Cynicism is not always justifiable. Sometimes there are exceptions to the standard corporate CEO it's-all-about-the-profit that is so common. Jobs seems to be one of those exceptions. Yes, he is ultimately responsible for maintaining Apple's profitability, but how he pursues that is what makes him apparently different. It is easy to brush it all off as nothing more than the usual, but I do not think the situation (or the man) is quite as simple as that.
Apple sells overpriced plastic boxes with lock-in that is done in such a way that it somehow doesn't grab the attention of the clueless sheep that use it.
And then there are the butt-reaming assholes who have the arrogance to think that people who choose to buy certain computers are clueless sheep merely by virtue of that choice.
As much as this pains me to say to a fellow Bill Hicks fan: blow it out your ass. I'm not locked into dick with a Mac. My mouse is Logitech. About a year ago I bought new memory -- standard, off-the-shelf DDR2 SDRAM from Crucial, not Apple. Bought a new HD last month, too. Got it at Fry's for $80. Plugged it in, worked.
Software wise? My IM client is OSS (Adium), browser is Firefox, I use Chicken of the VNC to control it remotely. My text editor is vim. My shell is bash underneath GNU Screen.
So where am I locked in, either hardware or software wise? I can't buy my own motherboard? I don't zero interest in dicking with hardware and never have, so BFD. You're forced to buy OS X when you get one? I like OS X. It's a great OS: powerful, secure, well-designed, and has great frameworks backing it up. No problem there, either.
So tell me: where in all of this is the either cluelessness or lock-in? I thought long and hard before making the switch, and did so for numerous well thought-out reasons, because it's a significant purchase.
The thing that pisses me off is your stereotypical Mac user. "OMG sif use M$ Windoze you should use Macs there way kewl" (spelling/grammar errors intended).
In other words: you're basing your decision upon a strawman.
I'll use a Mac if and when I decide to try it and if I like it, not just because a Mac user pushes me around. Linux elitests can be somewhat similar in this, but usually not half as bad.
And were the grammar and spelling mistakes in this sentence also intentional? People in glass houses really shouldn't throw stones.
Choose to buy or not buy something because it works best for you, not because of your loathing of imaginary "fanboys".
I sometimes find myself hunting for the right Preference Pane in OS X even, yet the System Preferences are much better organized than the Vista Control Panel.
This may help: open up System Preferences and type something in the search box in the upper right, e.g. "zoom".
Apple has a near monopoly on portable music players. As such, they wield a lot of power normal companies do not. Thus, all other things equal, it is perfectly reasonable for the law to require them not to tie the iPod to their store and DRM and jukebox software.
The iPod is not tied to iTMS. If an online music vendor chooses to sell songs in MP3 or even AAC there is nothing preventing them from doing so, and those songs would play just fine on an iPod.
Likewise, I should be able to use Mplayer of Windows Media player on equal ground with ITunes.
You can, or at least there are no legal prohibitions against it. There is, for example, a Winamp plug-in that allows you to sync up your Winamp library with your iPod. All it would take is the makers of the software choosing to do so.
No, they're doing it to make money, gobs and gobs of it.
Maintaining long-term profitability is impossible if the environment is damaged to the point that your customers are dying, starving, or otherwise negatively impacted.
Re:Prize goes to the 3D graphics provider
on
VMware Fusion goes Beta
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· Score: 5, Informative
Inside Mac Games had an interview recently with a PR guy from Parallels where he says "The goal is to have OpenGL and DirectX support in our next version, which should be in beta around the turn of the year."
You know, I'd really be curious to see how some of the CAD programs behave on a PowerMac with Parallels. Those are really fast machines. It would be an expensive experiment, but you're not the first CAD user I've heard mention this. A friend of mine works at an architecture firm, and he also mentioned the lack of CAD software available on the Mac as being the main reason he couldn't get one.
I've never been a fan of the language. Performance is terrible, and moving an app from one VM to another often causes serious problems. The cross platform claims have consistently been exaggerated.
I work for a large.com that serves up tens of millions of hits per day, and we are a Java shop.
