Although, if Jet Li stopped making movies with lame rappers he'd be faring quite good - The One was great fun
I like Jet Li as well, but as proof of his (or his agent's) bad career choices, check this out: he turned down the role of Seraph in Matrix Reloaded, a part that was pretty much written for him, to do that stupid film with DMX or whomever. How lame.
So, using that as an example and considering how much more common computers are in every day life than cars (know anyone how hasn't driven in the past 12 months? Now, know anyone who hasn't touched a computer in any way shape or form in the same time period?)...
Well... I do... but the analogy is not great either.
First lets at least mention that cars and buildings and whatnot are physical objects; rules applying to the usage and or operation of real world things will necessarily always have to differ from the responsibilities of manipulating abstract commands and data in computer memory.
In terms of licensing physical things we don't even fully cover the physical realm. Power boats, for instance, or Jet Skis, don't really require any sort of license whatsoever. They are powerful devices with combustion engines that can easily cause lots of damage and grief if misused, but any twerpy 16-year-old can cruise down to the beach and rent a Jet Ski with nothing but regular ID and his dad's credit card. (note: I'm in Canada, your legal may vary.)
As fir this,
why don't we have compulsory "basic operation" licsenses for computers?
Hey, great idea, but how in the hell are you going to enforce that? It's not impossible, but it may as well be in practical terms.
Would you plese stop using "hacker" word when the proper word would be "cracker"!
No. See, it's like this: practically everyone in the world associates 'hacker' with 'computer expert' and a fairly large percentage of those people also think 'nefarious' when they hear 'hacker'.
I know you really, really want your word back, but you just can't have it. The populace has kidnapped it. This is what it means now. It won't change. It's jargon anyways, so the meaning is fluid.
Hackers are computer experts who sometimes circumvent established systems, for learning or mischief. Crackers are small biscuits you eat.
I'm a little confused as to why the article just references 'QuickTime' when really we're talking about only one codex out of the (what, 200?) media types QT understands.
What I'm curious about is, there was some discussion before about the differences between the original AAC encoder that came with QT, and the newer one that now ships with QT 6.3 (and ties to iTunes). The original encoder was said to have sucked. This one, if I'm reading this right, is now very good...?
Anyways, I must have lead ears. I used to rip my MP3s at 160kbps, now I do 160kbit AACs, and cannot really tell the difference. AAC seems a tiny bit better maybe but could be a placebo effect.
What about a rating system based on whata you listened to, how much, and when?... Just thinking out loud here (er, well, I can hear the keyboard) -- but as a former experimental psychologist, the idea of an empirically-derived rating system has mucho appeal to me.
Yeah, me too. It's interesting to note that Apple has actually got a 'rating' system in iTunes, you choose between 1 and 5 stars (that represents graphically like you would expect.. its neat, you just slide the mouse across them). They've also gone to great lengths to make this feature very accessible - its under the contextual menu items, as well as on the new iPods themselves.
Makes you wonder if Apple could offer a discount in trade for your musical ratings data. I bet both parties would go for it, if it was anonymous.
Now you can sell your own electronically encoded tunes on a gigantic global network that has a massive ad campaign behind it, for $40.
Good for CD Baby. They negotiated the deal with Apple and seem to be happy to provide the connection. The terms are more than reasonable. Hell, for $40, I'd make an album just to *see* if I had any musical talent that anyone else appreciated. (er, I don't.)
Now, what we need is some sort of powerful mechanism for allowing people to be introduced to music they'd like, but don't know the name of. I've often thought a moderation-style system similar to what Slashdot has would be useful. Of course, its ony a tiny hop from there to find all those wonderful demographics marketers crave.. you know.. the Volkswagen-Coke-Nintendo-Apple-Sony style connections...
Am I right in thinking that the AudioPad table is basically a giant Wacom tablet? And if so... I wonder why they didn't just use one of those? Maybe not big enough... but with a Cintiq you could have a slightly more 'personal' audiopad experience, without the LCD projector.
Oh, and yeah, its incredibly cool.
Re:Integration
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The holster is a bit hokey... would it kill apple/vw to design the ipod so that it can go inside a slot fairly deep such that only the lcd screen is showing? I'm thinking on top of the dash, kinda like a toaster. If necessary, the ipod should be able to rotate the image on its screen accordingly (for upside-down or sideways installations).
Good lord man, why would you want that? From the video (which is a wicked commercial, btw) the iPod swivels and is fully exposed so you can, you know, use it. Plus it was on a fairly convenient angle. Much better than those things that clip to the vent or whatever.
