How does switching the active boot drive by holding one of four keys make macs easier to troubleshoot than PCs?
The ability to boot from any bootable drive attached to the computer makes troubleshooting a messed-up volume easy, because you can dig around in the files in the normal GUI. The PCs I currently encounter in the course of my job don't have the ability to boot a Windows installation from any old drive I plug in. I'm stuck with Recovery console or trying to coax some hacked-up boot disk to work so I can fix something or pull data off to another drive.
Yeah, but that's with that particular PC and laptop model. Abilities can vary wildly from one manufacturer and model to the next. Even if some PCs share the same BIOS features, they can still differ in the implementation.
It's the 21st century, and IMHO those features need to be standard across the board-- hell, until a few years ago I couldn't even count 100% on every PC I encountered in the field being able to boot from a CD, much less do any of the other stuff I mentioned in my previous post.
And like you said, having the right boot disk matters for you. For me, I can put a hosed Mac into target mode and connect it as an external drive to any Mac with a FireWire port, to attempt to repair it and/or retrieve data. With a PC you've still got to crack it open and recable at best, or take the whole drive out and put it in a new machine at worst. I've tried out BartPE and a couple other useful boot disks, but having to chase down all the components I need is a pain, and it's hard to make one that is truly universal when it comes to NIC drivers, etc (my company supports a *lot* of different machines).
Blowing the twenty year-old cruft out would be nice, like you said, but I still say the addition of useful features as a standard is what's needed the most.
...to find out why BIOS is antiquated crap. Apple didn't invent Open Firmware, but they make very good use of it.
Four examples: -Hold down a key at startup to boot from CD/DVD. -Hold down a different key at startup to boot from a network volume (if available). -Hold down another different key at startup to give you a menu of all bootable volumes, and boot from the one you want-- external, internal, it doesn't matter. -Hold down yet another different key at startup to have the machine act as an external hard drive.
The features above make troubleshooting a wayward, non-booting Mac a breeze, and they come in very handy at other times as well. If you encounter a non-booting Windows PC, you almost always need another computer nearby to effectively troubleshoot and fix it.
Ever since Apple announced the move to Intel, I've been a little worried about losing those features-- but I'm hopeful that they will find a way to keep them alive on Intel-based Macs.
No large numbers of people are going to buy the hardware to run XP on it.
No, they'll buy the hardware to run OS X on it. But for any Windows-only vertical market apps, or other software that just plain isn't available for Macs, Virtual PC (or some other 'run Windows within OS X' solution) becomes a much more palatable option, performance-wise. And if all else fails, they'll be able to run XP on it as a fall-back.
That's why Intel based Macs are a big deal.
BTW, Apple can barely produce enough Macs to meet demand right now. That's not how I'd define a "failed business model." Small market share or not, they've been kicking ass and taking names for quite a while.
Apple has always, and apparently still is taken with selling hardware that will only last two years at most.
I guess all those people who get five years or more out of their Macs must be hallucinating, then?
I bought a Power Mac 7600 in 1996, and it was my primary machine until 2002. Over the years I added RAM and a USB card and threw a G3 upgrade into it, but it was still a viable machine when I replaced it, except from the standpoint of being able to run OS X-- I needed a more recent model to do that. I'm a consultant, so I wanted a machine that would run it as my clients would see it, not with some third-party hack to get it working.
The 7600 was replaced with a used G4/733 from 2001, and that one was just fine until I bought the G5 I'm using now (yes, I only got 2 years out of the G4 as my primary Mac, but it was only ever intended to tide me over until the G5s came out). The G4 is now in my office running Tiger like a champ, and I expect this G5 to last me until nearly 2010.
Apple already successfully managed a CPU transition back in the 90s, and they did it without instantly obsoleting anyone's computer. I have no doubt that this one will go just as well. Mac applications that are written for the Intel processors can be compiled for the PPC by clicking a checkbox, so there's no additional effort or expense required for developers to support both architectures-- and with 5 years worth of PPC-based Macs out in the world (not counting the PPC Macs that can't run the current incarnation of OS X), they'd be crazy to not do so for at least the next five years.
