A) Not sure if I said, but Work == PC Home == Mac
B) None of the Dell's here at work came with an MP3 Decoder, maybe the home editions do. MS Media player I beleive decodes to wmf files but that does not help his in car MP3 player.
C) Sorry I didn't have the time to do some significant statistical analysis. I go on my own experience.
BTW Using your own logic your finding are flawed because your answers aren't quantified. How many people do you know where "reinstalling the OS" is the solution to there support problems?
I will give you an example, I have a mac, my friend has a PC, he is a systems admin (unix) I am a software developer (web based and.net). We both rip MP3's (him for his car (eg no wmf), me so I can listen to it on my computer).
He spent 2 hours trying to find an MP3 encoder for his computer, trying different software etc. I drop my CD into my machine and iTunes imports it into my playlist for me. Now the CPU advantage his machine has over mine was all but lost when he had to spend more than a couple of minutes trying to find MP3 software.
I find this over and over again. I organised a new iMac for my Dad, who is computer literate, but not a developer or anything like that. He picked it up in the middle of the day, had it setup, printer working and had installed MS Office. All within 30 minutes of arriving home with the computer. I might have spent an hour with my Dad fixing stuff on his computer. My sister with a PC, took longer than that just to get MS Office installed. Office on the Mac's software installation routine is this: Drag these folders to your computer, click application. I am sure you know the PC routine. Moving computers, just drag all your files and app s from one computer to the other. I did this and 1 or 2 apps prompted for license keys again, but apart from that a painless process.
I develop and do support all day on a PC, I use a mac at home because I don't want to have to spend my time fiddling with setting and pissing about. It just works.
The thing is that most people don't utilise 100% on any of these machines. For most people the fact that the system is stable and that it works predictably is more than enough.
Personally I find the fact that I have never had to rebuild my mac (my machine) from scratch has been a huge saving as I have had rebuild my PC several time (gets slow after installing crap).
The fact that I can move all my apps and preferences from my old mac to my new one in about an hour is a great saving. This includes all my prefences etc. It would take that long just to reinstall all my PC software.
These are the things that make the Mac fast for me, not how fast the CPU is every once in a while when I do some rendering.
I think comparing operating systems as a way of throwing out your first born is not correct.
Eg MacOS Classic was a direct descendent of the original MacOS that launched in 1984. I am sure that there is very little or no code from the original. Win9X was built on top of DOS which I believe has a lineage older than MacOS classic. Interesting note that both MacOSX and WinNT both came from an external base (NeXT and OS2 sort of).
If you want a better example IE 3.0 --> IE 4.0, Microsoft is a classic for working out the problems in the first version or two and then releasing a quality product.
Well there is this article...
Remote Root Exploit in CVS
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/0 1/21/1752251&mode=thread
Posted three days ago.
Is the MS Embedded development kit available for free? I know that the next version of WinCE.net (or whatever) is based on the soon to be released Visual Studio.net 2003, which I am going to guess will not be free.
These are exceptionally good money makers here in Australia. Recently the government tightened the laws as to the tolerances given for speeding (was speed + 10% + 3km, now just +3km over the speed) to compensate for people whose spedoes might be out.
Next on the money making wheel is combined red light & speed camera in one unit. That way if you speed through the red light you will get done for speeding as well as the red light.
The police here in Australia (well Victoria but I believe that all the other states use it as well) use speed camera and red light cameras. The pictures are processed automatically by computer to read your number plate and automatically send out the bill.
The process is nearly entirely automated. In fact the camera operators are now private companies rather than tying up police watching a camera in a car.
Have a good look at the bar graph on this page:
http://www.apple.com/safari/
I see a comparison with IE, Netscape 7.01 and Chimera 0.6.0
Hopefully this sort of thing will only increase the competition in the browser space on all platforms. We haven't see anything really new out of MS with IE for a couple of years. However Mozilla, Opera and other buddies have been bring out some good new stuff. Have to say tabbed browsing does rock and everyone who uses it falls in love pretty quick.
This sounds similar to IE on MacOS There is a little button that shrinks all the main icons at the top of the screen (eg the 60 pixel bar at the top into a slim little bar on the left hand side (18 pixels wide) and you have all the major functions still available (back-forward-refresh-stop).
Works like a charm. Microsoft should license that technology for their phones;-)
Some of this is just bad integration. Often typing in your account number will determine which branch you go to (eg corporate/enterprise, business, or home), however it should pop on the plebs screen when you finally get onto them.
It could actually be one of the 7200/7500/7600/BeigeG3DT machines. They were all in exactly the same form factor, all with the floppy drives in the same places.