Belkin makes the iPod cup holder thingy incidentally; you can email them with questions about it and they're fairly responsive.
I've seen exactly one make and model of car that had this exact feature: weirdly, the VW Golf had it. The standard factory cassette player for that car had a line-in minijack right on the corner of the faceplate.
I remember very specifically, for when I saw it, I went off on a giant geek tirade at the dealer, asking why this hasn't been as standard as the AC plug on every single car in the world for many years. (Conspiracy for 3rd party decks?)
"He doesn't promise to answer our emails! But we're Slashdot readers! We're Important, damnit!"
I would tend to agree with you; however, this...
We're not any more important than anyone else.
... is just the wrong attitude. While factually correct, in the eyes of the law, an equally true statement would be "we are not any less important than anyone else."
Everyone in a democracy is supposed to get equal time and treatment. The republic of the USA tries to face the (IMHO, old) reality of actually exercising a 1:1 democracy by having elected officials speak for chunks of the population. Furthermore all such officials at any;evel are to be accessible as possible by the public in light of "for the people" as well as acknowledging the handicap of this neo-democracy.
So while I would agree that this is not really news insofar as the unlikeliness of any message to president@whitehouse.gov ever actually being read by the president, the new system in place now demonstrates a microcosm of what the GOP has become.
For instance, the pre-canned Subject: tags that you select out of a menu. Or the laughable pre-qualifier - right up front! - of 'For or Against'. I'd loveto see that as a web form:
You are:br>
For
x Against
Mussolini had these radios, you may have heard of them, that could only pick up one radio station.
Put down the stick; I'm not saying Bush = Mussolini or that its even comparable. I'm saying this administration is very bold, does not tolerate criticism or dissent as part of their game plan, and certainly only pays lip service to many long-standing ideals of 2-way communication with the President.
You've seen the way President Bush is shielded in press situations. Now you've seen his email mechanism. Just observer them for what they are and derive what information you will from his actions.
I have no comment on the usage of Windows in this manner; the security of that operating system has been analysed to death and we all know what the outcome was.
I have a much bigger fundamental problem with this non-accountable electronic voting process that does not produce a verifiable paper ballot for each vote cast. Aside from any nefarious purposes in the design, having any system where the voting power is aggregated and sorted electronically - and nearly instantly (relatively speaking) - will prove too tempting for someone to sabotage.
I would think that at the very least, one should implement an electronic voting system on a transparent, open operating system, just for plain accountability.
And now its time to open the robot polls... and the robot results are in.
Have you done some background work on Dean? I live in VT, and the guy is as slippery as an Arkansas governor.
... said the Anonymous Coward. Look, if you can't back up assertations with even an anonymous nickname, you're opinion's not worth the pixels displaying it.
According to El Reg, Panther is not a true 64-bit operating system. However, Panther can do 64-bit tricks. So many 64-bit tricks that it works and behaves as a 64-bit OS would, accessing more than 8 GB of RAM, and so forth, if asked... but its not 64-bit.
I think I'll file under 'makes no difference to me'.
Articles such as these, just make me mad. Why do people have to conform in society in order to be accepted? Why can't we leverage from richness in variety within our organizational fabric in order to attain greater heights intellectually?
This utterance is way out of spec for a class-C biped. Please re-structure your comment for an elementary grade-4 level reader so that it may be more easily assimilated by the masses. Thank you.
As much as people would like to believe that Apple created the G5, that's simply not true. IBM was the one that created it, about 2.5 years ago for their servers.
Ah, but Power4 != G5.
The G5 was called the GigaProcessor UltraLite (i know) in development and is quite a different beast from a full-blown Power4; it is scaled down to 'desktop tolerances', has not as many cores, and an AltiVec unit.
Apple probably had a hand in what is now known as the 'G5' since the very beginning.
Errmm, but GCC does generate SSE2 instructions. There is a switch -msse2 to enable it. There was no good reason for Apple to have SSE2 disabled, other than to cripple the competition. Notice that they did use G5-specific switches on GCC on their own system.
However, the Apple dude pointed out that they ran most all the tests with various compiler flags on and off, and picked the fastest results of those for the Xeon. Hyperthreading is not a universal speed-up, nor is SSE. AFAIK they did not test for Altivec either.
RealMike, I should apologize. I took a nasty tone that was not strictly necessary, and appear to have started a flamefest which was not my intention. I do, however, stand by my assertations; now I will try to address the issues you mentioned.
