors, etc, so it's possible. Why is it none of the PC manufacturers have done it yet?
<em>A) I don't WANT a PPC system.</em>
Then why are you even talking about Macs in the first place?
<em> Apple is stupid for doing all this itself. It hems the customer into using whatever Apple feels they should use, and drives up cost. Build quality isn't drastically improved (I'm 99% sure that an Open PPC system would be just as high quality as the closed Apple system. Besides, the old Apple clones were just as good as real Apples) and the industry hates you for it. Companys hate Intel for sucking it all in and doing their own chipsets, motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards, and (if Apple becomes big enough to matter) people will hate Apple for the same reasons.<em>
Why the heck is Apple stupid? HP uses it's own motherboard (not a stock one from Tyan, MSI, or Intel), though it probably relies on chipsets from Intel or something. By doing this Apple can provide it's own feature set at the advantage of everyone else. Apple was one of the earliest adopters of USB, because it could build it into the system instead of waiting for Intel or Tyan to design the motherboards with USB support. The same with Firewire. Or wireless networking. Or gigabit ethernet. It's called innovation, and it's called leading the pack. They can either wait for someone else to do it, and bundle it, or they can do it themselves!
You're 99% sure? I'm pretty sure than in an Open PPC system, you'd get identical results as today's open PC system. Crap devices with crap drivers and crap systems. Don't tell me they don't exist! Apple may be the cream of the crop in such a market, but tell me how Apple gets an advantage in an Open system? Apple gets no advantage, and the users gets one advantage: The ability to choose their own motherboard (that's it! Everything else in a Mac is already standard!)
And do you seriously think there would be a company that build a better motherboard than Apple? If they do, they should *already* be building better motherboards than Apple today!
<em>The PC I built I just as high quality as any Apple machine</em>
I already gave you that point.
I cannot argue cheaper. I cannot argue more powerful. Both of those qualities are due to the economics of volume in the PC market. Even support is a question of volume. There are less choices for the Apple machines. But there are still video cards, SCSI cards, hard disks, etc, for Macs.
Okay, so now we get to the meat of your argument. That the platform is being killed by a non open standard.
Well, 2 things.
Apple *is* the standard.
Anyone (Dell, Compaq, etc) can release their own PPC systems if they wanted, but they would need an OS. Apple, as a business, need not 'give' their OS to a competitor. Think about it.
Apple sells what it sells, and people buy it. It suits their needs, despite the comparison you bring up. It's stable enough, full featured enough, fast enough, powerful enough.
If they weren't, people wouldn't buy Apple. They would buy Compaq, or Dell, or like yourself, build their own system.
The platform you speak of is easy to use *because* of everything you point out. That Apple does it's own hardware and software and drivers, because they have their own OS, because they roll their own systems. You can't get that *anywhere* else because no one else does it. Microsoft will soon, when they release their XBox, and then you'll have *all* the same arguments against them as you do against Apple!
So... You designed your own motherboards and chipsets, wrote your ROM bios code, spec-ed out your capicitors and diodes, pressed your own sheetmetal cases, injection molded your own case-skins, wrote your own firewire spec, then implemented the CMOS for it, and then wrote the drivers for it, designed and built the wireless antennas for your PC, and drafted your own bus specs and implementations?
You can create a PC as well as any 'lacky' who throws parts together. You may chose better or worse parts than any lacky, but when you buy Apple, you buy all of the above, and if you don't want to pay for that, then you can't get a PPC system.
Now I don't contest that a PC you build is stable or reliable; it cannot be denied that a multi-million dollar corp can build crap PCs too.
Except that to the 'OoB' consumer, Apple PPC is the same as Apple x86. To the 'hackers', one would not be able to buy an Apple x86 board any more than they could buy an Apple PPC board, and an Epox or MSI or Intel motherboard would be as useful to a hacker then as those boards are to the hacker today.
People still wouldn't be able to run OS X on a Tyan motherboard, any more than they can or can't today.
I can't even begin to talk about 'wasted' R&D expenditures, though.
You're not seeing something clearly. Hardware architecture (x86 vs PPC) has no bearing to the price of Apple hardware.
