the eye candy that Apple added generally gives you visual clues to what is going on. When I minimize a window it graphically collapses to the Dock, that's useful, because without thinking about it, I watched it drop down and keep track of it. When I switch between users, the graphical rotation visually lets me know that I've done something substantial. It breaks the visual space the way I've visually broken up the process.
XP does the same thing here - windows collapsing to the task bar or whereever. What resource-consuming pointless-eye-candy are you thinking of?
apple os is much better then windows as they have cut out all older api's and code from the old mac os 1-9 unlike M$ that still has code and API's from windows 3.X in vista.
They didn't cut it out - it's a different OS. It makes about as much sense to say that Windows Vista is great, because they cut out all the "api's and code" from the old AmigaOS.
The question is, in what measurable ways is Windows's backwards compatibility causing problems for it?
Wow! You mean eye candy that slows down your system and hogs resources is the best thing you can come up with for why people should upgrade to Vista?
Yet it's touted as a feature for OS X.
At least on Windows you can turn off the bloated eye candy.
Really though, if you don't like it, don't upgrade. If the worst that can be said about Vista is that the previous version of Windows was good enough, then that's not too bad, it just means that XP was good enough and doesn't need fixing. Strangely though, some people to think that Vista not offering some radical new feature means that niche platforms are suddenly better.
I think many people are staying with Windows XP because their computers are good enough. And that doesn't translate to throwing out their entire machine and spending loads on a Mac.
Hell, I'm still on Windows 2000, works fine for me!
And the only reason Vista nags so much, is because people (presumably Mac users) slagged off XP so much for not asking you, and said how OS X was better because you had to enter your password to do such things. So that's who we have to thank for that!
When I looked in the UK, most of the ones I saw only had one PATA socket, though I managed to pick up one with two sockets, so sure they exist. Either way, I haven't seen any that were SATA only, as the OP suggested...
Surely there's only been one european mission to Mars - which was a success, with a UK lander which failed. All the rest are US and USSR, and there've been plenty of failures.
Just about every motherboard I've seen still supports PATA, so it's not like it's an unusual situation - although it's annoying that most of them only support 2 devices.
Note that in Europe, liberal and conservative have different meaning than in the US. There, liberal means anti-government, close to a libertarian.
It means anti-authoritarian / pro-individual freedoms, not necessarily anti-Government (though being anti-Government is a subset of being liberal). It doesn't necessarily mean libertarian either (which means minimal Government intervention in an economic sense too), although a lot of people seem to use "libertarian" to mean "liberal".
Indeed, liberal is often conflated with being economically left ("lefty liberals").
Yes, because they all bought the OS so they can admire it on their bookshelf. No, no wait, I know! They all bought it so they can install it on their Dell boxes! No wait...
I think it's pretty safe to assume that each copy of the OS sold represents a single Mac user
But the percentage is still meaningless here. All we can do is look at the actual absolute sales figure, and that gives us a lower bound for the total number of Macs in use.
As for the actual article referred to by the submitter, Apple's great triumph was to claim half of the boxed OS sales for October. What kind of a statistic is that? Most new PCs are sold with Windows pre-installed, not boxed; hardly anybody buys it separately. So what Apple is saying is that more Apple users went out and bought the new OS for their old computer than PC users bought a boxed version of Windows. How surprising is that statistic? What percentage of the Windows-using public actually ever consider upgrading the OS separate from buying a new computer?
Indeed - and to add to that, there's no way that sales of the boxed OS can lead to new Mac users, since it can only run on an existing MacOS machine (where as this is plausibly possible with other operating systems, since you can build or buy PCs without an OS).
Just dump some plausibly-incriminating stuff on it (e.g. kinky porn, ABBA songs)
Not so fast! The UK plans to criminalise that too! (With a max sentence of three years rather than two, not to mention being placed on the sex offender register.)
You should be safe with ABBA though.
I forsee a future where people have to use TrueCrypt to hide their kinky (but nonetheless harmless) pr0n, and then give something like plans to kill someone as the alternative pretend data...
We're talking clones, so it wouldn't be a different face, let alone a whole different body.
Changes suggested by the OP such as eye colour are hardly comparable - otherwise people would have psychological problems everytime they put those coloured contact lenses!
Also note that these changes would be done by people who wanted them - so modifications to your face would be more comparable to cosmetic surgery (and could be counted as "fixing defects", anyway).
We Brits would never consider prohibition for example. As such a proposed ban on internet gambling would not have the grass roots support it does in the States and no politician is going to risk my vote, and plenty of others, by banning internet gambling.
