Very seriously, that does indeed work. A mixture of a small business loan and two credit cards can take care of all eventualities. If you had a third as a standby, you could be ready for the bad times after the movie is done and the cash has run out. It's painful (really painful, actually), but it can work.
Then again, there is some truth to the other saying that you should never make a movie with your own money.
If you really love the script and you really think it'll be fantastic, put yourself in terrible debt over it. Somehow it seems worth it in the end.
I would agree with you except that (after having tried to carry my Dell around in a carrying case twice and learning how bloody heavy the thing is), I never used it except as a not-at-my-desk-but-still-like-my-desktop machine... and it still came apart from the strain of being opened and closed every day so that the screen stopped working in less than a year. The primary function of a portable computer is that it be portable, and if it's not physically capable of withstanding that function, it's not very well-made.
Toshiba used to make really good laptops, but their newer ones you'll hear aren't meeting the same standards. Dell makes truly awful laptops (they seem to miss the point of portable completely)... Thinkpads are really truly the only non-Apple laptop I've used that really did the job right. They're small, sturdy, and they do what they need to do. If you need something powerful, you'll need a desktop too, but really the resolution, speed and energy efficiency of the Thinkpads are really quite good. Though of course, I still prefer my iBook:)
(You understand I can't pass up an opportunity like this to plug my own project. I'm sorry it's so self-serving)
I've recently 'opened' the creative guts of my animated series (including concepts, technologies, artwork etc), and am in the process of releasing content bit by bit, and it so if you're interested, you can use and modify the stuff already up there at Dustrunners.com or request new assets in the games stream on the site.
It's just getting rolling, but I'm sure there's something there that could help you...
The easiest way to learn these things is to open Keycaps in the Utilities folder (in Applications). That's the old-fashioned way to do it. Once upon a time, it used to be under the Apple menu, so everyone found it and misused it.
To do basic combinations, try things like option-e, option-i, option-u, and then hit whatever letter you want the accent to appear over. So option-e-e would give you é.
It seems like it might be tricky, but after a while it becomes second nature.
Even if you know this, you will not do it. But it helps you sometimes when you're really wiped out: nothing in your life will stay constant ever again. Pregnancy changes day to day... sometimes up, sometimes down. Usually a few of those in the same day. Kids are worse, because you want so badly to understand them...
Example: my younger daughter is now 9 months old. Two weeks ago she would sleep through the night without trouble. Now, suddenly, she wakes up at 2AM and starts screaming and crying for about 30 minutes until she decides that wow, she's tired, and promptly goes back to sleep. Now the first time around, if that had happened, it would have rattled me. Is she teething? Is she hurting somewhere? Is she insecure, spontaneously colicky, overtired, over-rested... what could it be?! Really, kids never stay the same for more than a few days. Call them phases if you like, but really it's not that clear anyway. This girl is going to cry from 2 to 2:30 every night until she stops, at which point she'll start walking --- out of the blue, mind you --- and that will quickly be followed by another set of problems.
If you try and look at parenthood as something you can understand, control, or diagnose, you will get more exhausted than you need to be. Everything will surprise you from this point on, but at the very least don't let your surprise catch you off guard.
The worst part about them as they get older is that you're always soooooo close to getting them on schedule, but they still make you miss the first few minutes of every show. Babies you expect to interfere, but by the time they're 3 you have this (ill-conceived) notion they should be structured enough to get to bed on time.
On a related note: just revisiting this gem this week... if you happen to leave your VCR near the floor with a toddler around, make sure you tell them not to stick their fingers inside. Then, when they ignore you and do it anyway, have a camera nearby to take a picture of their teary little red faces when they can't pull it back out because the flap catches their knuckles. It's awful, but funny as hell.
This may have been said already in relation to the article, but the bigger purpose of this service is to push Macs and iPods, discs being unimportant to the final product. So at least in that respect you're not being asked to pay for physical media. Liner notes, artwork, that could be delivered by a website... but again, if there isn't a jewel case in the first place, why print those at all?