If, miraculously, Apple had adopted Intel instead of Motorola, their boxen would still be the same price; not because the parts are cheaper or more stock, but because Apple dedicates engineering resources to motherboard design, case design, style, look, and feel. Why do you think that if Apple adopted Intel that OS X would run under stock Intel hardware? I'd think you would *still* need an Apple motherboard, and Apple chipset, an Apple rom and bios, etc.
Do some cleanroom reverse engineering, create a nice, clean desktop system, and you have a Mac clone. It's anyone's guess whether you compete against Apple or help Apple grow the market, but there's your solution!
His need to control the hardware was smart. He doesn't need to bless hardware for clones to exist. All a clone maker needs to do is make sure that it runs the current OS 100%, and provide future functionality to support future OSes.
"Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else."
That has to be the most selfish thought I've heard in a long time...
To turn it around;
"Nothing else anyone does matters, so anything they do won't affect or improve my status."
This is obviously false. Someone writes a better USB driver, and all of a sudden your camera stops crashing your PC. Someone tweaks the networking code, and your Quake framerates increase by 3%. I dunno if I'm eloquent enough to get my point across, but being selfishly isolated is a bad thing. Sigh, I wish I could articulate better.
So why is it important to get Unix onto everyones desktop? The same reason it's on yours. If it's useful to you, if it's powerful, if it's flexible, if it's reliable, or affordable or whatever. If it's worth something to you, it's worth it for everyone else!
As *cool* as seti@home and distributed.net are, they don't count as making our world better. They are good things and cool things, but do not help make the computer a life-style quality multiplier.
I can only think of trivial examples, like parsing, categorizing, and analyzing the music you listen to (songprinting, frequency of play, length of play, type of play) to help you find more music you like, and sharing this info with other machines to make music databases as easy to browse and search as the internet has made text databases browseable (if not easy).
But what can a single 400MHz machine do to make the average household 10% happier?
Here I have a 650MHz P3, there a 300MHz P2, at home a Celeron 450, and in my hand a 400MHz P3 laptop
Most suck power being idle.
What can we do (Open Source, PC industry, software industry) to make computers truly powerful, useful, productive! All these resources, Python, Perl, C/C++, CPUs, memory, storage, networking...
What can we be doing with all of this capacity to truly make our world better?
"Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else."
That has to be the most selfish thought I've heard in a long time...
To turn it around;
"Nothing else anyone does matters, so anything they do won't affect or improve my status."
This is obviously false. Someone writes a better USB driver, and all of a sudden your camera stops crashing your PC. Someone tweaks the networking code, and your Quake framerates increase by 3%. I dunno if I'm eloquent enough to get my point across, but being selfishly isolated is a bad thing. Sigh, I wish I could articulate better.
I've always wondered about these attempts to deliver linux to the common man.
Good people want to share the power and freedom they've been given by Linux and Un*x!
What i've always found appealing about the unix design is that it doesn't dumb things down in an attempt to be more 'user friendly'.
You speak as if user friendly and powerful are exclusive! All user friendly means is that the device, software, or application is conducive to allowing users to use it. If it is powerful *and* user friendly, it's a much better product than something that is only powerful, or only user friendly, right?
The command line is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't mean my mother should be exposed to it.
Absolutely correct! To each their level of comfort, need, and use!
Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
Ah, so you do believe that user friendly and powerful are at cross purposes!
User friendly means useful and useable to the user, right? But the whole point of 'engineering' and 'design' is to solve a problem within a set of constraints. Mac OS X, and not Linux, is engineered and designed to be user friendly. It is designed to be useable. Linux is designed and engineered to be useful. Not useable. There is nothing stopping a software company to shift the design balance; to create something more powerful at the sacrifice of learning curve, but the point is that the learning curve is something inherent in the design of the product. Apple, more or less, takes that into account. Myself I don't believe that user friendly comes at the expense of power. User friendly means that the learning curve is shallower near the beginning, and designed such that it is *always* shallow enough for the user to gain access to the next step up in power. To be non-user friendly is to ignore or forget about the learning curve, such that to access twice the power, you need to do twice or more work!
In short, marketing UNIX to my mother would be a mistake.
No, in short, marketing Linux to your mother would be a mistake. OS X has much less of those limitations, while retaining everything BSD and Un*x.
She neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides.