I don't have points? How do I not have points? My original post had some very clear, very specific points - namely that the assertion that there were no advantages to the PC platform anymore was rubbish. I pointed out several facts - the advantages of vendor independance, application compatability (no, Virtual PC doesn't count, nobody except hard core geeks want to pay for and run two OSs at once), and so on. These are points, backed up by facts.
Vendor Independence - This is kind of a myth, if you ask me. As another poster pointed out the PC market ain't as open as it used to be. But let's go with it: I'm assuming the advantage of this independence is the ability to source parts for your machine from a myriad of vendors, to get the best price, quality, etc.
Now, Macs use standard parts on a custom motherboard. PCI slots, DDR RAM, IDE harddrives, USB bus, IEEE 1394a/b, VGA/DVI, 802.11b/g, Gigabit Ethernet, nVidia/ATI video cards. By and large you can replace (or fill) any of these parts with regular PC peripherals and equipment. There are even video cards that will work on both Macs and PCs (endian issues notwithstanding).
So in short, you can walk into any PC shop and buy practically any harddrive, input device, memory, etc. for your Mac and it will work fine. That is my reasoning. With the sole exception of the CPU and power supply, they are just as 'open' as any typical PC.
Application Compatibility - more complicated. The most common application suite, MS Office, has a very nice Mac OS X version. Apple follows official standards for networking. It is POSIX compliant. It is a UNIX-workalike. Witness Fink, witness the new SourceForge section. OpenType. WebDAV. PDF. ZeroConf. Everything that is in BSD is in OS X with very few exceptions. Anything (that is not some goofy proprietary spec - oh the irony) sent over the Internet is easily, capably handled by any modern Mac.
Oh, by the way, VirtualPC does count. I can run any PC app (not Windows - *any* PC app) on my Mac. I cannot do the same with my PC. VirtuaPC costs exactly $10 less than a regular licensed copy of Windows.. or at least it used to, before MS bought Connectix. So don't dismiss it. Its certainly not perfect, but its great to have the optionWe all like options.... and so on... - Ok, I saw two 'points'.
I've answered this in order to try and convince you that people who like Apple are not all ravening fanboy maclots. I know they can be pretty shrill sometimes. You should understand, there are reasons for the attention. They may not be your reasons, but they are valid nonetheless. I hope I've demonstrated this. If not, sorry for the bother, I will trouble you no more.
The reality distortion field is strong here, and it annoys me. Or what, are my points not valid now because we're suddenly talking about Apple instead of a different slashdot topic?
Not at all. That is, in fact, my point. I think the RDF gets modded down pretty fast. Slashdot is a tough crowd. Facts are paramount. You don't have any "points" you just put forth an opinion.
You can't seem to help taking a swipe. It's tiresome.... And yet I keep getting modded up for it! You know what is really tiresome?
That you keep getting modded up for it? +5 'I agree'. Look, I'm not trying to start a war here. But there are other opinions. I do respect yours but you need to back it up every so often.
Why is this news? There has been plenty of competition in the high end workstation space for years. Oh right, I forgot. This is Apple. Their cases glow in the dark. Of course it's news.
THAT is what I am talking about. You know when AMD comes out with a new Opteron I don't go all frothy, I think, "That's cool." Apple comes out with a new chip and its "ooh, Apple, they glow, they blow." You just illustrated my point beautifully.
Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X...I hate to burst your bubble, but no they don't.
No worries. They do. I see it every day. People love love love OS X. Maybe you don't. Thats' fine. But its evident all over Slashdot.
Classic Mac apologism at work.
Fuck off. "Classic Mac troll at work." See how that goes?
I was merely intimating that many PC - and Mac - people yell about speed they don't need, but merely want. Nothing wrong with that per se but I get sick of people saying computers aren't 'fast enough'. Practically all of them are fast enough by practically anyone's standards. It was just an observation, it's not a platform 'apology'. If anything you are dodging the issue.
This does of course lead to the question of why you look forward to it. You look forward to it, because you have made a large (almost certainly personal) investment in the platform.
It's true that I have a Mac at home, not at work. It's true that I want them to hang around because they seem to be the only ones innovating at times. But, again, stop telling me what I think. You've dodged the issue once again and are dancing on the periphery of an ad hominem.
Clearly, this is the type of thinking that keeps Microsoft in the top spot, keeps IE dominating the web in the face of superior free alternatives etc. You want people to use Macs, despite the fact that this ultimately profits only Apple...
Clearly not. I just want people to stop pissing on Apple - strike that, any companuy, for stupid political reasons. That's it.
