Apple had a complete telephone integrated into my old Performa 6300CD circa ~1995 -- auto-answer, dial from directory, answering machine, et al....the whole enchilada.
I'm sure that was built-in functionality prior to that model too, FWIW.
Microsoft's chief innovation was how to translate IBM's monopoly to the PeeCee industry.
Merely a point of reference: All the gotchas you list were also present for me in the first tabbed Mozilla release.:-)
v.62, however, isn't released yet, so there's some degree of hope that the Safari implementation of tabs will be rid of all this bugs before the (rest of the) public sees them.
"I don't think Apple is going anywhere because of its high costs
and its inability to produce machines with superior value and/or price."
Given the insane rush to the bottom of the barrel by the entire PC hardware
industry, Apple has done surprising things to stay innovative and at the
top of the game in price, features and "quality".
Price: At the low end, on any given day of the week, Apple's machines cost no more
than $100 more than the equivalent Dell junk-box, at best Apple will best
their price by $100.
Features: At the integration level, you're guaranteed to have the best interconnectivity with an Apple computer. Apple packages the best USB and Firewire support available. With expandability options that run from ATA/133 and 4xAGP to Gigabit and Wireless Ethernet, you're unlikely to find something in the real world you can't connect to.
"Quality": Clearly, on a hardware basis, Apple offers more...
PowerMac gives you a case design to put all other case designs to shame.
iMac offers form and function simply not available elsewhere in Apple's
product line or anyone else's.
PowerBook and iBook hit the high and low end of the laptop market
equally hard with light, efficient, feature-rich designs.
To make the point, in todays market, there's only one other way to
offer "superior value and/or price", and that happens to lead directly to
your disappearance from the market a la Compaq,
Packard Bell, Acer, Gateway, etc.
From what we can
tell, there's not going to be much of a business left for whoever is
left standing. There's no support for the already-razor-thin profit margins
of the PeeCee maker.
You'll have to forgive Apple from taking the road less-traveled for their customers' sake!
In a nutshell, this article is saying, "Waaa! It's hard to be a real programmer!!"
Who didn't already know that?
For an anecdotal refutation, there are more interface tweaks available than I have time to explore.
Specifically regarding themes/schemes/skins/etc: It's a little bit of a bummer that Apple has never sanctioned them, but I can say after twiddling with WinAmp over on the dark side, that most interface remakes are absolute crap anyway. It's a perfectly windows-like waste of time sorting through the thousands of available skins to find the one skin that's an actual improvement to the original.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
In case you thought it was a serious article, please peruse your friendly Mac OS file archives.
About a year ago or more, I saw a show I believe was on PBS about alternative education. It covered from charter schools, to the Edison company to on-line universities and everything in between.
Included in the discussion was a Prof. from MIT talking about the "Open Sourcing" of their curriculum.
The way they layed it out at the time was fairly clear: This is not to be an online university, it is an open set of classes that a professor might use to improve or replace his existing class with.
From that view it seems they're coming along fairly well.
If you would like to contribute to the death of the RIAA as we know it, please go here:
http://www.iuma.com/
and
http://www.earbuzz.com/
I listen to all kinds of stuff from IUMA from the classical "Mechanical Piano" where top modern pianists reprise Beethoven, Motzart and Schubert greats, to the progressive rock My Fine Friend Phil album.
I even bought My Freind Phil from earbuzz.com I thought it was so good.
The more support like this that artists get, the less likely they will want/need to sell out to an RIAA affiliated company.
The fewer good artists they have the better off we all are.
From the point of view of being responsible for our own actions, then the answer is clear:
If you can look inside the software (i.e. source) and compile it yourself, then you've got everything you need to be as sure as any human can be that the software is safe - whatever that may mean to you as an individual.
If, as a company, you have to deprive your customer's of this capability in order to keep your business model, then you also take the responsibility that your software will be safe - whatever that may mean to your individual customers.
There cannot and should not be *nobody* responsible.