She will not and cannot know until she reaches the appropriate level of the learning curve. Linux doesn't offer that opportunity. OS X should.
She has a hard enough time using Windows.
That is Windows fault and has little bearing on Linux (except that Linux has chosen to ape Windows), Mac, or Mac OS X.
I see no problem in having different operating systems aimed at different audiences, rather than having one OS that tries to do everything.
A perfectly valid observation!
Why exactly does linux *want* world domination? The entire UNIX philosophy is that it's better to have things be the best at what they do, rather than trying to do everything.
Because until OS X is released, it was the best candidate for making the computing world a better place ^^
I want a powerful, stable, useful, desktop. I use Linux. In my generous heart, I want other people to use it to, so I work at making it more accessable. That's the impetus right there for world domination.
However, a lot of this will get sapped by OS X; it will provide for the power, the stability, and the usefulness. All that's left for me, the user, is to help promote Apple in selling Macs so that everyone has access to such a useful device, at the loss and inconvenience of Windows, Intel, and Linux. Linux didn't step up to the plate, so it falls back onto Apple to provide all of this.
I dunno if you are old enough to know, but it used to be that computers, fly by wire, and autopilot were all pipe dreams. Where moving the controls pushed and pulled at pneumatic and hydrolic lines that moved ailerons and flaps according to your movements.
I daresay your Lear Jet is only difficult because computing and processing hasn't made the last step yet, where the interface to the sky isn't the plane, but the computer model in which you 'point and click' and let the plane handle the rest. I believe they are working on that.
That aside, that's a crap argument for computers. Are you saying that your retard cousin *shouldn't* be able to use a PC? There are whole loads of people who are PC challenged, and making them easier isn't a good thing?
So that means all the Linux crowd should really be leapfrogging Windows and copying the original host; Apple!
Why the heck have KDE, GNOME, etc, all been aping Windows, when Microsoft has itself been aping Mac? If we really want powerful Linux UI development, shouldn't we be copying the most developed and intuitive UI in existence? Apple's?
Point for the first paragraph. Excellent point, even. This is what people pay for, when they buy Apple, software and hardware.
The second point is true too. Apple need not control every point in the product to make a profit. The whole concept of maximum advantage and relative advantage means the most profit and growth occurs when Apple sells and produces what it is best at, and other corps sell and produce what they are best at, and a synergistic whole is produced; Apple-> OSes and Hardware, UI and user experience, and then let other people create the rest that Apple doesn't decide to be strong in. Adobe is a good example. So is HP.
Point the third I can't give you.
"If only it would run on x86 hardware, Windows users would flock away from the evil empire"
Thats about as true as saying
"If only users would buy Mac hardware, Windows users would flock away from the evil empire"
In terms of practicality, guess what? Apple would make *their* own hardware, even if it were x86. They'd spend as much resources creating their x86 hardware as they do their PPC hardware, leaving a situation where people still can't run OS X on vanilla x86 boxen without at least some compatibility card or a set of 'emulation' drivers to fool the system into thinking it's Apple Boxen. Apple boot rom, USB hardware, Firewire hardware, busses and chipsets, etc.
Well, don't buy Apple; but I'd prefer and recommend them over Dell, Compaq, Gateway, or Micron. IBM, Toshiba, and Fujitsu I like ^^
Hmm, apologies for the fact that the following message is a little 'inflamatory'. I get carried away.
To name some 'facts'
Look it up if you want confirmation.
MPEG4 != DivX
The original DivX hacked a Microsoft implementation of the MPEG4 *draft* and created their own format.
So don't support the Microsoft version, and don't support the DivX version!
What's the alternative? MPEG4! OpenDivX is supposedly MPEG4 compliant, but it does not support the MPEG4 file format (go figure); Windows, hopefully, will support the real thing, and not just ASF/WMA implementations, as should Quicktime 5. Don't settle for DivX; it would be like settling for RealAudio when mp3 is just around the corner...
Imagine midair projection. Laser beams exciting the gases in the very air itself to create an illuminated image viewable at all angles; just shy of being holographic
Imagine the analogy to a good set of headphones; a pair of display glasses.
It isn't the wrong point at all, the technology and the innovation will grow to accomodate our increasingly 'leisure' oriented society.
Slashdot Mirror
I am so very wrong.