You don't know what you're talking about.
re: cross-plaform compatibility. I do my development on OS X, but most of our developers use Windows. Our dev and staging environments are Linux, and our production boxes are Solaris, although we've recently introduced Linux into that mix as well.
There have been several times where I have taken a jar file built on my machine, and deployed it to other developer's machines or our staging environment with absolutely no problems. The same jar runs on every OS we deploy to.
Nor has performance ever been a problem. VM technology has seen amazing improvements over the past ten years, and is now such that for most non-trivial applications it is more performant than the compiled C/C++/Obj C equivalent. The success that Java has seen would not have been so tremendous if this were not true.
Any tips how to do it? Where does it put the tracks? What she was doing was putting in the CD, selecting Import, after the import iTunes doesn't go to where they were imported to. So next she tried making a folder and dragging the tracks into it. iTunes just does nothing.
Have her right-click on the column titles in her library and make sure the "Date Added" column is checked. Then click on that column to sort by it, and go to the date/time when she did the import.
You should probably research OS X some more. OS X is based on the NeXT operating system, and is largely over 20 years old. Then add in all the components Apple has added to the core OS -- CoreData, CoreImage, launchd, Spotlight, etc. -- and I really have a hard time understanding how someone could believe that OS X was made primarily by copying other OSes.
If you were simply joking, I apologize in advance.
I don't know if you are a troll or an idiot. Neither speaks very highly of you.
She accidently removed Safari from the dock 6 months ago and hasn't been on the Internet since (cause she can't find the icon)
Most people would say she's just a fucking idiot. Finder | Applications | Safari. Don't know about Finder? Then just hit the "Help" button on the keyboard, type in "World Wide Web" and low and behold... There's even a "Open Safari for me" link.
and she struggled with iTunes for an hour before giving up and asking me if I could figure out how to get it to import a CD. I only managed to do it because I figured it needed to get track names from the internet before it would import, so I fixed her internet problem first, then importing the CD "just works".
Here I suspect you're simply lying. This past weekend my internet connection was down for most of Saturday afternoon, and we had a friend over who had a CD I had asked him for. I ripped it with absolutely no problems. I know from recent personal experience that what you said is simply not true.
... and just for grins I just tried it on my machine at work, and it worked similarly.
I actually use XP for most tasks, and I don't think it sucks once you tame it.
I switched from XP to OS X about a year ago. Yes, XP does suck.
However, the 360 is bad ass. I played the demo of Superman over Thanksgiving, and LO be still my beating heart. That is a game me and my friends dreamed of playing when we were a kids. "One day man, wouldn't it be cool if you could be Superman and fly all over the place?" Well, that day is here. Rock on.
If you have a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, but the product being marketed is not high quality, then that product will not succeed in the marketplace, especially over the long term. Marketing campaigns for new tangible consumer goods can, at best, provide a temporary up-front "here I am" effect. But word of mouth is far, far more important; if you have good word of mouth, then (and only then) will your success grow into the future.
I own an iPod. I, and many others, can attest to the quality of the device, the software behind it, and the interaction between the two. This has nothing to do with wanting to be cool, or the newest iPod commerical. Rather it is based upon direct experience.
That is why the iPod has seen such great success. Microsoft continues to fail when they enter new markets simply because they seem culturally unable to produce anything that is of truly superior quality, and instead believe as you do: that tricks of marketing or licensing are all it takes to make up for having mediocre products.
What the subtitle refers to is the false stories that he was found dead in his home on February 22, 1994 that propagated on the internet and the insights he had from watching the situation unfold.
Yeah, that was me.
I was bored, and wanted to cause a bit of a stir in alt.discordia. I was a huge Illuminatus! fan, and figured if anyone could handle the joke, the Discordians could. So... being 20 years old I dreamt up the idea of a fake obituary, posted it to alt.discordia. I didn't make it too long, because while he's known, he's not famous. Worthy of inclusion in the LA Times, but not national news. All the bio info I gleamed from his books and "About the Author" stuff."
I come back the next day and there's a HUGE stink about it. People looking for confirmation, wailing and gnashing of teeth, etc. In short: success! A few days later I got an email from RAW's publicist telling me that it was a good joke and that RAW got a chuckle out of it.
