The Mac *rules* the design world. Every Mac client I have is chomping at the bit for OS X native versions of all their heavy-hitter apps, so they can switch. Limited appeal, my ass! A very sizable chunk of Adobe's revenue comes from their Mac applications-- probably around 35-45%. From a platform that has 5% market share. That's nothing to sneeze at.
I hate spam with a passion, and go to great lengths to keep from even seeing it in my In Box.
I still keep an AOL account, and it was YEARS ago when it hit the point where it became more convenient to block all mail and have to add someone's address to my whitelist before they could send me anything, than to delete all the spam that hit that account without the whitelist.
I do much the same thing with my regular e-mail client. The last rule enacted on messages that aren't filtered out by the rules before it, basically puts everything into Deleted Mail, and it gets trashed automatically after 3 days. I peek in there once per day and almost never have to adjust any rules because non-spam accidentally was marked as spam.
The difference being, TiVo was upfront about what they collected, and people sniffed the outgoing packets from their TiVos and confirmed that what they said was being sent, was all that was being sent. Furthermore, TiVo gives you the option of opting out, and people sniffed the outgoing packets again to confirm that once you opt out, the tracking data is no longer sent.
Microsoft didn't tell anyone about this crap they put in WMP, and when 'caught,' simply amended their EULA to cover it. Additionally, Microsoft offers no option to opt out of it, and even if they did, anybody who tried to confirm this by the same methods the TiVoers used would probably get whacked by the DMCA.
If they were all that wouldnt more ppl be building clones of Macs?
If you're not a troll, then damn, you are the dumbass of the century.
Being "all that" has NOTHING to do with why PC clones are a dime a dozen. Do you think IBM, the all-time king of the proprietary system, allowed clones to be built of the original IBM PC, 20 years ago? Hell, no! Clonability was just a side effect of IBM's quick-and-dirty project, hurriedly throwing together an open system they could get on store shelves quickly to start taking marketshare from the Apple II. Then the Compaq guys figured out how to legally clone the BIOS in a way that IBM couldn't stop with an army of lawyers. Then another company (Phoenix, I think) did the same thing, but then instead of building their own boxes to put it in, just licensed their cloned BIOS to all comers-- which were mostly Asian companies cranking out dirt-cheap knockoff PCs by the thousands and flooding the market with them.
The x86 PC architecture has always been, and always will be, shit, simply because it was a bastard child built from off-the-shelf parts to save time. Its easy clonability was made possible by IBM's greed and shortsightedness. Its high popularity is because most people are cheap and dumb.
On the other hand, I make a very comfortable living fixing the crappy friggin' things when they break. More than enough to buy a nice Mac to use when I come home at night. After a long day of battling the BSOD, struggling with PCI cards that refuse to be recognized, and playing 'hunt down the correct driver,' it's nice to have a machine that just works at home.
Cripes, Taco, you couldn't even use a grammar-checker on this, the most important posting of your life?
Having said that, congratulations, and (I think I speak for more than a few Slashgeeks here) f--- you for reminding me that tonight I'll be going home to heat up a can of Chef Lonelyheart's Soup For One.
...I went and signed the online petition to save Futurama, and while I was there put my name to the ones for Family Guy and Undeclared as well.
Anyone noticed that Fox seems to always cancel its good shows, while keeping unfunny shit like Malcolm in the Middle on along with voyeur crapola like Temptation Island?
When they finally do away with *all* the shows I love, I'll have to start referring to Fox as "the good taste takes a holiday" network.
Imagine TV lineups changing weekly, daily, hourly in direct response to viewers desires based on their TiVos. Scary, isn't it?
Hardly. Hell, I'm all for it, if it would mean that us TiVo geeks could have Futurama pre-empt the last 30 minutes of a late-running stupid NFL game, instead of the other way around like it is now.:-)
Does anyone at Microsoft see the hilarious irony of making the shortest month of the year the official "Microsoft Bug Fixing and Security Adding Month"?
I'm tempted to call them up, just to see if the receptionist either rattles off that mouthful or has the balls to say "Thank you for calling CLITCO, how may I direct your call?"
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file.
Sounds like an old Apple commercial called "Manuals" (sorry, I spent ten minutes Googling and still did not come up with link to the ad) that showed an IBM PC with a stack of huge binders thundering down from the sky into a heap next to it... then panned over to the 128K Mac, as its single, thin manual fluttered down like a feather in comparison.
