The answer is quite simple: because the operating system allows it. In the explorer, when you click on an exe, it runs. So in a mailer, when you click on an exe, it runs. That is the same handler.
It's even worse than that. The Outlook Express preview pane allows an offending message to be opened without clicking on it.
1) Unsuspecting user selects a range of unwanted messages; 2) Unsuspecting user deletes messages; 3) Display updates and lands on an infected message... 4) BOOM!!
They've not done anything new for the home market since Windows 95 was released.
...With the exception of Windows 98. It is, by far, the predominate consumer operating system for personal computers. I'm a consultant and I tell all my customers to stick with 98 for as long as they can. Once you get the kinks worked out, W98 can be rock-solid, stable and responsive... and it doesn't check back with Microsoft every ten minutes on a broadband connection. It's the only non-Mac OS I can stand for more than five minutes.
Demographics. I'm sorry, but knowing that 56% of the people that live in zipcode 97223 view http://www.koin.com doesn't mean shit.
Gator watches what you do and reports the results back to the company. If that isn't spying, I don't know what is. Where is the information going? Who is using it? For what purpose(s) are they using it? Do they monitor keystrokes? Do they watch what you order? Do they record financial information? What configuration information do they gather?
I do not care to cede my right to privacy just because I use an operating system or download a utility). Gator is "spyware," pure-and-simple. And, as has been mentioned before in this thread, it is a resource hog that causes unpredictable results especially in older computers, and it installs additional unseen software that cripples a machine's performance. Add the fact that it's hard to remove, and you have a string of capital offenses.
There's even a screenplay in this: Computer science major at a university finds an "innocuous" program like Gator running on every machine he encounters. He gets curious, especially when he finds out that the program is recording everything and reporting it. Where to? His tracing efforts ring alarm bells in a covert government surveillance program that is accomplishing through stealth what it couldn't get via legislation. Very nasty, unsympathetic men chase him and try to kill him. He escapes with the help of a lissome love interest and manages to expose the plot. "Day of the Condor" meets "The Net." Seann William Scott and Asia Argento star with Samuel L. Jackson in the role of the villain. Any takers?
The lessons most indelibly written in your heart were probably first inscribed on your ass.
Anyway, I remember seeing this Apple dealer across the street (well, go out the front of the complex, make two rights, and make a sharp left across the street). They had a large colored Apple logo (the old "rainbow" style, which I am sentimental for), even though every other Apple symbol around was the new metal/steel/aqua or whatever they call it. I found that strangely comforting that even though Apple changed their logo, their old one was always staring them right back into the doorway of the gift shop. I was glad they didn't change their sign.
Unless they've changed it since I was last there (Christmas, 2001), the multi-colored Apple symbol still sits high above Apple's front door at Infinite Loop One.
MacDaffy...that's cool that you were able to do that, but what about eMac and iMac owners?
I'd tell them that that's the bargain they made when they bought a self-contained machine with limited options for expandability.
Also, just because Apple has a hand in establishing, inventing or promoting a standard doesn't mean that implementation is a slam-dunk. First of all, they've contracted manufacturers and suppliers to provide their current product lines. Those contracts don't just screech to a halt at Apple's behest. They have to be honored. There are also constituencies that have to cooperate (e.g. MPEG-4, 802.11g) or the standard dies or isn't interoperable.
Secondly, Apple does its best to test the crap out of everything they make--literally and figuratively. That's why I can stick an unsupported USB PCI card in my machine and have a reasonable expectation of it working. Firewire 800 is brand-new and I don't doubt that there are technical problems to be solved. They'll try to get it as good as they can before releasing it throughout their product lines because there's nothing like releasing something into the real world to show the holes in your quality program and to expose the limitations of your design.
Finally, Apple has gotten better at getting products right the first time. There is a number of examples of Apple products that didn't come out right the first time that went on to become winners (whether Apple made them winners or not). The Lisa, Apple Portable and Newton are the most obvious ones. I'm sure the entire product line will have Firewire 800 eventually, but it's just too soon to expect now.
I have a $32 Belkin USB 2.0 card in the G4 (AGP) I'm writing this on. Seems to be working at full speed under 10.2.6 (although Belkin studiously avoids mentioning Macintosh support for the card of any sort).
