A friend and I learned BASIC in 5th grade from older friends using a TRS-80 at a Radio Shack in the local mall. The employees there used to allow the area kids to come in and use the floor models for free (because back in the mid-80s, none of us could afford such a thing.) Eventually, the schools started investing in TRS-80s and set up fledgling computer labs for students to use and that's when things really seemed to take off. I spent a lot of time in front of that green-on-black screen teaching myself how to code and it's amazing to this day how much of what I taught myself is still relevant. Styles and syntax come and go, but the underlying concepts seem to be fairly static.
Is that all that counts today ? pretty effects and cool graphics ? I for one just want a plain old desktop with no background, just the classic theme without anything installed, no gadgets no candy just the desktop, a couple of icons there and that's about it.
You do realize, of course, that roughly 30 years ago, computer geeks were running complaining about these new-fangled GUIs and how they just wanted a good ol' command line interface without the pretty graphics. I think we're long past those arguments at this point.
IOW, you are squarely in the minority. People want computer interfaces they can relate to and that feel "human" and that means pretty effects and cool graphics.
I'm fine with that attitude which is why I've been migrating off Google's products over the last year. However, don't you take issue at all with a company misrepresenting itself to people? The issue here isn't that Google is collecting data but rather that they're doing it under the guise of providing free services. You really don't think companies like Google--hell, especially Google--shouldn't be a little more forthcoming about these things?
I don't understand how our standards and expectations of privacy as consumers got so damn low.
When I was in line to buy tickets for Revenge of the Sith, I was in line behind a kid about 12 or so jabbering away excitedly to his dad about how awesome it was that he was going to see how it all wraps up. It reminded me of my friends and me in our early teen years when Jedi came out. It was refreshing to see something like this after hearing several weeks of people carping about how Lucas had botched everything and the prequels were a lost cause and episode III was going to suck and blah blah blah. It was fantastic to hear someone talk about the films who really enjoyed them for what they were instead of bitching about what they should have been.
Star Wars never really jumped the shark. The real problem with the prequels were the sky-high expectations of the fans. The fans seem to have expected George Lucas to remake the original trilogies, and when he went off on a new direction, with a new tone and showed a whole other aspect of the Star Wars universe, everyone freaked. I just watched The Phantom Menace with my kids (age 5 and 11) this weekend and they were howling with delight every time Jar-Jar did something ridiculous, especially during the battle at the end. If you go to the movies like a kid, without all those years of built-up expectations about what a Star Wars movie "should" be, then you're going to see the films for what they really are: pure fun. And from that perspective, the Star Wars films have never jumped the shark.
As a published writer, I can tell you that the Internet is nothing but joy for aspiring and professional writers alike for two reasons. The first reason is really childish, but true. The second is totally a matter of practicality.
The first is that you get to see just how bad a lot of writers really are, and it gives you a kind of perspective that writers in previous generations never had, given that they were working in a bubble back then (relatively speaking.) There's nothing quite like the ego-boost a writer can get by perusing blogs and various writer sites and seeing the kind of grammar-challenged twaddle that 90% of the so-called writers out there produce. And it's sort of sad that most are neither educated nor experienced enough to know they should be embarrassed by it. It's amazing how often you see some unpublished writer on a writing forum float a query letter for public review that has some glaring grammar or spelling errors.
The second reason is that, with the Internet, you can dig up tons of information about agents, publishers and other writers. On top of that, you can make contact with many of them in various forums to gather information that would have taken a lifetime of writing and publishing to gain in the past. There's a wealth of information and resources for aspiring writers out there that should be explored and absorbed. The Internet has allowed working writers to consolidate information about agents and publishers and start separating the bad from the good. A lot of shady agents and underhanded business practices have been exposed on the Internet, and every writer should avail himself to that information.
Anyone who thinks the Internet is bad for professional writers has their head in the wrong place.
Talk about a strawman argument! He said nothing about a pro-MS press. He was talking about business analysts for investment firms and other financial institutions who dig up info for their investors and clients. And it's well known that they often skew reports about companies to further their own interests. People who are heavily invested in MS don't want to hear what a failure the Zune was and so the news gets warped to fit the desired perception.
