Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and a few other less-publicized incidents serve as object lessons in why we should be very circumspect about allowing the construction of nuclear power plants: these plants will be run by humans.
In an age when you can't eat tomatoes, brush your teeth, feed your pets, depend on a levee, trust your banker or mortgage lender, or take a prescription drug without risking death or disfigurement or disappointment, the nature of nuclear power plants and the organizations responsible for their safe operation make me skeptical.
And given the state of our educational system and the aggressive dumbing-down of our society, I despair when I meet some of the youth who would be stewards of these technological marvels; I imagine a legion of Homer Simpsons throughout our country minding potential radioactive piles of rubble.
You have it exactly right. Apple doesn't pay for recovery of data or installation of the operating system. A good Apple Authorized Service Provider makes every effort to retrieve the customer's data. That can involve a lot of time and money. Once the drive is kaput, there's nothing to fear from sending it to Apple:
First of all, they've got more than enough to worry about without taking the time to scour every customer's hard drive for useable tidbits--as I said, it's usually a moot point by the time it's sent in.
Secondly, they've probably got a warranty with the manufacturer just the way users do. Apple believes in metrics; a provider comes up with too many faulty parts, there's a price to be paid.
There's a case to be made for having the drive re-formatted (if possible--which is rare in these situations). If the drive is viable enough to survive the procedure, it could be re-formatted as MS-DOS, then formatted back to Mac OS Extended. Again, a drive wonky enough to bring in for service probably isn't going to render much.
Amen. Musicians have to embrace self-publishing. Samizdat music will be the death of the RIAA and the RIAA knows it. Open Source music, distribution, and sales are killing the traditional music industry as surely as talking pictures destroyed silent movies. Why should a band suck up to RIAA members when they can record their own tunes, set up their own sales and distribution, and collect all the proceeds from the people who appreciate what they've produced.
The Internet has eliminated the middleman. The RIAA is selling buggy whips in a fuel cell age.
Bingo! The RIAA is trying to conflate the.mp3 format with illegality when the "crime" consists in the "sharing" of those files--not in their creation and possession.
It's a mistake to extrapolate platform statistics on browser hits from one website into an industry-wide pronouncement. I can point to one real-world monkey-wrench in those statistics: How many of those XP and Vista hits are coming from Intel-based Macintoshes running Windows in emulation?
Here's my personal experience, for what it's worth (which is about as much as the post to which I'm responding): I'm getting more and more calls every week from people who are switching to Macintosh. They're either fed up with Windows or are returning to Macintosh after a long dalliance with other platforms. The new iMacs have only been on the market a relatively short time and I've already transitioned Windows data to three of them. I didn't do three Windows-Mac transitions all of last year.
The next year promises to be an interesting one vis-a-vis the OS wars.
Oh! That.2% decline in Apple sales you're seeing? Maybe those are people waiting for next week.
Never confuse the weather at your own navel for the global climate.
Apple doesn't have a history of missing major deadlines like this. Certainly, there's no comparison with the delays Microsoft has racked up while we've waited for its major OS releases.
Apple released Jaguar (Mac OS 10.2) in 2002. Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) will be on shelves next week. Microsoft has been churning Vista all that time. And let's not forget: Leopard will run on Apple equipment that is--in some cases--almost ten years old (G4-G5-Intel). If you want to run Vista in its optimal setting, you need a machine built for it.
When Copland--the planned follow-on to Mac OS 7--became like a car that was being repaired while it was hurtling down the freeway, it was cancelled. Apple couldn't afford to waste money on missed shots like that. If we all remember, Apple was "circling the drain," according to many optimists of the time. A certain CEO said that the company should be liquidated and its proceeds distributed.
Even if I accept what you say, WHY HASN'T IT HAPPENED YET? The only viral infection of a Mac I've seen in the last six years was one that corrupted Microsoft Word templates. No zombied machines. No bots. No remote exploits.