No way. The smaller laptops get, the more expensive they get-- the iBook is the consumer line, so they can't be them at higher price points than they are now, and the new models' pricing has already been reported to remain the same as the current models. Sub-notebooks are also more fragile, and if the iBooks get that way, what portables will Apple have to sell to school districts?
I've carried a 12" iBook around with me every day since the dual USB models were introduced in 2001, and I wouldn't trade the built-in CD drive and full complement of ports for a little less weight in my backpack. I've seen the compromises that have to be made to really shrink a laptop, and IMHO they suck-- in my job, I frequently need to burn CDs and connect all manner of stuff to my iBook when I'm in the field. I would not be a happy camper if I had to lug around some damned external CD drive or docking station.
Apple's old Powerbook Duo line was underappreciated and ahead of its time. I had a Duo 210 back in 1993 and loved it. I didn't need the Dock back then, just the external floppy drive-- which I didn't need to carry around often.
There's certainly room in Apple's laptop line for a subnotebook, but it probably won't be a new incarnation of the Duo system and it definitely won't replace the iBook models. It will probably be an additional choice in the Powerbook line, like "PowerBook mini" or something-- guts of the 12" PowerBook, but with an external CD drive and everything else shrunk accordingly and/or moved into the space vacated by the internal CD drive. If we're going to see one, though, it probably won't happen until the Intel transition hits the laptops.
I believe that Microsoft intentionally hampers their software so that it will not work as well on the Mac as it does on the PC. For Example:
1. Entourage + MS Exchange server = Crap.
I agree. Entourage is a great app if you're using POP/SMTP, but its Exchange connectivity really, really sucks ass. What moron thought getting rid of MAPI was a good idea?
And I'm not one to don the tinfoil hat, but I do find it mighty curious that the Mac Business Unit is taking so long just to get Entourage to have feature parity with Outlook 2001. There's still a lot of stuff missing, like full Public Folder support and the Out of Office assistant.
That makes me think, why are these launches in the middle of nowhere?
On the off chance you're not being a smartass:
Maybe because rockets are basically gigantic bombs with directional thrust? It could blow up on the pad and damage/destroy everything for quite a distance. If it blew up in the air, debris (some terribly toxic) would rain down on a populated area. Didn't you see the video of the all the Challenger debris splashing down in the ocean?
The minimum safe distance to a space shuttle launch is 3 miles. If you were closer you'd be deafened at best, and have your heart stopped from the shock waves at worst. It would be more than 3 miles, except that NASA has taken great pains to reduce the noise and shock waves by ducting the rocket blast in a certain direction and flooding water into the duct.
Now they're abusing DVDs by putting unskippable ads on those. It remains to be seen what the backlash from that one will be, but probably either people will stop buying them, or the Asian commodity consumer electronics companies will start (if they haven't already) cranking out DVD players that ignore previously-unskippable crap or let you skip it.
They abused phone calls, and that brought about the national Do Not Call list. They abused TV commercials, and that brought about "commercial skip" VCRs and TiVo. They abused pop-ups, and that brought about pop-up blockers. They abused Flash to make more attention-getting (read: obnoxious) banner ads, and that brought about Flashblock. They abused cookies, now people obsessively delete them if they allow them to be created at all.
I've been wanting to go see a shuttle launch for a while. This one's on a weekend, which makes it possible.
They're starting the countdown on the weekend. The actual launch is on Tuesday.
That is *way* too long a drive. If you're going, just fly into Orlando and rent a car for the drive to the east coast. I did it last week, and round trip airfare from Philly was ~$275 and the rental car was $40. I left my house at about 5:30am and got home again just before midnight, and I only had to take one day off from work. Spending 24 hours in the car, including some in launch day traffic, would wipe me out for a couple days.
From the geek perspective, why would I switch NOW? We know that the MacTel machines are coming which makes purchasing any PowerPC based Mac less reassuring.
Try looking at things from a perspective other than that of a geek. As a geek, you probably know how to secure and maintain a Windows box. I've got news for you: for every person like you using Windows, there's ten or more who aren't like you and who feel powerless to keep their machine from getting owned and/or having their personal information/identity stolen. We've got enough people just throwing out their malware-infested PCs and buying new ones that the practice merited an article in the New York Times.