If you dig the Firefly opening, check the links below out. An indie folk group took the theme and turned it into a full-length song (and they did a pretty damn good job with it) using the theme as their chorus and adding some very well-written verses.
What about me? I can speak more than one language and therefore can provide different possible conjugation forms of a verb on the fly. Hell, I could do that back in high school. Check it out... I'm prior art.
Of course, Jobs and his wife may be giving enormous sums of money to charity anonymously. If they are funneling cash to various causes in private, their names wouldn't show up on any lists, regardless of the size of their gifts.
There are many people in the world (I know a few) who feel that touting your own charitable giving is wrong, self-aggrandizing and that it should be done as anonymously as possible. For this writer to make such damningly certain statements in this regard without further investigation (or without attempting to contact Jobs for a comment, it would seem) shows that he's probably not interested in getting to the truth of what he's writing about.
I read an interview once with Pink Floyd's lead guitarist/singer David Gilmour (amongst the wealthiest people in the UK) who hinted at how he feels guilty sometimes about how much money he has and gets up at night to write a check or donate anonymously. Some wealthy people do give that way. Just because some choose to make a big, public display of it doesn't mean nobody else is giving.
I despise Microsoft and think their products are generally crappy, but what is it about patching or refining beta software that makes this newsworthy? Because it's MS?
You mean Apple is doing exactly what they stated they were doing when they unveiled this feature months ago? NOOO!!! How shocking! What an outrage. I'm glad the sleuthing reporters at mcelhearn.com are on top of these shocking developments and can bring them to our attention so quickly.
The only problem with this observation (beyond the fact that your iPod sales figure is laughably out-of-date) is that MS is losing money on each XBox sold whereas Apple is profiting quite nicely with each iPod.
So, would you rather sell 10 million units of something at a loss or 2 million with a profit?
Sorry. I got that wrong from memory. Mac sales were up 50% from last year so it's only half-amazing.;^) I was confusing it with iPod sales that were up over 200%.
You can read the details here if you want but the point is that Mac sales are going up pretty rapidly and market share is sort of an inaccurate way to judge it for many reasons. As long as market share includes business purchases that typically don't favor Macs, then it's going to skew things against the Mac considerably.
The Mini is their first attractively priced system in quite a while. I'm sure it has expanded their sales somewhat but it has also cababalized upgrades of higher priced models.
I am a professional working on a Mac around many other professionals on Macs and I can tell you that a mini woudn't cut it. I can't imagine how the minis would cannibalize the higher priced models. Apple's strong point in consumer sales are laptops and the iMac has a pretty consistently strong buzz. I'm not sure how the mini has that kind of effect.
That may not be the factor it used to be. It used to be the case that newer PCs would come out and you could see dramatic differences in performance, that spurred upgrade cycles.
I see it happening around me however. Most of my friends and colleagues who use Windows PCs have bought more computers in a given period of time than I have. I've also know lots of Mac users who buy new computers at a much slower rate. I've read in various sources that that's the case with PC and Mac users in terms of buying habits so I'm not just extrapolating that from my personal experience.
Also, two things to keep in mind. 1. Most computer geeks love to tinker with the insides and the components and PCs are more suited to that than Macs. 2. Joe Consumer is a helluva lot more likely to pick up the cheapie PC at Wal Mart than he is to buy a higher priced Mac. Since Apple doesn't do much in the sub-$500 range and they don't generally appeal to hardware geeks, they are completely out of those segments where it's likely PC manufacturers pick up a lot of sales. So again, I think market share is a dubious metric to use as there is far more volume of sales for PCs that Apple just isn't interested in.
They have had a resurgence. Mac sales have doubled since last year and have steadily grown since 1999, but there are those out there (like the other respondent here) who will always filter any Apple news through market share stats which is a dubious metric to use. I heard that Mac users tend to buy new machines a lot less often than their Windows/PC using counterparts which negatively affects their market share. (I have no stats to back that up, btw, but I've seen it in real life so I tend to believe it.)
