'While the nearly two decades separating NASA's three space disasters allowed room for the agency to grow complacent, the relatively short time between the 2003 loss of Columbia and the end of the shuttle program could avoid a repeat of such behavior.'"
In other words: "Basically, we're gonna keep on doing the same unsafe shit as always, but now it doesn't matter since the odds only seem to catch up with us every 20 years or so and the shuttle won't be around that long."
With that attitude, good luck finding suckers to strap into whatever manned launch vehicle is in use in the 2020's. Maybe they should just use humanoid robots that decade.
Never announce a product until you can actually ship it.
Original iMac. Announced: May, 1998. Shipped: August, 1998. Success: Huge.
Very few of Apple's hardware products since then have shipped on announcement day. "Available today" has been the exception rather than the rule. I don't think it's hurt them a bit in the past, and it won't hurt them now.
I don't think Jobs would have fallen for it again.
Change that to "I don't think Jobs would fall for it," as it was not him who fell for it the first time-- Jobs was gone from Apple in November of 1985 when Sculley signed the agreement with Microsoft.
FTFA: Allchin,... also suggested he talk to Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs to get the iPod to work with Microsoft's media software for fear the iPod would "drive people away from Windows Media Player.''
Why would Apple have agreed to that? What would have been in it for them? In 2003 (when the article seems to indicate the above took place) the iPod was taking off without any help from Microsoft and had been available for Windows since August of 2002. There is no advantage to having the iPod use WMP on Windows machines instead of iTunes. It would have meant that a team of Microsofties would have had to work closely with Apple and likely have had access to privileged information about the iPod to get it to work with WMP.
That sounds an awful lot like many partnerships Microsoft did in the past: They work with a company, get a good look at the company's closely-guarded crown jewels, and then 'change their mind' about doing what the partnership set out to accomplish. And then a little while later they use the information gleaned during the partnership to come up with a competing product and sink the other company, using high-priced lawyers and weasel clauses buried in contracts to avoid any penalty.
They already pulled that bit on Apple once when they developed Windows by copying the Mac while they had access to a few prototypes to develop Mac apps, and then hid behind a terribly vague licensing agreement. I don't think Jobs would have fallen for it again.
Keeping track of the email addresses is a breeze, I just use vendorname@mydomain.com.
Takes me about a minute to ssh into my mailserver, fire up nano to add an alias for a new vendor and have postfix reprocess the alias file to pick up the change. Once they're in there, that's where they stay until I yank them out for spamming me (hasn't happened yet).
The only other problem, are the email addresses used to register domains. They get slammed.
I noticed that, too. I dealt with that by changing that email address every so often by adding the current date, e.g. "registration04-24-06@mydomain.com"-- then I go through the handful of domains I own and change the contact info to use that address. When I start getting spams to the newer address, I know it's time to go back and update it again.
I suppose that would be more of a hassle if I owned more than 4 domains.
If I sign up for a trial membership or something that requires a credit card, I create a temporary credit card (via my CC account with MBNA, now Bank of America) with a spending limit of only what I need, and use that. If the vendor earns my trust, I change my billing info to a real card. If they don't, well, good luck trying to perpetually bill the temporary card, fuckers!
I also run my own mailserver, so every vendor I deal with gets their own address which just redirects to my main address. When I cease dealing with them, their e-mail address goes away and I never see another message from them. (This is also a handy method to see who's selling their customer databases to spammers)
Apple's brick wall between the user and the machine doesn't teach the user anything
You're right, it just lets them use their applications to accomplish things. An OS isn't there to teach you how to use it, it's there to stay the fuck out of your way and let you do other things.
OSX does not encourage exploration
Oh, and Windows DOES? Bwahahahaha!
I have helped many non-geeks switch from Windows to Mac, and to a person they were AFRAID to try anything outside of normal application usage-- either because they had been more curious in the past and accidentally blown up their computer, or because they had heard of such an experience from a fellow non-geek. It took quite a bit of convincing to get these people to relax and not be so afraid of destroying their computers by going to the wrong web site or installing the wrong software.
Something a lot of people tend to forget is that Windows has to account for much more different hardware then Apple ever had to...