There's an incredible amount of dark fiber strung all across the USA. (No idea of elsewhere, but Europe seems to be well wired.) Sunk cost. A glut.
(See: Qwest, Global Crossing, Level 3, PSINet, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, SBC, Bell South, Williams, Teleglobe and Cable & Wireless)
That said, there are a huge number of people wired to the internet right now via SOME method. There are quite a few hooked up via some broadband method. There's very obviously a huge potential consumer market here for broadband. If those owners of dark fiber ever want to recoup said costs they have got to figure out a way to GET US TO USE IT.
See:
www.cwt.vt.edu
www.its.bldrdoc.gov/meetings/art/art00/slides00/ bo s/bos_s.pdf
www.business2.com/webguide/0,1660,65069,FF.html
So why isn't this happening with today's existing infrastructure?
See: lame duck ILEC's and greedy-fucker media conglomerates.
I hope you can say either that you're a hard core crack addict and that's why you wronte all that nonsense, or that you do no have the benefit of any real perspective of the world pre-Microsoft-monopoly.
I don't claim to be an old-timer by any stretch, but my computing days started on an Atari 800 in the early 1980's. Back then our computers didn't crash. You could buy tons of games for every platform EXECPT the PC. (Yes my friend, there used to be alternativES (sic) to the PC) and Microsoft actually was a cross-platform oriented software copmany (see Microsoft Basic).
Thanks largely to IBM and Compaq, Microsoft's worm-like leader got a pretty easy break into an industry thet was hot with competition.
Riding on the coattails of IBM's monopoly of corporate IT mindshare, Microsoft was largely shielded from comptition in the medium- and large-business marketplace.
(Please compare with the competition among the other platform vendors. Criminy, they were still selling the CONCEPT of a personal computer in the office, when MSFT could easily tread in on all of IBM's business relationships from THEIR monopoly.
And WTF kind of math are you trying to use in your Windows Tax analogy?
Are you telling me you've got to give money to Microsoft in order to save money on your process?
Are you telling me that leaving Windows off your computers wouldn't save you the license fee?
Are you telling me that a one time proces refinment to allow bolting in a blank HD instead of one with Windows cost more that the reoccurring cost paying for Windows licenses you don't need or want?
You're contradicting basic economics. Your old company may have been doing this, but please don't try to pursuade anyone else it's a good idea.
(e.g. If you pay for only 100 Windows licences that your customers don't want and assue you pay $40 to MSFT per license, that's $4000 wasted. Take that $4000 and reengineer your process to allow for blank-drive sytems, tehn every time you sell a blank drive system after that 100th machine it's money in the bank and *more satisfied* customers.)
MS-Office now lists for OVER $450 dollars! The individual pieces of Office (that you mention) are priced in kind with Office - that is to say MORE expensive than they used to be.
The price is going up.
(You only get cheaper prices by getting it bundled by an OEM with your new computer. The upgrade? How does that fit the discussion unless you're trying to distract from the real point that M$FT is consistently increasing their prices as their competitions disappears?)
This is one thing that pisses me off about the "conservative" politico's and those that claim to identify with them...
The ONLY "last mile" solution EVER built (in the U.S. anyway) was 100% publicly/government financed because no other private or public institution had the balls to do it.
This remains true to this day. Qwest, AT&T, SBC, Verizon, et al., all have no balls. They only exist to continue suckling at their monopoly's teat under the protection of the FCC. Now that the GOP controls the FCC, FTC and DOJ, their monopolies are even safer.
AT&T (any others?) may be let off a little on this as they're apparently trying to bridge the gap a little with their cable and wireless properties, but it's still a hodgepodge, far-from-100%-coverage situation.
Perhaps one day the brain-dead conservatism in the U.S today will pass and we can once again persue enlightened, progressive public policy. The private sector is NOT the answer to every question.
(FWIW, I am more conservative than liberal, but wouldn't associate with any "conservative" U.S. politician on my worst day. The New Democrats are brain-dead in the same respects, BTW.)