You mean to tell me that someone came out with a great idea and Microsoft just happened to be hot on their heels with a similar idea that nobody is allowed to see yet? Is this a crazy world we live in? I mean... c'mon. What are the chances?
Its not a big hassle, although if your net connection doesn't work it might be. Its only some American distros that have had to cut MP3 support by default for legal reasons (ie. Fedora and Suse).
Legal reasons. Sheesh. I should have known it would be something that stupid.:^/
Anyway, thanks for being the only person to respond with a civil tone. I'm not sure what the hostility is all about. I'm starting to think some Linux users are trying to outdo Mac users for platform arrogance. (And yeah, I'm a Mac user so don't anyone freak.)
You shouldn't base any judgement of any operating system on your experience with a computer that clearly wasn't installed completely.
Then I have a gripe with the installer. I was very attentive to the whole process, reading up thoroughly before attempting it. If the installer screwed things up, my complaint still stands and I couldn't recommend it to others.
pretty much every NIC is supported some way or another
I checked out all the hardware before installing. Everything in the machine is explicitly supported except the display and I don't appear to be having any issues with that.
they have the ability to download and install any new program
Then I have a catch-22 on my hands that has never occurred for me on any other platform--other platforms that also have the ability to download and install new programs with a mouse click (puzzled as to why you chose that feature as a unique to Linux.)
You might want to revise your definition of "tried".
Perhaps you're right. I suppose I haven't really "tried" it if I can't do anything useful with it immediately after installing it which, sadly, appears to be the case.
I installed Linux on a machine at work with my boss's blessings and was, sadly, less than impressed. I'm not trying to troll. I'm no fan of MS, and I really wanted to like what I saw, but thus far, I have been underwhelmed. This was my first experience with Linux and I'd be hesistant to recommend it to anyone based on what I saw.
The big problem I have right now is that it simply cannot find the network. No matter what I do, the network connection is dead. I've read on help forums about how to remedy it, and nothing so far has worked. The connection I'm using works fine when plugged into the Windows machine next to it.
I also tried to play some mp3s on it and none of the audio players installed would recognize the file. I've since read that I may need to install additional software to get those programs to use mp3s. WTF? Something that minor, playing an mp3 file, shouldn't be that big a hassle.
"Marketing" is a very specific term about very specific activities, my friend. In a modern sense, it's a coordinated campaign to put out a specific message and image. I've worked with marketing people and I know what "marketing" is. You have yet to show me an example of the marketing you accused Apple of doing against Linux. In your post you wrote:
I wish, however, Apple and Apple proponents would stop marketing Macintosh by putting down Linux.
One page on Apple's site showing the testimony of a Linux user is not a marketing campaign for Macintosh based on putting down Linux. I haven't changed my argument midstream, but it has taken this many posts to figure out that you are misusing a term and that's causing me confusion.
Apple may not shy away from showing Linux users the benefits of OS X, but that's not marketing. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but thus far you haven't shown a single example of Apple actually marketing the Mac by putting down Linux. For that reason, I remain unconvinced.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend and I learned BASIC in 5th grade from older friends using a TRS-80 at a Radio Shack in the local mall. The employees there used to allow the area kids to come in and use the floor models for free (because back in the mid-80s, none of us could afford such a thing.) Eventually, the schools started investing in TRS-80s and set up fledgling computer labs for students to use and that's when things really seemed to take off. I spent a lot of time in front of that green-on-black screen teaching myself how to code and it's amazing to this day how much of what I taught myself is still relevant. Styles and syntax come and go, but the underlying concepts seem to be fairly static.
Is that all that counts today ? pretty effects and cool graphics ? I for one just want a plain old desktop with no background, just the classic theme without anything installed, no gadgets no candy just the desktop, a couple of icons there and that's about it.