Jesus christ, why do these comments STILL get modded up on every Mac story? Yes, it might be cool, no it will never, EVER happen. Apple would die for real if they were stupid enough to do that.
Apple will produce an x86 operating system and they won't die from it. It'll be for a very specific hardware configuration (on a licensed and/or Apple-branded machine). Your statement presumes that everyone will abandon PowerPC in droves.
There is an intrinsic value in buying PowerPC Macs: the tight integration of hardware and software. Most of us are not willing to give that up even if an x86 box is cheaper. The PPC 970 will make the combination even more attractive. That revenue stream will not dry up--indeed, it seems to be on the upswing.
Apple will realize a NEW revenue stream the minute they announce for x86. People with conforming machines will pay the $100 for the software to see if they can get a better computing experience. If the release is good enough, enterprises will be more inclined to take a look. That will engender developer interest. We're already seeing the value of Mac OS X's open source roots in that there's a flood of software that "just works" on the PPC side. This will be true, too, with a predictable, standardized x86 configuration.
The timing of the announcement of "Athens"--the more tightly-integrated PC from Microsoft and HP--is no coincidence. Microsoft doesn't mention Apple when it decries its "open source" competition. But you can bet that Bill Gates knows what's around the corner. It's why "trusted computing" is also a big deal with Wintel now.
Apple could "die", but it's demise would be self-inflicted. The company has everything going for it right now. Things are about to get interesting.
8. Slacking in the middle of the day is much better than showing up late or leaving early. People are paying the most attention in the morning and at quitting time. Arriving early and leaving late will give the semblance of dedication, even if you are taking 2 hours lunches, and hour long trips to the bookstore in the afternoon.
I have to differ with the characterization of the early morning hours by emphasizing Number 5. The only people there early in the morning are 1) the people who've been there all night, 2) psychotic executives and their sycophants, 3) the hard-working people who have families and a rigorous schedule to keep (i.e. mothers, with a moiety of dads sprinkled in), and 4) the Uber-Slacker Dilberts who spend the hours between six-thirty and ten reading their e-mail, corresponding on Usenet, transmitting or acquiring the latest "gotta-be-in-on-it" nugget of hacker culture, or in the break room balancing cups of coffee on their paunches waiting to twit the late arrivals who haven't been "working" as hard as they. They'll also take the two-hour lunches, they'll spend an hour at the bookstore, and they'll be there after 5:45 because they're looking to move up on the after-work "Unreal Tournament" ladder.
The lessons most indelibly inscribed in your heart were probably first written on your ass.
That's John Kricfalusi. I miss Ren & Stimpy too. The "Happy Helmet" episode is my favorite.
The nature of Children's Television has changed. I teach a computing course for migrant families here in Hawaii. The kids who attend regular classes flock to the computer lab when I open it because it has twenty workstations with broadband connections. Their main Internet destination? The games pages of Cartoon Network and kids-oriented channels. The influence of computers and gaming have diminished the power of children on Saturday morning, but increased it across-the-board during the rest of the week because there are channels catering to their interests.
I heard a story--possibly apocryphal--that The Tick disappeared from Fox Kids Saturday because too many parents were tuning in to watch the show and not relinquishing control after it was over (I also heard that the producers, like John K, were having trouble getting shows out on time). I think that the combination of the aforementioned distractions kids have plus the ascendancy of sports television in recent years have combined to kill Saturday morning viewing for kids. If dad wants to watch the NBA Playoffs, the kids have alternatives now.
I'm a musician. The idea that Dr. Dre can be sued for using a quote from a bass line in his own song is ridiculous. Music is rife with quotes from songs.
Should mariachi bands sue Paul McCartney for using a popular figure of theirs in "Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da?" Should Steven Stills sue everyone who's used the VI-V-IV progression from "Love The One You're With?" (It's the part that goes "...And there's a rose in a fisted glove...")... Should the writers of "Louie Louie" sue whoever wrote "Angel of the Morning?" (Same song!) Should Chuck Berry sue the Beach Boys for approximating "Sweet Little Sixteen" in "Surfin' USA?" George Clinton should be as rich as Croesus for all the quotations made of his various musical incarnations.