That's also something that escapes everyone who whines that they'd use OS X if oooooonly Apple would sell it to them for use on a generic PC they built themselves.
As if Apple could support all that generic bargain-bin crap overnight and have all it work as well as it does on genuine Macs. Microsoft has spent billions over the last 20 years trying to achieve the kind of HW/SW synergy that the Mac offers, and they still haven't gotten there (and probably never will).
If Apple tried to open up OS X for generic hardware and things didn't go absolutely perfectly, the impact to their "it just works" reputation would be devastating. Think about the bargain bin hardware these fools want to run OS X on. Shoddy drivers, poor "documentation" (i.e. a short text file written in Engrish)-- Apple would never let their corporate reputation ride on the quality of 3rd-party Mac drivers, so the only other option would be for them to write the drivers for everything, which is completely and totally impractical.
The best they can hope for is a return of how things were in the NeXTStep for Intel days, which was something like: "Here's a list of the dozen or so motherboards, CD-ROM drives, network cards, etc that we support. If you don't wanna use this stuff, you're SOL."
The only way to fix it was to hard reboot the box, and the directions were scary: "Go down to the older server room, and find an unlabeled shelf next to the first door near the panic switch....
Now THAT is funny... reminds me of HHGG, when Arthur goes to find the plans for the bypass in a locked file cabinet in an unlit basement in a disused lavatory labeled "Beware of the Tiger."
Then we found out that the cleaning crew was using portable "backpack" vacuum cleaners. They would plug into a wall outlet that was on the same breaker as our lab. When the breaker popped, they would reset it, and continue cleaning.
At my last job, one of the sites got a nice, new network printer/copier. They were a Mac shop, but their printer didn't support Macs natively. Solution: a small parallel port print server that did AppleTalk. When you plugged it in, a phantom printer appeared on the network for five minutes. You had to "print" a specially-formatted text file to that phantom to configure the server (this was in 1999 or 2000, so browser-based UIs had not yet become widespread). When AC power was lost, the print server was set back to is defaults.
We kept getting calls from those guys that they couldn't print to their new printer. We'd investigate, find out that the server had lost its config, reconfigure it, and move on-- they didn't want to put a UPS there just for the print server, so this continued for a while. I think we even had an electrician in to check that outlet. Finally one morning we got another call, and I went over to find the AC adapter for the print server unplugged. It was then that we realized that it was the cleaning crew unplugging the stuff for their vacuum, and they had forgotten to plug it back in this time.
We posted a small sign next to the outlet that said (in English and Spanish) "Do not unplug these!" They still unplugged them. So we ended up buying a lockbox that screwed onto the outlet so the outlets could not be unplugged unless you had the key. That finally fixed the problem.
The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
1984 was a cautionary tale about the perils of a totalitarian goverment, not a fucking manual on how to establish one!
I gave Spotlight a chance, but IMHO it couldn't match the speed or configurability of LaunchBar for launching apps (among other things). I think Apple should just buy LaunchBar or QuickSilver and integrate it into the OS.
Yeah, that sounds familiar. I was with Cingular a few years back, until they repeatedly stopped automatically billing my perfectly valid, unexpired credit card. And then tried to stick me with late fees for nonpayment, until I called and bitched them out about it.
After the third time that happened, I dropped them for AT&T Wireless. Needless to say, I was not thrilled when I became a Cingular customer again thanks to the merger. No billing issues yet, but I think they only just this week completed merging the AT&T Wireless billing system with their own, because I got an email about it over the weekend.
I stayed with them, but I'm month-to-month-- so if they fuck up once, I'm gone.
Entourage is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to an Exchange server. As an Exchange client, it sucks.
I have clients who still run Classic exclusively so they can use Outlook 2001. The Exchange support in Entourage has been so shameful for so long (they've taken YEARS and still haven't achieved feature parity with Outlook 2001) that I really have a hard time believing it's not a deliberate move to thwart Mac use in the enterprise.
The same goes for this move. Microsoft makes a TON of money selling Mac Office, and with the Mac market growing and Microsoft standing to see a Mac Office sales increase as a result, it's not like they can't afford the development costs.
