Microsoft might be an unethical monopoly, but is Gates complicit in the deaths of his own employees, as Carnegie was ?
People of the time didn't exactly have a high opinion of the steel magnate after that incident. People aren't fond of Gates now.
As an employee of the Carnegie Museums, I say give it a hundred years. We have Carnegie to thank for the museum of art, the museum of natural history, and the Pittsburgh public libraries. You think anyone remembers the labor strike?
Microsoft can't last. What Gates does with his money, however, has the potential to.
Everything Apple's ever done has, according to people who get paid to be taken seriously, been the death knell of the company.
And the only thing that's stopping some people from buying Macs isn't the price point or the applications, it's the games.
Feel free to spout off the list of everything with Mac support, and realize that Painkiller, System Shock, GTA, Half-Life, Half-Life 2 (and by extent Steam, CCS, etc) and a shitload of other games aren't available. And several Mac ports have been gutted on the way over- it's an old example, but Baldur's Gate for the Mac is missing multiplayer and any character customization capability.
There's a large chunk of the vocal PC userbase who use the thing as glorified nintendo- it's really (imo) the ONLY area where the PC has any kind of advantage over the Mac.
You'd think, wouldn't you? All it needs is a couple of COLUMBINE IS THE NEW POLICE STATE OH NOEZ HELLMOUTH references.
Aside from that, the fucktardishness is spot-on.
Katz is the only/. author I've filtered out of my existance- too bad I can't block by keyword, as I'd flush Dvorak and a few other things off of my front page.
Dvorak is right about as often as it rains lava in New York.
Somebody who's been predicting the death of the Macintosh since TCP/IP stacks were still third-party user-installed add-ons thinks he knows where computing is going? The only thing separating him from a blathering retard in a homeless shelter is that whoever's paying him is even less cluefull than he is.:D
My experiences have been similar- I buy everything I need online these days for the simple fact that the local mac reseller is a 30 minute drive outside of the city and they SUCK. They charge full price for five year old games, 300$ for 120g firewire hard drives, their third party software selection is vestigial, I know more about the hardware I'm taking in for servicing than their so-called "support staff" (it helps that I don't REEK OF POT SMOKE), and gear we've taken in for servicing has come back with other damage (big ol' SCRATCH on a SCSI card that was Fine... the machine taken in had other problems).
So imagine my RELIEF when an Apple Store actually opened up inside the city limits!
No waiting would be handy. The closest I've seen to it is wake-from-sleep in OS X on powerbooks. MacOS would snort and chug and grind and be caught with its pants down Every Single Time you woke the machine... OS X is just BING! there. Which is great.
However, the fact that the OS eats 256 megs of ram on boot (exponentially more when you start doing ram-sucking things like opening Finder windows) and the powerbook I'm using as an example shipped with 128 and an OS that used 40 of it....
... and Sonnet is reselling them as their own product at a hefty markup.
When speccing a server for quality parts, you get a broader selection of quality chipsets at good prices with an {IA32|PPC}/linux solution than you do with a PPC/OS X solution.
Not "The BSDs" straight up. I'm sure FreeBSD has a nice selection of FS support... I used linux as the example because I know more about that end of things.
Personally, the lamest thing about OS X is a Case Sensitive command line on a case insensitive filesystem. One of the perks of a case sensitive FS - README.TXT, readme.TXT, README.txt, and readme.txt would be four different files. 3
Heck, if you want to measure the filesystems an OS can deal with by the formatting utilities it includes, Apple's taken a GIANT step backwards with OS X. Can't use Disk Utility to format for A/UX, linux, ProDOS, etc.:-|
Apparently you either haven't heard the horror stories about UFS, or you're one of The Few The Proud The Etc. who've had good experience with it.
Apt is handy. And a hell of a lot easier to use than software update, ime- with debian, any gui app you have is updated through apt. No going to Adobe's site to download updates, going to Macromedia's site to download updates, no downloading Quicksilver and copying it to the Appllications folder every single week, etc. It makes the environment quite a bit more transparent.
