There is still a lot of fraud, though. It comes the opposite way around: the fraudster tricks granny into wiring him some money. Whoops! It really is non-revokable, so granny's money is gone. In recent years there are signs and stickers warning about this at most ATMs.
(Still, I think it is clearly better than the reverse case. Just pointing out that fraud will find a way.)
especially since 'solid state drive' is about the most nebulous possible term, and, taken unambiguously, only means 'not some fucking retarded mechanical contraption'
What a fucking tool. SSDs have *already* replaced HDDs, in all desktops and notebooks, for every single person I know who isn't retarded or in some weird financial hardship situation. It has *ALREADY* happened. Even fucking TELEGRAMS have not been TOTALLY replaced. Henry Newman, you are a cunt and a retard. Please hang yourself.
I have experience with lots and lots of mice, because for several years I went on a tear of buying a new mounse every couple months looking for one that didn't suck.
I finally settled down on two:
1.) Logitec MX Revolution "desktop mouse" (by which they mean non-changeable battery that needs charging cradle).
2.) Logitec VX Nano laptop mouse.
Note that on the Mac, these mice come with software that is not only the very worst mouse driver ever produced by humans, but is some of the worst software ever made, period. It will crash your whole Mac (kernel panics), and break OS upgrades in a grey-screen-of-infinity (google "logitech unsanity").
That made me really try my hardest not to buy them, but in the end I think the MX Revolution is the best mouse HARDWARE yet made. You need a third party shareware driver; I use Steermouse.
Pros of proprietary: 1) Instantaneous connection; no pairing and weird unpairing. 2) Available mice are better. 3) Better battery life (in my unscientific testing with a few mice of each type). 4) The fucking mouse doesn't stop working from time to time for no reason. 5) The newest smallest dongles are so small you can still slide your notebook into a sleeve case. 6) No jiggle-jiggle-wait dance while your mouse rouses itself from its battery-saving slumber, as with Bluetooth.
Cons: A) Lose the itty-bitty dongle and your mouse is useless. B) Takes a USB port. C) It's proprietary.
Apple, of course, has a funny history with mice: after basically introducing the mouse the the general computer user, they then proceeded to stick with the retard-oriented one-button mouse for years and years, and also designed some of the very worst mouse hardware in human history (perfectly round hockey puck iMac mouse).
Their latest offerings still suck horrifically in my opinion; I have many wired and wireless "Mighty Mouse" turds, but wouldn't every really use one.
I don't like making myself a Logitech customer, mainly because their software is so fucking bad that somebody should have to do a few weekends in jail for it, but the combo of their best mice with somebody else's driver is the best thing going on the Mac, I think.
Two things that I am still looking for:
a) Fucking charge the fucking mouse with a standard fucking USB cable please (mini-USB is fine).
b) Fucking put a vaginal USB port on the ass-end of the penile one, making it a little one port USB hub that is every bit as tiny as the current smallest dongles, so that we don't need to give up a USB port.
c) The Mighty Mouse does do a good job of scrolling in all directions, not just up and down. The Logitechs can do that too, but they have a tilt-wheel kinda awkward going left and right.
Bonus Note: The Logitech MX Revolution has a cool feature whereby if you flick the scroll-wheel hard, it disengages the resistance and really flies, scrolling through many many pages (it scrolls for like 7 seconds or so). Move it normally, and it operates normally. Press it and it is button 3 like a normal mouse.
This is really cool, and you will use it all the time once used to it; flick hard, scroll scroll scroll, and then tap the wheel gently to stop it. Really reduces how many times you have to bend your finger, and feels cool to boot.
However, I think the default turd Logitech drivers set this up differently, where you push the scroll wheel to toggle scroll modes, instead of having it auto-sense by the force of your scroll. That is stupid, since it breaks the button-3 functionality and feels clumsy, too. The cool way I have it set up might be a feature of my driver, Steermouse. I can't be positive since I would never install the Logitech driver to find out.
This is a moot point in my household; both the seat and lid stay closed. Even when my girlfriend is out of town. That's because if you don't shut the toilet before you flush, a massive cloud of tiny invisible particles of fecal matter and other nastoids comes shooting out of the toilet in all directions, coating you, the bathroom, and anything else in its path (like say, your toothbrush, if you don't leave it in the medicine cabinet or somewhere sheltered).