RealMike, your anti-Mac bias becomes more evident with each post. You can't seem to help taking a swipe. It's tiresome.
Oh sure. So the legendary Apple marketing machine will whip up a hyped frenzy in its followers. But other than being in the running again, nothing will have really changed.
Well, nothing at all, except for the fact that Macs might be faster than practically anything out there now, as opposed to before, when they were definitely not.
Home users care nothing for 'vendor independence', etc. They usually just buy the cheapest machine that has the specs they want.
The *really* big news is that a huge chunk of the geek-set here on Slashdot will soon have a really, really compelling alternative to any high-end PC workstation. If the IBM chip scales up fast, Apple is looking very well positioned to displace a few SGI and Sun machines in certain situations.
Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X - rightly so - but they had problems with the slower bus/clock speeds on the G4s (whether justified or not; I still suspect a lot of these goons screaming for speed just want it for Doom 3). With 64bit dual-Ghz high-speed-bus Macs, you will see an even larger migration of those Unix geeks to the Mac. Something I look forward to.
I'm not an Apple apologist by any means - I use the big 3 platforms pretty regularly - but let's give credit where its due, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
I like Jet Li as well, but as proof of his (or his agent's) bad career choices, check this out: he turned down the role of Seraph in Matrix Reloaded, a part that was pretty much written for him, to do that stupid film with DMX or whomever. How lame.
Well... I do... but the analogy is not great either.
First lets at least mention that cars and buildings and whatnot are physical objects; rules applying to the usage and or operation of real world things will necessarily always have to differ from the responsibilities of manipulating abstract commands and data in computer memory.
In terms of licensing physical things we don't even fully cover the physical realm. Power boats, for instance, or Jet Skis, don't really require any sort of license whatsoever. They are powerful devices with combustion engines that can easily cause lots of damage and grief if misused, but any twerpy 16-year-old can cruise down to the beach and rent a Jet Ski with nothing but regular ID and his dad's credit card. (note: I'm in Canada, your legal may vary.)
As fir this,
why don't we have compulsory "basic operation" licsenses for computers?
Hey, great idea, but how in the hell are you going to enforce that? It's not impossible, but it may as well be in practical terms.
No. See, it's like this: practically everyone in the world associates 'hacker' with 'computer expert' and a fairly large percentage of those people also think 'nefarious' when they hear 'hacker'.
I know you really, really want your word back, but you just can't have it. The populace has kidnapped it. This is what it means now. It won't change. It's jargon anyways, so the meaning is fluid.
Hackers are computer experts who sometimes circumvent established systems, for learning or mischief. Crackers are small biscuits you eat.
Attn: ad dept. Put the corny "heartfelt plea for filthy lucre" text here.
I guess that copy was approved.
What I'm curious about is, there was some discussion before about the differences between the original AAC encoder that came with QT, and the newer one that now ships with QT 6.3 (and ties to iTunes). The original encoder was said to have sucked. This one, if I'm reading this right, is now very good...?
Anyways, I must have lead ears. I used to rip my MP3s at 160kbps, now I do 160kbit AACs, and cannot really tell the difference. AAC seems a tiny bit better maybe but could be a placebo effect.
I believe it is licensed from Dolby Labs.
Yeah, me too. It's interesting to note that Apple has actually got a 'rating' system in iTunes, you choose between 1 and 5 stars (that represents graphically like you would expect.. its neat, you just slide the mouse across them). They've also gone to great lengths to make this feature very accessible - its under the contextual menu items, as well as on the new iPods themselves.
Makes you wonder if Apple could offer a discount in trade for your musical ratings data. I bet both parties would go for it, if it was anonymous.
Now you can sell your own electronically encoded tunes on a gigantic global network that has a massive ad campaign behind it, for $40.
Good for CD Baby. They negotiated the deal with Apple and seem to be happy to provide the connection. The terms are more than reasonable. Hell, for $40, I'd make an album just to *see* if I had any musical talent that anyone else appreciated. (er, I don't.)
Now, what we need is some sort of powerful mechanism for allowing people to be introduced to music they'd like, but don't know the name of. I've often thought a moderation-style system similar to what Slashdot has would be useful. Of course, its ony a tiny hop from there to find all those wonderful demographics marketers crave.. you know.. the Volkswagen-Coke-Nintendo-Apple-Sony style connections...
Oh, and yeah, its incredibly cool.
Good lord man, why would you want that? From the video (which is a wicked commercial, btw) the iPod swivels and is fully exposed so you can, you know, use it. Plus it was on a fairly convenient angle. Much better than those things that clip to the vent or whatever.