The cost of the AAC distribution (and it gets funny, because the cost of distribution is only really optimized for semi-popular material... too popular and the bandwidth costs start to eat into the profit, not popular enough and the storage space starts to eat away too) would probably average out to 0.20 a track (based on the specs I built a year ago for a similar project). That leaves (theoretically, since the actual price is uncertain) 0.80 for Apple and the copyright holder(s).
The argument that 0.99 is more for a song than you pay now is possibly true, but keep in mind that the money is not all going to the music industry. Apple is paying for distribution and taking its own profit in there, so what IS the music industry left with, once that's all done? Is it more or less than what they were earning before?
I would have to say that Apple is doing this Mac-only because it can run the service without losing money, and if it's catchy enough it will draw people who were fence-sitting about iPods and iBooks straight into the Mac fold. If I could pay $0.99 or thereabouts for a high-quality song for my iPod, I would start buying music again. And it's been four years since I bought a CD.
Right now my daughter needs to watch her DVDs off my wife's iBook hooked up to the TV, all because we can't play Japanese DVDs on our North American player. And it's not like the movies are cheap, coming from Japan. But the amount of wiring that needs to be done isn't worth the effort.
Someone bought her the Fox copy of Totoro a few months ago on DVD, thinking it would be a good replacement for the older VHS she got when she turned 1. She put the DVD in the player, turned it on, and within 5 minutes she came up to me and said, "Daddy, this movie is wrong." (the English voices were godawful)
If this is true, and she can get these movies on DVD with Region 1, they had better have the original voice tracks on them.
>You say that they're marketing a small piece of the puzzle but I think that it is demonstrably a pretty large part of it and YOU'RE the proof!
Yes, but like I said before, the only people that will make the tools for Keynote at this stage are the really adventurous people or those who can't say no.
I would reverse-engineer a PowerPoint system that does much the same thing, but no one has asked for that (aside from you, but you're not a paying customer, no offence), and I already inflict enough pain on myself.
Keynote using XML does not make it a brilliantly-simple system. It just makes it a brilliantly-easier system. The presence of XML in a product does not automatically make it great. But you're right, it does make a difference. Just not as much as some would like to believe.
Let me modify my previous analogy, then. It's the difference between making a full scale model of a porcupine out of toothpicks WITH and set of instructions (and possibly glue), and making it up yourself.
Now while it's not the end of the world to have to do a bit of creative thinking to make that porcupine from scratch, if you as a company are trying to push the idea of toothpick creatures, you're gonna want to publish a set of instructions. What we've got right now is a product that says "hey, it's easy to make and it uses toothpicks, which everyone can get!", but they're marketing a small piece of the puzzle.
On the flip side, though, I've made great progress deconstructing the files and have got a decently-workable tool for one client already. But it'd be much nicer if something were written out. Thinking is hard work.
>How many American cars do you think are running around Japan?
Actually a surprising number. The other thing that is very Japanese is a sense of inadequacy. They buy American cars because they think they're better, they don't see themselves as being better at electronics, entertainment or technology... that might be why they keep trying so hard.
My wife points out that the Japanese do think they're better than Canadians (which is why they suck at hockey I guess).
I wish this were better understood by the world at large.
The second the keynote ended, I got calls from any of the Mac-user clients I've ever had asking me if I could write them tools to connect their various systems to their Keynote presentations. "Ummm, yeah..." is all I can say, though that answer can also apply to "can you make a full scale model of a porcupine out of toothpicks?"
The first tools that take advantage of the XML will be written by the most dedicated programmers, or those who don't know how to say no.
I raised that point with my wife once and she said it's not imitation, it's the Japanese desire to IMPROVE things. Electronics, cars, animation... the concept actually makes a lot of sense when you think of it not so much as copying, but more like 'creating more quality products'.
This is also apparent in Japan's (secretly) genetically-engineered vegetables, which are typically 5 times the size of their natural counterparts. A normal eggplant could feed one person, but a Japanese eggplant can feed a whole family.
Quite aside from the patent-worthiness debate, I'd say that, after reading about this everywhere I could, this is a VERY novel patent. Much more so than any patent I can remember in the past few years. The ability to change the skin of objects (like an iPod, or a cell phone or what have you) really would make a big impact on many industries. That is a far better patent than, for instance, tabbed window interfaces.