Now, tiny droplets of shit and piss water won't kill you--if you are healthy, you could likely french kiss your toilet seat and not get sick, but that doesn't mean you wanna. I find the mere knowlege that, if I don't shut the toilet first, I will be bathed an a microscopic shit shower to be sufficiently unappealing that I always do so. And, this way is equitable to all parties involved--no matter if you are a stander, or a sitter, you still have to lift the lid to use the toilet.
Luckily, the ages-old controversy is being brought back by the Japanese. New toilets there have infrared sensors that detect your approach and lift the lid and/or seat for you. Sounds ridiculous, but once you get used to it (that is, use it once), you come around to liking it. And happily, this technology reignites the debate with your female counterpart: you can argue about whether Mr. Smarty Toilet should be programmed to lift the lid, or both lid and seat. That is, until they come up with the next generation of toilets than can differentiate between individual people...
Your post seems to be written by logic nazis, where consistently the excuse for not accepting something is not 'it's too complicated to understand', but 'it is an illogical juxtaposition of two things which don't even have a semblance of a relationship, akin to saying "masonry cannibals" or "carpentry neocons"'.
Not only that, but my computer workstation is a device that far, far more urgently "needs to work" when I need it to. If my cell phone doesn't work (which, by the way, happens all the time on any cellular carrier to anybody who moves around the city), I borrow a landline. If my workstation/laptop doesn't work at crunch time, I am a lot more likely to be fucked.
Which, BTW, is why I use a Mac (-Book Pro). It is robust and stable and it never ever crashes.
So I have a very hard time buying the "running the latest alpha of iGet 3 on my iPhone caused Cingular's west coast network to become self-aware and started the countdown to Armageddon" argument. It's a control issue, not any kind of reliability issue.
If you had to pick one single aspect that separates a "smart phone" from a "phone", the best indicator would probably be the ability to run arbitary software. Smart phones can do it: Treo, Symbian, WindowsCEPocketLiteWhatever, and various Japanese ones can all run user-installed software. Dumb phones can't; they just run a closed OS and usually just run that same software until the user throws away the phone and gets a new one.
The iPhone does appear to be a dazzling reinvention of the dumb phone. It does the same things my RAZR does: pictures, email, sorta browse the web, SMS, etc. I don't use, or just barely use, any of these features on my RAZR because the RAZR sucks at all of them. I junked my Treo 650 and got the RAZR because I wanted something that just made calls. So, in a limited way, it is cool that Apple is apparently going to best crappy phones like my RAZR, and make such features work reasonably. It even adds like 3 more features, such as google maps. So I'm sure they would dominate the dumbphone market with the iPhone, if it weren't for the fact that it has that smart phone price tag.
But, despite what anybody (e.g., Jobs) might say, smart phones are a hell of a lot more like computers than they are like iPods. After reading (ahem!) the article, I think we are kind of getting a glimpse of the hubris of the old Steve Jobs who wanted to see trucks full of sand coming in one side of the factory, where Apple would make its own silicon and assemble 100% Apple computers. Closed, proprietary systems can work for something like the iPod, but the reason is that iPods are only for doing one thing: playing media, mostly music.
A "smart phone", on the other hand, does many things. It is able to not only browse the web, but also, on a case-by-case basis, SSH into remote machines, view PDF content, view Flash content, run flash-card software for studying, run English-to-Japanese-Chinese-Arabic-Whatever dictionary software, count calories, time events, serve as a podium-top teleprompter for making speeches, record bibliographic data while researching in the library, play retro Missile Command and Dig-Diug clones, play MahJong, display recipes and cocktail how-tos, track ovulation, and so on, and so on.
Apple might be cool, but there is no way in hell that any single company can fill the software needs of a diverse user base.
So there are only three real potential outcomes here:
a.) Apple keeps it locked tight and is content to sell a very expensive but very elegant dumb phone.
b.) Lobbying by users, developers, and corporate purchases convince Apple that they need to offer a way to load third-party software... third party developers will certainly fill the void, and quickly if the iPhone's OS is really anything remotely like the developer-friendly Mac OS X.
c.) Some kind of middle ground is reached whereby developers pay Apple for the privilege of compatibility--like what they've managed to do with the iPod dock connector.