Scientists and Engineers largely have benefitted from the number-crunching capability and related software (Sci & Eng software). None of this relates to their bitch that 90% of all the crap that's been developedbeyond that is utter trash.
Can you say Windows? At least the MacOS was Engineered!
How many software titles out there on Tucows are worth a damn? Most only reinvent what came before it! That's THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of packages! What's that amount to in man-years?
Put this argument into another perspective:
How many boxes out there in the REAL WORLD utilize anything approaching the full capability of modern computing hardware?
Sci & Eng software. Photo & Movie editing. Database serving. Ummm.... The list begins to dry up not too long after this.
This is an infinitesimally small percentage of boxes!
This isn't true because CS has been cranking out HUGELY USEFUL app's.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple had a complete telephone integrated into my old Performa 6300CD circa ~1995 -- auto-answer, dial from directory, answering machine, et al....the whole enchilada.
I'm sure that was built-in functionality prior to that model too, FWIW.
Microsoft's chief innovation was how to translate IBM's monopoly to the PeeCee industry.
That's not really the open source model...
*The* open source model (if we can phrase it in a nutshell) is that coders create source code and give it out for free.
The "support for profit" model is merely an adjunct to the open source model.
Red Hat and a few other have made a success out of it, some others have not. This makes no direct reflection on open source at all.
Have fun!
-Matt
Merely a point of reference: All the gotchas you list were also present for me in the first tabbed Mozilla release. :-)
v.62, however, isn't released yet, so there's some degree of hope that the Safari implementation of tabs will be rid of all this bugs before the (rest of the) public sees them.
Your indifference and others who share it are the very reason the planet is populated with shitty Windows based computers.
Go fly a kite if you don't care.
I think the point was that this kind of relationship being established between the enforcer and the enforcee can easily lead to corruption.
Not that this was the end of security issue reporting as we know it.
And I agree. What do we call it when the Police have any kind of "relationship" with the criminals?
Corruption.
Given the insane rush to the bottom of the barrel by the entire PC hardware industry, Apple has done surprising things to stay innovative and at the top of the game in price, features and "quality".
Price: At the low end, on any given day of the week, Apple's machines cost no more than $100 more than the equivalent Dell junk-box, at best Apple will best their price by $100.
Features: At the integration level, you're guaranteed to have the best interconnectivity with an Apple computer. Apple packages the best USB and Firewire support available. With expandability options that run from ATA/133 and 4xAGP to Gigabit and Wireless Ethernet, you're unlikely to find something in the real world you can't connect to.
"Quality": Clearly, on a hardware basis, Apple offers more...
To make the point, in todays market, there's only one other way to offer "superior value and/or price", and that happens to lead directly to your disappearance from the market a la Compaq, Packard Bell, Acer, Gateway, etc.
From what we can tell, there's not going to be much of a business left for whoever is left standing. There's no support for the already-razor-thin profit margins of the PeeCee maker.
You'll have to forgive Apple from taking the road less-traveled for their customers' sake!
In a nutshell, this article is saying, "Waaa! It's hard to be a real programmer!!"
Who didn't already know that?
For an anecdotal refutation, there are more interface tweaks available than I have time to explore.
Specifically regarding themes/schemes/skins/etc: It's a little bit of a bummer that Apple has never sanctioned them, but I can say after twiddling with WinAmp over on the dark side, that most interface remakes are absolute crap anyway. It's a perfectly windows-like waste of time sorting through the thousands of available skins to find the one skin that's an actual improvement to the original.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
In case you thought it was a serious article, please peruse your friendly Mac OS file archives.
Here are some places to start:
MacUpdate
Apple
Mac OS X Apps
Stepwise
OSX Page
Versiontracker
About a year ago or more, I saw a show I believe was on PBS about alternative education. It covered from charter schools, to the Edison company to on-line universities and everything in between.
Included in the discussion was a Prof. from MIT talking about the "Open Sourcing" of their curriculum.
