Jobs' point is not that the user SHOULDN'T know what's in the box, it's that they NEEDN'T know what's inside the box. Anybody who's picked up a telephone with a neophyte user on the other end should agree.
Umm...the two million people who bought iMacs in the last year, the 200,000 people who have preordered iBooks, and the however many people who bought the blue and white G3's seem to trust Apple just fine.
Motorola found a serious bug in one of their processors. I think it's a Good Thing that they halted production, rather than let them go out to the public. Other companies *cough*Intel*cough* would have shipped the chips, and spent a pile of money on marketing convincing people that there wasn't really a problem. While I'd like to see Apple handle the situation better (like, how about an extra 128mb RAM in exchange for the 50mHz in clock speed?), the fact that they're doing ANYTHING is, to me, a positive sign.
Gee, and just when I thought humanity had managed to decouple gender identity from object ownership...guess I'm just naive.
If you need a black computer made of magnesium to make you feel like a man, you might consider taking that money to your plastic surgeon. They're doing amazing things with penis extensions these days. Me, I'm going to take my gender-secure happy male self, put my iBook in my Miata, and not worry too much about what other people think is "girlie".
Look, I don't know about you, but I don't give a good goddamn about the motivations of my assailant. If somebody wants to kill me, be it with a pointy stick, a gun, a bomb, or a thermonuclear device, my FIRST inclination is to do WHATEVER IS NECESSARY to make him STOP DOING THAT. I am NOT interested in having a heart to heart with that assailant about how cruel the world has been to him.
Bad guys WILL have weapons. Therefore, prudent good guys should also have weapons to thwart said bad guys.
Oh, and I'll take a crazed rifleman over an IRA car bomb any day of the week, thank you very much.
As far as the US Military's ability to subdue motivated peasants equipped with small-arms, I refer you to the conflict in a country called Vietnam. While the failure to succeed militarily in Vietnam was due more to political considerations than military capabilities or tactics, I believe that the political considerations involved in setting up a military regime in America would be, to say the least, daunting.
Did I miss some sort of cultural manifesto I had to sign when I was born? Why don't you give us ignant sheep a clue about "values", so we can tell you where to stick it.
Does anybody else find it amusing that the site is hosted on a server called "stiftung"? I mean, isn't that dangerously close to "gratuitous sex"?
Do you know how processor yields work? Apple can not buy enough 550 mHz parts to field a 550mHz G4 immediately. Newer or XLR8 or whoever (or PowerComputing, when they were in business...) sold fewer machines than Apple, so they can buy smaller batches of hardware and still not have the tremendous backlogs of orders that Apple was famous for. Apple is VERY WISELY guarding their sub-24 hour inventory numbers, because large amounts of unusable inventory has come close to bankrupting the company several times. The moral of the story is that Apple will release machines IFF it is confident that they will be able to build them. This is a wise strategy.
The only problem with this philosophy is when companies (like PowerComputing and the other Mac cloners) take advantage of Apple's R&D dollars and don't contribute to Apple's bottom line. The reason cloning was killed was because it was making Apple lose money. PowerComputing got some sort of SILLY cheap license for the MacOS and for Apple's motherboard designs (which was, of course, Apple's own damn fault for not having competent negotiators...) Why would any company want to do that, if it could stop it? Why should Apple let you use their prodigious R&D research (QuickTime, PlainTalk, OpenTransport, ColorSync, and a slew of other strangely capitalized innovations) without you paying for it?
If you want to buy a G4 machine that doesn't use any Apple technology, Apple doesn't give a shit. If you want to buy a G4 machine with Apple technology and not pay Apple, Apple does (quite rightly) give a shit. Simple economics.
So, your point is that in certain circumstances, the G4 kicks a bit less shit out of every X86 PC on the market, right? So therefore, that G4 must be a big stinky pile of crap, right?
OK. Just checking.
*hears clue phone ringing from here...* I think it's for you...
You: There are no easy upgrades for Macs. Several mac users: Here are links to sixty different ones. You: Well, gee, even though I was totally wrong about my initial point, I still feel like they cost more than I'd like to pay.