The jury fined Dr. Dre for using the bass line from a 1980's song called "Backstrokin'" by the Fatback Band. Now that I know that "Let's Get High" derives from that song, I want to hear it. Far from harming the originators, I think it helps them--especially if credit is given on the quoting work. Eminem's version of "Bitch, Please" led me to seek out and buy the original by Snoop Dogg. One of rap's germinal works, "Rapper's Delight," is based on the bass line of Chic's "Good Times" (that was ruled an infringement, as well, but I don't think Chic was harmed by forming the basis for a musical movement).
There need to well-reasoned, clear-cut standards for quoting and sampling of work. Every musical movement has been built on adaption and adoption of what has preceded it. Hip-hop/rap, especially, is a music that owes its vitality to free but restrained quotation. Originators of works deserve to be protected and compensated, but I think that they are also enriched by quotation, not only materially, but in that their creation retains life, albeit in an altered form.
Apple = Great marketing, bad products for corporations, could be fixed with lots of dollars.
John Sculley was CEO when I first arrived at Apple; Steve Jobs was at the helm when I left. The men who ran the company in the interim couldn't market their way out of a paper bag. They knew nothing about the computer industry, nor did they care. I told Gil Amelio to his face that the company needed to give customers a reason to buy its products (the vultures were circling One Inifinite Loop, nobody was buying, and Macs were being sold the way Tiger Direct sells PC's now!), and his answer was to port the Mac OS to Windows.
The less said about Mike "The Diesel" Spindler, the better...
No one who suffered through those years (they included a significant period when John Sculley seemed more interested in learning to be a visionary than he was in running the company) would say that Apple had "great marketing." Apple has survived because of loyal customers, a commitment by its employees to doing great work on behalf of those customers, and its willingness to continue to innovate in the personal computing market.
But "great marketing?!" For the longest time, the best Apple commercial out there was a Saturday Night Live parody.
ie: There are some songs I'd gladly pay $1 for, others which I wouldn't (but would buy for a quarter) etc.
I'm looking forward to the legacy market that this service will facilitate.
No CD's to press. No half-hearted marketing. A lot of exposure for very little expense.
Here's what I'm looking forward to: Apple Records releases its catalog to iMusic. In that catalogue is a little-heard gem of a record with an amazing pedigree.
Doris Troy (Apple Records, 1970).
Doris scored a 1963 hit with the single "Just One Look" and later was signed by Apple Records. I only know of the one album she made for them. Her vocals are impeccable. The music is fantastic! Her co-writers and backup band? George Harrison... Ringo Starr... Eric Clapton... Steven Stills... Billy Preston... Jackie Lomax... Klaus Voorman... Nicky Hopkins and Peter Frampton, to name a few.
This is a great album that deserves an audience. I believe that iMusic will make it possible.
Thing One: This idea sounds like the iPod interface placed on a mouse. Cool idea, if true,
Thing Two: Apple has had a number of reasons for sticking with one-button mice, as mentioned elsewhere: They're easier for novices to use, they're easier and cheaper to make, and they offer third-party manufacturers a revenue opportunity. Don't forget the "bad old days" when Apple made nearly everything itself. It caught hell for that until it adopted USB and VGA in '97-98. An Apple two- or three-button mouse would piss off vendors it doesn't need to antagonize.
Open sourcers, get this, and get it good: Your little platform idea has 1% tops of the entire user-end market. 1% tops. Linux is OLD now in IT terms, and you still have only 1%, if that. You have had your chance. If you were going to be a success, it would have happened long ago.
Did you forget that Mac OS X is Open Source, too? It is, you know. Innovations in Linux and Mac OS X are complementary. You can get industrial-strength Linux and Darwin distros for free... Apache beats the crap out of Windows IIS/2003 and it's FREE!!! You're wrong about the "one per cent." You're wrong about that "little platform idea."
And that last little fillip of yours? The "you can't even change 2%" of the world nastiness? Add up the market share of Linux and Mac OS X vis-a-vis new installations. Think about why Steve Ballmer would dignify open source with a mention if it weren't on his reptilian mind 24-7. Think about why Microsoft is advertising that features in Windows 2003 Server are turned off by default. Think about why the words "command line" are being mentioned in conjunction with a Windows product announcement. Think about the full-court press Microsoft is putting on open source (and don't ignore their own published memos).
Open source has already changed Microsoft, bucko. And that's a hell of a lot more than "two per cent" of the world. Eat it!