As far as the non-geek public is concerned Windows malware is an unchecked epidemic, right now-- a Mac is a solution to that, right now. Non-geek types don't look at development roadmaps to determine when they purchase a new computer. They usually buy something current when they need it, and use it until it dies-- they will most likely never crack it open to upgrade components, and probably won't even upgrade the OS over the lifetime of the machine (a habit developed when the major Windows PC makers refused to support any OS other than what shipped with the machine). They have no reason to care about what's down the road, because everything they're buying today will cover their needs for a long time to come. When they're ready to buy another brand new machine, the Apple x86 transition will be complete.
The Apple iPod strikes me as a triumph of advertising over interesting and useful features which ordinary people could use.
I think you missed the clue train, pal. The iPod was an instant hit, even before the marketing blitz. When it was Mac-only, Windows users were clamoring to hack it to work with their boxes, and rejoiced when Apple started selling a Windows-compatible version. Even after the marketing blitz, the reason the iPod sells so well is specifically because it is targeted at ordinary people and has the features they want.
Ordinary people don't give a rat's ass about Ogg, FLAC, or any other minority formats. Ordinary people listen to MP3s and their iTMS purchases, and that's pretty much it. They want to be able to plug the thing into the dock and have their music sync up without having to think about it. They don't want to program their iPod or run applications on it. Most people don't want to record to it directly, which is why recorders are add-ons and not a stock feature.
Let me share my experience. I had a ticket to watch the launch yesterday from inside the KSC Visitor Complex, which cost me about $50 and had to be quickly purchased a few months ago when the original May launch date was announced.
I flew to Orlando from Philadelphia in the morning and picked up a rental car. I got on the road at about 11:30am, about 4.5 hours before launch. They stagger guest arrival times to prevent total gridlock in the area, and my ticket said to show up no earlier than 1pm.
There was a LOT of traffic getting on Route 528, one of the main east-west routes in central FL. So much that they were just waving traffic through one of the toll plazas instead of collecting money. After that, it was just fine until about 8 miles from the Visitor Complex. I sat in traffic for about 45 minutes or so on Route 50, from a little ways east of Route 1 up to the 'official business check-in' building, where there was a security checkpoint in the road. Ticketed visitors like me with dashboard placards were waved through to proceed to the Visitor Complex. The other cars were turned away.
Once I got into the parking lot at about 1:10pm, they directed me to a spot. I was VERY far from the entrance because I arrived so late. I looked at the placards in other cars right by the entrance, and they had different times on them-- the earliest I saw said 9:30am.
Now, through security. I had a collapsible chair with me, binoculars, my camera and an external battery pack for it, two cellphones (work and personal), wallet and car keys. Carrying all this stuff was awkward because on launch days backpacks are absolutely verboten for security reasons. I had just been to KSC in May, and backpacks were fine then-- the security people check everything you have in them anyway.( If I go to KSC for a launch again, I'm going to be carrying my stuff in one of these-- they can't possibly object to that, can they?)
First it was through the metal detector with my pockets emptied, and then over to a table where another guy checked all my stuff. I had to turn on my camera and phones to show him they were functional, explain my camera's battery pack, and hold up my binocs so he could see through them. Satisfied, he let me pass. Oddly, he didn't even glance at the collapsible chair in the sleeve slung over my shoulder, where I could have been smuggling damned near anything 3' long and cylindrical.
Finally, I get out into the complex proper, and head over to the northeast corner of the complex. I chose a nice spot in the shade provided by the left SRB of the external tank and booster exhibit, and settled in to wait. You can't see the launch pad from the complex, due to a line of trees on the other side of the road, but the shuttle is only airborne for a few seconds before it clears them. Not ten minutes later, the launch was scrubbed. D'oh!
I hung out for a while and waited for everyone else to clear out before heading back to Orlando to catch my 8:30 flight home. Between the ticket, airfare and rental car, it was about a $400 day. I was disappointed, but I knew my chances when I decided to make the trip.
If they get it up before the end of July, I won't be there to see it. I'm rooting for this fuel sensor problem to be a real ballbuster so the launch is pushed back to September, and then maybe I'll take another crack at witnessing it. I don't know if I'm going to do it from KSC, though. It was a LOT of hassle with all the friggin' security. Also, the single-day round trip was a little rough. I had work on Thursday, and I had been very nervous about missing my flight home (th
Where will it end? Will we someday be pair programming with both programmers working the keyboard and telling each other which keys to hit? Will fights break out over who gets to press 'Y' and 'B'?