The system came preloaded with ME, and when we helped her switch to 2K for stabilitie's sake, Dell informed us the warranty was void without the original OS supplied with the system.
Hmmm, this must be that "choice" thing that Wintel people are always bragging about having.
I'll grant it's wonderfully readable, but in people's experience, is it actually easy to write?
It takes some getting used to, but AppleScript is extremely powerful. Scriptable applications written by competent authors/companies include a dictionary of all the scriptable terms/objects/etc so you have a ready reference.
I few months ago I wrote an AppleScript CGI that duplicated the functionality of Outlook Web Access, but pulled the mail from the copy of Microsoft Entourage (not the OS X version) on my Mac at home.
I did this mostly just because I was bored one day at work. It worked very well during testing with a copy of Entourage with only a few dummy messages scattered around, but unfortunately any decent amount of mail (like that contained on my Mac at home) would bring timeouts galore because it took too long to parse the mail folders and generate the pages. I dropped the project, but kept the code because it had a lot of useful functions I might need again someday. It was also pretty portable-- in less than two hours, I made two more versions of the CGI that worked with Claris Emailer and Outlook Express to see if things would work better, but they didn't.
Makes you wonder where the hell the media's priorities are.
~Philly
Conflict of interest?
on
Woz's New Startup
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A few weeks ago, Woz was named to the board of Danger, Inc, which seems to be a totally separate entity from Wheels of Zeus.
Since both companies are interested in producing whiz-bang handhelds, isn't him being on the board of one company and having his own, separate company some sort of raging conflict of interest?
Yeah, TNT Amusements near Phila, PA is the same way. They actually rent out their showroom for birthday parties and stuff, too.
For a while I was trading in my cabinet games for others every couple of years. I'd always bring a few friends and spend a couple hours in their showroom playing "trying to decide" what I wanted (though it was already decided days before we got there). Heheheh.
The first time I went, nobody was in the showroom and all the machines were powered down. The whole room's power was controlled by about 8 wall switches in a row. Using both forearms, the owner flipped them all on at once. The sound of all those classic machines firing up simultaneously damn near brought tears of nostalgia to my eyes.
The modern Olympic games are just a friggin' waste of TV time, and just one more thing in human culture that has been taken over, lock, stock and barrel by megacorporations and their sponsorships. Yeah-- like these athletes really got that way by sucking down Big Macs. Riiiiiiight.
The last time the games really mattered was in 1936, when Jesse Owens beat out Hitler's alleged Master Race competitors. It's been all downhill since then. All that's left now is a corporate-sponsored hollow shell. I'm surprised they haven't destroyed the last bastion of tradition and redone the torch to look like a big Bic or Zippo.
Face it, the most Olympic-related fun you can have nowadays is by dusting off your old Commodore 64/Atari/Apple II/what-have-you and loading up the old Epyx "[season] Games" titles.
"If you want to be on the cutting edge, expect to bleed."
Early adopters ALWAYS pay more for new products than the people who have enough self-control to wait a few months for bugs to be worked out and production to be fully ramped-up. If you think otherwise, see your doctor now.
No, but the blue & white G3s with the same easy-open case had been out since January of 1999, while your Rev. D iMac was introduced in April of 1999. So you should have been well aware of the existence of a Mac model that was designed to be easily dicked-around in.
And I've cracked open plenty of the pre-Rev. E iMacs for RAM upgrades, and while not that easy to open, it's not nearly the hardship you describe. Furthermore, the iMac is designed for people who aren't interested in opening their machines up and would be more likely to pay someone else to install their RAM upgrade-- not people like you who fearlessly go elbow-deep into the innards of their machines...
If you're 7'1", you don't buy a Pinto and then complain about the lack of legroom.
Remember the tractor tire smashing into Bill Paxton's pickup's windshield in the Twister trailer? Not in the movie. This fact was even lampooned on (IIRC) SNL around the time Twister was released: "Right!.... Left!... Cow!... The tire that was in the trailer but not the movie!"
And then there was the funny exchange from the Major League trailer: "That ball wouldn't have been out of a lot of parks." "Name one." "Yellowstone." That little gem actually made it into Major League II.
These are only the first two instances I can think of... but there are plenty more.