Apple hands picks it hardware, it knows how it will behave and thus programs it OS and application around it. It then releases, those spec to third party developer so they can do the same.
This works both ways. If Apple can get in on the ground floor of an advanced x86 chip, there's no reason they can't design a machine around it.
The most daunting aspect of the x86 problem is legacy support. The sanest way to handle it is to not provide it. x86 machines designed from the ground up for Mac OS X could be exploited by Apple and licensed to third parties --especially if those boxes could still run Windows and Linux and were reasonably priced. Rather than closing off the current hardware/software revenue stream, Apple would be opening new (and prospectively more lucrative) streams for its hardware, software, and ancillary products. The move would be fraught with problems, but they would be problems Apple would love to have.
Lastly, Apple has been driving hardware design industry-wide since the iMac was introduced. Innovations introduced on the Mac have routinely found their way into PC's (I can tell the vintage of most PC laptops by identifying the PowerBook they most resemble and counting forward six-to-nine months).
IIRC, Apple is shooting for around five per cent market share as a first step. If they can hit the right price-performance-stability sweet spot with an x86 box (and combine it with a PPC 970 box that puts its teeth directly into the Pentium's ass), I have no doubt whatsoever that they'll achieve that goal...unless, of course, they mess up the marketing.
The truth is, Apple as a proprietary processor company is dead.
The PowerPC isn't a proprietary processor. If you'd like to design a motherboard that uses it, go ahead. No one's stopping you (unless it infringes on an Apple design, that is). The hard part would be selling it...
Apple will not destroy its PPC customer- and developer-bases by tossing them aside after all the time, money, and effort expended on Mac OS X. Apple will adopt the PPC 970, take Motorola out of the CPU development loop, and provide Mac OS X for a tightly proscribed x86 configuration (including its own branded boxes--almost everything but the CPU in a Mac is now commodity parts, so that perceived barrier is long gone).
Steve Jobs is a patient man when it comes to the world-at-large. He knows that Apple probably won't ever replace Microsoft as the dominant player in the x86 market, but he also knows that this is probably the perfect time to give them some competition. Microsoft faces a number of challenges to its dominance: its attitude toward DRM, its "trusted computing" initiative, the quiet debacle it's weathering vis-a-vis virtual weekly security updates to XP and other critical software, the growing popularity of open source software, its enterprise licensing scheme, and the increased scrutiny it's under after losing the anti-trust case (like IBM before it, the loss itself will prove more damaging than the punishment).
Apple will continue to produce Mac OS X for PPC. The x86 version would be--in the beginning--a loss-leader. It would get noses into the tent from every market segment. That interest would fuel developer interest (notice how quickly the "there's no software for the Mac" discussion abated in the flood of Open Source offerings it now enjoys).
Once that interest is cultivated, Apple has a whole slew of products/ideas "on the shelf" that would benefit from this renewed interest. There's an advantage to being ahead of your time if you survive long enough.
i have run into lots of problems too. keep up the good fight. the latin phrase goes something like non illegetimum carborundum. don't let the bastards get you down!!! email me if you need assisstance. rmandel AT hartdistrict.org
(sorry for the typos, it's 1AM where i'm,at)
Dude, you're a teacher! I hope you don't allow your students to use time-of-day related excuses for sloppy work. There's no such thing as a bad time to set a good example (and it's illegitimati non carborundum).
So as part of testing a new patch for a rollout, you step forward a day at time and make sure it all still works for every, what, 365 days? 1000 days? Sounds like a nice way to waste a week.
When I was testing software, I'd roll the clock forward a number of years during beta or final candidate to see what would happen. Any good testing organization has some cases like this in their boundary condition scenarios. Some time-critical programs--especially those coded as system software/utilities (alarms clocks, etc.) are rolled forward to within a few minutes of the system's "drop-dead" date to make sure any errors are handled.
If the program cacks after rolling the clock forward ten years, then you'd halve the roll-forward time and try the test case again until the behavior stops. You then have a range within which to test.
You don't have to be paranoid to test software, but it helps.--Me
Right now, Google is the one search engine I can depend on to give me reliable results, relatively untainted by bias. If M$FT gets hold of it, the first thing that happens is that us Mac OS X users get deprecated results (if we get access at all), Then, anyone using an "unsupported" Windows OS (that is, older than Windows 2000), will be given short shrift.
