I just noticed that the ability to fetch mail from other servers (via pop) has been added to my gmail account. I understand that it is being gradually rolled out (I have no idea how long I've had it).
Unfortunately, of course, Yahoo and MSN only allow you to POP their mail if you pay for the privilege, while this has always been a free feature of gmail (It was a free feature of Yahoo too until they took it away, which is about the time I got fed up with them).
"Why would this bother anybody other than the tinfoil-hat types? What am I missing?"
The problem is that this looks a lot like (because it probably is) a bait-and-switch tactic.
When you get a Yahoo ID you also get a Yahoo e-mail address which you may not need or want. By default you also agree to be marketed to from a list of about 15 categories, and they ask some personal questions that many people would rather not answer. I have a Yahoo ID which I sign onto about once a month to delete the THOUSANDS of spam messages that have accumulated there (about half the spam goes to the spam folder, but almost as much stays in the inbox because yahoo sucks at identifying even the most obvious cases). My Yahoo e-mail ID is totally useless for mail, as I'd never find a legitimate message in all the junk that shows up there (often with dates in the future so that any legitimate message would be way down the list).
Most of the service providers are moving in the opposite direction. When Google acquired Blogger, the companies that created Docs and Spreadsheets, (and some others I think) they had to merge in overlapping name spaces which is a pain. But in every case that I've been involved, they ultimately allow either Google ID, or foreign ID, in the form of an external e-mail address to be used to sign in. The benefit is that external e-mail addresses are guaranteed to be unique. I'd much rather be known as me@mydomain.com rather than have to come up with some odd combination of letters and numbers that nobody else has thought of.
Yahoo went along with this trend too for a while, but my guess is that sagging ad sales has caused someone at the top to reverse course so that they can con advertisers with inflated user counts etc.
Seems like a lot of people don't and I'm surprised. I guess I've gone looking for those things and found them and others are waiting for some sort of notification. So here it is:
(groups was fairly sparse until recently but has been updated to include most of the same features as Yahoo groups, and has some of its own unique features as well)... and so on... there is a big long list once you get an account.
With a couple of exceptions (gmail and homepages where it wouldn't make sense) you can use an existing non-Google e-mail address as a logon. You have to type your full e-mail address each time (unless you have a cookie saved) which is a bit of a pain, but for someone who simply objects to having yet another e-mail address for each service they use, Google is accommodating. Yahoo did this too for a while, but as demonstrated with the recent Flickr changes they seem to be going the other direction now.
Man oh man, they should have used a circuit breaker instead of a fuse. I'd hate to get up there with a bag of those little fuses and find out I had to go back to the service station for the right one.
I'm not sure if anyone above read past the third paragraph, but I see no evidence of it.
Noteworthy in the article was a combining of conventional X86 technology and Cell technology along with some state of the art memory management. (I'm not employed by or invested in any of the companies involved, just reporting the facts mam).
For the average user there is NO downside to multi core technology, so any statement to the contrary (in the article summary in this case, not the article itself) gets me worked up.
If you don't have a multi-core machine, go into your local superstore and start up the Windows Task Manager and watch the little graphs on the two (or more) processors as you open programs etc. See, both processors are being kept busy doing things in the background? Modern bloat-ware OSs have plenty of stuff that can be done in the background as you type up your little office party announcement. The "average" user can even benefit by being able to keep multiple programs running at the same time, doing a big complex document reformat, syncing your palm device, downloading the latest virus update, and so on. The OSs have been pretty good at multitasking for some time now, and while 16 or 32 processors are probably overkill, it is simply wrong to say there is no benefit and REALLY wrong to imply that there is some sort of disadvantage to multi-core processors (or even multiple single core processors) in almost ANY modern use of a computer. Beyond having multiple processors, advances are being made in controlling shared memory and I?O devices so those processors don't end up stepping on each others toes. What is finally happening is the "commodity" PC is beginning to look like a mainframe of the 70s (and earlier, which had separate devices for memory and I/O management) which the OS, not the application programmer, could use to very great effect. So THERE.