I predict that they will breed programmers with six or more fingers on each hand, and only they will be able to properly use future keyboards.
"If you did, the billions of dollars and millions of man-hours Microsoft has thrown at the problem in the last two decades would have figured out how."
with
"If you could, Microsoft would have figured out how by now-- they've thrown billions of dollars and millions of man-hours at the problem in the last two decades."
OK, so when is Apple going to become mainly an OS company?
As soon as they figure out how to shift their business model so they don't rely on that hardware revenue. Their reliance on hardware revenue is why the company almost died during the mid-90's cloning experiment. Now, your first reaction will probably to point to the iPod juggernaut, but the fact remains that most of Apple's money still comes from their high-margin computer sales. The iPod revenue is just a thick layer of icing on the cake.
Don't expect to run OS X on any old PC you cobbled together from bargain-bin parts, though. You simply can't do that sort of stuff and enjoy the same tight hardware-software integration we have on Macs. If you did, the billions of dollars and millions of man-hours Microsoft has thrown at the problem in the last two decades would have figured out how.
If Apple shifted to a software-only company, the best you could ever hope for would probably be a handful of officially supported motherboards, NICs, video cards, etc-- the way NeXT did things when NeXTStep ran on Intel.
The "Maximum Access" ticket is separate from the tour which takes you to the shuttle observation area. For that, you need to buy an additional ticket for the "Up Close" tour.
I just went to KSC in May and took the "Maximum Access" tour they offer. They took us into the building where they build/prep the ISS modules, right past the Vehicle Assembly Building and up the access road along the crawler path to an observation area between pad 39A and 39B for a view of Discovery on the pad, then on to the Apollo-Saturn Center.
Just the day before, the part of the tour where you get less than a mile away from the pads was cancelled because they were testing the external tank by (IIRC) partially fueling it up. The tour tickets say something like "Parts of the tour may be removed/altered due to the operational requirements of the facility," or something like that.
First of all, there will NEVER be another passenger aircraft hijacking again. The age of "Be cool, do what they say, and everything will be fine" ended at about 8:50 or so on September 11, 2001. Now, as soon as some schmuck stands up in a plane and says, "Okay, everybody this is a hija--," everyone within reach of him will try to tear him apart. Hell, even guys who get drunk and rowdy on a flight are rather enthusiastically subdued by passengers these days.
Furthermore, the fact that the Fibbies even think this is necessary is IMHO a very public no-confidence vote in the TSA and all the crap they make us go through to even get near a plane, much less on it.
...at least AFAIK. I read Jerry Kaplan's book and in there the company is called "Go Corporation," or "Go Corp" for short... NEVER is it called "Go Computer."
Search for either of those names or for "PenPoint" (the name of their first tablet and its OS) returns quite a few pages.
Well that *really* makes it useless, then-- nobody I know with dialup access stays logged in unless they're actively using the connection, so the updates will simply never be downloaded.
There's a chapter in that book specifically about Go Corp. The highlight of it is a passage where Microsoftie Marlin Eller (the book's author) and someone else at MS were discussing Pen Windows. I don't remember who said what, but one of them lamented that it was a failure. The other one insisted that it was a success, saying something like, "Pen Windows wasn't about 'grow the market,' it was about 'block that kick.' Go Corp spent $[big bucks] developing their product, and we spent $10(?) million shooting them down. They'll never sell their shit again."
I don't have the quote 100% right, but it's close enough-- I remember it so well because when I read it, I was completely stunned by the revelation that Microsoft whipped up a product for no other reason than to prevent a competitor's product from getting a foothold in the market.
If this case goes to trial, I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see the plaintiff call Eller to testify.
I did enable the firewall. As for automatic updates, I tried it, and using that dialup connection was painfully slow enough without the updates downloading in the background-- and by the time they get all of them that have been released since SP2, they'll have the cable modem and I'll be back out there.
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How does switching the active boot drive by holding one of four keys make macs easier to troubleshoot than PCs?