Don't be so sure - there are plenty of people in the UK too who view anything to do with the Internet as bad, and anything related to gambling as bad. And the difference here in the UK is that they won't care whether there's majority support or not. As long as they can put their bias spin on it, it's easy to ban things with few people caring.
I can see it now: A "Crackdown on Internet Gambling"; claims that Internet sites have links to organised crimes (doesn't matter if it isn't true, people will believe it); produce some biased evidence that online gambling leads to family breakdown and people committing crimes. They'll stand to gain as many votes as they lose, they'll be seen to be doing something, and the Government only needs a minority of the votes to stay in power anyway.
Open and save dialogs highlight the entire filename in the text entry field, despite the fact that 99 times out of 100, I don't want to change the extension.
Tools->Folder Options->View, "Hide file extensions for known types". This should be on by default.
Your suggestion sounds an interesting additional option, but just to point out it's not like this behaviour is broken for the majority of Windows users.
You are right that it's hard to predict the future, but...
On the other hand: where IS my flying car? 50 years ago I'm sure you could find people confidently predicting that in the far-off future of 2007, people would have androids do their chores, live under the sea, and fly to work in that flying car.
We have the technology for "small flying vehicle", the problems are more unrelated to technology: that they are expensive, and require a harder-to-get pilot's licence.
As for androids doing chores, it was more that technology went a different route - having some robot that does everything is rather inefficient, so instead we have devices that are specific for a particular purpose. Things like washing machines, microwaves, dishwashers are gradually but significantly reducing the amount of time people have to spend on chores; things like robotic vacuum cleaners (and IIRC lawn mowers) are appearing.
A similar example might be video telephones, which are often portrayed in descriptions of the future. But the technology does exist (and any bog standard phone will do it now), it's just most people don't want to get dressed up to use the phone.
But note that Perverted Justice are also wanting these kinds of meaningless changes - they keep a list of "corporate 'sexual offenders'", which includes LiveJournal (because pedophiles are allowed to have blogs) and YouTube, as well as Wikipedia (because "Anyone can edit" also includes pedophiles!) They also helped MySpace delete 30,000 sex offender accounts (that's sex offenders, not just child abusers). ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverted-Justice.com ) So yes, they may do some good with Dateline, but they're as much as part of the problem when it comes to harrassing social networking sites.
And, they get a lot of media hype - whether it's Slashdot or the BBC, running a story everytime Apple make a noise (or even when they don't - as in the case of this story). Just look at all the stories about people queuing up for Iphones - yet it seems these stories are being run by the media, irrespective of whether there is any great rush for the phones.
Partly that's as a result of their marketing in the past. It also probably has a lot to do with the traditional popularity of in the niche market of desktop publishing and the media in general - so you've got a much higher proportion than normal of Apple fans amongst those people who control the media.
Come on now - if (4) was really the correct one, we would have to wonder why (3) isn't true.
You can see what an Apple toilet would look like here, btw. Best money can buy? If you say so.
No the iPhone isn't perfect I looked at one at the apple store and I was mostly unimpressed with it. It felt slow and sluggish.
Well this is the point, I feel. It's all very well saying "Well I guess I can live without that feature" when we're talking about the dirt cheap phones. But if I was going to spend large amounts of money, it'd clearly better do it all. Otherwise I'm better off saving my money, and get something that does those features for far less.
The "hate" is just in response to the constant hype.
If it's like the Iphone, it won't be especially desirable or popular - it'll just have lots of hype claiming that to be the case, but otherwise just be yet another tablet PC.
In a "thinking" job (as opposed to a "doing" job), it's really hard to prove that you didn't spend any time on it while at work and vice versa
That vice versa is important. If any company put that argument to me, I'd bill them for the time I spend thinking about work matters outside of work.
if your work entails writing software to track stocks and then while at home you write a similar product, even if completely on your own free time with your own personal resources, etc. Don't you think your employer would have some greivance with you?
But that's not what we're talking about - that would clearly be a conflict of interest. No one is suggesting ripping off the company by reproducing the same thing outside of work, or making a competing product.
That isn't an argument for claiming ownership of all IP.
Slashdot Mirror
the eye candy that Apple added generally gives you visual clues to what is going on. When I minimize a window it graphically collapses to the Dock, that's useful, because without thinking about it, I watched it drop down and keep track of it. When I switch between users, the graphical rotation visually lets me know that I've done something substantial. It breaks the visual space the way I've visually broken up the process.