Well, fine. Don't. Don't buy a Mac. Don't buy a Mac upgrade. There are plenty of us who DO like Macs and their upgrades to keep Apple solvent, despite the industry's (and Apple's) best efforts to destroy the Macintosh.
Sorry about the pointed comment, but people spouting off these tired, false statements about upgradeability/price/performance whatever are really annoying me.
*slashdot to Moofie* So stop reading, dumbass! *moofie to Slashdot* Can't....stop...reading....
And nobody bought one either, right? Ooops! No, I forgot. Two million sales so far in the last 12 months. Guess nobody wants these no-floppy-havin' fruity 15" monitor computers, right?
Note: Your computing tastes are not the same as everybody's computing tastes. This is axiomatic for all values of "your" and "tastes". Don't like it? Don't buy it. Why does its existence offend you? Did an iMac take your lunch money?
OS9 and OSX are parallel releases. From what I understand, OS9 and its follow ons (that will be able to run on all Macs with sufficient RAM back to, I believe, the Mac II something) will continue to be updated for at least 18 months. OSX is going to be available, supporting the G3 and G4 based Macs (basically, everything from the last 18 months and newer), and will be the long-term OS for Apple. So, basically, same thing that MS has been trying (and failing) to do since the introduction of WinNT.
Out of curiousity, why four satellites? From what I remember of orbital mechanics, you can have an equilateral triangle of satellites in Clarke orbits, giving global (equatorial) coverage. The reindeer in Siberia and Northern Canadia get left out (that's a joke, people), but doesn't somebody operate birds in Molniya orbits over the north pole?
You might consider mailstart.com or mail.yahoo.com or mailexcite.com or ureach.com or any one of the bazillion other web POP clients. They can't ALL suck.
Yep. My PC will always be a little pipsqueak compared to those billion kajillion dollar super-raging-stonker computers. For my purposes, an overclocked Celeron has a stupendous price/performance ratio. If YOU can afford those machines, bully for you! Leave the rest of us peons alone.
They may not have moral obligations, but as they (corporations) are entities formed under the law (a law that was specifically engineered to allow for their existence), you better believe that they must act according to the law. IFF they don't, they get spanked sooner or later by DOJ. Or, if they have enough money to grease the sphincters of certain state attorneys general (*cough* Dell....*cough* Texas...) said attorneys general drop off the anti-trust lawsuits.
When I move to Mars, I'm not going to have any of this collusive corrupt back-door action bullshit. It really annoys me. The law will make sense, and people will follow it because it makes sense.
Simple. The original poster seemed to want to be able to hear several different sources simultaneously through the same speakers. That's precisely what I want to do, too. For instance, I'd like to be able to run my VCR's sound output, output for my PC and my Mac, all through the same speakers OR to a set of headphones. Ideally, I could control both master volume and volume for all the input channels. An input switcher is not sufficient for my purposes. I _think_ the original poster is looking for the same thing, but I could be wrong.
I'm fascinated by the idea of building my own (I just got my first soldering iron...LOOK OUT!). Does anybody have any tasty links or book recommendations that would give me some idea as to how to build such a thing with minimal cross-talk and no damage to the speakers?
Screw Earth. The sooner all of us Smart People get off this dirtball and go to Mars/L5/Luna/Wherever, we'll be in MUCH better shape. If the normals want to spiral down the toilet bowl of restrictive governments and Racial Tensions (tm), let 'em. Those of us with courage, vision, initiative, imagination, and know-how can just move elsewhere. Maybe I'm selfish, but I'm not smart enough to solve all the problems of this planet. I AM smart enough, however, to route around them.
It's like that scary dude in Alien:Resurrection said: "Earth...what a shithole..."
Just to crank a little more life out of this horribly overstressed metaphor, note that for a significant fraction of the last 20 years, Apple has been in the top 5 computer manufacturers in terms of volume. That does NOT mean that Apple computers are more popular than PC's (unfortunately), only that there are more sorts of PC's (and Protestant religions) to choose from.