These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation.
It's driver dependent. Support for it is built right into OS X, the latest Boot Camp beta adds a trackpad driver so you can do it in Windows as well. As for Linux, I have no idea-- there are certainly no Apple-provided drivers.
150 million dollars worth of stock that proceeded to increase in value over the next five years isn't much? If you say so, Rich Uncle Pennybags.
Considering Apple had 4 billion in the bank at the time, I don't think it did much at all for Apple except act as a very public vote of confidence. Their pledge to keep putting out Office for Mac was probably worth more to Apple-- of course, Microsoft wasn't doing that to be nice, they were doing that because the antitrust storm was brewing and they needed a viable competitor to point to as part of their defense.
You complain, "Apple and Sony are stuck in lock-in land - our kit, our standards, our profit," and then go on to laud Microsoft for the coming up with the Zune, which is Microsoft doing the lock-in thing a la iPod/iTunes.
I also question your assertion that Microsoft has interoperability going for it. Interoperability with other Microsoft products, maybe, but people like myself who have to deal with getting and keeping non-Microsoft systems talking to a Microsoft-based world see it differently.
Well, the best stupid/evil cable company story I've ever heard involves getting wrongly prosecuted for cable theft. About 8 years back, Comcast's cable TV and cable internet entities each didn't know what the other was doing. A woman got Comcast internet service but chose to not get cable TV. Comcast's TV techs kept disconnecting her because their records didn't show her as a TV customer, their internet service techs kept reconnecting her. Eventually they attempted to prosecute her for theft of cable TV service.
Slashdot Mirror
'While the nearly two decades separating NASA's three space disasters allowed room for the agency to grow complacent, the relatively short time between the 2003 loss of Columbia and the end of the shuttle program could avoid a repeat of such behavior.'"
In other words: "Basically, we're gonna keep on doing the same unsafe shit as always, but now it doesn't matter since the odds only seem to catch up with us every 20 years or so and the shuttle won't be around that long."
With that attitude, good luck finding suckers to strap into whatever manned launch vehicle is in use in the 2020's. Maybe they should just use humanoid robots that decade.
~Philly
Never announce a product until you can actually ship it.
Original iMac. Announced: May, 1998. Shipped: August, 1998. Success: Huge.
Very few of Apple's hardware products since then have shipped on announcement day. "Available today" has been the exception rather than the rule. I don't think it's hurt them a bit in the past, and it won't hurt them now.
~Philly
I stand corrected, forgot all about MusicMatch.
~Philly
I don't think Jobs would have fallen for it again.
Change that to "I don't think Jobs would fall for it," as it was not him who fell for it the first time-- Jobs was gone from Apple in November of 1985 when Sculley signed the agreement with Microsoft.
~Philly
FTFA: ... also suggested he talk to Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs to get the iPod to work with Microsoft's media software for fear the iPod would "drive people away from Windows Media Player.''
Allchin,
Why would Apple have agreed to that? What would have been in it for them? In 2003 (when the article seems to indicate the above took place) the iPod was taking off without any help from Microsoft and had been available for Windows since August of 2002. There is no advantage to having the iPod use WMP on Windows machines instead of iTunes. It would have meant that a team of Microsofties would have had to work closely with Apple and likely have had access to privileged information about the iPod to get it to work with WMP.
That sounds an awful lot like many partnerships Microsoft did in the past: They work with a company, get a good look at the company's closely-guarded crown jewels, and then 'change their mind' about doing what the partnership set out to accomplish. And then a little while later they use the information gleaned during the partnership to come up with a competing product and sink the other company, using high-priced lawyers and weasel clauses buried in contracts to avoid any penalty.
They already pulled that bit on Apple once when they developed Windows by copying the Mac while they had access to a few prototypes to develop Mac apps, and then hid behind a terribly vague licensing agreement. I don't think Jobs would have fallen for it again.
~Philly
Keeping track of the email addresses is a breeze, I just use vendorname@mydomain.com.