Microsoft has been doing some "interesting" work in using the multiple processors in some graphics cards to do floating point calculations in the background and getting orders of magnitude faster restult with some (specialized) applications. Of course the better way is to leave the graphics card alone to accelerate graphics (presumably thats why you paid big bucks for it) and build the basic PC to handle all these parallel tasks (not just spreadsheet recalcs, but ordinary I/O and memory management) more efficiently. Based on this article, sounds like the scientific community will be seeing such systems in the near future, and us ordinary desktop users will probably start benefiting from it (or some Dell/Apple/Intel/etc variation in a few years.) It's great news.
Yes, this is a sales piece. Just like yesterdays "announcement" of the upcoming 45nm processors was a (gigantic) sales piece coordinated to show up here there and everywhere with pre-taped videos, Scoble blog DRAHMA meltdowns and more pictures of bunny suits than we've seen in ten years. How much actual "news" was there in the Intel/IBM announcments? Not a lot as I think they (and AMD, and IBM) have been hawking this change for almost a year now. Yesterday we learned about "Hafnium", or at least that aspect of it was news to me, and in all these product announcements, even when there isn't MUCH news, there are often tidbits that make it interesting. There is no reason to be complaining about the article, at least until it has been duped half a dozen times or so (and it probably will be.)
"Like XP vs W2K before, Vista uptake will necessarily be slow, but eventually it will be installed everywhere."
Does that mean that before Vista can be installed everywhere W2K has to be installed everywhere? Because as far as I know that has yet to happen.
There will be a steadily growing number of people like me, who haven't used Windows of any kind for... about 4 years now. Most of those people will not be in the USA at first, but I fully expect us to catch up with the rest of the world once a few folk over here realize how hopelessly comic our floundering around has become.
"The canonical forms of string theory include three mathematical assumptions--Lorentz invariance, analyticity and unitarity. Our test sets bounds on these assumptions."
Within a 25 mile radius of me (half of which is the Atlantic Ocean) there are only two stores that carry computers. One is a Walmart that on any given day has maybe one, or at most two models to choose from. The other is a Staples which seems to have several laptops on display at any given time, but usually most of them are flagged "out of stock". I don't remember ever seeing a desktop PC at the Staples at all, but maybe they are just well hidden. Now there *is* a small computer shop walking distance from here that sells some sort of generic PC for about twice what it is worth, but I'd never consider buying one. I'd have no problems buying the Walmart model of the day if I was in a pinch. The price for whatever they have is always quite low and they are mostly HPs I think, although I might have seen an e-machine in there too. They are always just basic machines, not for gaming or fancy graphics. If I had to have more I'd order by mail or go to "the big city". On the other hand, since I've switched to Linux the older machines seem to be hanging in there a lot longer, so I may actually have more machines in use than Walmart has in stock. If one was to die, I'd hardly miss it.
One way to define an operating system is that it provides a layer of abstraction between the the actual hardware and applications. At one time Windows ran on at least three hardware architectures (maybe more, but I can remember three) and at that time I fully supported the notion that it could be an OS for almost any platform, allowing applications to be easily ported from Intel to PowerPC, etc. Versions of Windows still run on hand-held machines, the XBox, large multiprocessor systems and desktops, but in fact some of these are, I think, a totally different code base. Linux, and before that other Unix variants have always run on a large variety of platforms and have made it possible, particularly for server applications for users (organizations) to shop around for the most cost effective hardware without being locked-in to a particular OS.
I think Apple is taking the wrong course if they want to be a successful computer company (but based on the name change I think there is good reason to question that they want to do that at all). As a server vendor there is no reason not to support Intel, AMD, PowerPC and new architectures as they arise without immediately dropping support for the old ones. New stuff coming from Apple and other vendors that are important to the OS X infrastructure (eg: MS and Adobe) have already end-of-lifed support for the PowerPC. that means that machines that I have, that I got big memory for, big disk drives, etc so as to last a good long while will be artificially rendered obsolete and unusable. That pisses me off, as it was exactly that type of collusion between Intel and MS that convinced me to dump that technology. As a user of Linux as well as OS X it is now clear to me that I made a mistake in trusting Apple. From now on it I will do independent hardware and software selection and as far as OSs are concerned that will be Linux, BSD or some other Unix variant. If Apple hardware makes sense (and I'm already running Linux on some of it) I'll go with that, but I suspect that will not be the case. It was bad enough having Microsoft and Intel collude on upgrade strategies to milk their mutual customer base, Apple of course doesn't have to collude, they run the whole scam in-house. My appreciation for the company has ended.