I second this, but with minor modifications. I used to run a company that specialized in a specific product. My starting that company made me an entrepreneur, whether or not the idea was good (the idea was good, my business abilities less so).
Now I run another company that is essentially re-selling the skills I and my associates built up on the first company. It's very services-driven. While technically that still falls under entrepreneurial activities, it doesn't evoke the same sense of "go out there and do something great!" so much as "bwahaha I know how to make boxes on webpages, I do I do I do!". Not that there's anything wrong with boxes on webpages. It's a very nice change of pace to be able to just do something. But the word "entrepreneur" somehow implies more than that.
However, point being (and I am living proof of this): entrepreneurs are smart people who have the desire to do well for themselves; hugely bloody rich entrepreneurs are smart people who have crafty ideas and want to do well for themselves.
People who don't get good accountants are neither, no matter how their ambitions start off.
I've looked at making a channel myself in the past few weeks, but the astonishing lack of a community of developers who would have any knowledge of what I was doing make me rethink things. I wonder if the lack of channels is in any way a subconscious boycott on behalf of Watson...
Just because something is based on getting around a technical limitation doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Examples: 1) Save. Everyone's been burned by the Damn-I-Forgot-To-Save problem at least once, but the alternative is not always a very good option. When using large files, such as graphic documents or (shudder) video files, having your work auto-save as you go without your specifically saying so would slow you down to the point in stupidity. It needs to be the user's responsibility to save their own work, because sometimes the 'flow' you're in doesn't allow for momentary delays. 2) Save locations. I've been doing this trick of late where I save everything I do to the Documents folder (used to the be the desktop, but that was even worse). Then I would sort through everything afterwards and move them to the right folders. Bad idea. I presently have close to 150 files flying about randomly in the documents folder, and I know I will likely never sort them properly. Forcing people to choose where their files go is a matter of, again, putting the responsiblity of a messy filesystem into the hands of the user. It's like with my receipts for taxes: if I didn't have those inboxes on my desk, I'd toss them all in the drawer, and get burned in an audit. You need that choice. 3) Quit. I hate explaining quit to Switchers, but again the issue of larger, more complex programs defeats the argument of "just stop the program when it's not in use". If I had to wait for Photoshop to load back into memory every time I closed the last document, played in Illustrator, and then went back to Photoshop, I would likely die. Text editors can load in 2 seconds, but computers are still not in the state where they can load ALL programs that fast.
So why not let developers put Save and Quit in the programs that need them? Because then you have a truly awful time trying to explain to users how every program works. Photoshop? Quit that one. BBEdit? It closes on its own. Inconsistency is the ultimate interface evil.
Until all computers ARE good enough to run EVERY program flawlessly, cruft needs to be around. It may seem obnoxious to those comfortably working in the can-be-done-easily zone of computing, but to those whose fields are still in the pushing-the-envelope zone, we're not done with cruft yet.
Sympatico is a fairly huge ISP in Canada. It may be hard to believe outside the country, but they're actually part of a very large company, and as such have very broad customer relations policies that prevent them from being responsive to any small requests.
As such, I'd imagine that if, when you called, you asked them to take stronger actions against those who do damage to the symaptico.ca name, their representative would say: "Huh? What's IRC? Have you plugged your modem in, sir?"
Being an artist, a mac user for years upon years, I would have to say the analogy is close, but not right. Artists will buy the best brush, fine-tune it so it's just right, and paint. They won't however, etch little drawings into it, change its overall shape, colour or function just for fun. Tweaking OS X is very much like that: you get some 3rd party tools to adjust the dock etc, but you really only completely skin your interface when you're bored out of your skull and are trying to convince yourself that what you're doing is really creative expression.
Not to knock people who do that. I just happen to know that a lot of good creative energy tends to go into things you really can't put in your portfolio with clean conscience.
I had an Intellimouse too, but the thing about it (and boy it's nice having the wheel and extra buttons) is that it creaks when I use it. It's not compact, not tough, it creaks. It's something in the plastics... I dunno. That has always been my issue with PC hardware. It just doesn't feel tough enough somehow.