As a potential customer, I can say that I was 100% ready to buy some of these initially, until I heard about this very surprising position taken by Apple. Now, I don't know. It's possible I would buy one, but $600 is a lot to spend for what is an admittedly elegant but extremely limited feature set.
Although I do have a dollar here that says hackers will figure it out whatever Apple does...
But the executive summary is that this is a bummer for users and has legitimately dissipated the bulk of the excitement that surrounded the iPhone launch. I think most users naturally assumed it would run a diverse set of applications, so at first it seemed like an ultra-portable mini-Mac. Now, it's more like an ultra-portable mini-Mac that only runs iLife. The former is a lot more exciting than the latter.
LOOK: IT DOESN'T FUCKING "HAS TO BE SAID" ANYMORE! Thousands of would-be Slashdot readers are so so so so SO SO SO incredibly fucking sick of the "I for one welcome our joke-which-was-only-the-very-slightest-bit-humorou s-in-its-original-form bludgenoning-the-living-shit-out-of overlords" redundant unfunny shitposts that we just grimace and go read the New York Times instead.
Until we come back a few days later and encounter yet another idiot like you.
I don't hope you die, though, BMO. I just hope every person who modded your post above -1 gets bowel cancer.
When MC Frontalot coined the term "nerdcore" it was funny and pithy, but that was mainly because he had a bunch of clever songs which he imbued with all of his original lyrics and nerdy references, and happened to also be good at making music. As in, understanding melody and rhythm and so on, you know to like, make a fucking song.
Every other "nerdcore" thing I have ever seen is a bunch of no-talent jerkoffs doing a crappy imitation of crappy mass-market gangsta rap and throwing in a couple of computer references. They sound like they made the music in their bedroom at their mom's house, and while that is probably true it does not make for good music that any sensible person would listen to by choice.
Hey Slashdot, what's up, man! Dude, I read your thing and like totally agree about Best Work Proving Spam Site Work! Dude, that's awesome!
Bro, in the same vein, I was totally checking out this dope ass site which you might wanna check out too man. Guys like us that dig Spam Which Proving and Best work Filters will be all over this before long...
OK, man take care until I see you this Friday at the dinner thing, Slashdot!
>Of course that all assumes that downloading a file to make a >backup of something you own is actually legal. >I have no idea about the status of that one.
No idea, huh... then why don't you shut the fuck up, hmm?
You are mostly right, but wrong on one key point: they didn't "luck into" a large and loyal customer base. That pretty directly resulted from their business philosophy (although certainly timing was key as well).
> Microsoft run by a WalMart Exec. The mind boggles....
Why does your mind boggle? Microsoft and Wal-Mart have always seemed similar to me. If you can leverage distribution on a colossal scale, it really doesn't matter whether most of your product is shoddy or substandard.
If that's the best they can do, what is the big deal? I also have fiber in my apartment, and it also is about $45 per month. The difference is, my fiber is fast. 100Mbps down and no bullshit upstream cap--that is also 100Mbps. If it took me 15 minutes to download only 1.7GB, I would be gritting my teeth.
Of course, I live in Japan.
Real world speeds: Downloading from Apple (or seemingly any big company using Akamai) I get ten megabytes per second solid. A lot of sites hosted in the US give piddly-ass downloads around 600 kilobytes per second, but that is their problem, not mine. The really cool thing is I get real world transfers (using iGet or SFTP) between here and my buddy's Tokyo's apartment at about 6-7 megabytes per second. (Which means, you can start iGetting a movie, and then start watching it in VLC 30 seconds later, for cheap homebrew video-almost-on-demand.)
I don't understand why it would be a winning strategy to incur the expense of a fiber rollout, and then offer these piddling speeds that barely outpace DSL. My office back in the US has business DSL from sonic.net that is 6/0.6 Mbps. Sure, this is incrementally faster but it is not at all mind-blowing. (And in fact, it is way way slower than even DSL here in Japan.)