Especially when it comes to hardware. Debian makes beige macs and blue g3s (machines that SUCK for OS X) useable, and more importantly- the system isn't strapped to the PPC.... which enables us (my workplace) to spend a heck of a lot less on server hardware. And if you're running it on PPC, you're not stuck with PCI cards and hardware with OS X drivers available- you can run anything that has a linux driver- a good example would be Debian Stable shipping with drivers for common Realtek ethernet chipsets- something that's a driver install on either OS 9 OR OS X. A driver you have to _download_.
Server-wise, I'm a lot more comfortable with linux than I am with OS X. I can get around it, but I just _don't_ like using it headless. The GUI's the entire point of the OS, and if I'm not going to be using it, I'll run something that takes advantage of the features I DO want. The box in the closet could be a pentium three, a Sparc, an SGI or a PPC, but if it's got debian installed, it doesn't matter. (compare SGI, solaris, and Apple command line environments... bleh.)
If you're familiar with linux, it's a hell of a lot better for most server things than OS X. And it's free. Yes, netatalk isn't as good as Apple's own filesharing implimentation, but it works well enough.
If you don't need a GUI, you don't need OS X (with few exceptions). Debian, in my experience, makes a vastly better server than OS X on the same hardware.:P
Computers will be "fast enough" when they can instant-on and operate at the speed of thought.
I'm talking no waiting for documents to load, or save. No swapping. No WAITING.
When the hardware/software reaches a point where it's a layer of skin over the fingers, it'll be Good Enough. We've progressed from thick woolen mittens to thick woolen gloves, but when it comes to operating transparency, we're not even to isotoner... let alone latex.
Steam rankles me for exactly the same reasons. I can't bring myself to get into a product that is unuseable without an active network connection- a connection that absolutely DEPENDS on the server on the other end being in a good mood. Rather I want to play online or not.
Yeah, there are supposed benefits to Steam.... but what if Valve took their ball and went home?
I hopped on iTunes the second it was available. It was free, the library management was great, and it was the first STABLE mp3 player I'd ever used on the Mac. For a 1.0 release it was extremely capable- and more stable than iTunes 2.0, no less.:P
Since then, iTunes has gotten a hell of a lot better.
And I've never bothered with the equalizer or the music store. Funny how the feature you HAVE TO HAVE influences your judgment of the product in its early life...
(of course, for some people, holding out on the equalizer was probably as annoying as Adobe holding out on 16-bit image editing in photoshop for YEARS...)
I have a Quicktake 150. It's an Apple branded CCD. It's frigging OLD- old as in the drivers don't like being installed on 8.5 or higher. We're talking "optimized for 68k" here.
Apple had digital cameras years before they were useable, PDAs years before they hit the right price point, PVRs (in prototype) years before hard drives got big enough and hardware got fast enough for realtime encoding, a video game console years before MS entered the market... they made their own printers, their own scanners, etc, etc, etc.
And no, the Quicktake doesn't work with iPhoto. Nothing from the Beige Era does, not even their Applevision self-calibrating monitors.:-|
So. I've used an Apple branded camera. It's as real as the screen you're reading this on. It sucked.
The iPod family is really the only NEW thing for Apple- everything else they've been doing since Jobs got back falls into the category of rehash- updated and spit-shining old (and in some cases, ancient) ideas to work with the new OS and with hardware that's finally fast enough to push where the company was trying to go in the mid nineties.
(new) Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Max Headroom.
Enterprise sure as heck ain't on that list. I'd put Babylon 5 up there as well, and DS9 if I could pick seasons and not the series.
Give the geeks tits and ass and suddenly plot takes a backseat to cleavage- how many potential contributors have X-rated T'Pol fanfic on their hard drives?
If object-oriented programmings means what I always _thought_ it did but doesn't _seem_ to (that is, a string of modules knitted together like a necklace, self-contained), then it would have the potential to speed the annoying bits of game development by reusing and making minor improvements to things that already work.
I live in a college town, and every motherhumper who can afford khakis and polo shirts is running around with the signature white earbuds trailing out of their ears. The hugeass I'M A DJ NO REALLY headphones are totally last year.