FF7 is a superlative game. The problem with the playstation is input devices. The gamepad is insufficient for the bulk of the games I want to play (that is, realistic flight simulators). Games like Falcon 4, iWar, Longbow 2, F-22ADF, and the forthcoming Babylon 5 space combat simulator simply will not work on a d-pad, even a dual analog one. Unless game consoles ship from the factory with a keyboard and an analog joystick, MY gaming penchants (and I bet I'm not alone) cannot be satisfied by a console.
You did an end run around all the salient points. The iMac's design philosophy, as evidenced by its INCREDIBLE sales success, leads me to believe that there is a market to be served by simple computers. Just 'cuz you don't like it doesn't mean it's not so.
Circular logic is logic that is used to prove itself. Just because you didn't understand it doesn't mean it's wrong.
Consumer products (in the sense that the iMac is a consumer desktop computer, and the iBook is a consumer laptop) as opposed to professional products is a common differentiator within product lines of all sorts of technical gadgetry. Sure, Joe Sixpack can buy an umpty bajillion dollar Nikon FX 500000 camera, but that doesn't make it a product designed for consumers.
In your narrow view that if somebody uses object x, they are a consumer, yes you are correct...Linux is a consumer product. But you've just made "consumer product" redundant. In the sense that I (and a bunch of other people posting here and Steve Jobs) are using the term consumer, it means "non-geek computer user". That's not you. It's not me, either, but I'm open minded enough to see that the iBook serves every conceivable need I might have in the near term for a portable computer. Therefore, I (and a bunch of non-geek computer users, like my grandma) will buy them.
Calling my grandma names doesn't make your point correct. Go learn about "ad hominem rhetoric" and how to avoid it. It makes you look foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
Jobs' point is not that the user SHOULDN'T know what's in the box, it's that they NEEDN'T know what's inside the box. Anybody who's picked up a telephone with a neophyte user on the other end should agree.
Umm...the two million people who bought iMacs in the last year, the 200,000 people who have preordered iBooks, and the however many people who bought the blue and white G3's seem to trust Apple just fine.
Motorola found a serious bug in one of their processors. I think it's a Good Thing that they halted production, rather than let them go out to the public. Other companies *cough*Intel*cough* would have shipped the chips, and spent a pile of money on marketing convincing people that there wasn't really a problem. While I'd like to see Apple handle the situation better (like, how about an extra 128mb RAM in exchange for the 50mHz in clock speed?), the fact that they're doing ANYTHING is, to me, a positive sign.
Gee, and just when I thought humanity had managed to decouple gender identity from object ownership...guess I'm just naive.
If you need a black computer made of magnesium to make you feel like a man, you might consider taking that money to your plastic surgeon. They're doing amazing things with penis extensions these days. Me, I'm going to take my gender-secure happy male self, put my iBook in my Miata, and not worry too much about what other people think is "girlie".
Have a nice day.
And "Legos" are supposed to be "Lego bricks and toys (tm)".
I still call 'em legos. I don't even always capitalize it.
Look, I don't know about you, but I don't give a good goddamn about the motivations of my assailant. If somebody wants to kill me, be it with a pointy stick, a gun, a bomb, or a thermonuclear device, my FIRST inclination is to do WHATEVER IS NECESSARY to make him STOP DOING THAT. I am NOT interested in having a heart to heart with that assailant about how cruel the world has been to him.
Bad guys WILL have weapons. Therefore, prudent good guys should also have weapons to thwart said bad guys.
Oh, and I'll take a crazed rifleman over an IRA car bomb any day of the week, thank you very much.
As far as the US Military's ability to subdue motivated peasants equipped with small-arms, I refer you to the conflict in a country called Vietnam. While the failure to succeed militarily in Vietnam was due more to political considerations than military capabilities or tactics, I believe that the political considerations involved in setting up a military regime in America would be, to say the least, daunting.
Tyrants like unarmed peasants.