One of my prouder moments, honestly. I only received a couple of flames about it; after it all blew over everyone was in good spirits about it.
Now, having said that I did feel like a complete ass when just a couple of months later Robert Shea really did die, and no one would believe it at first. Unintended consequences... Yin/yang.
Oh yes. The best solution is for the well-funded, well-equipped, politically influencial stabilizing force to leave the unstable power-vacuum suddenly. That worked so well when the Russians did it in the 80s.
Same logic used in Vietnam. Whee history does repeat itself.
We are not winning in Iraq. Every indication is that things get worse, day by day, not better. Projecting this into the future, things will continue to get worse. There are no indications -- none, zero, zip, nada -- that things are improving let alone stabilizing.
So of course the RATIONAL thing to do is to continue hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Someday, somehow, it will stop being so painful. Just you wait!
Whether or not you agree with the Republicans currently in office, I think almost every rational person understands that us leaving Iraq would be about the *worst* action we could take.
But of course none of those people are irrational, so in the true spirit of democracy their wishes shouldn't be respected or, really, even listened to.
Wow, what an eloquent message! You are quite the gifted writer and persuader. This is exactly the kind of message that persuades Americans to agree with you and vote for your guys. I wonder why you guys keep losing these elections?
Awwww did someone hurt you widdle ears? Cry harder, faggot.
BTW: Ever wonder what the people with ideas think? Believe it or not, some people are actually for things. They look forward to a better future instead or dreading the inevitable end of the world.
Really! Like.. the end of the world from the scary terrorists? Like the non-stop fear mongering that has come from the right for the past 6 years? OMG TURRISTS TORCH THE CONTSTITUTION LOLZ BUSH AS EMPROR!!1!
Idiot. You can't stand against something without standing for something. It's a logical impossibility.
It's not going to make the terrorists that want to kill Americans go away. The US not doing anything during the 1990s didn't stop them from bombing the Cole or the first unsuccessful World Trade Center bombing. We didn't do anything then, and they just kept coming.
Hello, Mr. Goddamn Liar, nice to meet you.
The criminals who bombed the WTC in 1993 -- 6 months after Clinton took office -- are currently sitting in jail. They were captured, tried, and imprisoned.
At this point, a vote for a Democrat is just to stop everything is the "solution". That's the hope of a lot of those on the left
The solution of the left is to get the fuck out of Iraq. Seeing as how the longer we stay there, the worse things get, the more terrorists attacks there are, and the more this war costs, that seems like a good fucking idea to me. "STAY THE COURSE! CUT AND RUN!" I have an idea! Know what would fight terrorism! You hitting yourself in the hammer! Just once, mind you. Oh wait, that didn't stop terrorism? Try it again! In fact, KEEP trying it! It'll work! GEORGE BUSH said so!
So you sorry pieces of shit keep pushing your memes. Maybe they'll stick. Maybe people will forget what a fascist sack of shit George Bush is. Then again maybe it'll turn around and bite you in the fucking ass because while you're all gung-ho over the GOP and parroting whatever it is that Fox tells you to, the values and treasure of your country are being willfully destroyed by those same people you so worshipfully defend.
Don't be so literal. It's metaphor. You haven't said anything that isn't already known by either the authors or, I would imagine, most of the readers. No one is implying that time has started to run backwards. Of course the fittest survive. The more interesting questions are why it is happening, and what the repercussions are.
If you haven't done so already, you may want to check out Quicksilver. It's technically an app-launcher, but it has by-and-large replaced Finder for me. You can use it for all your file operations: open, move, unmount/eject, move to Trash, etc.
Since your comment was neither modded up -- which it deserved -- nor replied to -- which is equally as disappointing -- I wanted to let you know that I, for one, have read it several times. It was insightful, and I have nothing to add other than "well said."
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Cynicism is not always justifiable. Sometimes there are exceptions to the standard corporate CEO it's-all-about-the-profit that is so common. Jobs seems to be one of those exceptions. Yes, he is ultimately responsible for maintaining Apple's profitability, but how he pursues that is what makes him apparently different. It is easy to brush it all off as nothing more than the usual, but I do not think the situation (or the man) is quite as simple as that.