You rarely see the players but you know they're wearing them. Only a matter of time until muggers figure this out- these hipster doofuses all eager to be cool have market themselves as being worth at least fifty to a hundred bucks on the back-of-the-truck resale channel.
Or "type in the characters" or whatever. I fail those things three times out of five, and I'm about as human as you can get these days. The frigging things to NOT compensate for vision problems.... some have case sensitive input, some don't, etc, etc.
Much like aggressive spam filtering, any ARE YOU A POOTER? [ Y ] { N } [ ______ } is going to turn up false positives.
Everyone I know who uses a Mac uses a two button input device. Except for the *book users, who are stuck with the one.
Heck, the two machines on my desk right now are attached to a Kensington Orbit trackball (two button) and a three button Sun Microsystems USB mouse.
Oh, and I'm using a TactilePro keyboard, since Apple has YET to produce a non-slurpy/squishy/sluggish USB keyboard.
If Apple didn't consistently produce one button mice and shitty keyboards, there'd be almost NO market for third party input devices on the Mac, and that would suck.
... is some halfway decent PVR software that does what TiVo does. Price it at, say, fiddy bux. Modern hardware's good enough to work it on the fly- all it has to do is be smart enough to recognize various sources of audio and video input, basic tuning faccilities, etc. and be EASY. TO. USE. None of this homebrew shit that causes your mom to lose interest.
Oh, and make the software cross platform. From the number of people spunking their pants over OMFG MAC MINI SET TOP BAWX!!!!!!!!!11111 SQUIRT!, fuck- it would go like hotcakes.
Especially considering how much of a pain in the ass the bittorrent scene has insisted on making itself over the past few weeks/months.:|
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Microsoft might be an unethical monopoly, but is Gates complicit in the deaths of his own employees, as Carnegie was ?
People of the time didn't exactly have a high opinion of the steel magnate after that incident. People aren't fond of Gates now.
As an employee of the Carnegie Museums, I say give it a hundred years. We have Carnegie to thank for the museum of art, the museum of natural history, and the Pittsburgh public libraries. You think anyone remembers the labor strike?
Microsoft can't last. What Gates does with his money, however, has the potential to.
Everything Apple's ever done has, according to people who get paid to be taken seriously, been the death knell of the company.
And the only thing that's stopping some people from buying Macs isn't the price point or the applications, it's the games.
Feel free to spout off the list of everything with Mac support, and realize that Painkiller, System Shock, GTA, Half-Life, Half-Life 2 (and by extent Steam, CCS, etc) and a shitload of other games aren't available. And several Mac ports have been gutted on the way over- it's an old example, but Baldur's Gate for the Mac is missing multiplayer and any character customization capability.
There's a large chunk of the vocal PC userbase who use the thing as glorified nintendo- it's really (imo) the ONLY area where the PC has any kind of advantage over the Mac.
You'd think, wouldn't you? All it needs is a couple of COLUMBINE IS THE NEW POLICE STATE OH NOEZ HELLMOUTH references.
/. author I've filtered out of my existance- too bad I can't block by keyword, as I'd flush Dvorak and a few other things off of my front page.
Aside from that, the fucktardishness is spot-on.
Katz is the only
So here's my 3 day old OSN comment:
:D
Dvorak is right about as often as it rains lava in New York.
Somebody who's been predicting the death of the Macintosh since TCP/IP stacks were still third-party user-installed add-ons thinks he knows where computing is going? The only thing separating him from a blathering retard in a homeless shelter is that whoever's paying him is even less cluefull than he is.
My experiences have been similar- I buy everything I need online these days for the simple fact that the local mac reseller is a 30 minute drive outside of the city and they SUCK. They charge full price for five year old games, 300$ for 120g firewire hard drives, their third party software selection is vestigial, I know more about the hardware I'm taking in for servicing than their so-called "support staff" (it helps that I don't REEK OF POT SMOKE), and gear we've taken in for servicing has come back with other damage (big ol' SCRATCH on a SCSI card that was Fine... the machine taken in had other problems).
So imagine my RELIEF when an Apple Store actually opened up inside the city limits!