None.
And the fact that it hasn't been done yet is even more incentive to do it.
Bill Catambay has done yeoman work in keeping the Pascal spark alive in all its flavors. For those of you who are nostalgic, curious, desperate, eager to find a centralized repository for mockery, or want to try one of the easiest, most powerful tools you've ever used, visit Pascal Central. Tools, compilers, source code, links, Bill's article on the reasons Pascal is still relevant (which I helped edit), and a community of people ready, willing, and able to get those of you interested in giving the language another look (or a first look) a lot of help and support.
If you want power, readability, a maintainable code base, easier string-handling, no-brainer memory management, and an elegant "No-BS" language, try Pascal. It has survived this long for a reason.
I now regret using up my mod points last night. Thank you for an informative post.
Since you sound like you'v got a clue, I've got a question: I watch MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann. That network is still pumping "NBC News + iTunes" in all of its promotional materials. Do you expect that relationship to cease or is the added value of iTunes to NBC's News division (and MSNBC) too good to pass up?
Look at the improvements differently. Apple gets hammered no matter what they do, but they've been on a continual path to make their designs simpler and more easy to service. Granted, the iMac G4 was an abominable machine to service. But the G5 and Intel systems have been pretty nice.
The iMac G4 is pretty easy to deal with once you get the hang of it. For instance, you have to gut it to replace the power supply. I've done the whole job in half an hour. You just have to be careful not to pinch the video cable.
But the Intel iMacs? Until I learned an alternate method of opening them, I'd have fits when one came in. I'm an Apple Authorized Service Provider, but I once closed my shop and went home early after twenty minutes of trying to open one. The "official" method of opening them is like a rigged arcade game at a carnival; try it ten times and you might get lucky once. I called around and found two alternate methods of getting them open. The first one I found is sure-fire. It's now the way I do it. The second one is ingenious but I haven't tried it yet.
I agree with everything else you say, but the Intel iMac is the devil to open if you try to do it the way it's designed to be opened.
...Then, imagine you want software that lets you import and edit video directly from the camera.
And software that turns that edited footage into a DVD.
And software that manages your photos (all you have to do is plug the camera into the USB port).
Want to create a.pdf file without buying Adobe Acrobat?
Don't forget antivirus/spyware software.
Compare the price of iWorks to Microsoft Office.
Built-in automation software?
Video conferencing and chat built-in? (AIM)
Anyone advocating a Windows solution should compute the price of buying all that software, assign themselves an hourly wage, and charge that wage for every hour consumed getting all this to work.
If you had made even a perfunctory attempt at providing an example of doing what you purported you can do, I'd give you some slack. But what do you say when someone tells you you're BS-ing them?
Apple might not have had DLL hell, but they had an extension hell with pre-OS X that, according to Mac people that used it that long ago, was a pain. This was fixed with OS X.
This isn't accurate. I can think of VERY few extension conflicts in Apple extensions. There was an extensive integration and compatibility group to make sure of it. There could be plenty of problems with the mix of Apple and third-party extensions, but resolving them wasn't "hell"...usually.
A user could boot with the shift key held down, turning off all extensions. Then, a search of the preferences folder by date modified would often turn up the offending extension or control panel. You could boot into the Extensions Manager by holding down the SPACE bar. Then, you could either choose a basic Mac OS extension-control panel set or a full Apple-only set. If your machine crashed after booting from that, you could eliminate extensions until the problem was isolated. There was also an application called Conflict Catcher that also helped with the situation.
The best way to solve extension hell? If you just installed something and your machine starts crashing, uninstall it. Inconvenient, but hardly "hell." And it was WAAAAY easier than resolving DLL problems.
The last version of Parallels I tried had a limitation on the amount of memory you could devote to an application. This meant that the dictation software a customer of mine bought had to be installed in Boot Camp so that the application had all the resources it needed to run effectively. My recommendation is to get the most powerful processor, most memory, and largest drive you can afford (a PowerMac with dual drive would be ideal).