I will get rotated back to the US next month and the one thing I have been dreading is the slow-ass Internet back there. I guess I will have to face that even if I can get fiber.
Sorry, but you are dead wrong. You may be right about the first three points, but your wrongness on the last point wins. Asterisk had no "huge business impact," or even a noticeable one. Asterisk changed the world about 0.1% as much as Skype did.
Despite their crap architecture (which is mostly secret, but you can tell it's crap by how much of your CPU it uses when idle in the background, using your computer to help strangers have phone sex), its crap UI (compared to [insert competitor here]), and its crap sound quality, Skype has touched more lives than ALL OTHER COMPETITORS COMBINED.
Now, I see this changing as the market adjusts; their share is plummeting now, as one might expect.
Nevertheless, Skype has introduced more people to cheap Internet phone calls that work (at least minimally) than any and all of the other more P.C. (open source, not founded by spyware software pirates, whatever) solutions that one could name here.
Sorry if you don't like these facts, though... do you work for Digium by any chance?
Uh, no, it's not just you... it's apparently you and a whole lot of other weird pervert freaks. (E.g., those that moderated your post "Score:5, Interesting", for example... maybe they're some of those "poor bastards" who get themseves into "predicaments" with kids, so they understand where you're coming from.)
I personally talk to kids all the time, even toss them back them their footballs when they bounce my way. Never had any "problems" with doing that. The thing that works for me, which you might want to try, is keeping my dick in my pants--and my hands out of theirs--while doing so.
And regardless, sex with underage children helps terrorists kill Americans.
I think people who don't actually know much/anything about the Newton are missing the point here.
Of course the Newton is not "coming back". Its fate was sealed when Apple shut it down but refused to sell the technology.
But at the Newton conference yesterday one speaker said, "I've been trying to replace my Newton for almost ten years now." The audience agreed. But the design philosophies behind the Newton (continued in Mac OS X) have kept it ahead of unambitious crap like the moribund Palm OS (talk about dead--*that* OS sure won't remain in use for a decade after it gets discontinued). And in these intervening years Newtons have remained in service and the data on these things has even continued to accumulate.
Is the Newton coming back? No, it is not. But what Einstein means is that it may be able to STAY AROUND for a couple (several?) more years until the industry can come up with something good enough to actually replace it fro the people still using them.
Allow me to rephrase that (typically modest and non-confrontational) Slashdot post that you quote, as follows: "A dual-core Yonah will DEFINITELY STOMP THE GIZZARDS OUT OF the 1.67GHz PowerPC G4, even at the same (or lower) clock speed."
(But of course, the clock speed will likely be higher.)
The desktop G5? Yeah, that's good. The G4? Not good. Not good at all. (Maybe it was good once. But we're not in 2002 anymore.)
All Yonah has to be is not bad, and it'll be real good.
iGet (geat file transfer tool) is alread shipping as a Universal Binary.
BBEdit (killer text editor) is alread shipping as a Universal Binary.
SpamSieve (best Bayesian antispam) is alread shipping (its plugin) as a Universal Binary.
OmniWeb (world's best browser) is in testing (likely to be ready immediately upon Intel Macs shipping).
And many others, etc. etc. etc. Only the huge, slow-cycle behemoths will really be lagging. But the real question is, when will FinderPop go Intel-native? That will dictate my own Intel migration timeframe...
Oh, I forgot to disclose to you all my secret insider information that Intel PowerBooks will be released too, since even a single-core Yonah would have to be hobbled like the dude in that Heinlein story not to burn fiery rings around the circa-2004 processors in the shiny PowerBooks.
Now that you know that, my previous post will make more sense.
Well, it should be no surprise, after that high-end Apple laptops improved *not* *one* *hertz* on the high end since January. Still this is pretty big news, since the PowerBook has had to advance in every other area in the interrim--backlit keyboards, scrolling trackpad, now high-density displays.
But it will be nice to again have a PowerBook that is actually somewhat fast.
Slashdot Mirror
There is still a lot of fraud, though. It comes the opposite way around: the fraudster tricks granny into wiring him some money. Whoops! It really is non-revokable, so granny's money is gone. In recent years there are signs and stickers warning about this at most ATMs.