XP does the same thing here - windows collapsing to the task bar or whereever. What resource-consuming pointless-eye-candy are you thinking of?
apple os is much better then windows as they have cut out all older api's and code from the old mac os 1-9 unlike M$ that still has code and API's from windows 3.X in vista.
They didn't cut it out - it's a different OS. It makes about as much sense to say that Windows Vista is great, because they cut out all the "api's and code" from the old AmigaOS.
The question is, in what measurable ways is Windows's backwards compatibility causing problems for it?
Wow! You mean eye candy that slows down your system and hogs resources is the best thing you can come up with for why people should upgrade to Vista?
Yet it's touted as a feature for OS X.
At least on Windows you can turn off the bloated eye candy.
Really though, if you don't like it, don't upgrade. If the worst that can be said about Vista is that the previous version of Windows was good enough, then that's not too bad, it just means that XP was good enough and doesn't need fixing. Strangely though, some people to think that Vista not offering some radical new feature means that niche platforms are suddenly better.
Many are moving on to Apple or Linux instead.
Citation needed.
I think many people are staying with Windows XP because their computers are good enough. And that doesn't translate to throwing out their entire machine and spending loads on a Mac.
Hell, I'm still on Windows 2000, works fine for me!
And the only reason Vista nags so much, is because people (presumably Mac users) slagged off XP so much for not asking you, and said how OS X was better because you had to enter your password to do such things. So that's who we have to thank for that!
When I looked in the UK, most of the ones I saw only had one PATA socket, though I managed to pick up one with two sockets, so sure they exist. Either way, I haven't seen any that were SATA only, as the OP suggested...
(and european/UK ones in particular)
Surely there's only been one european mission to Mars - which was a success, with a UK lander which failed. All the rest are US and USSR, and there've been plenty of failures.
Just about every motherboard I've seen still supports PATA, so it's not like it's an unusual situation - although it's annoying that most of them only support 2 devices.
Note that in Europe, liberal and conservative have different meaning than in the US. There, liberal means anti-government, close to a libertarian.
It means anti-authoritarian / pro-individual freedoms, not necessarily anti-Government (though being anti-Government is a subset of being liberal). It doesn't necessarily mean libertarian either (which means minimal Government intervention in an economic sense too), although a lot of people seem to use "libertarian" to mean "liberal".
Indeed, liberal is often conflated with being economically left ("lefty liberals").
Yes, because they all bought the OS so they can admire it on their bookshelf. No, no wait, I know! They all bought it so they can install it on their Dell boxes! No wait...
I think it's pretty safe to assume that each copy of the OS sold represents a single Mac user
But the percentage is still meaningless here. All we can do is look at the actual absolute sales figure, and that gives us a lower bound for the total number of Macs in use.
As for the actual article referred to by the submitter, Apple's great triumph was to claim half of the boxed OS sales for October. What kind of a statistic is that? Most new PCs are sold with Windows pre-installed, not boxed; hardly anybody buys it separately. So what Apple is saying is that more Apple users went out and bought the new OS for their old computer than PC users bought a boxed version of Windows. How surprising is that statistic? What percentage of the Windows-using public actually ever consider upgrading the OS separate from buying a new computer?
Indeed - and to add to that, there's no way that sales of the boxed OS can lead to new Mac users, since it can only run on an existing MacOS machine (where as this is plausibly possible with other operating systems, since you can build or buy PCs without an OS).
Just dump some plausibly-incriminating stuff on it (e.g. kinky porn, ABBA songs)
Not so fast! The UK plans to criminalise that too! (With a max sentence of three years rather than two, not to mention being placed on the sex offender register.)
You should be safe with ABBA though.
I forsee a future where people have to use TrueCrypt to hide their kinky (but nonetheless harmless) pr0n, and then give something like plans to kill someone as the alternative pretend data...
We're talking clones, so it wouldn't be a different face, let alone a whole different body.
Changes suggested by the OP such as eye colour are hardly comparable - otherwise people would have psychological problems everytime they put those coloured contact lenses!
Also note that these changes would be done by people who wanted them - so modifications to your face would be more comparable to cosmetic surgery (and could be counted as "fixing defects", anyway).
We Brits would never consider prohibition for example. As such a proposed ban on internet gambling would not have the grass roots support it does in the States and no politician is going to risk my vote, and plenty of others, by banning internet gambling.
Don't be so sure - there are plenty of people in the UK too who view anything to do with the Internet as bad, and anything related to gambling as bad. And the difference here in the UK is that they won't care whether there's majority support or not. As long as they can put their bias spin on it, it's easy to ban things with few people caring.