Note: I have purchased several iPods. I have nothing against Apple as consumer electronics company competing with Sony, LG, etc. I just think they are going to drown in that space and regret putting computers on the back burner. The name change ends any doubt about where they are headed.
I think the bigger issue is that the lead time (which is more likely to slip than accelerate) made it look like they didn't really have anything else to talk about and also, coupled with the name change, that they are in a big hurry to get out of the computer business before it becomes too obvious that they are stuck around 5 percent again. Jobs as much as said he'd rather have 1 percent of the phone market.
I would much rather have heard a renewed corporate push, as well as a universal OS X with separate binaries for Intel, PowerPC and maybe even a couple other things.
Linux is now the only general purpose operating system in the universe. I suspect dual binaries (or whatever they are called) will start to fade in a year or less and those of use with PPCs that we are perfectly happy with will have no choice but to switch to Linux or do without security updates. Fortunately there hasn't been a big need for such things.
"And yeah, MACworld and not ONE word about Macs? "
Yes, ther WAS one word in a way. One word REMOVED from the name of the company.
Apple Computer Inc. --> Apple Inc.
(Wasn't part of the deal with the Beatles over this distinction?)
I think that speaks volumes about where Apple is headed, which is to make computers an optional part of their business. If five years down the road the hardware (or even software) part of the business isn't contributing, it can easily be jettisoned.
"Next time try something else, like starting a vacuum and move it towards the bed, or if it doesn't have a problem with that, try squirting lemon or oranges towards it. Both assuming the cat has two ways out - if it's cornered doing stuff like that is just plain cruel."
I doubt the vacuum cleaner trick will have any effect on the SCO lawyers. But I bet the judge might be desperate enough now to try that lemon in the eye thing. As to cruelty, the only ones who suffer in the end are users who have to pay for it one way or another in higher software costs, slower development cycles and wasted hours reading of the latest antics here and there and everywhere. I guess if cruelty to the lawyers WERE to become an issue the best thing would be to just shoot them.
Why is parent post modded troll? It is a statement of fact, and on-topic. High-security organizations have been know to forbid the use of ActiveX and VBA scripting and for very good reasons.
* the dryish fruit of some plants, contains one to many seeds and usually flattened
* a group of whales.
* Developed ovary or fruit.
* with animals such as whales, dolphins, or porpoises, the term describes a family or social group that stays together; roughly equivalent to a flock or school.
We went through this with Windows. Just because Microsoft was stupid enough to name an OS after a commonly used word doesn't mean we all have to stop using that word. We routinely continue to use the word with respect to a clear piece of hardware on the exterior of our dwellings, and we even talk of "windows" in a generic sense as user interfaces elements.
Why Apple chose the word "pod" I don't know, but I'm sure that the world's podiatrists aren't about to desecrate their diplomas and substitute "foot doctor".
This move can only be bad for Apple, and the timing couldn't be better for Microsoft for us to pick another word that doesn't remind us of the device that got detachable music devices into almost every American household (even thought they were far from being the first such device).
This is the sort of thing, common in Apple's history, where 10 year hence hindsight will have them saying "What were we thinking?!"
I think the reason Microsoft changed the menus was that they needed to change SOMETHING that was significant in order to justify calling it a new release.
In answer to the question posed: The gaff that will be seen with 20-20 hindsight in a few years is that Windows can only have a single user interface. If they would isolate (further) the GUI from the rest of the OS they could (like Linux) have a multiplicity of users interfaces and if people were comfortable with the old one they could continue to use it with the new OS (or office version, etc).
Do ya get the impression that when they are all done these disks and players are going to be more temperamental than anything we've seen before? You'll have to set your media center up in an Intel clean room to keep your player from skiping out to la-la land half way through the movie.