I was thinking that Apple should make the button on the TiBook (and iBook for that matter) like the scroll wheel on the iPod, so you could have it detect a touch to the left side as a left click or to the right side as a right click, or, if you don't want either, a touch anywhere means just a normal click. Software-driven mouse buttons. That would be very cool.
My first-gen TiBook (which I admittedly got second-hand from a liquidating dotcom) cost, when it came out, a good $2000 less than my Dell Inspiron 8000. The TiBook is theoretically under-powered, but it easily holds its own against the top-of-the-line Dell. And what's more, the TiBook can stand up to a 3-year old's bashing and smashing, while my Dell gave me exactly 7 months of service (discounting the blue screen of death the first time I turned it on) before falling apart (hardware and software) so badly I have to run it closed plugged into a CRT all the time to avoid the godawful screen. A very expensive desktop.
Macs may not be as fast as PCs (anymore...and for how long?) but they make FAR better hardware. The reason I don't own a 2-button mouse is because Apple has yet to make one. 3rd-party hardware always feels so creaky and crumbly to me... just like the hinges on the Dell. You don't appreciate a Mac till you grab an iBook by the top of the screen and carry it into another room, just swaying, not even considering how stupid it is to do that.
Now for desktops, building your own might be a better idea, but for latops, no one beats Apple. There are no other small-form-factor power laptops around.
(the Dell's fan is whirring today which is why I'm so sour on PCs right now)
I can't verify this anymore, but I recall that when I installed OS X 10.1 on my old iBook without a DVD-R, it wouldn't install iDVD at all. But the same disc installing on my Quicksilver with the Superdrive installed iDVD without any trouble at all. And since Apple bundles the hardware in the computers by default, that kind of checking is essentially only tying the software to the burner, not to the OS or he computer. In effect, iDVD is simply "part of" the Superdrive in Apple machines, so screwing with either the hardware or the software is dubious.
Legality of it all? Not sure. But they've taken care to distribute things properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Very seriously, that does indeed work. A mixture of a small business loan and two credit cards can take care of all eventualities. If you had a third as a standby, you could be ready for the bad times after the movie is done and the cash has run out. It's painful (really painful, actually), but it can work.
Then again, there is some truth to the other saying that you should never make a movie with your own money.
If you really love the script and you really think it'll be fantastic, put yourself in terrible debt over it. Somehow it seems worth it in the end.
I would agree with you except that (after having tried to carry my Dell around in a carrying case twice and learning how bloody heavy the thing is), I never used it except as a not-at-my-desk-but-still-like-my-desktop machine... and it still came apart from the strain of being opened and closed every day so that the screen stopped working in less than a year.
The primary function of a portable computer is that it be portable, and if it's not physically capable of withstanding that function, it's not very well-made.
Toshiba used to make really good laptops, but their newer ones you'll hear aren't meeting the same standards. Dell makes truly awful laptops (they seem to miss the point of portable completely)... :)
Thinkpads are really truly the only non-Apple laptop I've used that really did the job right. They're small, sturdy, and they do what they need to do. If you need something powerful, you'll need a desktop too, but really the resolution, speed and energy efficiency of the Thinkpads are really quite good.
Though of course, I still prefer my iBook
I've recently 'opened' the creative guts of my animated series (including concepts, technologies, artwork etc), and am in the process of releasing content bit by bit, and it so if you're interested, you can use and modify the stuff already up there at Dustrunners.com or request new assets in the games stream on the site.
It's just getting rolling, but I'm sure there's something there that could help you...
To do basic combinations, try things like option-e, option-i, option-u, and then hit whatever letter you want the accent to appear over. So option-e-e would give you é.
It seems like it might be tricky, but after a while it becomes second nature.
Sometimes known as "time to upgrade to a PVR" tools.
Not that I have ulterior motives...
Even if you know this, you will not do it. But it helps you sometimes when you're really wiped out: nothing in your life will stay constant ever again. Pregnancy changes day to day... sometimes up, sometimes down. Usually a few of those in the same day. Kids are worse, because you want so badly to understand them...