After that, you'll probably have to be "Palladium-compliant" AND have a Passport account to access "premium' (read as: "What we're getting now") service.
Google is one of the indispensible advances of the Information Age...as it is now constituted. It lets me find what I'm looking for without hindering my experience by turning the results to its preferred commercial ends.
Microsoft WILL pave paradise and put up a parking lot, if given the chance. Bet on it.
- It'd bring Apple to the commodity pricing world of the PC. This is bad for Apple for hardware upgrades, since users would stop buying peripherals from Apple, and instead buy them from third parties, but it'd be good for Apple's software business which could potentially grow tremendously, thus the bottom line is possitive for Apple.
My 400 MHz G4 has an LG 4320B DVD-CDR combo drive, Viking PC100 memory, a Maxtor 80 GB HD, a Sylvania T721 monitor and an internal IDE Zip drive. I work as a computer consultant and regularly buy/recommend/install off-the-shelf equipment for my customers from Wal-Mart (the easiest place to find a lot of stuff here on the Big Island of Hawaii). As a matter of fact, just about the only non-commodity part you'll find on a Mac is the CPU. Apple has been using commodity parts for a LOOONG time now.
As for the three-button mouse... many of Apple's customers are first-time users. One button is more than enough for them. Any user that knows enough to NEED another button can buy one (I heartily recommend the optical mice from Micron--a steal at around fifteen bucks--or the optical ones from Logitech). I've been a three-button man for a long time now (early versions of Mac OS X) but I can still be happy and productive with one button--as long as it's not the iMac "hockey puck." Apple's usability studies are a lot more extensive than your experience or mine.
Hey! The Hindenbook was the fault of a third-party Lithium-Ion battery vendor! It got fixed! Really! I had a 5300 for two years and it flare didn't up once.
Pascal on the Mac was dreadful as an API for developing Classic apps
You must have had a lot more trouble than I did. I could put together a pretty robust Classic application with ResEdit and CodeWarrior in a couple of hours. I wrote a wireless signal strength meter a couple of years ago that still runs fine under Classic. I've also done things like generate SMB packets for server testing, build a quick-and-dirty ping app, make small educational programs, parse raw Ethernet packets, and generate calendar-based import files for FileMaker Pro. The time and headaches I saved over doing them in C were well worth it just for the string-handling alone.
(BTW, I share your pain vis-a-vis the maintenance of the mudball that became Macintosh system programming, but that was more an outgrowth of the evolution of the platform and the programming tools than anything else. Revolutions are messy).
Pascal is clean, straightforward and reliable. If someone reads my code, they won't wonder what I casted "void" to and where I did the casting. There's nothing I can do in C that I can't do in Pascal and it'll be easier to debug and maintain. And C++? I consider it a full-employment device designed for the John Forbes Nash wing of the programming arts.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Unsuspecting user selects a range of unwanted messages;
2) Unsuspecting user deletes messages;
3) Display updates and lands on an infected message...
4) BOOM!!
iTunes remembers the music you bought. All you have to do is sign in with your account and password and your selections are available again.
I do not care to cede my right to privacy just because I use an operating system or download a utility). Gator is "spyware," pure-and-simple. And, as has been mentioned before in this thread, it is a resource hog that causes unpredictable results especially in older computers, and it installs additional unseen software that cripples a machine's performance. Add the fact that it's hard to remove, and you have a string of capital offenses.
There's even a screenplay in this: Computer science major at a university finds an "innocuous" program like Gator running on every machine he encounters. He gets curious, especially when he finds out that the program is recording everything and reporting it. Where to? His tracing efforts ring alarm bells in a covert government surveillance program that is accomplishing through stealth what it couldn't get via legislation. Very nasty, unsympathetic men chase him and try to kill him. He escapes with the help of a lissome love interest and manages to expose the plot. "Day of the Condor" meets "The Net." Seann William Scott and Asia Argento star with Samuel L. Jackson in the role of the villain. Any takers?
The lessons most indelibly written in your heart were probably first inscribed on your ass.
Also, just because Apple has a hand in establishing, inventing or promoting a standard doesn't mean that implementation is a slam-dunk. First of all, they've contracted manufacturers and suppliers to provide their current product lines. Those contracts don't just screech to a halt at Apple's behest. They have to be honored. There are also constituencies that have to cooperate (e.g. MPEG-4, 802.11g) or the standard dies or isn't interoperable.