1. Money talks.
2. Lucas OBVIOUSLY thinks ep3 won't suck ass. Money can make that kind of enthusiasm contagious.
No waiting would be handy. The closest I've seen to it is wake-from-sleep in OS X on powerbooks. MacOS would snort and chug and grind and be caught with its pants down Every Single Time you woke the machine... OS X is just BING! there. Which is great.
However, the fact that the OS eats 256 megs of ram on boot (exponentially more when you start doing ram-sucking things like opening Finder windows) and the powerbook I'm using as an example shipped with 128 and an OS that used 40 of it....
ugh.
... and Sonnet is reselling them as their own product at a hefty markup.
When speccing a server for quality parts, you get a broader selection of quality chipsets at good prices with an {IA32|PPC}/linux solution than you do with a PPC/OS X solution.
Not "The BSDs" straight up. I'm sure FreeBSD has a nice selection of FS support... I used linux as the example because I know more about that end of things.
Personally, the lamest thing about OS X is a Case Sensitive command line on a case insensitive filesystem. One of the perks of a case sensitive FS - README.TXT, readme.TXT, README.txt, and readme.txt would be four different files. 3
Heck, if you want to measure the filesystems an OS can deal with by the formatting utilities it includes, Apple's taken a GIANT step backwards with OS X. Can't use Disk Utility to format for A/UX, linux, ProDOS, etc. :-|
Apparently you either haven't heard the horror stories about UFS, or you're one of The Few The Proud The Etc. who've had good experience with it.
Apt is handy. And a hell of a lot easier to use than software update, ime- with debian, any gui app you have is updated through apt. No going to Adobe's site to download updates, going to Macromedia's site to download updates, no downloading Quicksilver and copying it to the Appllications folder every single week, etc. It makes the environment quite a bit more transparent.
Especially when it comes to hardware. Debian makes beige macs and blue g3s (machines that SUCK for OS X) useable, and more importantly- the system isn't strapped to the PPC.... which enables us (my workplace) to spend a heck of a lot less on server hardware. And if you're running it on PPC, you're not stuck with PCI cards and hardware with OS X drivers available- you can run anything that has a linux driver- a good example would be Debian Stable shipping with drivers for common Realtek ethernet chipsets- something that's a driver install on either OS 9 OR OS X. A driver you have to _download_.
Server-wise, I'm a lot more comfortable with linux than I am with OS X. I can get around it, but I just _don't_ like using it headless. The GUI's the entire point of the OS, and if I'm not going to be using it, I'll run something that takes advantage of the features I DO want. The box in the closet could be a pentium three, a Sparc, an SGI or a PPC, but if it's got debian installed, it doesn't matter. (compare SGI, solaris, and Apple command line environments... bleh.)
If you're familiar with linux, it's a hell of a lot better for most server things than OS X. And it's free. Yes, netatalk isn't as good as Apple's own filesharing implimentation, but it works well enough.
:P
If you don't need a GUI, you don't need OS X (with few exceptions). Debian, in my experience, makes a vastly better server than OS X on the same hardware.
Computers will be "fast enough" when they can instant-on and operate at the speed of thought.
I'm talking no waiting for documents to load, or save. No swapping. No WAITING.
When the hardware/software reaches a point where it's a layer of skin over the fingers, it'll be Good Enough. We've progressed from thick woolen mittens to thick woolen gloves, but when it comes to operating transparency, we're not even to isotoner... let alone latex.
Steam rankles me for exactly the same reasons. I can't bring myself to get into a product that is unuseable without an active network connection- a connection that absolutely DEPENDS on the server on the other end being in a good mood. Rather I want to play online or not.
Yeah, there are supposed benefits to Steam.... but what if Valve took their ball and went home?
I hopped on iTunes the second it was available. It was free, the library management was great, and it was the first STABLE mp3 player I'd ever used on the Mac. For a 1.0 release it was extremely capable- and more stable than iTunes 2.0, no less. :P
Since then, iTunes has gotten a hell of a lot better.
And I've never bothered with the equalizer or the music store. Funny how the feature you HAVE TO HAVE influences your judgment of the product in its early life...