1999-2000. Wireless networking wasn't ubiquitous, as it is now. The company I worked for had a dead spot in its new wireless network. But no one could identify which access point was failing. I programmed an application that displayed the current access point, its signal strength, and its MAC address. The application also beeped when the handoff was made between one access point and another. Equipped with my application and a list of the MAC addresses for each access point, the malfunction unit was found in a few minutes.
One of Apple's problems during the 1990's was leadership. John Sculley ceasewd to pay attention to the nuts-and-bolts toward the end of his tenure, and a lot of time, money, and effort were wasted on projects that advanced the state-of-the-art but withered on the vine. Newton deserved a lot more attention than it received. The company was essentially out of control and being run by guys who knew nothing about computing.
To this day, I have no idea what the deal was with Michael Spindler. The company basically hurtled on without him, making the transition to PowerPC, developing QuickTime, shoring up its firelsharing products, ensuring future Windows compatibility for removable media, adopting the CD, and pushing the design side of the industry (PC keyboard and mouse ports still closely resemble Apple's ADB) and defining the laptop as we know it.
When Gil Amelio came on board, hopes were high. They were quickly dashed. The Performa was a debacle. Rumors that the company was going to license Windows made some of us wonder whether the company was going to survive. The scariest development was the complete absence of any marketing savvy. There was a sense that the executive staff was making the best of a bad situation by milking what--even in its worst times--was still a cash cow. And there was always that four billion dollars in the bank. It was Apple's loyal customers and the engineering staff that kept Apple going.
Rhapsody was like working on a car while it was moving down the highway. The tensions created didn't make working there fun. When Rhapsody came to a halt in fall of 1996, the guessing game started on what Apple would do next--so to speak. We were paid from late summer of 1996 until the layoffs in March of 1997 to stay in place and wait.
Steve Jobs's return to the Big Chair and the subsequent announcements of Mac OS X and the iMac marked the end of the Flailing Era. Apple had a CEO that understood computing AND their marketing and design. Through it all, the people were what made it a great place to work. It was also gratifying to have the chance to be the first person in the world to try something. I got to do that a couple of times with new networking technologies Apple developed. It was worth every moment.
What software does Mac have that I can't get something similar on the PC (disregarding media editing/authoring software)? There is WAY more software for the PC than the Mac, you are on crack. The biggest area I can think of is games, if you are a computer gamer then you NEED a PC or you will not be happy.
I'm typing this on a MacBook. I've got Parallels installed running Windows XP SP2. I can install Linux on an additional virtual machine.
First of all, I was working at Apple when the Army made its change to Webstar. Since I retired from the company in 2001, a) EXCUUUUSE MEEE for being a little behind on current news and b) I got your "fanboy" swinging right here. I'm part of the original equipment, bitch, and whether you like it or not, Macs have NEVER been as susceptible to hacking as PC's are. I adopted the Mac platform in December of 1987 and from that day to this one I have not spent ONE CENT on measures to keep me safe from viruses, malware, spyware, trojans, bots, or any of the crap the average PC user has to guard against. I plug my Mac directly into my cable modem and I don't worry about it. If you use Windows, you shouldn't do that. Ever. If you say otherwise, you expose yourself as a wet-behind-the-ears, I've-got-a-pantload ID10T.
The point is that the Army made the change. The point is that they're not using Windows any more.
That "fanboy" term is a bitter acknowledgement that we're busy surfing wherever we please while you're either de-fleaing your system or begging for drivers and software that you don't get to have. Wallow in it. Revel in it. You are coolness personified.
Slashdot Mirror
(Modified to please the filter):
FYI... kma. smd. uya. fy*. ems. pmf. fkw.
TIA.
HTH.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and a few other less-publicized incidents serve as object lessons in why we should be very circumspect about allowing the construction of nuclear power plants: these plants will be run by humans.