Secondly, Apple does its best to test the crap out of everything they make--literally and figuratively. That's why I can stick an unsupported USB PCI card in my machine and have a reasonable expectation of it working. Firewire 800 is brand-new and I don't doubt that there are technical problems to be solved. They'll try to get it as good as they can before releasing it throughout their product lines because there's nothing like releasing something into the real world to show the holes in your quality program and to expose the limitations of your design.
Finally, Apple has gotten better at getting products right the first time. There is a number of examples of Apple products that didn't come out right the first time that went on to become winners (whether Apple made them winners or not). The Lisa, Apple Portable and Newton are the most obvious ones. I'm sure the entire product line will have Firewire 800 eventually, but it's just too soon to expect now.
I have a $32 Belkin USB 2.0 card in the G4 (AGP) I'm writing this on. Seems to be working at full speed under 10.2.6 (although Belkin studiously avoids mentioning Macintosh support for the card of any sort).
Joe Blow doesn't have to settle for 1.1.
There is an intrinsic value in buying PowerPC Macs: the tight integration of hardware and software. Most of us are not willing to give that up even if an x86 box is cheaper. The PPC 970 will make the combination even more attractive. That revenue stream will not dry up--indeed, it seems to be on the upswing.
Apple will realize a NEW revenue stream the minute they announce for x86. People with conforming machines will pay the $100 for the software to see if they can get a better computing experience. If the release is good enough, enterprises will be more inclined to take a look. That will engender developer interest. We're already seeing the value of Mac OS X's open source roots in that there's a flood of software that "just works" on the PPC side. This will be true, too, with a predictable, standardized x86 configuration.
The timing of the announcement of "Athens"--the more tightly-integrated PC from Microsoft and HP--is no coincidence. Microsoft doesn't mention Apple when it decries its "open source" competition. But you can bet that Bill Gates knows what's around the corner. It's why "trusted computing" is also a big deal with Wintel now.
Apple could "die", but it's demise would be self-inflicted. The company has everything going for it right now. Things are about to get interesting.
The lessons most indelibly inscribed in your heart were probably first written on your ass.
const
c_snobbery = maxint;
myFavorite = 'Pascal is still a great language';
var
modPoints : integer;
agreement : integer;
derision : integer;
iPostThis : boolean;
begin
if ( iPostThis ) then
modPoints
writeln ( myFavorite );
if ( derision >= c_snobbery ) then
halt;
end.
The nature of Children's Television has changed. I teach a computing course for migrant families here in Hawaii. The kids who attend regular classes flock to the computer lab when I open it because it has twenty workstations with broadband connections. Their main Internet destination? The games pages of Cartoon Network and kids-oriented channels. The influence of computers and gaming have diminished the power of children on Saturday morning, but increased it across-the-board during the rest of the week because there are channels catering to their interests.
I heard a story--possibly apocryphal--that The Tick disappeared from Fox Kids Saturday because too many parents were tuning in to watch the show and not relinquishing control after it was over (I also heard that the producers, like John K, were having trouble getting shows out on time). I think that the combination of the aforementioned distractions kids have plus the ascendancy of sports television in recent years have combined to kill Saturday morning viewing for kids. If dad wants to watch the NBA Playoffs, the kids have alternatives now.
I'm a musician. The idea that Dr. Dre can be sued for using a quote from a bass line in his own song is ridiculous. Music is rife with quotes from songs.
Should mariachi bands sue Paul McCartney for using a popular figure of theirs in "Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da?" Should Steven Stills sue everyone who's used the VI-V-IV progression from "Love The One You're With?" (It's the part that goes "...And there's a rose in a fisted glove...")... Should the writers of "Louie Louie" sue whoever wrote "Angel of the Morning?" (Same song!) Should Chuck Berry sue the Beach Boys for approximating "Sweet Little Sixteen" in "Surfin' USA?" George Clinton should be as rich as Croesus for all the quotations made of his various musical incarnations.