The ability to boot from any bootable drive attached to the computer makes troubleshooting a messed-up volume easy, because you can dig around in the files in the normal GUI. The PCs I currently encounter in the course of my job don't have the ability to boot a Windows installation from any old drive I plug in. I'm stuck with Recovery console or trying to coax some hacked-up boot disk to work so I can fix something or pull data off to another drive.
~Philly
Yeah, but that's with that particular PC and laptop model. Abilities can vary wildly from one manufacturer and model to the next. Even if some PCs share the same BIOS features, they can still differ in the implementation.
It's the 21st century, and IMHO those features need to be standard across the board-- hell, until a few years ago I couldn't even count 100% on every PC I encountered in the field being able to boot from a CD, much less do any of the other stuff I mentioned in my previous post.
And like you said, having the right boot disk matters for you. For me, I can put a hosed Mac into target mode and connect it as an external drive to any Mac with a FireWire port, to attempt to repair it and/or retrieve data. With a PC you've still got to crack it open and recable at best, or take the whole drive out and put it in a new machine at worst. I've tried out BartPE and a couple other useful boot disks, but having to chase down all the components I need is a pain, and it's hard to make one that is truly universal when it comes to NIC drivers, etc (my company supports a *lot* of different machines).
Blowing the twenty year-old cruft out would be nice, like you said, but I still say the addition of useful features as a standard is what's needed the most.
~Philly
...to find out why BIOS is antiquated crap. Apple didn't invent Open Firmware, but they make very good use of it.
Four examples:
-Hold down a key at startup to boot from CD/DVD.
-Hold down a different key at startup to boot from a network volume (if available).
-Hold down another different key at startup to give you a menu of all bootable volumes, and boot from the one you want-- external, internal, it doesn't matter.
-Hold down yet another different key at startup to have the machine act as an external hard drive.
The features above make troubleshooting a wayward, non-booting Mac a breeze, and they come in very handy at other times as well. If you encounter a non-booting Windows PC, you almost always need another computer nearby to effectively troubleshoot and fix it.
Ever since Apple announced the move to Intel, I've been a little worried about losing those features-- but I'm hopeful that they will find a way to keep them alive on Intel-based Macs.
~Philly
No large numbers of people are going to buy the hardware to run XP on it.
No, they'll buy the hardware to run OS X on it. But for any Windows-only vertical market apps, or other software that just plain isn't available for Macs, Virtual PC (or some other 'run Windows within OS X' solution) becomes a much more palatable option, performance-wise. And if all else fails, they'll be able to run XP on it as a fall-back.
That's why Intel based Macs are a big deal.
BTW, Apple can barely produce enough Macs to meet demand right now. That's not how I'd define a "failed business model." Small market share or not, they've been kicking ass and taking names for quite a while.
~Philly
Apple has always, and apparently still is taken with selling hardware that will only last two years at most.
I guess all those people who get five years or more out of their Macs must be hallucinating, then?
I bought a Power Mac 7600 in 1996, and it was my primary machine until 2002. Over the years I added RAM and a USB card and threw a G3 upgrade into it, but it was still a viable machine when I replaced it, except from the standpoint of being able to run OS X-- I needed a more recent model to do that. I'm a consultant, so I wanted a machine that would run it as my clients would see it, not with some third-party hack to get it working.
The 7600 was replaced with a used G4/733 from 2001, and that one was just fine until I bought the G5 I'm using now (yes, I only got 2 years out of the G4 as my primary Mac, but it was only ever intended to tide me over until the G5s came out). The G4 is now in my office running Tiger like a champ, and I expect this G5 to last me until nearly 2010.
Apple already successfully managed a CPU transition back in the 90s, and they did it without instantly obsoleting anyone's computer. I have no doubt that this one will go just as well. Mac applications that are written for the Intel processors can be compiled for the PPC by clicking a checkbox, so there's no additional effort or expense required for developers to support both architectures-- and with 5 years worth of PPC-based Macs out in the world (not counting the PPC Macs that can't run the current incarnation of OS X), they'd be crazy to not do so for at least the next five years.
~Philly
No way. The smaller laptops get, the more expensive they get-- the iBook is the consumer line, so they can't be them at higher price points than they are now, and the new models' pricing has already been reported to remain the same as the current models. Sub-notebooks are also more fragile, and if the iBooks get that way, what portables will Apple have to sell to school districts?