Did I miss some sort of cultural manifesto I had to sign when I was born? Why don't you give us ignant sheep a clue about "values", so we can tell you where to stick it.
Does anybody else find it amusing that the site is hosted on a server called "stiftung"? I mean, isn't that dangerously close to "gratuitous sex"?
If I DID misread the post, my apologies to the original poster. I'm getting a little trigger happy with the flamethrower, eh? : )
Do you know how processor yields work? Apple can not buy enough 550 mHz parts to field a 550mHz G4 immediately. Newer or XLR8 or whoever (or PowerComputing, when they were in business...) sold fewer machines than Apple, so they can buy smaller batches of hardware and still not have the tremendous backlogs of orders that Apple was famous for. Apple is VERY WISELY guarding their sub-24 hour inventory numbers, because large amounts of unusable inventory has come close to bankrupting the company several times. The moral of the story is that Apple will release machines IFF it is confident that they will be able to build them. This is a wise strategy.
The only problem with this philosophy is when companies (like PowerComputing and the other Mac cloners) take advantage of Apple's R&D dollars and don't contribute to Apple's bottom line. The reason cloning was killed was because it was making Apple lose money. PowerComputing got some sort of SILLY cheap license for the MacOS and for Apple's motherboard designs (which was, of course, Apple's own damn fault for not having competent negotiators...) Why would any company want to do that, if it could stop it? Why should Apple let you use their prodigious R&D research (QuickTime, PlainTalk, OpenTransport, ColorSync, and a slew of other strangely capitalized innovations) without you paying for it?
If you want to buy a G4 machine that doesn't use any Apple technology, Apple doesn't give a shit. If you want to buy a G4 machine with Apple technology and not pay Apple, Apple does (quite rightly) give a shit. Simple economics.
So, your point is that in certain circumstances, the G4 kicks a bit less shit out of every X86 PC on the market, right? So therefore, that G4 must be a big stinky pile of crap, right?
OK. Just checking.
*hears clue phone ringing from here...* I think it's for you...
You can't figure out how to get into a 6100? And you can be out in public unsupervised? Do you have hands?
Let me see if I can summarize your posts.
You: There are no easy upgrades for Macs.
Several mac users: Here are links to sixty different ones.
You: Well, gee, even though I was totally wrong about my initial point, I still feel like they cost more than I'd like to pay.
Well, fine. Don't. Don't buy a Mac. Don't buy a Mac upgrade. There are plenty of us who DO like Macs and their upgrades to keep Apple solvent, despite the industry's (and Apple's) best efforts to destroy the Macintosh.
Sorry about the pointed comment, but people spouting off these tired, false statements about upgradeability/price/performance whatever are really annoying me.
*slashdot to Moofie* So stop reading, dumbass!
*moofie to Slashdot* Can't....stop...reading....
And nobody bought one either, right? Ooops! No, I forgot. Two million sales so far in the last 12 months. Guess nobody wants these no-floppy-havin' fruity 15" monitor computers, right?
Note: Your computing tastes are not the same as everybody's computing tastes. This is axiomatic for all values of "your" and "tastes". Don't like it? Don't buy it. Why does its existence offend you? Did an iMac take your lunch money?
OS9 and OSX are parallel releases. From what I understand, OS9 and its follow ons (that will be able to run on all Macs with sufficient RAM back to, I believe, the Mac II something) will continue to be updated for at least 18 months. OSX is going to be available, supporting the G3 and G4 based Macs (basically, everything from the last 18 months and newer), and will be the long-term OS for Apple. So, basically, same thing that MS has been trying (and failing) to do since the introduction of WinNT.
Out of curiousity, why four satellites? From what I remember of orbital mechanics, you can have an equilateral triangle of satellites in Clarke orbits, giving global (equatorial) coverage. The reindeer in Siberia and Northern Canadia get left out (that's a joke, people), but doesn't somebody operate birds in Molniya orbits over the north pole?
You might consider mailstart.com or mail.yahoo.com or mailexcite.com or ureach.com or any one of the bazillion other web POP clients. They can't ALL suck.