The Intel P4s are something like $600 to the Athlon's $300. You acknowledge that yourself. But I think you misinterpret my words:
"get the fastest processor at the highest price"
I never meant for a buyer to spend the most money possible; that's silly and stupid. Rather take the most the can afford, say $170, and find all the CPUs at that price, and take the highest clocked CPU. This is perfectly valid for x86 CPUs because so much is weighted by clockspeeds, but across the various flavors of AMDs and Intels.
Using SharkyExtreme, $170 gives us an Athlon 950MHz, An Athlon T-bird 1.1GHz, and a P3 850MHz. Guess what? The T-bird wins.
I can see why you can interpret my statement to mean "Buy the most expensive CPU on the market", but with that kind of reasoning, one would buy, san, an SGI P3 Xeon or something!
Geek dating!
If you're going to learn a new UI in the first place... or need to buy a new PC... though there's still the curse of less software Macs can finally tap into the whole OS/GNU software thing, because of the BSD underpinnings.
As well as the case that for any real Windows software requirements, there's always VirtualPC + W2k, which may still take less resources and outperform a Windows XP install!
Geek dating!
But isn't OS X actually 2 OSes and 2 UIs + a whole slew of *stuff*, to XPs OS + UI + stuff?
Apple has the BSD OS, atop which sits their Aqua UI; then there's their Mac Classic virtual OS and the Classic UI, + a bunch of Unix apps, their mail app, IE, and GNU stuff...
Where Microsoft has it's two UIs, Luna and Classic, their one OS (W2k++), + IE, the photo stuff, and their versions of GNU and Unix apps?
I think Mac OS X gets much smaller without the ~350mb of Classic, doesn't it?
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I dunno if the other replies are of this vein, but in y experience there's two pretty reliable ways to do this kind of comparison shopping; either getting the fastest MHz at the price you are willing to pay (say $90, you can get a 500MHz Celeron, a 650MHz Duron, or a 550 MHz Athlon, I'd get the Duron), or you can get the fastest processor at the highest price; 1.12GHz Intel, 1.25GHz AMD, I'd get the AMD Athlon...
It makes sense, because the market uses $$$ as the optimal means of conveying the value of performance!
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This just truly boggles the mind.
It's like... wondering 'What would happen if I replaced my coffee with ground walnuts?'
Yes; it makes absolutely no sense!
Well, I guess this guy is creative to a fault =)
Me, I would have thought it more interesting to take a G4 Cube and placed it inside, say, a juicer!
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Who cares? In the PC industry, the people who do these jobs (hint, they're called computer engineers) do it as well (or better) than Apple does it. The only reason that the PC's aren't as high-quality as Macs is because of the limitations in the architecture, not bad build quality.
Who cares? The people who buy the PCs care that they get something well designed. This applies as equally to Macs as to PCs, to cars. It means more to some than to others, but quality is what people pay for!
And thus the real question; are you actually acknowledging that Macs are higher quality than PCs?
Still, if the PC has problems because of limitations in the architecture, that's still a problem. Why is it that Compaq or Dell have not 'engineered' their own solution to overcome these limitations? Macs use the same AGP and PCI busses, memory busses, USB, Firewire, ATA drive specs, video connectors, etc, so it's possible. Why is it none of the PC manufacturers have done it yet?
<em>A) I don't WANT a PPC system.</em>
Then why are you even talking about Macs in the first place?
<em> Apple is stupid for doing all this itself. It hems the customer into using whatever Apple feels they should use, and drives up cost. Build quality isn't drastically improved (I'm 99% sure that an Open PPC system would be just as high quality as the closed Apple system. Besides, the old Apple clones were just as good as real Apples) and the industry hates you for it. Companys hate Intel for sucking it all in and doing their own chipsets, motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards, and (if Apple becomes big enough to matter) people will hate Apple for the same reasons.<em>
Why the heck is Apple stupid? HP uses it's own motherboard (not a stock one from Tyan, MSI, or Intel), though it probably relies on chipsets from Intel or something. By doing this Apple can provide it's own feature set at the advantage of everyone else. Apple was one of the earliest adopters of USB, because it could build it into the system instead of waiting for Intel or Tyan to design the motherboards with USB support. The same with Firewire. Or wireless networking. Or gigabit ethernet. It's called innovation, and it's called leading the pack. They can either wait for someone else to do it, and bundle it, or they can do it themselves!