Belkin makes the iPod cup holder thingy incidentally; you can email them with questions about it and they're fairly responsive.
I remember very specifically, for when I saw it, I went off on a giant geek tirade at the dealer, asking why this hasn't been as standard as the AC plug on every single car in the world for many years. (Conspiracy for 3rd party decks?)
I would tend to agree with you; however, this...
We're not any more important than anyone else.
Everyone in a democracy is supposed to get equal time and treatment. The republic of the USA tries to face the (IMHO, old) reality of actually exercising a 1:1 democracy by having elected officials speak for chunks of the population. Furthermore all such officials at any ;evel are to be accessible as possible by the public in light of "for the people" as well as acknowledging the handicap of this neo-democracy.
So while I would agree that this is not really news insofar as the unlikeliness of any message to president@whitehouse.gov ever actually being read by the president, the new system in place now demonstrates a microcosm of what the GOP has become.
For instance, the pre-canned Subject: tags that you select out of a menu. Or the laughable pre-qualifier - right up front! - of 'For or Against'. I'd loveto see that as a web form:
You are:br> For
x Against
Mussolini had these radios, you may have heard of them, that could only pick up one radio station.
Put down the stick; I'm not saying Bush = Mussolini or that its even comparable. I'm saying this administration is very bold, does not tolerate criticism or dissent as part of their game plan, and certainly only pays lip service to many long-standing ideals of 2-way communication with the President.
You've seen the way President Bush is shielded in press situations. Now you've seen his email mechanism. Just observer them for what they are and derive what information you will from his actions.
I have no comment on the usage of Windows in this manner; the security of that operating system has been analysed to death and we all know what the outcome was.
I have a much bigger fundamental problem with this non-accountable electronic voting process that does not produce a verifiable paper ballot for each vote cast. Aside from any nefarious purposes in the design, having any system where the voting power is aggregated and sorted electronically - and nearly instantly (relatively speaking) - will prove too tempting for someone to sabotage.
I would think that at the very least, one should implement an electronic voting system on a transparent, open operating system, just for plain accountability.
And now its time to open the robot polls... and the robot results are in.
According to El Reg, Panther is not a true 64-bit operating system. However, Panther can do 64-bit tricks. So many 64-bit tricks that it works and behaves as a 64-bit OS would, accessing more than 8 GB of RAM, and so forth, if asked... but its not 64-bit.
I think I'll file under 'makes no difference to me'.
Tigger was already used; I believe it was the codename for Xserve.
This utterance is way out of spec for a class-C biped. Please re-structure your comment for an elementary grade-4 level reader so that it may be more easily assimilated by the masses. Thank you.
Ah, but Power4 != G5. The G5 was called the GigaProcessor UltraLite (i know) in development and is quite a different beast from a full-blown Power4; it is scaled down to 'desktop tolerances', has not as many cores, and an AltiVec unit. Apple probably had a hand in what is now known as the 'G5' since the very beginning.
You know, I just mentally pictured a game with all these characters in it... and it was awesome.
However, the Apple dude pointed out that they ran most all the tests with various compiler flags on and off, and picked the fastest results of those for the Xeon. Hyperthreading is not a universal speed-up, nor is SSE. AFAIK they did not test for Altivec either.
It's way beta, dude.
Wow, that IS huge. Good eye, downix.
RealMike, I should apologize. I took a nasty tone that was not strictly necessary, and appear to have started a flamefest which was not my intention. I do, however, stand by my assertations; now I will try to address the issues you mentioned.
I don't have points? How do I not have points? My original post had some very clear, very specific points - namely that the assertion that there were no advantages to the PC platform anymore was rubbish. I pointed out several facts - the advantages of vendor independance, application compatability (no, Virtual PC doesn't count, nobody except hard core geeks want to pay for and run two OSs at once), and so on. These are points, backed up by facts.
Vendor Independence - This is kind of a myth, if you ask me. As another poster pointed out the PC market ain't as open as it used to be. But let's go with it: I'm assuming the advantage of this independence is the ability to source parts for your machine from a myriad of vendors, to get the best price, quality, etc.
Now, Macs use standard parts on a custom motherboard. PCI slots, DDR RAM, IDE harddrives, USB bus, IEEE 1394a/b, VGA/DVI, 802.11b/g, Gigabit Ethernet, nVidia/ATI video cards. By and large you can replace (or fill) any of these parts with regular PC peripherals and equipment. There are even video cards that will work on both Macs and PCs (endian issues notwithstanding).