The way they layed it out at the time was fairly clear: This is not to be an online university, it is an open set of classes that a professor might use to improve or replace his existing class with.
From that view it seems they're coming along fairly well.
B.S., and I can't believe this was modded to 5.
You give someone physical access to your shit and it's not secure. Period.
The answer to your answer is Firewire.
Much faster.
No "host" at all.
Unfortunately we don't live in a "best product wins" kind of world, we live in a Microsoft world.
Ergo: No Firewire PDA's or cellphones
If a piece of software is written in C++, then C++ happens to be a feature of that software.
Now machine language could not be considered a feature, as that is what is *really* the true nature of the program.
Get it?
If you would like to contribute to the death of the RIAA as we know it, please go here:
http://www.iuma.com/
and
http://www.earbuzz.com/
I listen to all kinds of stuff from IUMA from the classical "Mechanical Piano" where top modern pianists reprise Beethoven, Motzart and Schubert greats, to the progressive rock My Fine Friend Phil album.
I even bought My Freind Phil from earbuzz.com I thought it was so good.
The more support like this that artists get, the less likely they will want/need to sell out to an RIAA affiliated company.
The fewer good artists they have the better off we all are.
From the point of view of being responsible for our own actions, then the answer is clear:
If you can look inside the software (i.e. source) and compile it yourself, then you've got everything you need to be as sure as any human can be that the software is safe - whatever that may mean to you as an individual.
If, as a company, you have to deprive your customer's of this capability in order to keep your business model, then you also take the responsibility that your software will be safe - whatever that may mean to your individual customers.
There cannot and should not be *nobody* responsible.
It's beyond foolish to think that governments represent their people in any significant way.
Certainly here in the 'States at least.
Some reading material from our friends at google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gun+deaths+p er+capita):
A C: www.uagv.org/com091898.html+gun+deaths+per+capita& hl=en
a sp ?li=AMN&ArticleKey=6166
http://www.guncite.com/cnngunde.html
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/fafacts.htm
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:-mDTgr9H-u
http://www.asiamedicinenet.com/script/main/Art.
Bullshit.
/ bo s/bos_s.pdf
There's an incredible amount of dark fiber strung all across the USA. (No idea of elsewhere, but Europe seems to be well wired.) Sunk cost. A glut.
(See: Qwest, Global Crossing, Level 3, PSINet, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, SBC, Bell South, Williams, Teleglobe and Cable & Wireless)
That said, there are a huge number of people wired to the internet right now via SOME method. There are quite a few hooked up via some broadband method. There's very obviously a huge potential consumer market here for broadband. If those owners of dark fiber ever want to recoup said costs they have got to figure out a way to GET US TO USE IT.
See:
www.cwt.vt.edu
www.its.bldrdoc.gov/meetings/art/art00/slides00
www.business2.com/webguide/0,1660,65069,FF.html
So why isn't this happening with today's existing infrastructure?
See: lame duck ILEC's and greedy-fucker media conglomerates.
I hope you can say either that you're a hard core crack addict and that's why you wronte all that nonsense, or that you do no have the benefit of any real perspective of the world pre-Microsoft-monopoly.
I don't claim to be an old-timer by any stretch, but my computing days started on an Atari 800 in the early 1980's. Back then our computers didn't crash. You could buy tons of games for every platform EXECPT the PC. (Yes my friend, there used to be alternativES (sic) to the PC) and Microsoft actually was a cross-platform oriented software copmany (see Microsoft Basic).
Thanks largely to IBM and Compaq, Microsoft's worm-like leader got a pretty easy break into an industry thet was hot with competition.
Riding on the coattails of IBM's monopoly of corporate IT mindshare, Microsoft was largely shielded from comptition in the medium- and large-business marketplace.
(Please compare with the competition among the other platform vendors. Criminy, they were still selling the CONCEPT of a personal computer in the office, when MSFT could easily tread in on all of IBM's business relationships from THEIR monopoly.
And WTF kind of math are you trying to use in your Windows Tax analogy?