The jury fined Dr. Dre for using the bass line from a 1980's song called "Backstrokin'" by the Fatback Band. Now that I know that "Let's Get High" derives from that song, I want to hear it. Far from harming the originators, I think it helps them--especially if credit is given on the quoting work. Eminem's version of "Bitch, Please" led me to seek out and buy the original by Snoop Dogg. One of rap's germinal works, "Rapper's Delight," is based on the bass line of Chic's "Good Times" (that was ruled an infringement, as well, but I don't think Chic was harmed by forming the basis for a musical movement).
There need to well-reasoned, clear-cut standards for quoting and sampling of work. Every musical movement has been built on adaption and adoption of what has preceded it. Hip-hop/rap, especially, is a music that owes its vitality to free but restrained quotation. Originators of works deserve to be protected and compensated, but I think that they are also enriched by quotation, not only materially, but in that their creation retains life, albeit in an altered form.
The less said about Mike "The Diesel" Spindler, the better...
No one who suffered through those years (they included a significant period when John Sculley seemed more interested in learning to be a visionary than he was in running the company) would say that Apple had "great marketing." Apple has survived because of loyal customers, a commitment by its employees to doing great work on behalf of those customers, and its willingness to continue to innovate in the personal computing market.
But "great marketing?!" For the longest time, the best Apple commercial out there was a Saturday Night Live parody.
No CD's to press. No half-hearted marketing. A lot of exposure for very little expense.
Here's what I'm looking forward to: Apple Records releases its catalog to iMusic. In that catalogue is a little-heard gem of a record with an amazing pedigree.
Doris Troy (Apple Records, 1970).
Doris scored a 1963 hit with the single "Just One Look" and later was signed by Apple Records. I only know of the one album she made for them. Her vocals are impeccable. The music is fantastic! Her co-writers and backup band? George Harrison... Ringo Starr... Eric Clapton... Steven Stills... Billy Preston... Jackie Lomax... Klaus Voorman... Nicky Hopkins and Peter Frampton, to name a few.
This is a great album that deserves an audience. I believe that iMusic will make it possible.
Thing One: This idea sounds like the iPod interface placed on a mouse. Cool idea, if true,
Thing Two: Apple has had a number of reasons for sticking with one-button mice, as mentioned elsewhere: They're easier for novices to use, they're easier and cheaper to make, and they offer third-party manufacturers a revenue opportunity. Don't forget the "bad old days" when Apple made nearly everything itself. It caught hell for that until it adopted USB and VGA in '97-98. An Apple two- or three-button mouse would piss off vendors it doesn't need to antagonize.
Fud, fud, fud, fud,
Fud, fud, fud, fud,
Wonderful fud,
Glorious fud...
Or, to more closely quote Michael Flanders and Donald Swann and their Hippo Song (how appropriate):
FUD! FUD! Glorious FUD!
Nothing quite like it for chilling the blood
So, follow, O! Follow along with callow
And wallow in gloooor-ious FUD!
(And here's to Thomas Andrew Lehrer, while I'm at it)
And that last little fillip of yours? The "you can't even change 2%" of the world nastiness? Add up the market share of Linux and Mac OS X vis-a-vis new installations. Think about why Steve Ballmer would dignify open source with a mention if it weren't on his reptilian mind 24-7. Think about why Microsoft is advertising that features in Windows 2003 Server are turned off by default. Think about why the words "command line" are being mentioned in conjunction with a Windows product announcement. Think about the full-court press Microsoft is putting on open source (and don't ignore their own published memos).
Open source has already changed Microsoft, bucko. And that's a hell of a lot more than "two per cent" of the world. Eat it!
The most daunting aspect of the x86 problem is legacy support. The sanest way to handle it is to not provide it. x86 machines designed from the ground up for Mac OS X could be exploited by Apple and licensed to third parties --especially if those boxes could still run Windows and Linux and were reasonably priced. Rather than closing off the current hardware/software revenue stream, Apple would be opening new (and prospectively more lucrative) streams for its hardware, software, and ancillary products. The move would be fraught with problems, but they would be problems Apple would love to have.
Lastly, Apple has been driving hardware design industry-wide since the iMac was introduced. Innovations introduced on the Mac have routinely found their way into PC's (I can tell the vintage of most PC laptops by identifying the PowerBook they most resemble and counting forward six-to-nine months).
IIRC, Apple is shooting for around five per cent market share as a first step. If they can hit the right price-performance-stability sweet spot with an x86 box (and combine it with a PPC 970 box that puts its teeth directly into the Pentium's ass), I have no doubt whatsoever that they'll achieve that goal...unless, of course, they mess up the marketing.