You're 99% sure? I'm pretty sure than in an Open PPC system, you'd get identical results as today's open PC system. Crap devices with crap drivers and crap systems. Don't tell me they don't exist! Apple may be the cream of the crop in such a market, but tell me how Apple gets an advantage in an Open system? Apple gets no advantage, and the users gets one advantage: The ability to choose their own motherboard (that's it! Everything else in a Mac is already standard!)
And do you seriously think there would be a company that build a better motherboard than Apple? If they do, they should *already* be building better motherboards than Apple today!
<em>The PC I built I just as high quality as any Apple machine</em>
I already gave you that point.
I cannot argue cheaper. I cannot argue more powerful. Both of those qualities are due to the economics of volume in the PC market. Even support is a question of volume. There are less choices for the Apple machines. But there are still video cards, SCSI cards, hard disks, etc, for Macs.
Okay, so now we get to the meat of your argument. That the platform is being killed by a non open standard.
Well, 2 things.
Apple *is* the standard.
Anyone (Dell, Compaq, etc) can release their own PPC systems if they wanted, but they would need an OS. Apple, as a business, need not 'give' their OS to a competitor. Think about it.
Apple sells what it sells, and people buy it. It suits their needs, despite the comparison you bring up. It's stable enough, full featured enough, fast enough, powerful enough.
If they weren't, people wouldn't buy Apple. They would buy Compaq, or Dell, or like yourself, build their own system.
The platform you speak of is easy to use *because* of everything you point out. That Apple does it's own hardware and software and drivers, because they have their own OS, because they roll their own systems. You can't get that *anywhere* else because no one else does it. Microsoft will soon, when they release their XBox, and then you'll have *all* the same arguments against them as you do against Apple!
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So... You designed your own motherboards and chipsets, wrote your ROM bios code, spec-ed out your capicitors and diodes, pressed your own sheetmetal cases, injection molded your own case-skins, wrote your own firewire spec, then implemented the CMOS for it, and then wrote the drivers for it, designed and built the wireless antennas for your PC, and drafted your own bus specs and implementations?
You can create a PC as well as any 'lacky' who throws parts together. You may chose better or worse parts than any lacky, but when you buy Apple, you buy all of the above, and if you don't want to pay for that, then you can't get a PPC system.
Now I don't contest that a PC you build is stable or reliable; it cannot be denied that a multi-million dollar corp can build crap PCs too.
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Except that to the 'OoB' consumer, Apple PPC is the same as Apple x86. To the 'hackers', one would not be able to buy an Apple x86 board any more than they could buy an Apple PPC board, and an Epox or MSI or Intel motherboard would be as useful to a hacker then as those boards are to the hacker today.
People still wouldn't be able to run OS X on a Tyan motherboard, any more than they can or can't today.
I can't even begin to talk about 'wasted' R&D expenditures, though.
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All your base are belong to Apple!
You're not seeing something clearly. Hardware architecture (x86 vs PPC) has no bearing to the price of Apple hardware.
If, miraculously, Apple had adopted Intel instead of Motorola, their boxen would still be the same price; not because the parts are cheaper or more stock, but because Apple dedicates engineering resources to motherboard design, case design, style, look, and feel. Why do you think that if Apple adopted Intel that OS X would run under stock Intel hardware? I'd think you would *still* need an Apple motherboard, and Apple chipset, an Apple rom and bios, etc.
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Well, yeah. It's also called 'engineered'
Macs are an engineered solution... like cars, or ovens, or bunches of other things in our lives.
It's what you get when you buy a Mac.
Your only other choice... is to go work for Apple, I guess!
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Here's what I wonder...
Why do you need Apple's okay to make Mac clones?
Did Compaq petition IBM to make IBM-PC clones?
Do some cleanroom reverse engineering, create a nice, clean desktop system, and you have a Mac clone. It's anyone's guess whether you compete against Apple or help Apple grow the market, but there's your solution!
His need to control the hardware was smart. He doesn't need to bless hardware for clones to exist. All a clone maker needs to do is make sure that it runs the current OS 100%, and provide future functionality to support future OSes.