In an age when you can't eat tomatoes, brush your teeth, feed your pets, depend on a levee, trust your banker or mortgage lender, or take a prescription drug without risking death or disfigurement or disappointment, the nature of nuclear power plants and the organizations responsible for their safe operation make me skeptical.
And given the state of our educational system and the aggressive dumbing-down of our society, I despair when I meet some of the youth who would be stewards of these technological marvels; I imagine a legion of Homer Simpsons throughout our country minding potential radioactive piles of rubble.
And the sitcom died a quick and merciful death... one which the company now makes light of in a "What were they thinking?" commercial campaign.
You have it exactly right. Apple doesn't pay for recovery of data or installation of the operating system. A good Apple Authorized Service Provider makes every effort to retrieve the customer's data. That can involve a lot of time and money. Once the drive is kaput, there's nothing to fear from sending it to Apple:
First of all, they've got more than enough to worry about without taking the time to scour every customer's hard drive for useable tidbits--as I said, it's usually a moot point by the time it's sent in.
Secondly, they've probably got a warranty with the manufacturer just the way users do. Apple believes in metrics; a provider comes up with too many faulty parts, there's a price to be paid.
There's a case to be made for having the drive re-formatted (if possible--which is rare in these situations). If the drive is viable enough to survive the procedure, it could be re-formatted as MS-DOS, then formatted back to Mac OS Extended. Again, a drive wonky enough to bring in for service probably isn't going to render much.
Amen. Musicians have to embrace self-publishing. Samizdat music will be the death of the RIAA and the RIAA knows it. Open Source music, distribution, and sales are killing the traditional music industry as surely as talking pictures destroyed silent movies. Why should a band suck up to RIAA members when they can record their own tunes, set up their own sales and distribution, and collect all the proceeds from the people who appreciate what they've produced.
The Internet has eliminated the middleman. The RIAA is selling buggy whips in a fuel cell age.
Bingo! The RIAA is trying to conflate the .mp3 format with illegality when the "crime" consists in the "sharing" of those files--not in their creation and possession.
I'll do the same and when people ask me what language they should use, I'll answer "Pascal."
It's a mistake to extrapolate platform statistics on browser hits from one website into an industry-wide pronouncement. I can point to one real-world monkey-wrench in those statistics: How many of those XP and Vista hits are coming from Intel-based Macintoshes running Windows in emulation?
.2% decline in Apple sales you're seeing? Maybe those are people waiting for next week.
Here's my personal experience, for what it's worth (which is about as much as the post to which I'm responding): I'm getting more and more calls every week from people who are switching to Macintosh. They're either fed up with Windows or are returning to Macintosh after a long dalliance with other platforms. The new iMacs have only been on the market a relatively short time and I've already transitioned Windows data to three of them. I didn't do three Windows-Mac transitions all of last year.
The next year promises to be an interesting one vis-a-vis the OS wars.
Oh! That
Never confuse the weather at your own navel for the global climate.
Apple doesn't have a history of missing major deadlines like this. Certainly, there's no comparison with the delays Microsoft has racked up while we've waited for its major OS releases.
Apple released Jaguar (Mac OS 10.2) in 2002. Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) will be on shelves next week. Microsoft has been churning Vista all that time. And let's not forget: Leopard will run on Apple equipment that is--in some cases--almost ten years old (G4-G5-Intel). If you want to run Vista in its optimal setting, you need a machine built for it.
When Copland--the planned follow-on to Mac OS 7--became like a car that was being repaired while it was hurtling down the freeway, it was cancelled. Apple couldn't afford to waste money on missed shots like that. If we all remember, Apple was "circling the drain," according to many optimists of the time. A certain CEO said that the company should be liquidated and its proceeds distributed.
What a difference ten years makes...