(of course, for some people, holding out on the equalizer was probably as annoying as Adobe holding out on 16-bit image editing in photoshop for YEARS...)
I have a Quicktake 150. It's an Apple branded CCD. It's frigging OLD- old as in the drivers don't like being installed on 8.5 or higher. We're talking "optimized for 68k" here.
:-|
Apple had digital cameras years before they were useable, PDAs years before they hit the right price point, PVRs (in prototype) years before hard drives got big enough and hardware got fast enough for realtime encoding, a video game console years before MS entered the market... they made their own printers, their own scanners, etc, etc, etc.
And no, the Quicktake doesn't work with iPhoto. Nothing from the Beige Era does, not even their Applevision self-calibrating monitors.
So. I've used an Apple branded camera. It's as real as the screen you're reading this on. It sucked.
The iPod family is really the only NEW thing for Apple- everything else they've been doing since Jobs got back falls into the category of rehash- updated and spit-shining old (and in some cases, ancient) ideas to work with the new OS and with hardware that's finally fast enough to push where the company was trying to go in the mid nineties.
Enterprise sure as heck ain't on that list. I'd put Babylon 5 up there as well, and DS9 if I could pick seasons and not the series.
Give the geeks tits and ass and suddenly plot takes a backseat to cleavage- how many potential contributors have X-rated T'Pol fanfic on their hard drives?
If object-oriented programmings means what I always _thought_ it did but doesn't _seem_ to (that is, a string of modules knitted together like a necklace, self-contained), then it would have the potential to speed the annoying bits of game development by reusing and making minor improvements to things that already work.
Hell, look at any EA sports title.
I live in a college town, and every motherhumper who can afford khakis and polo shirts is running around with the signature white earbuds trailing out of their ears. The hugeass I'M A DJ NO REALLY headphones are totally last year.
You rarely see the players but you know they're wearing them. Only a matter of time until muggers figure this out- these hipster doofuses all eager to be cool have market themselves as being worth at least fifty to a hundred bucks on the back-of-the-truck resale channel.
Or "type in the characters" or whatever. I fail those things three times out of five, and I'm about as human as you can get these days. The frigging things to NOT compensate for vision problems.... some have case sensitive input, some don't, etc, etc.
Much like aggressive spam filtering, any ARE YOU A POOTER? [ Y ] { N } [ ______ } is going to turn up false positives.
Everyone I know who uses a Mac uses a two button input device. Except for the *book users, who are stuck with the one.
Heck, the two machines on my desk right now are attached to a Kensington Orbit trackball (two button) and a three button Sun Microsystems USB mouse.
Oh, and I'm using a TactilePro keyboard, since Apple has YET to produce a non-slurpy/squishy/sluggish USB keyboard.
If Apple didn't consistently produce one button mice and shitty keyboards, there'd be almost NO market for third party input devices on the Mac, and that would suck.
The Pippin was an Apple-developed gaming console / set top box, circa 1996.
:P
They hit the gaming market (and failed) long before Microsoft even thought about it.
Of which you can find bucketloads for cheaper.
... is some halfway decent PVR software that does what TiVo does. Price it at, say, fiddy bux. Modern hardware's good enough to work it on the fly- all it has to do is be smart enough to recognize various sources of audio and video input, basic tuning faccilities, etc. and be EASY. TO. USE. None of this homebrew shit that causes your mom to lose interest.
:|
Oh, and make the software cross platform. From the number of people spunking their pants over OMFG MAC MINI SET TOP BAWX!!!!!!!!!11111 SQUIRT!, fuck- it would go like hotcakes.
Especially considering how much of a pain in the ass the bittorrent scene has insisted on making itself over the past few weeks/months.
The first mp3 player to start taking market share FROM the iPod line will have to be :
1. Prettier.
2. Even more retardproof than the iPod.
Finding anything that meets item 1 is hard enough- item 2 is next to impossible... both? Ain't happening.
he's soliciting Apple employees to break their NDAs.
:P
Apple employees specifically.
Apple has a case, imo.
Blind admission regardless, Harvard tuition ain't Community College tuition.