(Still, I think it is clearly better than the reverse case. Just pointing out that fraud will find a way.)
especially since 'solid state drive' is about the most nebulous possible term, and, taken unambiguously, only means 'not some fucking retarded mechanical contraption'
What a fucking tool. SSDs have *already* replaced HDDs, in all desktops and notebooks, for every single person I know who isn't retarded or in some weird financial hardship situation. It has *ALREADY* happened. Even fucking TELEGRAMS have not been TOTALLY replaced. Henry Newman, you are a cunt and a retard. Please hang yourself.
LOL, he said POP3.
I have experience with lots and lots of mice, because for several years I went on a tear of buying a new mounse every couple months looking for one that didn't suck.
I finally settled down on two:
1.) Logitec MX Revolution "desktop mouse" (by which they mean non-changeable battery that needs charging cradle).
2.) Logitec VX Nano laptop mouse.
Note that on the Mac, these mice come with software that is not only the very worst mouse driver ever produced by humans, but is some of the worst software ever made, period. It will crash your whole Mac (kernel panics), and break OS upgrades in a grey-screen-of-infinity (google "logitech unsanity").
That made me really try my hardest not to buy them, but in the end I think the MX Revolution is the best mouse HARDWARE yet made. You need a third party shareware driver; I use Steermouse.
Pros of proprietary:
1) Instantaneous connection; no pairing and weird unpairing.
2) Available mice are better.
3) Better battery life (in my unscientific testing with a few mice of each type).
4) The fucking mouse doesn't stop working from time to time for no reason.
5) The newest smallest dongles are so small you can still slide your notebook into a sleeve case.
6) No jiggle-jiggle-wait dance while your mouse rouses itself from its battery-saving slumber, as with Bluetooth.
Cons:
A) Lose the itty-bitty dongle and your mouse is useless.
B) Takes a USB port.
C) It's proprietary.
Apple, of course, has a funny history with mice: after basically introducing the mouse the the general computer user, they then proceeded to stick with the retard-oriented one-button mouse for years and years, and also designed some of the very worst mouse hardware in human history (perfectly round hockey puck iMac mouse).
Their latest offerings still suck horrifically in my opinion; I have many wired and wireless "Mighty Mouse" turds, but wouldn't every really use one.
I don't like making myself a Logitech customer, mainly because their software is so fucking bad that somebody should have to do a few weekends in jail for it, but the combo of their best mice with somebody else's driver is the best thing going on the Mac, I think.
Two things that I am still looking for:
a) Fucking charge the fucking mouse with a standard fucking USB cable please (mini-USB is fine).
b) Fucking put a vaginal USB port on the ass-end of the penile one, making it a little one port USB hub that is every bit as tiny as the current smallest dongles, so that we don't need to give up a USB port.
c) The Mighty Mouse does do a good job of scrolling in all directions, not just up and down. The Logitechs can do that too, but they have a tilt-wheel kinda awkward going left and right.
Bonus Note: The Logitech MX Revolution has a cool feature whereby if you flick the scroll-wheel hard, it disengages the resistance and really flies, scrolling through many many pages (it scrolls for like 7 seconds or so). Move it normally, and it operates normally. Press it and it is button 3 like a normal mouse.
This is really cool, and you will use it all the time once used to it; flick hard, scroll scroll scroll, and then tap the wheel gently to stop it. Really reduces how many times you have to bend your finger, and feels cool to boot.
However, I think the default turd Logitech drivers set this up differently, where you push the scroll wheel to toggle scroll modes, instead of having it auto-sense by the force of your scroll. That is stupid, since it breaks the button-3 functionality and feels clumsy, too. The cool way I have it set up might be a feature of my driver, Steermouse. I can't be positive since I would never install the Logitech driver to find out.
This is a moot point in my household; both the seat and lid stay closed. Even when my girlfriend is out of town. That's because if you don't shut the toilet before you flush, a massive cloud of tiny invisible particles of fecal matter and other nastoids comes shooting out of the toilet in all directions, coating you, the bathroom, and anything else in its path (like say, your toothbrush, if you don't leave it in the medicine cabinet or somewhere sheltered).