I've carried a 12" iBook around with me every day since the dual USB models were introduced in 2001, and I wouldn't trade the built-in CD drive and full complement of ports for a little less weight in my backpack. I've seen the compromises that have to be made to really shrink a laptop, and IMHO they suck-- in my job, I frequently need to burn CDs and connect all manner of stuff to my iBook when I'm in the field. I would not be a happy camper if I had to lug around some damned external CD drive or docking station.
Apple's old Powerbook Duo line was underappreciated and ahead of its time. I had a Duo 210 back in 1993 and loved it. I didn't need the Dock back then, just the external floppy drive-- which I didn't need to carry around often.
There's certainly room in Apple's laptop line for a subnotebook, but it probably won't be a new incarnation of the Duo system and it definitely won't replace the iBook models. It will probably be an additional choice in the Powerbook line, like "PowerBook mini" or something-- guts of the 12" PowerBook, but with an external CD drive and everything else shrunk accordingly and/or moved into the space vacated by the internal CD drive. If we're going to see one, though, it probably won't happen until the Intel transition hits the laptops.
~Philly
I believe that Microsoft intentionally hampers their software so that it will not work as well on the Mac as it does on the PC. For Example:
1. Entourage + MS Exchange server = Crap.
I agree. Entourage is a great app if you're using POP/SMTP, but its Exchange connectivity really, really sucks ass. What moron thought getting rid of MAPI was a good idea?
And I'm not one to don the tinfoil hat, but I do find it mighty curious that the Mac Business Unit is taking so long just to get Entourage to have feature parity with Outlook 2001. There's still a lot of stuff missing, like full Public Folder support and the Out of Office assistant.
~Philly
That makes me think, why are these launches in the middle of nowhere?
On the off chance you're not being a smartass:
Maybe because rockets are basically gigantic bombs with directional thrust? It could blow up on the pad and damage/destroy everything for quite a distance. If it blew up in the air, debris (some terribly toxic) would rain down on a populated area. Didn't you see the video of the all the Challenger debris splashing down in the ocean?
The minimum safe distance to a space shuttle launch is 3 miles. If you were closer you'd be deafened at best, and have your heart stopped from the shock waves at worst. It would be more than 3 miles, except that NASA has taken great pains to reduce the noise and shock waves by ducting the rocket blast in a certain direction and flooding water into the duct.
~Philly
Now they're abusing DVDs by putting unskippable ads on those. It remains to be seen what the backlash from that one will be, but probably either people will stop buying them, or the Asian commodity consumer electronics companies will start (if they haven't already) cranking out DVD players that ignore previously-unskippable crap or let you skip it.
~Philly
They abused phone calls, and that brought about the national Do Not Call list.
They abused TV commercials, and that brought about "commercial skip" VCRs and TiVo.
They abused pop-ups, and that brought about pop-up blockers.
They abused Flash to make more attention-getting (read: obnoxious) banner ads, and that brought about Flashblock.
They abused cookies, now people obsessively delete them if they allow them to be created at all.
Am I the only one who sees a pattern here?
~Philly
I've been wanting to go see a shuttle launch for a while. This one's on a weekend, which makes it possible.
They're starting the countdown on the weekend. The actual launch is on Tuesday.
That is *way* too long a drive. If you're going, just fly into Orlando and rent a car for the drive to the east coast. I did it last week, and round trip airfare from Philly was ~$275 and the rental car was $40. I left my house at about 5:30am and got home again just before midnight, and I only had to take one day off from work. Spending 24 hours in the car, including some in launch day traffic, would wipe me out for a couple days.
~Philly
From the geek perspective, why would I switch NOW? We know that the MacTel machines are coming which makes purchasing any PowerPC based Mac less reassuring.
Try looking at things from a perspective other than that of a geek. As a geek, you probably know how to secure and maintain a Windows box. I've got news for you: for every person like you using Windows, there's ten or more who aren't like you and who feel powerless to keep their machine from getting owned and/or having their personal information/identity stolen. We've got enough people just throwing out their malware-infested PCs and buying new ones that the practice merited an article in the New York Times.