The PowerPC isn't a proprietary processor. If you'd like to design a motherboard that uses it, go ahead. No one's stopping you (unless it infringes on an Apple design, that is). The hard part would be selling it...
Apple will not destroy its PPC customer- and developer-bases by tossing them aside after all the time, money, and effort expended on Mac OS X. Apple will adopt the PPC 970, take Motorola out of the CPU development loop, and provide Mac OS X for a tightly proscribed x86 configuration (including its own branded boxes--almost everything but the CPU in a Mac is now commodity parts, so that perceived barrier is long gone).
Steve Jobs is a patient man when it comes to the world-at-large. He knows that Apple probably won't ever replace Microsoft as the dominant player in the x86 market, but he also knows that this is probably the perfect time to give them some competition. Microsoft faces a number of challenges to its dominance: its attitude toward DRM, its "trusted computing" initiative, the quiet debacle it's weathering vis-a-vis virtual weekly security updates to XP and other critical software, the growing popularity of open source software, its enterprise licensing scheme, and the increased scrutiny it's under after losing the anti-trust case (like IBM before it, the loss itself will prove more damaging than the punishment).
Apple will continue to produce Mac OS X for PPC. The x86 version would be--in the beginning--a loss-leader. It would get noses into the tent from every market segment. That interest would fuel developer interest (notice how quickly the "there's no software for the Mac" discussion abated in the flood of Open Source offerings it now enjoys).
Once that interest is cultivated, Apple has a whole slew of products/ideas "on the shelf" that would benefit from this renewed interest. There's an advantage to being ahead of your time if you survive long enough.
Dude, you're a teacher! I hope you don't allow your students to use time-of-day related excuses for sloppy work. There's no such thing as a bad time to set a good example (and it's illegitimati non carborundum).
Pie Jesu Domine...dona eis requiem...WHACK!
When I was testing software, I'd roll the clock forward a number of years during beta or final candidate to see what would happen. Any good testing organization has some cases like this in their boundary condition scenarios. Some time-critical programs--especially those coded as system software/utilities (alarms clocks, etc.) are rolled forward to within a few minutes of the system's "drop-dead" date to make sure any errors are handled.
If the program cacks after rolling the clock forward ten years, then you'd halve the roll-forward time and try the test case again until the behavior stops. You then have a range within which to test.
You don't have to be paranoid to test software, but it helps.--Me
Right now, Google is the one search engine I can depend on to give me reliable results, relatively untainted by bias. If M$FT gets hold of it, the first thing that happens is that us Mac OS X users get deprecated results (if we get access at all), Then, anyone using an "unsupported" Windows OS (that is, older than Windows 2000), will be given short shrift.
After that, you'll probably have to be "Palladium-compliant" AND have a Passport account to access "premium' (read as: "What we're getting now") service.
Google is one of the indispensible advances of the Information Age...as it is now constituted. It lets me find what I'm looking for without hindering my experience by turning the results to its preferred commercial ends.
Microsoft WILL pave paradise and put up a parking lot, if given the chance. Bet on it.
My 400 MHz G4 has an LG 4320B DVD-CDR combo drive, Viking PC100 memory, a Maxtor 80 GB HD, a Sylvania T721 monitor and an internal IDE Zip drive. I work as a computer consultant and regularly buy/recommend/install off-the-shelf equipment for my customers from Wal-Mart (the easiest place to find a lot of stuff here on the Big Island of Hawaii). As a matter of fact, just about the only non-commodity part you'll find on a Mac is the CPU. Apple has been using commodity parts for a LOOONG time now.
As for the three-button mouse... many of Apple's customers are first-time users. One button is more than enough for them. Any user that knows enough to NEED another button can buy one (I heartily recommend the optical mice from Micron--a steal at around fifteen bucks--or the optical ones from Logitech). I've been a three-button man for a long time now (early versions of Mac OS X) but I can still be happy and productive with one button--as long as it's not the iMac "hockey puck." Apple's usability studies are a lot more extensive than your experience or mine.
Hey! The Hindenbook was the fault of a third-party Lithium-Ion battery vendor! It got fixed! Really! I had a 5300 for two years and it flare didn't up once.