Takes me about a minute to ssh into my mailserver, fire up nano to add an alias for a new vendor and have postfix reprocess the alias file to pick up the change. Once they're in there, that's where they stay until I yank them out for spamming me (hasn't happened yet).
The only other problem, are the email addresses used to register domains. They get slammed.
I noticed that, too. I dealt with that by changing that email address every so often by adding the current date, e.g. "registration04-24-06@mydomain.com"-- then I go through the handful of domains I own and change the contact info to use that address. When I start getting spams to the newer address, I know it's time to go back and update it again.
I suppose that would be more of a hassle if I owned more than 4 domains.
~Philly
If I sign up for a trial membership or something that requires a credit card, I create a temporary credit card (via my CC account with MBNA, now Bank of America) with a spending limit of only what I need, and use that. If the vendor earns my trust, I change my billing info to a real card. If they don't, well, good luck trying to perpetually bill the temporary card, fuckers!
I also run my own mailserver, so every vendor I deal with gets their own address which just redirects to my main address. When I cease dealing with them, their e-mail address goes away and I never see another message from them. (This is also a handy method to see who's selling their customer databases to spammers)
~Philly
Apple's brick wall between the user and the machine doesn't teach the user anything
You're right, it just lets them use their applications to accomplish things. An OS isn't there to teach you how to use it, it's there to stay the fuck out of your way and let you do other things.
OSX does not encourage exploration
Oh, and Windows DOES? Bwahahahaha!
I have helped many non-geeks switch from Windows to Mac, and to a person they were AFRAID to try anything outside of normal application usage-- either because they had been more curious in the past and accidentally blown up their computer, or because they had heard of such an experience from a fellow non-geek. It took quite a bit of convincing to get these people to relax and not be so afraid of destroying their computers by going to the wrong web site or installing the wrong software.
~Philly
Something a lot of people tend to forget is that Windows has to account for much more different hardware then Apple ever had to...
That's also something that escapes everyone who whines that they'd use OS X if oooooonly Apple would sell it to them for use on a generic PC they built themselves.
As if Apple could support all that generic bargain-bin crap overnight and have all it work as well as it does on genuine Macs. Microsoft has spent billions over the last 20 years trying to achieve the kind of HW/SW synergy that the Mac offers, and they still haven't gotten there (and probably never will).
If Apple tried to open up OS X for generic hardware and things didn't go absolutely perfectly, the impact to their "it just works" reputation would be devastating. Think about the bargain bin hardware these fools want to run OS X on. Shoddy drivers, poor "documentation" (i.e. a short text file written in Engrish)-- Apple would never let their corporate reputation ride on the quality of 3rd-party Mac drivers, so the only other option would be for them to write the drivers for everything, which is completely and totally impractical.
The best they can hope for is a return of how things were in the NeXTStep for Intel days, which was something like: "Here's a list of the dozen or so motherboards, CD-ROM drives, network cards, etc that we support. If you don't wanna use this stuff, you're SOL."
~Philly
Great! Where can I buy it?
Here.
Pretty much all of the features listed in the GP post except the last one or two are in Tiger Server, which has been available since April of 2005.
Next time, remove head from sphincter before posting.
~Philly
The only way to fix it was to hard reboot the box, and the directions were scary: "Go down to the older server room, and find an unlabeled shelf next to the first door near the panic switch....
Now THAT is funny... reminds me of HHGG, when Arthur goes to find the plans for the bypass in a locked file cabinet in an unlit basement in a disused lavatory labeled "Beware of the Tiger."
~Philly
Then we found out that the cleaning crew was using portable "backpack" vacuum cleaners. They would plug into a wall outlet that was on the same breaker as our lab. When the breaker popped, they would reset it, and continue cleaning.
At my last job, one of the sites got a nice, new network printer/copier. They were a Mac shop, but their printer didn't support Macs natively. Solution: a small parallel port print server that did AppleTalk. When you plugged it in, a phantom printer appeared on the network for five minutes. You had to "print" a specially-formatted text file to that phantom to configure the server (this was in 1999 or 2000, so browser-based UIs had not yet become widespread). When AC power was lost, the print server was set back to is defaults.