You do realize, of course, that roughly 30 years ago, computer geeks were running complaining about these new-fangled GUIs and how they just wanted a good ol' command line interface without the pretty graphics. I think we're long past those arguments at this point. IOW, you are squarely in the minority. People want computer interfaces they can relate to and that feel "human" and that means pretty effects and cool graphics.
I'm fine with that attitude which is why I've been migrating off Google's products over the last year. However, don't you take issue at all with a company misrepresenting itself to people? The issue here isn't that Google is collecting data but rather that they're doing it under the guise of providing free services. You really don't think companies like Google--hell, especially Google--shouldn't be a little more forthcoming about these things? I don't understand how our standards and expectations of privacy as consumers got so damn low.
"Most Home Network Gear Buggy"
When I was in line to buy tickets for Revenge of the Sith, I was in line behind a kid about 12 or so jabbering away excitedly to his dad about how awesome it was that he was going to see how it all wraps up. It reminded me of my friends and me in our early teen years when Jedi came out. It was refreshing to see something like this after hearing several weeks of people carping about how Lucas had botched everything and the prequels were a lost cause and episode III was going to suck and blah blah blah. It was fantastic to hear someone talk about the films who really enjoyed them for what they were instead of bitching about what they should have been.
Star Wars never really jumped the shark. The real problem with the prequels were the sky-high expectations of the fans. The fans seem to have expected George Lucas to remake the original trilogies, and when he went off on a new direction, with a new tone and showed a whole other aspect of the Star Wars universe, everyone freaked. I just watched The Phantom Menace with my kids (age 5 and 11) this weekend and they were howling with delight every time Jar-Jar did something ridiculous, especially during the battle at the end. If you go to the movies like a kid, without all those years of built-up expectations about what a Star Wars movie "should" be, then you're going to see the films for what they really are: pure fun. And from that perspective, the Star Wars films have never jumped the shark.
As a published writer, I can tell you that the Internet is nothing but joy for aspiring and professional writers alike for two reasons. The first reason is really childish, but true. The second is totally a matter of practicality.
The first is that you get to see just how bad a lot of writers really are, and it gives you a kind of perspective that writers in previous generations never had, given that they were working in a bubble back then (relatively speaking.) There's nothing quite like the ego-boost a writer can get by perusing blogs and various writer sites and seeing the kind of grammar-challenged twaddle that 90% of the so-called writers out there produce. And it's sort of sad that most are neither educated nor experienced enough to know they should be embarrassed by it. It's amazing how often you see some unpublished writer on a writing forum float a query letter for public review that has some glaring grammar or spelling errors.
The second reason is that, with the Internet, you can dig up tons of information about agents, publishers and other writers. On top of that, you can make contact with many of them in various forums to gather information that would have taken a lifetime of writing and publishing to gain in the past. There's a wealth of information and resources for aspiring writers out there that should be explored and absorbed. The Internet has allowed working writers to consolidate information about agents and publishers and start separating the bad from the good. A lot of shady agents and underhanded business practices have been exposed on the Internet, and every writer should avail himself to that information.
Anyone who thinks the Internet is bad for professional writers has their head in the wrong place.
Talk about a strawman argument! He said nothing about a pro-MS press. He was talking about business analysts for investment firms and other financial institutions who dig up info for their investors and clients. And it's well known that they often skew reports about companies to further their own interests. People who are heavily invested in MS don't want to hear what a failure the Zune was and so the news gets warped to fit the desired perception.
If you dig the Firefly opening, check the links below out. An indie folk group took the theme and turned it into a full-length song (and they did a pretty damn good job with it) using the theme as their chorus and adding some very well-written verses.
3
http://www.cyphertext.net/escapekey/Mal_studio.mp
Other songs by the same group, here:
http://www.cyphertext.net/escapekey/songs.html
What about me? I can speak more than one language and therefore can provide different possible conjugation forms of a verb on the fly. Hell, I could do that back in high school. Check it out... I'm prior art.
There are many people in the world (I know a few) who feel that touting your own charitable giving is wrong, self-aggrandizing and that it should be done as anonymously as possible. For this writer to make such damningly certain statements in this regard without further investigation (or without attempting to contact Jobs for a comment, it would seem) shows that he's probably not interested in getting to the truth of what he's writing about.