What really chaps my ass, though, is when they put a song that catches my ear in the commercials for a movie, and then the song is not in the movie or on the soundtrack, and doesn't get any/enough radio play so I can ever find out what song it is. Thanks to CDNow's samples, and Napster/Morpheus nowadays, though, I no longer have to waste $20 on the soundtrack CD, only to find out that the song I bought it for, isn't even on there.
Damn, that's pretty good. Right now I pay Comcast $118/mo for only basic cable plus 3 HBOs, and my internet service.
RCN tried to offer service in Philadelphia, but Comcast shut them out of the marktet pretty handily because they've got a lot of influence in the city government.
----- This copy of Windows has already been activated on another computer. Self-destruct sequence activated. We hope Hell is where you wanted to go today.
Don't even try to go there. Ensured obsolescence has always worked much better for Microsoft, and by extension, Intel, than for Apple.
Microsoft chucks their older OSes into the memory hole, Apple's you can still download from their site, up to OS 7.5.5 right now, I believe. You can't even download any version of MS-DOS from Microsoft's site.
Microsoft always makes buying a new machine preloaded with their latest OS a more attractive option than upgrading what you've got by buying the new version of Windows off the shelf. Installing a new OS is quite a challenge for Joe Consumer, no matter how easy Microsoft tries to make it. I know, because a few of my friends are Joe Consumers and need help with the simplest of troubleshooting and other upkeep-related tasks in Windows, and that's *with* all the hand-holding Microsoft codes in. And the increased code bloat in every version of Windows makes that new Gateway or Dell box with a speedier processor that much more attractive to them.
Apple may dabble in planned obsolescence, but Microsoft invented and perfected it.
Slashdot Mirror
Who the hell modded this flamebait "interesting"?
The Mac *rules* the design world. Every Mac client I have is chomping at the bit for OS X native versions of all their heavy-hitter apps, so they can switch. Limited appeal, my ass! A very sizable chunk of Adobe's revenue comes from their Mac applications-- probably around 35-45%. From a platform that has 5% market share. That's nothing to sneeze at.
~Philly
I hate spam with a passion, and go to great lengths to keep from even seeing it in my In Box.
I still keep an AOL account, and it was YEARS ago when it hit the point where it became more convenient to block all mail and have to add someone's address to my whitelist before they could send me anything, than to delete all the spam that hit that account without the whitelist.
I do much the same thing with my regular e-mail client. The last rule enacted on messages that aren't filtered out by the rules before it, basically puts everything into Deleted Mail, and it gets trashed automatically after 3 days. I peek in there once per day and almost never have to adjust any rules because non-spam accidentally was marked as spam.
~Philly
...is that there's actually a vegetarian MRE.
:-)
You don't win wars with sal-ad! You don't win wars with sal-ad! You don't win wars with sal-ad!
~Philly
The difference being, TiVo was upfront about what they collected, and people sniffed the outgoing packets from their TiVos and confirmed that what they said was being sent, was all that was being sent. Furthermore, TiVo gives you the option of opting out, and people sniffed the outgoing packets again to confirm that once you opt out, the tracking data is no longer sent.
Microsoft didn't tell anyone about this crap they put in WMP, and when 'caught,' simply amended their EULA to cover it. Additionally, Microsoft offers no option to opt out of it, and even if they did, anybody who tried to confirm this by the same methods the TiVoers used would probably get whacked by the DMCA.
~Philly
If they were all that wouldnt more ppl be building clones of Macs?
If you're not a troll, then damn, you are the dumbass of the century.
Being "all that" has NOTHING to do with why PC clones are a dime a dozen. Do you think IBM, the all-time king of the proprietary system, allowed clones to be built of the original IBM PC, 20 years ago? Hell, no! Clonability was just a side effect of IBM's quick-and-dirty project, hurriedly throwing together an open system they could get on store shelves quickly to start taking marketshare from the Apple II. Then the Compaq guys figured out how to legally clone the BIOS in a way that IBM couldn't stop with an army of lawyers. Then another company (Phoenix, I think) did the same thing, but then instead of building their own boxes to put it in, just licensed their cloned BIOS to all comers-- which were mostly Asian companies cranking out dirt-cheap knockoff PCs by the thousands and flooding the market with them.
The x86 PC architecture has always been, and always will be, shit, simply because it was a bastard child built from off-the-shelf parts to save time. Its easy clonability was made possible by IBM's greed and shortsightedness. Its high popularity is because most people are cheap and dumb.