We kept getting calls from those guys that they couldn't print to their new printer. We'd investigate, find out that the server had lost its config, reconfigure it, and move on-- they didn't want to put a UPS there just for the print server, so this continued for a while. I think we even had an electrician in to check that outlet. Finally one morning we got another call, and I went over to find the AC adapter for the print server unplugged. It was then that we realized that it was the cleaning crew unplugging the stuff for their vacuum, and they had forgotten to plug it back in this time.
We posted a small sign next to the outlet that said (in English and Spanish) "Do not unplug these!" They still unplugged them. So we ended up buying a lockbox that screwed onto the outlet so the outlets could not be unplugged unless you had the key. That finally fixed the problem.
~Philly
On a big (but apparently not yet big enough to suit them) pile of money.
~Philly
The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
1984 was a cautionary tale about the perils of a totalitarian goverment, not a fucking manual on how to establish one!
~Philly
The thought of the idiots who receive the junk and buy the crap advertised in it.
~Philly
I gave Spotlight a chance, but IMHO it couldn't match the speed or configurability of LaunchBar for launching apps (among other things). I think Apple should just buy LaunchBar or QuickSilver and integrate it into the OS.
I've had billing issues for 4 of last 9 months.
Yeah, that sounds familiar. I was with Cingular a few years back, until they repeatedly stopped automatically billing my perfectly valid, unexpired credit card. And then tried to stick me with late fees for nonpayment, until I called and bitched them out about it.
After the third time that happened, I dropped them for AT&T Wireless. Needless to say, I was not thrilled when I became a Cingular customer again thanks to the merger. No billing issues yet, but I think they only just this week completed merging the AT&T Wireless billing system with their own, because I got an email about it over the weekend.
I stayed with them, but I'm month-to-month-- so if they fuck up once, I'm gone.
~Philly
Entourage is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to an Exchange server. As an Exchange client, it sucks.
I have clients who still run Classic exclusively so they can use Outlook 2001. The Exchange support in Entourage has been so shameful for so long (they've taken YEARS and still haven't achieved feature parity with Outlook 2001) that I really have a hard time believing it's not a deliberate move to thwart Mac use in the enterprise.
The same goes for this move. Microsoft makes a TON of money selling Mac Office, and with the Mac market growing and Microsoft standing to see a Mac Office sales increase as a result, it's not like they can't afford the development costs.
These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation.
~Philly
iZac!
~Philly
It's driver dependent. Support for it is built right into OS X, the latest Boot Camp beta adds a trackpad driver so you can do it in Windows as well. As for Linux, I have no idea-- there are certainly no Apple-provided drivers.
~Philly
150 million dollars worth of stock that proceeded to increase in value over the next five years isn't much? If you say so, Rich Uncle Pennybags.
Considering Apple had 4 billion in the bank at the time, I don't think it did much at all for Apple except act as a very public vote of confidence. Their pledge to keep putting out Office for Mac was probably worth more to Apple-- of course, Microsoft wasn't doing that to be nice, they were doing that because the antitrust storm was brewing and they needed a viable competitor to point to as part of their defense.
~Philly
You complain, "Apple and Sony are stuck in lock-in land - our kit, our standards, our profit," and then go on to laud Microsoft for the coming up with the Zune, which is Microsoft doing the lock-in thing a la iPod/iTunes.
I also question your assertion that Microsoft has interoperability going for it. Interoperability with other Microsoft products, maybe, but people like myself who have to deal with getting and keeping non-Microsoft systems talking to a Microsoft-based world see it differently.
~Philly
Having to marry Bill Gates is considered getting off easy?
Maybe if the alternative punishment is having to give Ballmer a hummer.
Now can it get much worse then that?
Well, the best stupid/evil cable company story I've ever heard involves getting wrongly prosecuted for cable theft. About 8 years back, Comcast's cable TV and cable internet entities each didn't know what the other was doing. A woman got Comcast internet service but chose to not get cable TV. Comcast's TV techs kept disconnecting her because their records didn't show her as a TV customer, their internet service techs kept reconnecting her. Eventually they attempted to prosecute her for theft of cable TV service.
~Philly