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Are easy.
Buy an iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac, Cube, or iMac!
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Hey, that's why I use Linux for my web and file server, Mac for my notebook, and Windows for my game machine!
To each their own strength!
I totally don't disagree with you on this!
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Get a Mac tower. Heck, get a dual CPU 533MHz G4 with built in firewire, CD-RW, gigabit ethernet, and a GeForce3 ^^
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This is a repost of mine...
"Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else."
That has to be the most selfish thought I've heard in a long time...
To turn it around;
"Nothing else anyone does matters, so anything they do won't affect or improve my status."
This is obviously false. Someone writes a better USB driver, and all of a sudden your camera stops crashing your PC. Someone tweaks the networking code, and your Quake framerates increase by 3%. I dunno if I'm eloquent enough to get my point across, but being selfishly isolated is a bad thing. Sigh, I wish I could articulate better.
So why is it important to get Unix onto everyones desktop? The same reason it's on yours. If it's useful to you, if it's powerful, if it's flexible, if it's reliable, or affordable or whatever. If it's worth something to you, it's worth it for everyone else!
Geek dating!
As *cool* as seti@home and distributed.net are, they don't count as making our world better. They are good things and cool things, but do not help make the computer a life-style quality multiplier.
I can only think of trivial examples, like parsing, categorizing, and analyzing the music you listen to (songprinting, frequency of play, length of play, type of play) to help you find more music you like, and sharing this info with other machines to make music databases as easy to browse and search as the internet has made text databases browseable (if not easy).
But what can a single 400MHz machine do to make the average household 10% happier?
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What for?
Here I have a 650MHz P3, there a 300MHz P2, at home a Celeron 450, and in my hand a 400MHz P3 laptop
Most suck power being idle.
What can we do (Open Source, PC industry, software industry) to make computers truly powerful, useful, productive! All these resources, Python, Perl, C/C++, CPUs, memory, storage, networking...
What can we be doing with all of this capacity to truly make our world better?
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"Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else."
That has to be the most selfish thought I've heard in a long time...
To turn it around;
"Nothing else anyone does matters, so anything they do won't affect or improve my status."
This is obviously false. Someone writes a better USB driver, and all of a sudden your camera stops crashing your PC. Someone tweaks the networking code, and your Quake framerates increase by 3%. I dunno if I'm eloquent enough to get my point across, but being selfishly isolated is a bad thing. Sigh, I wish I could articulate better.
Geek dating!
I've always wondered about these attempts to deliver linux to the common man.
Good people want to share the power and freedom they've been given by Linux and Un*x!
What i've always found appealing about the unix design is that it doesn't dumb things down in an attempt to be more 'user friendly'.
You speak as if user friendly and powerful are exclusive! All user friendly means is that the device, software, or application is conducive to allowing users to use it. If it is powerful *and* user friendly, it's a much better product than something that is only powerful, or only user friendly, right?
The command line is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't mean my mother should be exposed to it.
Absolutely correct! To each their level of comfort, need, and use!
Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
Ah, so you do believe that user friendly and powerful are at cross purposes!
User friendly means useful and useable to the user, right? But the whole point of 'engineering' and 'design' is to solve a problem within a set of constraints. Mac OS X, and not Linux, is engineered and designed to be user friendly. It is designed to be useable. Linux is designed and engineered to be useful. Not useable. There is nothing stopping a software company to shift the design balance; to create something more powerful at the sacrifice of learning curve, but the point is that the learning curve is something inherent in the design of the product. Apple, more or less, takes that into account. Myself I don't believe that user friendly comes at the expense of power. User friendly means that the learning curve is shallower near the beginning, and designed such that it is *always* shallow enough for the user to gain access to the next step up in power. To be non-user friendly is to ignore or forget about the learning curve, such that to access twice the power, you need to do twice or more work!
In short, marketing UNIX to my mother would be a mistake.
No, in short, marketing Linux to your mother would be a mistake. OS X has much less of those limitations, while retaining everything BSD and Un*x.
She neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides.
She will not and cannot know until she reaches the appropriate level of the learning curve. Linux doesn't offer that opportunity. OS X should.
She has a hard enough time using Windows.