See here:
http://www.apple-history.com/quickgallery.html?whe re=7600.html
I am not 100% sure but I would nearly say that there are no Apple desktops with the floppy drive below the CD ROM drive.
Supposedly accessible via the command line.
See this post:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44754&th reshold=0&commentsort=3&tid=179&mode=thread&cid=46 42715
When doing this you would have to make sure that you don't lose to many of your ADC paying members.
These members get software updates for free and is part of the 'value' they get from Apple. Admittedly they get more as well (discounts on machines, developer CD's shipped at regular intervals etc).
The JATO story is semi urban legend. The guy who actually did this posted a story on the net correcting a number of facts about the story.
Basically it is mostly correct except they were a little more controlled, it was done on train lines and the car ran into a block mine shaft that collapsed on the car.
Some parts of the story are very accurate (eg car type and color) and other bits (smashing high up on a cliff) are not. Search for google on it, you should find the 'real' story.
Some Office Virus's can propogate from MacOS to Window if they use VBA that isn't specifically tied to Windows (not many but a couple of virus's do this).
I think you will find that the Mem usage goes down, but Virtual Memory size (Add it in the Select Column in the view menu) will stay exactly the same. I think it is just a trick to free up some ram in the machine when minimised (and therefore not needed to be immediately available.
It probably won't exist on the motherboard. If you need com ports or LPT you will buy a PCI card for those.
1% of the market may need them and pay the extra, for everyone else they will be get the $2 cost saving of a motherboard without these ports.
Feel is how everything fits together, it makes it feel like a professional package.
I would have to say that the only UI thing I have ever been stumped over is the check boxes in Linux, which simply use a push up/down look, which out any indication of which is on and which is off. The check mark on the box is much better.
Now I am a seasoned computer user, I can imagine alot of the things would catch users out.
This is a discussion at an O'Reilly conference, I don't think it is going to change Apple's strategy in consideration of DRM.
I hope Apple continues down the same route that they followed with the iPOD, eg stick a big bright sticker on the box saying: "Don't Steal Music"
It is probably just as effective as all the other measures put in place.
Slashdot Mirror
A) Not sure if I said, but Work == PC Home == Mac B) None of the Dell's here at work came with an MP3 Decoder, maybe the home editions do. MS Media player I beleive decodes to wmf files but that does not help his in car MP3 player. C) Sorry I didn't have the time to do some significant statistical analysis. I go on my own experience. BTW Using your own logic your finding are flawed because your answers aren't quantified. How many people do you know where "reinstalling the OS" is the solution to there support problems?
He spent 2 hours trying to find an MP3 encoder for his computer, trying different software etc. I drop my CD into my machine and iTunes imports it into my playlist for me. Now the CPU advantage his machine has over mine was all but lost when he had to spend more than a couple of minutes trying to find MP3 software.
I find this over and over again. I organised a new iMac for my Dad, who is computer literate, but not a developer or anything like that. He picked it up in the middle of the day, had it setup, printer working and had installed MS Office. All within 30 minutes of arriving home with the computer. I might have spent an hour with my Dad fixing stuff on his computer. My sister with a PC, took longer than that just to get MS Office installed. Office on the Mac's software installation routine is this: Drag these folders to your computer, click application. I am sure you know the PC routine. Moving computers, just drag all your files and app s from one computer to the other. I did this and 1 or 2 apps prompted for license keys again, but apart from that a painless process.
I develop and do support all day on a PC, I use a mac at home because I don't want to have to spend my time fiddling with setting and pissing about. It just works.
Personally I find the fact that I have never had to rebuild my mac (my machine) from scratch has been a huge saving as I have had rebuild my PC several time (gets slow after installing crap).
The fact that I can move all my apps and preferences from my old mac to my new one in about an hour is a great saving. This includes all my prefences etc. It would take that long just to reinstall all my PC software.
These are the things that make the Mac fast for me, not how fast the CPU is every once in a while when I do some rendering.
I think comparing operating systems as a way of throwing out your first born is not correct. Eg MacOS Classic was a direct descendent of the original MacOS that launched in 1984. I am sure that there is very little or no code from the original. Win9X was built on top of DOS which I believe has a lineage older than MacOS classic. Interesting note that both MacOSX and WinNT both came from an external base (NeXT and OS2 sort of). If you want a better example IE 3.0 --> IE 4.0, Microsoft is a classic for working out the problems in the first version or two and then releasing a quality product.