I read an interview once with Pink Floyd's lead guitarist/singer David Gilmour (amongst the wealthiest people in the UK) who hinted at how he feels guilty sometimes about how much money he has and gets up at night to write a check or donate anonymously. Some wealthy people do give that way. Just because some choose to make a big, public display of it doesn't mean nobody else is giving.
So, would you rather sell 10 million units of something at a loss or 2 million with a profit?
You can read the details here if you want but the point is that Mac sales are going up pretty rapidly and market share is sort of an inaccurate way to judge it for many reasons. As long as market share includes business purchases that typically don't favor Macs, then it's going to skew things against the Mac considerably.
I am a professional working on a Mac around many other professionals on Macs and I can tell you that a mini woudn't cut it. I can't imagine how the minis would cannibalize the higher priced models. Apple's strong point in consumer sales are laptops and the iMac has a pretty consistently strong buzz. I'm not sure how the mini has that kind of effect.
That may not be the factor it used to be. It used to be the case that newer PCs would come out and you could see dramatic differences in performance, that spurred upgrade cycles.
I see it happening around me however. Most of my friends and colleagues who use Windows PCs have bought more computers in a given period of time than I have. I've also know lots of Mac users who buy new computers at a much slower rate. I've read in various sources that that's the case with PC and Mac users in terms of buying habits so I'm not just extrapolating that from my personal experience.
Also, two things to keep in mind. 1. Most computer geeks love to tinker with the insides and the components and PCs are more suited to that than Macs. 2. Joe Consumer is a helluva lot more likely to pick up the cheapie PC at Wal Mart than he is to buy a higher priced Mac. Since Apple doesn't do much in the sub-$500 range and they don't generally appeal to hardware geeks, they are completely out of those segments where it's likely PC manufacturers pick up a lot of sales. So again, I think market share is a dubious metric to use as there is far more volume of sales for PCs that Apple just isn't interested in.
rick%
It's not just Safari.
Legal reasons. Sheesh. I should have known it would be something that stupid. :^/
Anyway, thanks for being the only person to respond with a civil tone. I'm not sure what the hostility is all about. I'm starting to think some Linux users are trying to outdo Mac users for platform arrogance. (And yeah, I'm a Mac user so don't anyone freak.)
Then I have a gripe with the installer. I was very attentive to the whole process, reading up thoroughly before attempting it. If the installer screwed things up, my complaint still stands and I couldn't recommend it to others.
pretty much every NIC is supported some way or another
I checked out all the hardware before installing. Everything in the machine is explicitly supported except the display and I don't appear to be having any issues with that.
they have the ability to download and install any new program
Then I have a catch-22 on my hands that has never occurred for me on any other platform--other platforms that also have the ability to download and install new programs with a mouse click (puzzled as to why you chose that feature as a unique to Linux.)
You might want to revise your definition of "tried".
Perhaps you're right. I suppose I haven't really "tried" it if I can't do anything useful with it immediately after installing it which, sadly, appears to be the case.
The big problem I have right now is that it simply cannot find the network. No matter what I do, the network connection is dead. I've read on help forums about how to remedy it, and nothing so far has worked. The connection I'm using works fine when plugged into the Windows machine next to it.
I also tried to play some mp3s on it and none of the audio players installed would recognize the file. I've since read that I may need to install additional software to get those programs to use mp3s. WTF? Something that minor, playing an mp3 file, shouldn't be that big a hassle.
I wish, however, Apple and Apple proponents would stop marketing Macintosh by putting down Linux.
One page on Apple's site showing the testimony of a Linux user is not a marketing campaign for Macintosh based on putting down Linux. I haven't changed my argument midstream, but it has taken this many posts to figure out that you are misusing a term and that's causing me confusion.
Apple may not shy away from showing Linux users the benefits of OS X, but that's not marketing. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but thus far you haven't shown a single example of Apple actually marketing the Mac by putting down Linux. For that reason, I remain unconvinced.