Example: my younger daughter is now 9 months old. Two weeks ago she would sleep through the night without trouble. Now, suddenly, she wakes up at 2AM and starts screaming and crying for about 30 minutes until she decides that wow, she's tired, and promptly goes back to sleep.
Now the first time around, if that had happened, it would have rattled me. Is she teething? Is she hurting somewhere? Is she insecure, spontaneously colicky, overtired, over-rested... what could it be?! Really, kids never stay the same for more than a few days. Call them phases if you like, but really it's not that clear anyway. This girl is going to cry from 2 to 2:30 every night until she stops, at which point she'll start walking --- out of the blue, mind you --- and that will quickly be followed by another set of problems.
If you try and look at parenthood as something you can understand, control, or diagnose, you will get more exhausted than you need to be. Everything will surprise you from this point on, but at the very least don't let your surprise catch you off guard.
The worst part about them as they get older is that you're always soooooo close to getting them on schedule, but they still make you miss the first few minutes of every show. Babies you expect to interfere, but by the time they're 3 you have this (ill-conceived) notion they should be structured enough to get to bed on time.
On a related note: just revisiting this gem this week... if you happen to leave your VCR near the floor with a toddler around, make sure you tell them not to stick their fingers inside. Then, when they ignore you and do it anyway, have a camera nearby to take a picture of their teary little red faces when they can't pull it back out because the flap catches their knuckles. It's awful, but funny as hell.
I think it should be noted that with toddlers, this rule is often abandoned when you're out of the room.
This may have been said already in relation to the article, but the bigger purpose of this service is to push Macs and iPods, discs being unimportant to the final product. So at least in that respect you're not being asked to pay for physical media. Liner notes, artwork, that could be delivered by a website... but again, if there isn't a jewel case in the first place, why print those at all?
The cost of the AAC distribution (and it gets funny, because the cost of distribution is only really optimized for semi-popular material... too popular and the bandwidth costs start to eat into the profit, not popular enough and the storage space starts to eat away too) would probably average out to 0.20 a track (based on the specs I built a year ago for a similar project). That leaves (theoretically, since the actual price is uncertain) 0.80 for Apple and the copyright holder(s).
The argument that 0.99 is more for a song than you pay now is possibly true, but keep in mind that the money is not all going to the music industry. Apple is paying for distribution and taking its own profit in there, so what IS the music industry left with, once that's all done? Is it more or less than what they were earning before?
I would have to say that Apple is doing this Mac-only because it can run the service without losing money, and if it's catchy enough it will draw people who were fence-sitting about iPods and iBooks straight into the Mac fold. If I could pay $0.99 or thereabouts for a high-quality song for my iPod, I would start buying music again. And it's been four years since I bought a CD.
Right now my daughter needs to watch her DVDs off my wife's iBook hooked up to the TV, all because we can't play Japanese DVDs on our North American player. And it's not like the movies are cheap, coming from Japan. But the amount of wiring that needs to be done isn't worth the effort.
Someone bought her the Fox copy of Totoro a few months ago on DVD, thinking it would be a good replacement for the older VHS she got when she turned 1. She put the DVD in the player, turned it on, and within 5 minutes she came up to me and said, "Daddy, this movie is wrong." (the English voices were godawful)
If this is true, and she can get these movies on DVD with Region 1, they had better have the original voice tracks on them.
>You say that they're marketing a small piece of the puzzle but I think that it is demonstrably a pretty large part of it and YOU'RE the proof!
Yes, but like I said before, the only people that will make the tools for Keynote at this stage are the really adventurous people or those who can't say no.
I would reverse-engineer a PowerPoint system that does much the same thing, but no one has asked for that (aside from you, but you're not a paying customer, no offence), and I already inflict enough pain on myself.
Keynote using XML does not make it a brilliantly-simple system. It just makes it a brilliantly-easier system. The presence of XML in a product does not automatically make it great. But you're right, it does make a difference. Just not as much as some would like to believe.