Even if I accept what you say, WHY HASN'T IT HAPPENED YET? The only viral infection of a Mac I've seen in the last six years was one that corrupted Microsoft Word templates. No zombied machines. No bots. No remote exploits.
None.
And the fact that it hasn't been done yet is even more incentive to do it.
Bill Catambay has done yeoman work in keeping the Pascal spark alive in all its flavors. For those of you who are nostalgic, curious, desperate, eager to find a centralized repository for mockery, or want to try one of the easiest, most powerful tools you've ever used, visit Pascal Central. Tools, compilers, source code, links, Bill's article on the reasons Pascal is still relevant (which I helped edit), and a community of people ready, willing, and able to get those of you interested in giving the language another look (or a first look) a lot of help and support.
If you want power, readability, a maintainable code base, easier string-handling, no-brainer memory management, and an elegant "No-BS" language, try Pascal. It has survived this long for a reason.
I now regret using up my mod points last night. Thank you for an informative post.
Since you sound like you'v got a clue, I've got a question: I watch MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann. That network is still pumping "NBC News + iTunes" in all of its promotional materials. Do you expect that relationship to cease or is the added value of iTunes to NBC's News division (and MSNBC) too good to pass up?
The iMac G4 is pretty easy to deal with once you get the hang of it. For instance, you have to gut it to replace the power supply. I've done the whole job in half an hour. You just have to be careful not to pinch the video cable.
But the Intel iMacs? Until I learned an alternate method of opening them, I'd have fits when one came in. I'm an Apple Authorized Service Provider, but I once closed my shop and went home early after twenty minutes of trying to open one. The "official" method of opening them is like a rigged arcade game at a carnival; try it ten times and you might get lucky once. I called around and found two alternate methods of getting them open. The first one I found is sure-fire. It's now the way I do it. The second one is ingenious but I haven't tried it yet.
I agree with everything else you say, but the Intel iMac is the devil to open if you try to do it the way it's designed to be opened.
Don't forget that metal construction interferes with WiFi reception.
I came bearing mod points and left you American Chocolate!
Aloha!
...Then, imagine you want software that lets you import and edit video directly from the camera.
.pdf file without buying Adobe Acrobat?
And software that turns that edited footage into a DVD.
And software that manages your photos (all you have to do is plug the camera into the USB port).
Want to create a
Don't forget antivirus/spyware software.
Compare the price of iWorks to Microsoft Office.
Built-in automation software?
Video conferencing and chat built-in? (AIM)
Anyone advocating a Windows solution should compute the price of buying all that software, assign themselves an hourly wage, and charge that wage for every hour consumed getting all this to work.
Heh...
If you had made even a perfunctory attempt at providing an example of doing what you purported you can do, I'd give you some slack. But what do you say when someone tells you you're BS-ing them?
You dance.
Give examples.
Apple might not have had DLL hell, but they had an extension hell with pre-OS X that, according to Mac people that used it that long ago, was a pain. This was fixed with OS X.
This isn't accurate. I can think of VERY few extension conflicts in Apple extensions. There was an extensive integration and compatibility group to make sure of it. There could be plenty of problems with the mix of Apple and third-party extensions, but resolving them wasn't "hell"...usually.
A user could boot with the shift key held down, turning off all extensions. Then, a search of the preferences folder by date modified would often turn up the offending extension or control panel. You could boot into the Extensions Manager by holding down the SPACE bar. Then, you could either choose a basic Mac OS extension-control panel set or a full Apple-only set. If your machine crashed after booting from that, you could eliminate extensions until the problem was isolated. There was also an application called Conflict Catcher that also helped with the situation.
The best way to solve extension hell? If you just installed something and your machine starts crashing, uninstall it. Inconvenient, but hardly "hell." And it was WAAAAY easier than resolving DLL problems.
The last version of Parallels I tried had a limitation on the amount of memory you could devote to an application. This meant that the dictation software a customer of mine bought had to be installed in Boot Camp so that the application had all the resources it needed to run effectively. My recommendation is to get the most powerful processor, most memory, and largest drive you can afford (a PowerMac with dual drive would be ideal).