On the other hand, I make a very comfortable living fixing the crappy friggin' things when they break. More than enough to buy a nice Mac to use when I come home at night. After a long day of battling the BSOD, struggling with PCI cards that refuse to be recognized, and playing 'hunt down the correct driver,' it's nice to have a machine that just works at home.
~Philly
I love you more then I can describe
Cripes, Taco, you couldn't even use a grammar-checker on this, the most important posting of your life?
Having said that, congratulations, and (I think I speak for more than a few Slashgeeks here) f--- you for reminding me that tonight I'll be going home to heat up a can of Chef Lonelyheart's Soup For One.
~Philly
...I went and signed the online petition to save Futurama, and while I was there put my name to the ones for Family Guy and Undeclared as well.
Anyone noticed that Fox seems to always cancel its good shows, while keeping unfunny shit like Malcolm in the Middle on along with voyeur crapola like Temptation Island?
When they finally do away with *all* the shows I love, I'll have to start referring to Fox as "the good taste takes a holiday" network.
~Philly
"Cut teeth into the edges of the platters, and stick a baseball card in there so your hard drive sounds like a motorcycle!"
What do I need to do... ...to protect my rights if any company ever comes my way and serves me with one of
these bullshit suits?
Start saving and investing wisely now, so when the time comes you'll have a large bankroll to spend on more expensive lawyers than the plaintiff's.
~Philly
Imagine TV lineups changing weekly, daily, hourly in direct response to viewers desires based on their TiVos. Scary, isn't it?
:-)
Hardly. Hell, I'm all for it, if it would mean that us TiVo geeks could have Futurama pre-empt the last 30 minutes of a late-running stupid NFL game, instead of the other way around like it is now.
~Philly
Does anyone at Microsoft see the hilarious irony of making the shortest month of the year the official "Microsoft Bug Fixing and Security Adding Month"?
~Philly
I'm tempted to call them up, just to see if the receptionist either rattles off that mouthful or has the balls to say "Thank you for calling CLITCO, how may I direct your call?"
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file.
Sounds like an old Apple commercial called "Manuals" (sorry, I spent ten minutes Googling and still did not come up with link to the ad) that showed an IBM PC with a stack of huge binders thundering down from the sky into a heap next to it... then panned over to the 128K Mac, as its single, thin manual fluttered down like a feather in comparison.
~Philly
The system came preloaded with ME, and when we helped her switch to 2K for stabilitie's sake, Dell informed us the warranty was void without the original OS supplied with the system.
Hmmm, this must be that "choice" thing that Wintel people are always bragging about having.
~Philly
I'll grant it's wonderfully readable, but in people's experience, is it actually easy to write?
It takes some getting used to, but AppleScript is extremely powerful. Scriptable applications written by competent authors/companies include a dictionary of all the scriptable terms/objects/etc so you have a ready reference.
I few months ago I wrote an AppleScript CGI that duplicated the functionality of Outlook Web Access, but pulled the mail from the copy of Microsoft Entourage (not the OS X version) on my Mac at home.
I did this mostly just because I was bored one day at work. It worked very well during testing with a copy of Entourage with only a few dummy messages scattered around, but unfortunately any decent amount of mail (like that contained on my Mac at home) would bring timeouts galore because it took too long to parse the mail folders and generate the pages. I dropped the project, but kept the code because it had a lot of useful functions I might need again someday. It was also pretty portable-- in less than two hours, I made two more versions of the CGI that worked with Claris Emailer and Outlook Express to see if things would work better, but they didn't.
~Philly
It's amazing that Reuters ran this story. It's even more amazing that news media across the country are running it too.
Yeah, especially since [gasp!!] O.J.'s girlfriend is *missing*!
Makes you wonder where the hell the media's priorities are.
~Philly
A few weeks ago, Woz was named to the board of Danger, Inc, which seems to be a totally separate entity from Wheels of Zeus.
Since both companies are interested in producing whiz-bang handhelds, isn't him being on the board of one company and having his own, separate company some sort of raging conflict of interest?
~Philly
Yeah, TNT Amusements near Phila, PA is the same way. They actually rent out their showroom for birthday parties and stuff, too.