This was documented in a mildly famous study by Charles Gerba. It has been amusingly dubbed the F3: the Fecal Fountain Factor.
Now, tiny droplets of shit and piss water won't kill you--if you are healthy, you could likely french kiss your toilet seat and not get sick, but that doesn't mean you wanna. I find the mere knowlege that, if I don't shut the toilet first, I will be bathed an a microscopic shit shower to be sufficiently unappealing that I always do so. And, this way is equitable to all parties involved--no matter if you are a stander, or a sitter, you still have to lift the lid to use the toilet.
Luckily, the ages-old controversy is being brought back by the Japanese. New toilets there have infrared sensors that detect your approach and lift the lid and/or seat for you. Sounds ridiculous, but once you get used to it (that is, use it once), you come around to liking it. And happily, this technology reignites the debate with your female counterpart: you can argue about whether Mr. Smarty Toilet should be programmed to lift the lid, or both lid and seat. That is, until they come up with the next generation of toilets than can differentiate between individual people...
Your post seems to be written by logic nazis, where consistently the excuse for not accepting something is not 'it's too complicated to understand', but 'it is an illogical juxtaposition of two things which don't even have a semblance of a relationship, akin to saying "masonry cannibals" or "carpentry neocons"'.
You fucking etiquette Nazi. How dare you say that Linus isn't the nicest person around?
Not only that, but my computer workstation is a device that far, far more urgently "needs to work" when I need it to. If my cell phone doesn't work (which, by the way, happens all the time on any cellular carrier to anybody who moves around the city), I borrow a landline. If my workstation/laptop doesn't work at crunch time, I am a lot more likely to be fucked.
Which, BTW, is why I use a Mac (-Book Pro). It is robust and stable and it never ever crashes.
So I have a very hard time buying the "running the latest alpha of iGet 3 on my iPhone caused Cingular's west coast network to become self-aware and started the countdown to Armageddon" argument. It's a control issue, not any kind of reliability issue.
If you had to pick one single aspect that separates a "smart phone" from a "phone", the best indicator would probably be the ability to run arbitary software. Smart phones can do it: Treo, Symbian, WindowsCEPocketLiteWhatever, and various Japanese ones can all run user-installed software. Dumb phones can't; they just run a closed OS and usually just run that same software until the user throws away the phone and gets a new one.
The iPhone does appear to be a dazzling reinvention of the dumb phone. It does the same things my RAZR does: pictures, email, sorta browse the web, SMS, etc. I don't use, or just barely use, any of these features on my RAZR because the RAZR sucks at all of them. I junked my Treo 650 and got the RAZR because I wanted something that just made calls. So, in a limited way, it is cool that Apple is apparently going to best crappy phones like my RAZR, and make such features work reasonably. It even adds like 3 more features, such as google maps. So I'm sure they would dominate the dumbphone market with the iPhone, if it weren't for the fact that it has that smart phone price tag.
But, despite what anybody (e.g., Jobs) might say, smart phones are a hell of a lot more like computers than they are like iPods. After reading (ahem!) the article, I think we are kind of getting a glimpse of the hubris of the old Steve Jobs who wanted to see trucks full of sand coming in one side of the factory, where Apple would make its own silicon and assemble 100% Apple computers. Closed, proprietary systems can work for something like the iPod, but the reason is that iPods are only for doing one thing: playing media, mostly music.
A "smart phone", on the other hand, does many things. It is able to not only browse the web, but also, on a case-by-case basis, SSH into remote machines, view PDF content, view Flash content, run flash-card software for studying, run English-to-Japanese-Chinese-Arabic-Whatever dictionary software, count calories, time events, serve as a podium-top teleprompter for making speeches, record bibliographic data while researching in the library, play retro Missile Command and Dig-Diug clones, play MahJong, display recipes and cocktail how-tos, track ovulation, and so on, and so on.
Apple might be cool, but there is no way in hell that any single company can fill the software needs of a diverse user base.