Let me modify my previous analogy, then. It's the difference between making a full scale model of a porcupine out of toothpicks WITH and set of instructions (and possibly glue), and making it up yourself.
Now while it's not the end of the world to have to do a bit of creative thinking to make that porcupine from scratch, if you as a company are trying to push the idea of toothpick creatures, you're gonna want to publish a set of instructions. What we've got right now is a product that says "hey, it's easy to make and it uses toothpicks, which everyone can get!", but they're marketing a small piece of the puzzle.
On the flip side, though, I've made great progress deconstructing the files and have got a decently-workable tool for one client already. But it'd be much nicer if something were written out. Thinking is hard work.
>How many American cars do you think are running around Japan?
Actually a surprising number. The other thing that is very Japanese is a sense of inadequacy. They buy American cars because they think they're better, they don't see themselves as being better at electronics, entertainment or technology... that might be why they keep trying so hard.
My wife points out that the Japanese do think they're better than Canadians (which is why they suck at hockey I guess).
I wish this were better understood by the world at large.
The second the keynote ended, I got calls from any of the Mac-user clients I've ever had asking me if I could write them tools to connect their various systems to their Keynote presentations. "Ummm, yeah..." is all I can say, though that answer can also apply to "can you make a full scale model of a porcupine out of toothpicks?"
The first tools that take advantage of the XML will be written by the most dedicated programmers, or those who don't know how to say no.
I raised that point with my wife once and she said it's not imitation, it's the Japanese desire to IMPROVE things. Electronics, cars, animation... the concept actually makes a lot of sense when you think of it not so much as copying, but more like 'creating more quality products'.
This is also apparent in Japan's (secretly) genetically-engineered vegetables, which are typically 5 times the size of their natural counterparts. A normal eggplant could feed one person, but a Japanese eggplant can feed a whole family.
Find good things, increase their worth.
Quite aside from the patent-worthiness debate, I'd say that, after reading about this everywhere I could, this is a VERY novel patent. Much more so than any patent I can remember in the past few years. The ability to change the skin of objects (like an iPod, or a cell phone or what have you) really would make a big impact on many industries. That is a far better patent than, for instance, tabbed window interfaces.
I second this, but with minor modifications.
I used to run a company that specialized in a specific product. My starting that company made me an entrepreneur, whether or not the idea was good (the idea was good, my business abilities less so).
Now I run another company that is essentially re-selling the skills I and my associates built up on the first company. It's very services-driven. While technically that still falls under entrepreneurial activities, it doesn't evoke the same sense of "go out there and do something great!" so much as "bwahaha I know how to make boxes on webpages, I do I do I do!". Not that there's anything wrong with boxes on webpages. It's a very nice change of pace to be able to just do something. But the word "entrepreneur" somehow implies more than that.
However, point being (and I am living proof of this): entrepreneurs are smart people who have the desire to do well for themselves; hugely bloody rich entrepreneurs are smart people who have crafty ideas and want to do well for themselves.
People who don't get good accountants are neither, no matter how their ambitions start off.
I've looked at making a channel myself in the past few weeks, but the astonishing lack of a community of developers who would have any knowledge of what I was doing make me rethink things. I wonder if the lack of channels is in any way a subconscious boycott on behalf of Watson...
Just because something is based on getting around a technical limitation doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Examples:
1) Save. Everyone's been burned by the Damn-I-Forgot-To-Save problem at least once, but the alternative is not always a very good option. When using large files, such as graphic documents or (shudder) video files, having your work auto-save as you go without your specifically saying so would slow you down to the point in stupidity. It needs to be the user's responsibility to save their own work, because sometimes the 'flow' you're in doesn't allow for momentary delays.
2) Save locations. I've been doing this trick of late where I save everything I do to the Documents folder (used to the be the desktop, but that was even worse). Then I would sort through everything afterwards and move them to the right folders. Bad idea. I presently have close to 150 files flying about randomly in the documents folder, and I know I will likely never sort them properly. Forcing people to choose where their files go is a matter of, again, putting the responsiblity of a messy filesystem into the hands of the user. It's like with my receipts for taxes: if I didn't have those inboxes on my desk, I'd toss them all in the drawer, and get burned in an audit. You need that choice.