Apple sells overpriced plastic boxes with lock-in that is done in such a way that it somehow doesn't grab the attention of the clueless sheep that use it.
And then there are the butt-reaming assholes who have the arrogance to think that people who choose to buy certain computers are clueless sheep merely by virtue of that choice.
As much as this pains me to say to a fellow Bill Hicks fan: blow it out your ass. I'm not locked into dick with a Mac. My mouse is Logitech. About a year ago I bought new memory -- standard, off-the-shelf DDR2 SDRAM from Crucial, not Apple. Bought a new HD last month, too. Got it at Fry's for $80. Plugged it in, worked.
Software wise? My IM client is OSS (Adium), browser is Firefox, I use Chicken of the VNC to control it remotely. My text editor is vim. My shell is bash underneath GNU Screen.
The photos I import into iPhoto are JPGs. The movies I work on in iMovie can be exported as .movs and from there converted to anything else. I import my music as 192bit MP3s. iCal uses the open iCalendar format for storing its data. The piss-poor music I attempt to make in GarageBand can be exported as MP3s.
So where am I locked in, either hardware or software wise? I can't buy my own motherboard? I don't zero interest in dicking with hardware and never have, so BFD. You're forced to buy OS X when you get one? I like OS X. It's a great OS: powerful, secure, well-designed, and has great frameworks backing it up. No problem there, either.
So tell me: where in all of this is the either cluelessness or lock-in? I thought long and hard before making the switch, and did so for numerous well thought-out reasons, because it's a significant purchase.
The thing that pisses me off is your stereotypical Mac user. "OMG sif use M$ Windoze you should use Macs there way kewl" (spelling/grammar errors intended).
In other words: you're basing your decision upon a strawman.
I'll use a Mac if and when I decide to try it and if I like it, not just because a Mac user pushes me around. Linux elitests can be somewhat similar in this, but usually not half as bad.
And were the grammar and spelling mistakes in this sentence also intentional? People in glass houses really shouldn't throw stones.Choose to buy or not buy something because it works best for you, not because of your loathing of imaginary "fanboys".
I would just like to add to the sentiment that that was an excellent comment.
I sometimes find myself hunting for the right Preference Pane in OS X even, yet the System Preferences are much better organized than the Vista Control Panel.
This may help: open up System Preferences and type something in the search box in the upper right, e.g. "zoom".
Apple has a near monopoly on portable music players. As such, they wield a lot of power normal companies do not. Thus, all other things equal, it is perfectly reasonable for the law to require them not to tie the iPod to their store and DRM and jukebox software.
The iPod is not tied to iTMS. If an online music vendor chooses to sell songs in MP3 or even AAC there is nothing preventing them from doing so, and those songs would play just fine on an iPod.
Likewise, I should be able to use Mplayer of Windows Media player on equal ground with ITunes.
You can, or at least there are no legal prohibitions against it. There is, for example, a Winamp plug-in that allows you to sync up your Winamp library with your iPod. All it would take is the makers of the software choosing to do so.No, they're doing it to make money, gobs and gobs of it.
Maintaining long-term profitability is impossible if the environment is damaged to the point that your customers are dying, starving, or otherwise negatively impacted.
Inside Mac Games had an interview recently with a PR guy from Parallels where he says "The goal is to have OpenGL and DirectX support in our next version, which should be in beta around the turn of the year."
You know, I'd really be curious to see how some of the CAD programs behave on a PowerMac with Parallels. Those are really fast machines. It would be an expensive experiment, but you're not the first CAD user I've heard mention this. A friend of mine works at an architecture firm, and he also mentioned the lack of CAD software available on the Mac as being the main reason he couldn't get one.
I've never been a fan of the language. Performance is terrible, and moving an app from one VM to another often causes serious problems. The cross platform claims have consistently been exaggerated.
I work for a large .com that serves up tens of millions of hits per day, and we are a Java shop.