For a while I was trading in my cabinet games for others every couple of years. I'd always bring a few friends and spend a couple hours in their showroom playing "trying to decide" what I wanted (though it was already decided days before we got there). Heheheh.
The first time I went, nobody was in the showroom and all the machines were powered down. The whole room's power was controlled by about 8 wall switches in a row. Using both forearms, the owner flipped them all on at once. The sound of all those classic machines firing up simultaneously damn near brought tears of nostalgia to my eyes.
~Philly
The modern Olympic games are just a friggin' waste of TV time, and just one more thing in human culture that has been taken over, lock, stock and barrel by megacorporations and their sponsorships. Yeah-- like these athletes really got that way by sucking down Big Macs. Riiiiiiight.
The last time the games really mattered was in 1936, when Jesse Owens beat out Hitler's alleged Master Race competitors. It's been all downhill since then. All that's left now is a corporate-sponsored hollow shell. I'm surprised they haven't destroyed the last bastion of tradition and redone the torch to look like a big Bic or Zippo.
Face it, the most Olympic-related fun you can have nowadays is by dusting off your old Commodore 64/Atari/Apple II/what-have-you and loading up the old Epyx "[season] Games" titles.
~Philly
...the settlers get the land."
"If you want to be on the cutting edge, expect to bleed."
Early adopters ALWAYS pay more for new products than the people who have enough self-control to wait a few months for bugs to be worked out and production to be fully ramped-up. If you think otherwise, see your doctor now.
~Philly
The G4s were not out at that point in time
No, but the blue & white G3s with the same easy-open case had been out since January of 1999, while your Rev. D iMac was introduced in April of 1999. So you should have been well aware of the existence of a Mac model that was designed to be easily dicked-around in.
And I've cracked open plenty of the pre-Rev. E iMacs for RAM upgrades, and while not that easy to open, it's not nearly the hardship you describe. Furthermore, the iMac is designed for people who aren't interested in opening their machines up and would be more likely to pay someone else to install their RAM upgrade-- not people like you who fearlessly go elbow-deep into the innards of their machines...
If you're 7'1", you don't buy a Pinto and then complain about the lack of legroom.
Remember the tractor tire smashing into Bill Paxton's pickup's windshield in the Twister trailer? Not in the movie. This fact was even lampooned on (IIRC) SNL around the time Twister was released: "Right!.... Left!... Cow!... The tire that was in the trailer but not the movie!"
And then there was the funny exchange from the Major League trailer: "That ball wouldn't have been out of a lot of parks." "Name one." "Yellowstone." That little gem actually made it into Major League II.
These are only the first two instances I can think of... but there are plenty more.
What really chaps my ass, though, is when they put a song that catches my ear in the commercials for a movie, and then the song is not in the movie or on the soundtrack, and doesn't get any/enough radio play so I can ever find out what song it is. Thanks to CDNow's samples, and Napster/Morpheus nowadays, though, I no longer have to waste $20 on the soundtrack CD, only to find out that the song I bought it for, isn't even on there.
~Philly
Damn, that's pretty good. Right now I pay Comcast $118/mo for only basic cable plus 3 HBOs, and my internet service.
RCN tried to offer service in Philadelphia, but Comcast shut them out of the marktet pretty handily because they've got a lot of influence in the city government.
~Philly
-----
This copy of Windows has already been activated on another computer. Self-destruct sequence activated.
We hope Hell is where you wanted to go today.
Sincerely,
The Microsoft Windows Team
-----
Don't even try to go there. Ensured obsolescence has always worked much better for Microsoft, and by extension, Intel, than for Apple.
Microsoft chucks their older OSes into the memory hole, Apple's you can still download from their site, up to OS 7.5.5 right now, I believe. You can't even download any version of MS-DOS from Microsoft's site.
Microsoft always makes buying a new machine preloaded with their latest OS a more attractive option than upgrading what you've got by buying the new version of Windows off the shelf. Installing a new OS is quite a challenge for Joe Consumer, no matter how easy Microsoft tries to make it. I know, because a few of my friends are Joe Consumers and need help with the simplest of troubleshooting and other upkeep-related tasks in Windows, and that's *with* all the hand-holding Microsoft codes in. And the increased code bloat in every version of Windows makes that new Gateway or Dell box with a speedier processor that much more attractive to them.
Apple may dabble in planned obsolescence, but Microsoft invented and perfected it.
~Philly