That is Windows fault and has little bearing on Linux (except that Linux has chosen to ape Windows), Mac, or Mac OS X.
I see no problem in having different operating systems aimed at different audiences, rather than having one OS that tries to do everything.
A perfectly valid observation!
Why exactly does linux *want* world domination? The entire UNIX philosophy is that it's better to have things be the best at what they do, rather than trying to do everything.
Because until OS X is released, it was the best candidate for making the computing world a better place ^^
I want a powerful, stable, useful, desktop. I use Linux. In my generous heart, I want other people to use it to, so I work at making it more accessable. That's the impetus right there for world domination.
However, a lot of this will get sapped by OS X; it will provide for the power, the stability, and the usefulness. All that's left for me, the user, is to help promote Apple in selling Macs so that everyone has access to such a useful device, at the loss and inconvenience of Windows, Intel, and Linux. Linux didn't step up to the plate, so it falls back onto Apple to provide all of this.
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Airplanes are easier to fly!
I dunno if you are old enough to know, but it used to be that computers, fly by wire, and autopilot were all pipe dreams. Where moving the controls pushed and pulled at pneumatic and hydrolic lines that moved ailerons and flaps according to your movements.
I daresay your Lear Jet is only difficult because computing and processing hasn't made the last step yet, where the interface to the sky isn't the plane, but the computer model in which you 'point and click' and let the plane handle the rest. I believe they are working on that.
That aside, that's a crap argument for computers. Are you saying that your retard cousin *shouldn't* be able to use a PC? There are whole loads of people who are PC challenged, and making them easier isn't a good thing?
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So that means all the Linux crowd should really be leapfrogging Windows and copying the original host; Apple!
Why the heck have KDE, GNOME, etc, all been aping Windows, when Microsoft has itself been aping Mac? If we really want powerful Linux UI development, shouldn't we be copying the most developed and intuitive UI in existence? Apple's?
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Point for the first paragraph. Excellent point, even. This is what people pay for, when they buy Apple, software and hardware.
The second point is true too. Apple need not control every point in the product to make a profit. The whole concept of maximum advantage and relative advantage means the most profit and growth occurs when Apple sells and produces what it is best at, and other corps sell and produce what they are best at, and a synergistic whole is produced; Apple-> OSes and Hardware, UI and user experience, and then let other people create the rest that Apple doesn't decide to be strong in. Adobe is a good example. So is HP.
Point the third I can't give you.
"If only it would run on x86 hardware, Windows users would flock away from the evil empire"
Thats about as true as saying
"If only users would buy Mac hardware, Windows users would flock away from the evil empire"
In terms of practicality, guess what? Apple would make *their* own hardware, even if it were x86. They'd spend as much resources creating their x86 hardware as they do their PPC hardware, leaving a situation where people still can't run OS X on vanilla x86 boxen without at least some compatibility card or a set of 'emulation' drivers to fool the system into thinking it's Apple Boxen. Apple boot rom, USB hardware, Firewire hardware, busses and chipsets, etc.
Well, don't buy Apple; but I'd prefer and recommend them over Dell, Compaq, Gateway, or Micron. IBM, Toshiba, and Fujitsu I like ^^
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So here's a uninformed post by me ^^
X has competition; Mac OS X
I'll let everyone else fight over this comment =)
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Hmm, apologies for the fact that the following message is a little 'inflamatory'. I get carried away.
To name some 'facts'
Look it up if you want confirmation.
MPEG4 != DivX
The original DivX hacked a Microsoft implementation of the MPEG4 *draft* and created their own format.
So don't support the Microsoft version, and don't support the DivX version!
What's the alternative? MPEG4! OpenDivX is supposedly MPEG4 compliant, but it does not support the MPEG4 file format (go figure); Windows, hopefully, will support the real thing, and not just ASF/WMA implementations, as should Quicktime 5. Don't settle for DivX; it would be like settling for RealAudio when mp3 is just around the corner...
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Physical limitations can be overcome;
Imagine midair projection. Laser beams exciting the gases in the very air itself to create an illuminated image viewable at all angles; just shy of being holographic
Imagine the analogy to a good set of headphones; a pair of display glasses.
It isn't the wrong point at all, the technology and the innovation will grow to accomodate our increasingly 'leisure' oriented society.
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