3) Quit. I hate explaining quit to Switchers, but again the issue of larger, more complex programs defeats the argument of "just stop the program when it's not in use". If I had to wait for Photoshop to load back into memory every time I closed the last document, played in Illustrator, and then went back to Photoshop, I would likely die. Text editors can load in 2 seconds, but computers are still not in the state where they can load ALL programs that fast.
So why not let developers put Save and Quit in the programs that need them? Because then you have a truly awful time trying to explain to users how every program works. Photoshop? Quit that one. BBEdit? It closes on its own. Inconsistency is the ultimate interface evil.
Until all computers ARE good enough to run EVERY program flawlessly, cruft needs to be around. It may seem obnoxious to those comfortably working in the can-be-done-easily zone of computing, but to those whose fields are still in the pushing-the-envelope zone, we're not done with cruft yet.
Sympatico is a fairly huge ISP in Canada. It may be hard to believe outside the country, but they're actually part of a very large company, and as such have very broad customer relations policies that prevent them from being responsive to any small requests.
As such, I'd imagine that if, when you called, you asked them to take stronger actions against those who do damage to the symaptico.ca name, their representative would say: "Huh? What's IRC? Have you plugged your modem in, sir?"
Being an artist, a mac user for years upon years, I would have to say the analogy is close, but not right. Artists will buy the best brush, fine-tune it so it's just right, and paint. They won't however, etch little drawings into it, change its overall shape, colour or function just for fun. Tweaking OS X is very much like that: you get some 3rd party tools to adjust the dock etc, but you really only completely skin your interface when you're bored out of your skull and are trying to convince yourself that what you're doing is really creative expression.
Not to knock people who do that. I just happen to know that a lot of good creative energy tends to go into things you really can't put in your portfolio with clean conscience.
I had an Intellimouse too, but the thing about it (and boy it's nice having the wheel and extra buttons) is that it creaks when I use it. It's not compact, not tough, it creaks. It's something in the plastics... I dunno. That has always been my issue with PC hardware. It just doesn't feel tough enough somehow.
I was thinking that Apple should make the button on the TiBook (and iBook for that matter) like the scroll wheel on the iPod, so you could have it detect a touch to the left side as a left click or to the right side as a right click, or, if you don't want either, a touch anywhere means just a normal click. Software-driven mouse buttons. That would be very cool.
Tactile response aside.
My first-gen TiBook (which I admittedly got second-hand from a liquidating dotcom) cost, when it came out, a good $2000 less than my Dell Inspiron 8000. The TiBook is theoretically under-powered, but it easily holds its own against the top-of-the-line Dell. And what's more, the TiBook can stand up to a 3-year old's bashing and smashing, while my Dell gave me exactly 7 months of service (discounting the blue screen of death the first time I turned it on) before falling apart (hardware and software) so badly I have to run it closed plugged into a CRT all the time to avoid the godawful screen. A very expensive desktop.
Macs may not be as fast as PCs (anymore...and for how long?) but they make FAR better hardware. The reason I don't own a 2-button mouse is because Apple has yet to make one. 3rd-party hardware always feels so creaky and crumbly to me... just like the hinges on the Dell. You don't appreciate a Mac till you grab an iBook by the top of the screen and carry it into another room, just swaying, not even considering how stupid it is to do that.
Now for desktops, building your own might be a better idea, but for latops, no one beats Apple. There are no other small-form-factor power laptops around.
(the Dell's fan is whirring today which is why I'm so sour on PCs right now)
I can't verify this anymore, but I recall that when I installed OS X 10.1 on my old iBook without a DVD-R, it wouldn't install iDVD at all. But the same disc installing on my Quicksilver with the Superdrive installed iDVD without any trouble at all. And since Apple bundles the hardware in the computers by default, that kind of checking is essentially only tying the software to the burner, not to the OS or he computer. In effect, iDVD is simply "part of" the Superdrive in Apple machines, so screwing with either the hardware or the software is dubious.
Legality of it all? Not sure. But they've taken care to distribute things properly.