So there are only three real potential outcomes here:
a.) Apple keeps it locked tight and is content to sell a very expensive but very elegant dumb phone.
b.) Lobbying by users, developers, and corporate purchases convince Apple that they need to offer a way to load third-party software... third party developers will certainly fill the void, and quickly if the iPhone's OS is really anything remotely like the developer-friendly Mac OS X.
c.) Some kind of middle ground is reached whereby developers pay Apple for the privilege of compatibility--like what they've managed to do with the iPod dock connector.
As a potential customer, I can say that I was 100% ready to buy some of these initially, until I heard about this very surprising position taken by Apple. Now, I don't know. It's possible I would buy one, but $600 is a lot to spend for what is an admittedly elegant but extremely limited feature set.
Although I do have a dollar here that says hackers will figure it out whatever Apple does...
But the executive summary is that this is a bummer for users and has legitimately dissipated the bulk of the excitement that surrounded the iPhone launch. I think most users naturally assumed it would run a diverse set of applications, so at first it seemed like an ultra-portable mini-Mac. Now, it's more like an ultra-portable mini-Mac that only runs iLife. The former is a lot more exciting than the latter.
LOOK: IT DOESN'T FUCKING "HAS TO BE SAID" ANYMORE! Thousands of would-be Slashdot readers are so so so so SO SO SO incredibly fucking sick of the "I for one welcome our joke-which-was-only-the-very-slightest-bit-humorou s-in-its-original-form bludgenoning-the-living-shit-out-of overlords" redundant unfunny shitposts that we just grimace and go read the New York Times instead.
Until we come back a few days later and encounter yet another idiot like you.
I don't hope you die, though, BMO. I just hope every person who modded your post above -1 gets bowel cancer.
When MC Frontalot coined the term "nerdcore" it was funny and pithy, but that was mainly because he had a bunch of clever songs which he imbued with all of his original lyrics and nerdy references, and happened to also be good at making music. As in, understanding melody and rhythm and so on, you know to like, make a fucking song.
Every other "nerdcore" thing I have ever seen is a bunch of no-talent jerkoffs doing a crappy imitation of crappy mass-market gangsta rap and throwing in a couple of computer references. They sound like they made the music in their bedroom at their mom's house, and while that is probably true it does not make for good music that any sensible person would listen to by choice.
This is just more of the same.
Hey Slashdot, what's up, man! Dude, I read your thing and like totally agree about Best Work Proving Spam Site Work! Dude, that's awesome!
Bro, in the same vein, I was totally checking out this dope ass site which you might wanna check out too man. Guys like us that dig Spam Which Proving and Best work Filters will be all over this before long...
OK, man take care until I see you this Friday at the dinner thing, Slashdot!
Cheers,
John
>Of course that all assumes that downloading a file to make a
>backup of something you own is actually legal.
>I have no idea about the status of that one.
No idea, huh... then why don't you shut the fuck up, hmm?
You are mostly right, but wrong on one key point: they didn't "luck into" a large and loyal customer base. That pretty directly resulted from their business philosophy (although certainly timing was key as well).
> Microsoft run by a WalMart Exec. The mind boggles ....
Why does your mind boggle? Microsoft and Wal-Mart have always seemed similar to me. If you can leverage distribution on a colossal scale, it really doesn't matter whether most of your product is shoddy or substandard.
If that's the best they can do, what is the big deal? I also have fiber in my apartment, and it also is about $45 per month. The difference is, my fiber is fast. 100Mbps down and no bullshit upstream cap--that is also 100Mbps. If it took me 15 minutes to download only 1.7GB, I would be gritting my teeth.
Of course, I live in Japan.
Real world speeds: Downloading from Apple (or seemingly any big company using Akamai) I get ten megabytes per second solid. A lot of sites hosted in the US give piddly-ass downloads around 600 kilobytes per second, but that is their problem, not mine. The really cool thing is I get real world transfers (using iGet or SFTP) between here and my buddy's Tokyo's apartment at about 6-7 megabytes per second. (Which means, you can start iGetting a movie, and then start watching it in VLC 30 seconds later, for cheap homebrew video-almost-on-demand.)
I don't understand why it would be a winning strategy to incur the expense of a fiber rollout, and then offer these piddling speeds that barely outpace DSL. My office back in the US has business DSL from sonic.net that is 6/0.6 Mbps. Sure, this is incrementally faster but it is not at all mind-blowing. (And in fact, it is way way slower than even DSL here in Japan.)