I can see it now: A "Crackdown on Internet Gambling"; claims that Internet sites have links to organised crimes (doesn't matter if it isn't true, people will believe it); produce some biased evidence that online gambling leads to family breakdown and people committing crimes. They'll stand to gain as many votes as they lose, they'll be seen to be doing something, and the Government only needs a minority of the votes to stay in power anyway.
Protectionism becomes corrupt when you start putting individuals in prison for it...
Open and save dialogs highlight the entire filename in the text entry field, despite the fact that 99 times out of 100, I don't want to change the extension.
Tools->Folder Options->View, "Hide file extensions for known types". This should be on by default.
Your suggestion sounds an interesting additional option, but just to point out it's not like this behaviour is broken for the majority of Windows users.
You are right that it's hard to predict the future, but...
On the other hand: where IS my flying car? 50 years ago I'm sure you could find people confidently predicting that in the far-off future of 2007, people would have androids do their chores, live under the sea, and fly to work in that flying car.
We have the technology for "small flying vehicle", the problems are more unrelated to technology: that they are expensive, and require a harder-to-get pilot's licence.
As for androids doing chores, it was more that technology went a different route - having some robot that does everything is rather inefficient, so instead we have devices that are specific for a particular purpose. Things like washing machines, microwaves, dishwashers are gradually but significantly reducing the amount of time people have to spend on chores; things like robotic vacuum cleaners (and IIRC lawn mowers) are appearing.
A similar example might be video telephones, which are often portrayed in descriptions of the future. But the technology does exist (and any bog standard phone will do it now), it's just most people don't want to get dressed up to use the phone.
That being said, I'm fairly certain _nobody_ publishing "academic papers" would take seriously an article that cites an encyclopedia.
Fixed.
I'd say they have covered their arses legally by using an appropriate licence.
The only person I see going on about morality is the OP who incorrectly thought what they were doing was allowed by law.
But note that Perverted Justice are also wanting these kinds of meaningless changes - they keep a list of "corporate 'sexual offenders'", which includes LiveJournal (because pedophiles are allowed to have blogs) and YouTube, as well as Wikipedia (because "Anyone can edit" also includes pedophiles!) They also helped MySpace delete 30,000 sex offender accounts (that's sex offenders, not just child abusers). ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverted-Justice.com ) So yes, they may do some good with Dateline, but they're as much as part of the problem when it comes to harrassing social networking sites.
5) They're very good at marketing.
And, they get a lot of media hype - whether it's Slashdot or the BBC, running a story everytime Apple make a noise (or even when they don't - as in the case of this story). Just look at all the stories about people queuing up for Iphones - yet it seems these stories are being run by the media, irrespective of whether there is any great rush for the phones.
Partly that's as a result of their marketing in the past. It also probably has a lot to do with the traditional popularity of in the niche market of desktop publishing and the media in general - so you've got a much higher proportion than normal of Apple fans amongst those people who control the media.
Come on now - if (4) was really the correct one, we would have to wonder why (3) isn't true.
You can see what an Apple toilet would look like here, btw. Best money can buy? If you say so.
so much better is exactly why the iPhone is a massive success
Source?
You don't sell phones by having expensive epeen features that no one can actually use
Wait, let me get this straight - you think the Iphone is cheap?
No the iPhone isn't perfect I looked at one at the apple store and I was mostly unimpressed with it. It felt slow and sluggish.
Well this is the point, I feel. It's all very well saying "Well I guess I can live without that feature" when we're talking about the dirt cheap phones. But if I was going to spend large amounts of money, it'd clearly better do it all. Otherwise I'm better off saving my money, and get something that does those features for far less.
It's not stupid at all. Apple make a huge impact every time they release something major - far and away more than any of their rivals.
If by "huge impact" you mean "hype", sure. Otherwise, I don't see that is true at all.
what's with all the hate?
The "hate" is just in response to the constant hype.
If it's like the Iphone, it won't be especially desirable or popular - it'll just have lots of hype claiming that to be the case, but otherwise just be yet another tablet PC.
In a "thinking" job (as opposed to a "doing" job), it's really hard to prove that you didn't spend any time on it while at work and vice versa
That vice versa is important. If any company put that argument to me, I'd bill them for the time I spend thinking about work matters outside of work.
if your work entails writing software to track stocks and then while at home you write a similar product, even if completely on your own free time with your own personal resources, etc. Don't you think your employer would have some greivance with you?
But that's not what we're talking about - that would clearly be a conflict of interest. No one is suggesting ripping off the company by reproducing the same thing outside of work, or making a competing product.
That isn't an argument for claiming ownership of all IP.