You don't know what you're talking about.
re: cross-plaform compatibility. I do my development on OS X, but most of our developers use Windows. Our dev and staging environments are Linux, and our production boxes are Solaris, although we've recently introduced Linux into that mix as well.
There have been several times where I have taken a jar file built on my machine, and deployed it to other developer's machines or our staging environment with absolutely no problems. The same jar runs on every OS we deploy to.
Nor has performance ever been a problem. VM technology has seen amazing improvements over the past ten years, and is now such that for most non-trivial applications it is more performant than the compiled C/C++/Obj C equivalent. The success that Java has seen would not have been so tremendous if this were not true.
No, to my experience, this has always sucked and been unreliable, with very few exceptions
I'm not going to get into a flamefest with you, but the fact that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about just needs to be said.
You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Any tips how to do it? Where does it put the tracks? What she was doing was putting in the CD, selecting Import, after the import iTunes doesn't go to where they were imported to. So next she tried making a folder and dragging the tracks into it. iTunes just does nothing.
Have her right-click on the column titles in her library and make sure the "Date Added" column is checked. Then click on that column to sort by it, and go to the date/time when she did the import.
If you were simply joking, I apologize in advance.
She accidently removed Safari from the dock 6 months ago and hasn't been on the Internet since (cause she can't find the icon)
Most people would say she's just a fucking idiot. Finder | Applications | Safari. Don't know about Finder? Then just hit the "Help" button on the keyboard, type in "World Wide Web" and low and behold... There's even a "Open Safari for me" link.
and she struggled with iTunes for an hour before giving up and asking me if I could figure out how to get it to import a CD. I only managed to do it because I figured it needed to get track names from the internet before it would import, so I fixed her internet problem first, then importing the CD "just works".
Here I suspect you're simply lying. This past weekend my internet connection was down for most of Saturday afternoon, and we had a friend over who had a CD I had asked him for. I ripped it with absolutely no problems. I know from recent personal experience that what you said is simply not true.... and just for grins I just tried it on my machine at work, and it worked similarly.
I actually use XP for most tasks, and I don't think it sucks once you tame it.
I switched from XP to OS X about a year ago. Yes, XP does suck.
However, the 360 is bad ass. I played the demo of Superman over Thanksgiving, and LO be still my beating heart. That is a game me and my friends dreamed of playing when we were a kids. "One day man, wouldn't it be cool if you could be Superman and fly all over the place?" Well, that day is here. Rock on.
No.
If you have a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, but the product being marketed is not high quality, then that product will not succeed in the marketplace, especially over the long term. Marketing campaigns for new tangible consumer goods can, at best, provide a temporary up-front "here I am" effect. But word of mouth is far, far more important; if you have good word of mouth, then (and only then) will your success grow into the future.
I own an iPod. I, and many others, can attest to the quality of the device, the software behind it, and the interaction between the two. This has nothing to do with wanting to be cool, or the newest iPod commerical. Rather it is based upon direct experience.
That is why the iPod has seen such great success. Microsoft continues to fail when they enter new markets simply because they seem culturally unable to produce anything that is of truly superior quality, and instead believe as you do: that tricks of marketing or licensing are all it takes to make up for having mediocre products.
This is not true, and hasn't been for many years.
Maybe you should see what effect the resistance in Iraq has had. A highly motivated population is no match for even the most well-funded military.
What the subtitle refers to is the false stories that he was found dead in his home on February 22, 1994 that propagated on the internet and the insights he had from watching the situation unfold.
Yeah, that was me.
I was bored, and wanted to cause a bit of a stir in alt.discordia. I was a huge Illuminatus! fan, and figured if anyone could handle the joke, the Discordians could. So... being 20 years old I dreamt up the idea of a fake obituary, posted it to alt.discordia. I didn't make it too long, because while he's known, he's not famous. Worthy of inclusion in the LA Times, but not national news. All the bio info I gleamed from his books and "About the Author" stuff."
I come back the next day and there's a HUGE stink about it. People looking for confirmation, wailing and gnashing of teeth, etc. In short: success! A few days later I got an email from RAW's publicist telling me that it was a good joke and that RAW got a chuckle out of it.