1999-2000. Wireless networking wasn't ubiquitous, as it is now. The company I worked for had a dead spot in its new wireless network. But no one could identify which access point was failing. I programmed an application that displayed the current access point, its signal strength, and its MAC address. The application also beeped when the handoff was made between one access point and another. Equipped with my application and a list of the MAC addresses for each access point, the malfunction unit was found in a few minutes.
It's probably the growth hormones in that red meat (and poultry and dairy products) that is tipping the scales.
One of Apple's problems during the 1990's was leadership. John Sculley ceasewd to pay attention to the nuts-and-bolts toward the end of his tenure, and a lot of time, money, and effort were wasted on projects that advanced the state-of-the-art but withered on the vine. Newton deserved a lot more attention than it received. The company was essentially out of control and being run by guys who knew nothing about computing.
To this day, I have no idea what the deal was with Michael Spindler. The company basically hurtled on without him, making the transition to PowerPC, developing QuickTime, shoring up its firelsharing products, ensuring future Windows compatibility for removable media, adopting the CD, and pushing the design side of the industry (PC keyboard and mouse ports still closely resemble Apple's ADB) and defining the laptop as we know it.
When Gil Amelio came on board, hopes were high. They were quickly dashed. The Performa was a debacle. Rumors that the company was going to license Windows made some of us wonder whether the company was going to survive. The scariest development was the complete absence of any marketing savvy. There was a sense that the executive staff was making the best of a bad situation by milking what--even in its worst times--was still a cash cow. And there was always that four billion dollars in the bank. It was Apple's loyal customers and the engineering staff that kept Apple going.
Rhapsody was like working on a car while it was moving down the highway. The tensions created didn't make working there fun. When Rhapsody came to a halt in fall of 1996, the guessing game started on what Apple would do next--so to speak. We were paid from late summer of 1996 until the layoffs in March of 1997 to stay in place and wait.
Steve Jobs's return to the Big Chair and the subsequent announcements of Mac OS X and the iMac marked the end of the Flailing Era. Apple had a CEO that understood computing AND their marketing and design. Through it all, the people were what made it a great place to work. It was also gratifying to have the chance to be the first person in the world to try something. I got to do that a couple of times with new networking technologies Apple developed. It was worth every moment.
What software does Mac have that I can't get something similar on the PC (disregarding media editing/authoring software)? There is WAY more software for the PC than the Mac, you are on crack. The biggest area I can think of is games, if you are a computer gamer then you NEED a PC or you will not be happy.
I'm typing this on a MacBook. I've got Parallels installed running Windows XP SP2. I can install Linux on an additional virtual machine.
You were saying?
First of all, I was working at Apple when the Army made its change to Webstar. Since I retired from the company in 2001, a) EXCUUUUSE MEEE for being a little behind on current news and b) I got your "fanboy" swinging right here. I'm part of the original equipment, bitch, and whether you like it or not, Macs have NEVER been as susceptible to hacking as PC's are. I adopted the Mac platform in December of 1987 and from that day to this one I have not spent ONE CENT on measures to keep me safe from viruses, malware, spyware, trojans, bots, or any of the crap the average PC user has to guard against. I plug my Mac directly into my cable modem and I don't worry about it. If you use Windows, you shouldn't do that. Ever. If you say otherwise, you expose yourself as a wet-behind-the-ears, I've-got-a-pantload ID10T.
The point is that the Army made the change. The point is that they're not using Windows any more.
That "fanboy" term is a bitter acknowledgement that we're busy surfing wherever we please while you're either de-fleaing your system or begging for drivers and software that you don't get to have. Wallow in it. Revel in it. You are coolness personified.
I'll go back to my utopia now.
They got sick of this crap years ago and installed an Apple server. No hacks since.