As far as the non-geek public is concerned Windows malware is an unchecked epidemic, right now-- a Mac is a solution to that, right now. Non-geek types don't look at development roadmaps to determine when they purchase a new computer. They usually buy something current when they need it, and use it until it dies-- they will most likely never crack it open to upgrade components, and probably won't even upgrade the OS over the lifetime of the machine (a habit developed when the major Windows PC makers refused to support any OS other than what shipped with the machine). They have no reason to care about what's down the road, because everything they're buying today will cover their needs for a long time to come. When they're ready to buy another brand new machine, the Apple x86 transition will be complete.
~Philly
These days, "Marketing," "Mindless" or "Moronic."
The Apple iPod strikes me as a triumph of advertising over interesting and useful features which ordinary people could use.
I think you missed the clue train, pal. The iPod was an instant hit, even before the marketing blitz. When it was Mac-only, Windows users were clamoring to hack it to work with their boxes, and rejoiced when Apple started selling a Windows-compatible version. Even after the marketing blitz, the reason the iPod sells so well is specifically because it is targeted at ordinary people and has the features they want.
Ordinary people don't give a rat's ass about Ogg, FLAC, or any other minority formats. Ordinary people listen to MP3s and their iTMS purchases, and that's pretty much it. They want to be able to plug the thing into the dock and have their music sync up without having to think about it. They don't want to program their iPod or run applications on it. Most people don't want to record to it directly, which is why recorders are add-ons and not a stock feature.
~Philly
Let me share my experience. I had a ticket to watch the launch yesterday from inside the KSC Visitor Complex, which cost me about $50 and had to be quickly purchased a few months ago when the original May launch date was announced.
I flew to Orlando from Philadelphia in the morning and picked up a rental car. I got on the road at about 11:30am, about 4.5 hours before launch. They stagger guest arrival times to prevent total gridlock in the area, and my ticket said to show up no earlier than 1pm.
There was a LOT of traffic getting on Route 528, one of the main east-west routes in central FL. So much that they were just waving traffic through one of the toll plazas instead of collecting money. After that, it was just fine until about 8 miles from the Visitor Complex. I sat in traffic for about 45 minutes or so on Route 50, from a little ways east of Route 1 up to the 'official business check-in' building, where there was a security checkpoint in the road. Ticketed visitors like me with dashboard placards were waved through to proceed to the Visitor Complex. The other cars were turned away.
Once I got into the parking lot at about 1:10pm, they directed me to a spot. I was VERY far from the entrance because I arrived so late. I looked at the placards in other cars right by the entrance, and they had different times on them-- the earliest I saw said 9:30am.
Now, through security. I had a collapsible chair with me, binoculars, my camera and an external battery pack for it, two cellphones (work and personal), wallet and car keys. Carrying all this stuff was awkward because on launch days backpacks are absolutely verboten for security reasons. I had just been to KSC in May, and backpacks were fine then-- the security people check everything you have in them anyway.( If I go to KSC for a launch again, I'm going to be carrying my stuff in one of these-- they can't possibly object to that, can they?)
First it was through the metal detector with my pockets emptied, and then over to a table where another guy checked all my stuff. I had to turn on my camera and phones to show him they were functional, explain my camera's battery pack, and hold up my binocs so he could see through them. Satisfied, he let me pass. Oddly, he didn't even glance at the collapsible chair in the sleeve slung over my shoulder, where I could have been smuggling damned near anything 3' long and cylindrical.
Finally, I get out into the complex proper, and head over to the northeast corner of the complex. I chose a nice spot in the shade provided by the left SRB of the external tank and booster exhibit, and settled in to wait. You can't see the launch pad from the complex, due to a line of trees on the other side of the road, but the shuttle is only airborne for a few seconds before it clears them. Not ten minutes later, the launch was scrubbed. D'oh!
I hung out for a while and waited for everyone else to clear out before heading back to Orlando to catch my 8:30 flight home. Between the ticket, airfare and rental car, it was about a $400 day. I was disappointed, but I knew my chances when I decided to make the trip.
If they get it up before the end of July, I won't be there to see it. I'm rooting for this fuel sensor problem to be a real ballbuster so the launch is pushed back to September, and then maybe I'll take another crack at witnessing it. I don't know if I'm going to do it from KSC, though. It was a LOT of hassle with all the friggin' security. Also, the single-day round trip was a little rough. I had work on Thursday, and I had been very nervous about missing my flight home (th
Where will it end? Will we someday be pair programming with both programmers working the keyboard and telling each other which keys to hit? Will fights break out over who gets to press 'Y' and 'B'?