One of my prouder moments, honestly. I only received a couple of flames about it; after it all blew over everyone was in good spirits about it.
Now, having said that I did feel like a complete ass when just a couple of months later Robert Shea really did die, and no one would believe it at first. Unintended consequences... Yin/yang.
Oh yes. The best solution is for the well-funded, well-equipped, politically influencial stabilizing force to leave the unstable power-vacuum suddenly. That worked so well when the Russians did it in the 80s.
Same logic used in Vietnam. Whee history does repeat itself.
We are not winning in Iraq. Every indication is that things get worse, day by day, not better. Projecting this into the future, things will continue to get worse. There are no indications -- none, zero, zip, nada -- that things are improving let alone stabilizing.
So of course the RATIONAL thing to do is to continue hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Someday, somehow, it will stop being so painful. Just you wait!
Whether or not you agree with the Republicans currently in office, I think almost every rational person understands that us leaving Iraq would be about the *worst* action we could take.
Poll: 72% of U.S. Troops Say End War in 2006
81% of non-Kurdish Iraqis want Americans to leave "immediately"
Opposition to Iraq War at All Time High - Only 35% support it, 61% oppose
But of course none of those people are irrational, so in the true spirit of democracy their wishes shouldn't be respected or, really, even listened to.
Wow, what an eloquent message! You are quite the gifted writer and persuader. This is exactly the kind of message that persuades Americans to agree with you and vote for your guys. I wonder why you guys keep losing these elections?
Awwww did someone hurt you widdle ears? Cry harder, faggot.
BTW: Ever wonder what the people with ideas think? Believe it or not, some people are actually for things. They look forward to a better future instead or dreading the inevitable end of the world.
Really! Like.. the end of the world from the scary terrorists? Like the non-stop fear mongering that has come from the right for the past 6 years? OMG TURRISTS TORCH THE CONTSTITUTION LOLZ BUSH AS EMPROR!!1!
Idiot. You can't stand against something without standing for something. It's a logical impossibility.
It's not going to make the terrorists that want to kill Americans go away. The US not doing anything during the 1990s didn't stop them from bombing the Cole or the first unsuccessful World Trade Center bombing. We didn't do anything then, and they just kept coming.
Hello, Mr. Goddamn Liar, nice to meet you.
The criminals who bombed the WTC in 1993 -- 6 months after Clinton took office -- are currently sitting in jail. They were captured, tried, and imprisoned.
At this point, a vote for a Democrat is just to stop everything is the "solution". That's the hope of a lot of those on the left
The solution of the left is to get the fuck out of Iraq. Seeing as how the longer we stay there, the worse things get, the more terrorists attacks there are, and the more this war costs, that seems like a good fucking idea to me. "STAY THE COURSE! CUT AND RUN!" I have an idea! Know what would fight terrorism! You hitting yourself in the hammer! Just once, mind you. Oh wait, that didn't stop terrorism? Try it again! In fact, KEEP trying it! It'll work! GEORGE BUSH said so!So you sorry pieces of shit keep pushing your memes. Maybe they'll stick. Maybe people will forget what a fascist sack of shit George Bush is. Then again maybe it'll turn around and bite you in the fucking ass because while you're all gung-ho over the GOP and parroting whatever it is that Fox tells you to, the values and treasure of your country are being willfully destroyed by those same people you so worshipfully defend.
Have a nice day, see you October 5th.
There is only one way to address radical Islam, and that is to completely and absolutely destroy it.
And here I thought you were talking about the Bush administration. My bad.
Don't be so literal. It's metaphor. You haven't said anything that isn't already known by either the authors or, I would imagine, most of the readers. No one is implying that time has started to run backwards. Of course the fittest survive. The more interesting questions are why it is happening, and what the repercussions are.
If you haven't done so already, you may want to check out Quicksilver. It's technically an app-launcher, but it has by-and-large replaced Finder for me. You can use it for all your file operations: open, move, unmount/eject, move to Trash, etc.
Since your comment was neither modded up -- which it deserved -- nor replied to -- which is equally as disappointing -- I wanted to let you know that I, for one, have read it several times. It was insightful, and I have nothing to add other than "well said."