Well there is this article... Remote Root Exploit in CVS http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/0 1/21/1752251&mode=thread
Posted three days ago.
Is the MS Embedded development kit available for free? I know that the next version of WinCE.net (or whatever) is based on the soon to be released Visual Studio .net 2003, which I am going to guess will not be free.
These are exceptionally good money makers here in Australia. Recently the government tightened the laws as to the tolerances given for speeding (was speed + 10% + 3km, now just +3km over the speed) to compensate for people whose spedoes might be out. Next on the money making wheel is combined red light & speed camera in one unit. That way if you speed through the red light you will get done for speeding as well as the red light.
The police here in Australia (well Victoria but I believe that all the other states use it as well) use speed camera and red light cameras. The pictures are processed automatically by computer to read your number plate and automatically send out the bill. The process is nearly entirely automated. In fact the camera operators are now private companies rather than tying up police watching a camera in a car.
Have a good look at the bar graph on this page:
http://www.apple.com/safari/
I see a comparison with IE, Netscape 7.01 and Chimera 0.6.0
Hopefully this sort of thing will only increase the competition in the browser space on all platforms. We haven't see anything really new out of MS with IE for a couple of years. However Mozilla, Opera and other buddies have been bring out some good new stuff. Have to say tabbed browsing does rock and everyone who uses it falls in love pretty quick.
This sounds similar to IE on MacOS There is a little button that shrinks all the main icons at the top of the screen (eg the 60 pixel bar at the top into a slim little bar on the left hand side (18 pixels wide) and you have all the major functions still available (back-forward-refresh-stop). Works like a charm. Microsoft should license that technology for their phones ;-)
Some of this is just bad integration. Often typing in your account number will determine which branch you go to (eg corporate/enterprise, business, or home), however it should pop on the plebs screen when you finally get onto them.
It could actually be one of the 7200/7500/7600/BeigeG3DT machines. They were all in exactly the same form factor, all with the floppy drives in the same places. See here: http://www.apple-history.com/quickgallery.html?whe re=7600.html
I am not 100% sure but I would nearly say that there are no Apple desktops with the floppy drive below the CD ROM drive.
Get any mac with firewire port, hold down 't' key (I think) and it will go into slave mode. Plug into another Mac and it will see all its discs.
Has to be one of the coolest computer peripherals in a while: http://www.charismac.com/Products/firedino/index.h tml
Firewire hub/dinosaur!
Supposedly accessible via the command line. See this post: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44754&th reshold=0&commentsort=3&tid=179&mode=thread&cid=46 42715
When doing this you would have to make sure that you don't lose to many of your ADC paying members. These members get software updates for free and is part of the 'value' they get from Apple. Admittedly they get more as well (discounts on machines, developer CD's shipped at regular intervals etc).
The JATO story is semi urban legend. The guy who actually did this posted a story on the net correcting a number of facts about the story. Basically it is mostly correct except they were a little more controlled, it was done on train lines and the car ran into a block mine shaft that collapsed on the car. Some parts of the story are very accurate (eg car type and color) and other bits (smashing high up on a cliff) are not. Search for google on it, you should find the 'real' story.
Some Office Virus's can propogate from MacOS to Window if they use VBA that isn't specifically tied to Windows (not many but a couple of virus's do this).
I think you will find that the Mem usage goes down, but Virtual Memory size (Add it in the Select Column in the view menu) will stay exactly the same. I think it is just a trick to free up some ram in the machine when minimised (and therefore not needed to be immediately available.
It probably won't exist on the motherboard. If you need com ports or LPT you will buy a PCI card for those. 1% of the market may need them and pay the extra, for everyone else they will be get the $2 cost saving of a motherboard without these ports.
There is also ThinkFree Office. Haven't used it but it has been getting good reviews: http://www.thinkfree.com/
Feel is how everything fits together, it makes it feel like a professional package. I would have to say that the only UI thing I have ever been stumped over is the check boxes in Linux, which simply use a push up/down look, which out any indication of which is on and which is off. The check mark on the box is much better. Now I am a seasoned computer user, I can imagine alot of the things would catch users out.
iChat for one, puts a menu next to the clock in the menu bar, which is one of the un-documented APIs that people are complaining about.
I had one of these, to be used as a scratch/non important junk area on a file server. The first one didn't make it through 1 format, before dieing.
This is a discussion at an O'Reilly conference, I don't think it is going to change Apple's strategy in consideration of DRM. I hope Apple continues down the same route that they followed with the iPOD, eg stick a big bright sticker on the box saying: "Don't Steal Music" It is probably just as effective as all the other measures put in place.