Are you telling me you've got to give money to Microsoft in order to save money on your process?
Are you telling me that leaving Windows off your computers wouldn't save you the license fee?
Are you telling me that a one time proces refinment to allow bolting in a blank HD instead of one with Windows cost more that the reoccurring cost paying for Windows licenses you don't need or want?
You're contradicting basic economics. Your old company may have been doing this, but please don't try to pursuade anyone else it's a good idea.
(e.g. If you pay for only 100 Windows licences that your customers don't want and assue you pay $40 to MSFT per license, that's $4000 wasted. Take that $4000 and reengineer your process to allow for blank-drive sytems, tehn every time you sell a blank drive system after that 100th machine it's money in the bank and *more satisfied* customers.)
Not much louder than a normal speaking voice really:
h tm
http://www.shpna.org/caltrain/caltdbexmpl.htm
Comparable to a premium-brand gas generator:
http://www.hondapowerequipment.com/genecoframe.
Noise isn't really the point of this anyway...there's still going to be plenty of moving parts in a generator....no?
"Gouging can only happen when there's a monopoly"
Gouging is only illegal when there's a monopoly.
(And then - likely - only when it's an illegal monopoly. Indeed, gouging may make it an illegal monopoly.)
http://www.aro.com/
Ultima lost my interest after III.
Wrong!
MS-Office now lists for OVER $450 dollars! The individual pieces of Office (that you mention) are priced in kind with Office - that is to say MORE expensive than they used to be.
The price is going up.
(You only get cheaper prices by getting it bundled by an OEM with your new computer. The upgrade? How does that fit the discussion unless you're trying to distract from the real point that M$FT is consistently increasing their prices as their competitions disappears?)
This is one thing that pisses me off about the "conservative" politico's and those that claim to identify with them...
The ONLY "last mile" solution EVER built (in the U.S. anyway) was 100% publicly/government financed because no other private or public institution had the balls to do it.
This remains true to this day. Qwest, AT&T, SBC, Verizon, et al., all have no balls. They only exist to continue suckling at their monopoly's teat under the protection of the FCC. Now that the GOP controls the FCC, FTC and DOJ, their monopolies are even safer.
AT&T (any others?) may be let off a little on this as they're apparently trying to bridge the gap a little with their cable and wireless properties, but it's still a hodgepodge, far-from-100%-coverage situation.
Perhaps one day the brain-dead conservatism in the U.S today will pass and we can once again persue enlightened, progressive public policy. The private sector is NOT the answer to every question.
(FWIW, I am more conservative than liberal, but wouldn't associate with any "conservative" U.S. politician on my worst day. The New Democrats are brain-dead in the same respects, BTW.)
Enjoy!
Scientists and Engineers largely have benefitted from the number-crunching capability and related software (Sci & Eng software). None of this relates to their bitch that 90% of all the crap that's been developedbeyond that is utter trash.
Can you say Windows? At least the MacOS was Engineered!
How many software titles out there on Tucows are worth a damn? Most only reinvent what came before it! That's THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of packages! What's that amount to in man-years?
Put this argument into another perspective:
How many boxes out there in the REAL WORLD utilize anything approaching the full capability of modern computing hardware?
Sci & Eng software. Photo & Movie editing. Database serving. Ummm.... The list begins to dry up not too long after this.
This is an infinitesimally small percentage of boxes!
This isn't true because CS has been cranking out HUGELY USEFUL app's.
Anyway...
Methinks this is a vaporous counterstrike to the vaporous Xbox.
Methinks the Xbox vapor is cutting a little into PS2 sales.
May M$FT die.
ILEC's do suck. CLEC's may or may not suck.
We do know that ILEC's suck(*).
Now, that said:
All the bitching about what the ILEC's charge the CLEC's for their copper? Unfounded.
If that cost was such a huge burden, why aren't these CLEC's stretching their own last mile solution?
(*) I've been in telecom (WAN services) working for various carriers for 5+years so have that much anecdotal evidence to support this.