So in short, you can walk into any PC shop and buy practically any harddrive, input device, memory, etc. for your Mac and it will work fine. That is my reasoning. With the sole exception of the CPU and power supply, they are just as 'open' as any typical PC.
Application Compatibility - more complicated. The most common application suite, MS Office, has a very nice Mac OS X version. Apple follows official standards for networking. It is POSIX compliant. It is a UNIX-workalike. Witness Fink, witness the new SourceForge section. OpenType. WebDAV. PDF. ZeroConf. Everything that is in BSD is in OS X with very few exceptions. Anything (that is not some goofy proprietary spec - oh the irony) sent over the Internet is easily, capably handled by any modern Mac.
Oh, by the way, VirtualPC does count. I can run any PC app (not Windows - *any* PC app) on my Mac. I cannot do the same with my PC. VirtuaPC costs exactly $10 less than a regular licensed copy of Windows.. or at least it used to, before MS bought Connectix. So don't dismiss it. Its certainly not perfect, but its great to have the optionWe all like options. ... and so on... - Ok, I saw two 'points'.
I've answered this in order to try and convince you that people who like Apple are not all ravening fanboy maclots. I know they can be pretty shrill sometimes. You should understand, there are reasons for the attention. They may not be your reasons, but they are valid nonetheless. I hope I've demonstrated this. If not, sorry for the bother, I will trouble you no more.
Not at all. That is, in fact, my point. I think the RDF gets modded down pretty fast. Slashdot is a tough crowd. Facts are paramount. You don't have any "points" you just put forth an opinion.
You can't seem to help taking a swipe. It's tiresome.... And yet I keep getting modded up for it! You know what is really tiresome?
That you keep getting modded up for it? +5 'I agree'. Look, I'm not trying to start a war here. But there are other opinions. I do respect yours but you need to back it up every so often.
Why is this news? There has been plenty of competition in the high end workstation space for years. Oh right, I forgot. This is Apple. Their cases glow in the dark. Of course it's news.
THAT is what I am talking about. You know when AMD comes out with a new Opteron I don't go all frothy, I think, "That's cool." Apple comes out with a new chip and its "ooh, Apple, they glow, they blow." You just illustrated my point beautifully.
Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X...I hate to burst your bubble, but no they don't.
No worries. They do. I see it every day. People love love love OS X. Maybe you don't. Thats' fine. But its evident all over Slashdot.
Classic Mac apologism at work.
Fuck off. "Classic Mac troll at work." See how that goes?
I was merely intimating that many PC - and Mac - people yell about speed they don't need, but merely want. Nothing wrong with that per se but I get sick of people saying computers aren't 'fast enough'. Practically all of them are fast enough by practically anyone's standards. It was just an observation, it's not a platform 'apology'. If anything you are dodging the issue.
This does of course lead to the question of why you look forward to it. You look forward to it, because you have made a large (almost certainly personal) investment in the platform.
It's true that I have a Mac at home, not at work. It's true that I want them to hang around because they seem to be the only ones innovating at times. But, again, stop telling me what I think. You've dodged the issue once again and are dancing on the periphery of an ad hominem.
Clearly, this is the type of thinking that keeps Microsoft in the top spot, keeps IE dominating the web in the face of superior free alternatives etc. You want people to use Macs, despite the fact that this ultimately profits only Apple...
Clearly not. I just want people to stop pissing on Apple - strike that, any companuy, for stupid political reasons. That's it.
Oh sure. So the legendary Apple marketing machine will whip up a hyped frenzy in its followers. But other than being in the running again, nothing will have really changed.
Well, nothing at all, except for the fact that Macs might be faster than practically anything out there now, as opposed to before, when they were definitely not.
Home users care nothing for 'vendor independence', etc. They usually just buy the cheapest machine that has the specs they want.
The *really* big news is that a huge chunk of the geek-set here on Slashdot will soon have a really, really compelling alternative to any high-end PC workstation. If the IBM chip scales up fast, Apple is looking very well positioned to displace a few SGI and Sun machines in certain situations.
Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X - rightly so - but they had problems with the slower bus/clock speeds on the G4s (whether justified or not; I still suspect a lot of these goons screaming for speed just want it for Doom 3). With 64bit dual-Ghz high-speed-bus Macs, you will see an even larger migration of those Unix geeks to the Mac. Something I look forward to.
I'm not an Apple apologist by any means - I use the big 3 platforms pretty regularly - but let's give credit where its due, huh?