I predict that they will breed programmers with six or more fingers on each hand, and only they will be able to properly use future keyboards.
~Philly
Replace
"If you did, the billions of dollars and millions of man-hours Microsoft has thrown at the problem in the last two decades would have figured out how."
with
"If you could, Microsoft would have figured out how by now-- they've thrown billions of dollars and millions of man-hours at the problem in the last two decades."
OK, so when is Apple going to become mainly an OS company?
As soon as they figure out how to shift their business model so they don't rely on that hardware revenue. Their reliance on hardware revenue is why the company almost died during the mid-90's cloning experiment. Now, your first reaction will probably to point to the iPod juggernaut, but the fact remains that most of Apple's money still comes from their high-margin computer sales. The iPod revenue is just a thick layer of icing on the cake.
Don't expect to run OS X on any old PC you cobbled together from bargain-bin parts, though. You simply can't do that sort of stuff and enjoy the same tight hardware-software integration we have on Macs. If you did, the billions of dollars and millions of man-hours Microsoft has thrown at the problem in the last two decades would have figured out how.
If Apple shifted to a software-only company, the best you could ever hope for would probably be a handful of officially supported motherboards, NICs, video cards, etc-- the way NeXT did things when NeXTStep ran on Intel.
~Philly
The "Maximum Access" ticket is separate from the tour which takes you to the shuttle observation area. For that, you need to buy an additional ticket for the "Up Close" tour.
~Philly
I just went to KSC in May and took the "Maximum Access" tour they offer. They took us into the building where they build/prep the ISS modules, right past the Vehicle Assembly Building and up the access road along the crawler path to an observation area between pad 39A and 39B for a view of Discovery on the pad, then on to the Apollo-Saturn Center.
Just the day before, the part of the tour where you get less than a mile away from the pads was cancelled because they were testing the external tank by (IIRC) partially fueling it up. The tour tickets say something like "Parts of the tour may be removed/altered due to the operational requirements of the facility," or something like that.
~Philly
First of all, there will NEVER be another passenger aircraft hijacking again. The age of "Be cool, do what they say, and everything will be fine" ended at about 8:50 or so on September 11, 2001. Now, as soon as some schmuck stands up in a plane and says, "Okay, everybody this is a hija--," everyone within reach of him will try to tear him apart. Hell, even guys who get drunk and rowdy on a flight are rather enthusiastically subdued by passengers these days.
Furthermore, the fact that the Fibbies even think this is necessary is IMHO a very public no-confidence vote in the TSA and all the crap they make us go through to even get near a plane, much less on it.
~Philly
...at least AFAIK. I read Jerry Kaplan's book and in there the company is called "Go Corporation," or "Go Corp" for short... NEVER is it called "Go Computer."
Search for either of those names or for "PenPoint" (the name of their first tablet and its OS) returns quite a few pages.
~Philly
Well that *really* makes it useless, then-- nobody I know with dialup access stays logged in unless they're actively using the connection, so the updates will simply never be downloaded.
~Philly
There's a chapter in that book specifically about Go Corp. The highlight of it is a passage where Microsoftie Marlin Eller (the book's author) and someone else at MS were discussing Pen Windows. I don't remember who said what, but one of them lamented that it was a failure. The other one insisted that it was a success, saying something like, "Pen Windows wasn't about 'grow the market,' it was about 'block that kick.' Go Corp spent $[big bucks] developing their product, and we spent $10(?) million shooting them down. They'll never sell their shit again."
I don't have the quote 100% right, but it's close enough-- I remember it so well because when I read it, I was completely stunned by the revelation that Microsoft whipped up a product for no other reason than to prevent a competitor's product from getting a foothold in the market.
If this case goes to trial, I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see the plaintiff call Eller to testify.
~Philly
I did enable the firewall. As for automatic updates, I tried it, and using that dialup connection was painfully slow enough without the updates downloading in the background-- and by the time they get all of them that have been released since SP2, they'll have the cable modem and I'll be back out there.
~Philly