I will get rotated back to the US next month and the one thing I have been dreading is the slow-ass Internet back there. I guess I will have to face that even if I can get fiber.
Sorry, but you are dead wrong. You may be right about the first three points, but your wrongness on the last point wins. Asterisk had no "huge business impact," or even a noticeable one. Asterisk changed the world about 0.1% as much as Skype did.
Despite their crap architecture (which is mostly secret, but you can tell it's crap by how much of your CPU it uses when idle in the background, using your computer to help strangers have phone sex), its crap UI (compared to [insert competitor here]), and its crap sound quality, Skype has touched more lives than ALL OTHER COMPETITORS COMBINED.
Now, I see this changing as the market adjusts; their share is plummeting now, as one might expect.
Nevertheless, Skype has introduced more people to cheap Internet phone calls that work (at least minimally) than any and all of the other more P.C. (open source, not founded by spyware software pirates, whatever) solutions that one could name here.
Sorry if you don't like these facts, though... do you work for Digium by any chance?
Uh, no, it's not just you... it's apparently you and a whole lot of other weird pervert freaks. (E.g., those that moderated your post "Score:5, Interesting", for example... maybe they're some of those "poor bastards" who get themseves into "predicaments" with kids, so they understand where you're coming from.)
I personally talk to kids all the time, even toss them back them their footballs when they bounce my way. Never had any "problems" with doing that. The thing that works for me, which you might want to try, is keeping my dick in my pants--and my hands out of theirs--while doing so.
And regardless, sex with underage children helps terrorists kill Americans.
I think people who don't actually know much/anything about the Newton are missing the point here.
Of course the Newton is not "coming back". Its fate was sealed when Apple shut it down but refused to sell the technology.
But at the Newton conference yesterday one speaker said, "I've been trying to replace my Newton for almost ten years now." The audience agreed. But the design philosophies behind the Newton (continued in Mac OS X) have kept it ahead of unambitious crap like the moribund Palm OS (talk about dead--*that* OS sure won't remain in use for a decade after it gets discontinued). And in these intervening years Newtons have remained in service and the data on these things has even continued to accumulate.
Is the Newton coming back? No, it is not. But what Einstein means is that it may be able to STAY AROUND for a couple (several?) more years until the industry can come up with something good enough to actually replace it fro the people still using them.
It's cool to be able to emulate old systems
In a word (and then another word): No. And no.
Allow me to rephrase that (typically modest and non-confrontational) Slashdot post that you quote, as follows: "A dual-core Yonah will DEFINITELY STOMP THE GIZZARDS OUT OF the 1.67GHz PowerPC G4, even at the same (or lower) clock speed."
(But of course, the clock speed will likely be higher.)
The desktop G5? Yeah, that's good. The G4? Not good. Not good at all. (Maybe it was good once. But we're not in 2002 anymore.)
All Yonah has to be is not bad, and it'll be real good.
Lots:
iGet (geat file transfer tool) is alread shipping as a Universal Binary.
BBEdit (killer text editor) is alread shipping as a Universal Binary.
SpamSieve (best Bayesian antispam) is alread shipping (its plugin) as a Universal Binary.
OmniWeb (world's best browser) is in testing (likely to be ready immediately upon Intel Macs shipping).
And many others, etc. etc. etc. Only the huge, slow-cycle behemoths will really be lagging. But the real question is, when will FinderPop go Intel-native? That will dictate my own Intel migration timeframe...
Well nice try: would have been funny if you actualy got the first post...
Oh, I forgot to disclose to you all my secret insider information that Intel PowerBooks will be released too, since even a single-core Yonah would have to be hobbled like the dude in that Heinlein story not to burn fiery rings around the circa-2004 processors in the shiny PowerBooks.
Now that you know that, my previous post will make more sense.
Well, it should be no surprise, after that high-end Apple laptops improved *not* *one* *hertz* on the high end since January. Still this is pretty big news, since the PowerBook has had to advance in every other area in the interrim--backlit keyboards, scrolling trackpad, now high-density displays.
But it will be nice to again have a PowerBook that is actually somewhat fast.