Yep. My PC will always be a little pipsqueak compared to those billion kajillion dollar super-raging-stonker computers. For my purposes, an overclocked Celeron has a stupendous price/performance ratio. If YOU can afford those machines, bully for you! Leave the rest of us peons alone.
They may not have moral obligations, but as they (corporations) are entities formed under the law (a law that was specifically engineered to allow for their existence), you better believe that they must act according to the law. IFF they don't, they get spanked sooner or later by DOJ. Or, if they have enough money to grease the sphincters of certain state attorneys general (*cough* Dell....*cough* Texas...) said attorneys general drop off the anti-trust lawsuits.
When I move to Mars, I'm not going to have any of this collusive corrupt back-door action bullshit. It really annoys me. The law will make sense, and people will follow it because it makes sense.
Simple. The original poster seemed to want to be able to hear several different sources simultaneously through the same speakers. That's precisely what I want to do, too. For instance, I'd like to be able to run my VCR's sound output, output for my PC and my Mac, all through the same speakers OR to a set of headphones. Ideally, I could control both master volume and volume for all the input channels. An input switcher is not sufficient for my purposes. I _think_ the original poster is looking for the same thing, but I could be wrong.
I'm fascinated by the idea of building my own (I just got my first soldering iron...LOOK OUT!). Does anybody have any tasty links or book recommendations that would give me some idea as to how to build such a thing with minimal cross-talk and no damage to the speakers?
Screw Earth. The sooner all of us Smart People get off this dirtball and go to Mars/L5/Luna/Wherever, we'll be in MUCH better shape. If the normals want to spiral down the toilet bowl of restrictive governments and Racial Tensions (tm), let 'em. Those of us with courage, vision, initiative, imagination, and know-how can just move elsewhere. Maybe I'm selfish, but I'm not smart enough to solve all the problems of this planet. I AM smart enough, however, to route around them.
It's like that scary dude in Alien:Resurrection said: "Earth...what a shithole..."
Just to crank a little more life out of this horribly overstressed metaphor, note that for a significant fraction of the last 20 years, Apple has been in the top 5 computer manufacturers in terms of volume. That does NOT mean that Apple computers are more popular than PC's (unfortunately), only that there are more sorts of PC's (and Protestant religions) to choose from.
Stay good, day stock traders, stay good! - kiki
FF7 is a superlative game. The problem with the playstation is input devices. The gamepad is insufficient for the bulk of the games I want to play (that is, realistic flight simulators). Games like Falcon 4, iWar, Longbow 2, F-22ADF, and the forthcoming Babylon 5 space combat simulator simply will not work on a d-pad, even a dual analog one. Unless game consoles ship from the factory with a keyboard and an analog joystick, MY gaming penchants (and I bet I'm not alone) cannot be satisfied by a console.
You did an end run around all the salient points. The iMac's design philosophy, as evidenced by its INCREDIBLE sales success, leads me to believe that there is a market to be served by simple computers. Just 'cuz you don't like it doesn't mean it's not so.
Circular logic is logic that is used to prove itself. Just because you didn't understand it doesn't mean it's wrong.
Consumer products (in the sense that the iMac is a consumer desktop computer, and the iBook is a consumer laptop) as opposed to professional products is a common differentiator within product lines of all sorts of technical gadgetry. Sure, Joe Sixpack can buy an umpty bajillion dollar Nikon FX 500000 camera, but that doesn't make it a product designed for consumers.
In your narrow view that if somebody uses object x, they are a consumer, yes you are correct...Linux is a consumer product. But you've just made "consumer product" redundant. In the sense that I (and a bunch of other people posting here and Steve Jobs) are using the term consumer, it means "non-geek computer user". That's not you. It's not me, either, but I'm open minded enough to see that the iBook serves every conceivable need I might have in the near term for a portable computer. Therefore, I (and a bunch of non-geek computer users, like my grandma) will buy them.
Calling my grandma names doesn't make your point correct. Go learn about "ad hominem rhetoric" and how to avoid it. It makes you look foolish.