Given the heat-related problems that Apple laptops (and desktops) have been having... and the fact that these same designs are being sold as Dells, HPs etc as well, I'd be tempted to run any new machine such as this at 100% 24 hours a day for at least a month or two after I got it. That way, if it's going to go up in smoke it will still be during the short period during which the store will replace or refund lemon products without a lot of hassle. Why subject yourself to the whims of the manufacturer when you can just take it back to Walmart, Costco, or the like and get a refund, in most cases, no-questions-asked? Unfortunately for Apple users they are probably dealing with an Apple store under orders to discourage returns, but buying from one of the EZ-return retailers you are in pretty good shape.
I think they are similar, but not binary nor instruction set compatible, just "similar" as IBM, Motorola, and Apple colaborated on the design, but I agree that the Intel had a nasty design for assembler programmers. I also think Apple has missed a chance to shine in the server market by focusing exclusively on the lowest common denominator desktop systems (and treating servers as just rack-mounted variations on same).
There are a couple of companies building small and inexpensive desktop systems based on the older PowerPC chips (not these $18,000 babies) and now that Apple and Dell are about as differentiated as Chevy and Pontiac I'll seriously be considering one of these truly high-tech alternatives.
"As for myself, I found the image sizes too small, but I suppose we are basing the keywords on first impressions and are expected to come from the image search."
Yes, WAY too small. I was tempted to try typing "postage stamp" or "blurry thing" for the few images I was shown. If I play again I'll have to keep a magnifier handy (or the sooftware equivalent).
Slashdot Mirror
Just a note...
I just noticed that the ability to fetch mail from other servers (via pop) has been added to my gmail account. I understand that it is being gradually rolled out (I have no idea how long I've had it).
Unfortunately, of course, Yahoo and MSN only allow you to POP their mail if you pay for the privilege, while this has always been a free feature of gmail (It was a free feature of Yahoo too until they took it away, which is about the time I got fed up with them).
"Quietly implemented, without a fuss."
That's your problem right there. You Canadians don't have enough clueless gadflys hanging all over the process. Here, take some of ours, PLEASE!
"Why would this bother anybody other than the tinfoil-hat types? What am I missing?"
The problem is that this looks a lot like (because it probably is) a bait-and-switch tactic.
When you get a Yahoo ID you also get a Yahoo e-mail address which you may not need or want. By default you also agree to be marketed to from a list of about 15 categories, and they ask some personal questions that many people would rather not answer. I have a Yahoo ID which I sign onto about once a month to delete the THOUSANDS of spam messages that have accumulated there (about half the spam goes to the spam folder, but almost as much stays in the inbox because yahoo sucks at identifying even the most obvious cases). My Yahoo e-mail ID is totally useless for mail, as I'd never find a legitimate message in all the junk that shows up there (often with dates in the future so that any legitimate message would be way down the list).
Most of the service providers are moving in the opposite direction. When Google acquired Blogger, the companies that created Docs and Spreadsheets, (and some others I think) they had to merge in overlapping name spaces which is a pain. But in every case that I've been involved, they ultimately allow either Google ID, or foreign ID, in the form of an external e-mail address to be used to sign in. The benefit is that external e-mail addresses are guaranteed to be unique. I'd much rather be known as me@mydomain.com rather than have to come up with some odd combination of letters and numbers that nobody else has thought of.
Yahoo went along with this trend too for a while, but my guess is that sagging ad sales has caused someone at the top to reverse course so that they can con advertisers with inflated user counts etc.
You didn't know Google had all those things?
... and so on... there is a big long list once you get an account.
Seems like a lot of people don't and I'm surprised. I guess I've gone looking for those things and found them and others are waiting for some sort of notification. So here it is:
Google personalized page:
http://www.google.com/ig
Google Reader:
http://www.google.com/reader
Free home pages:
http://pages.google.com/
Docs and spreadsheets:
http://docs.google.com/
Google groups:
http://groups.google.com/
(groups was fairly sparse until recently but has been updated to include most of the same features as Yahoo groups, and has some of its own unique features as well)
With a couple of exceptions (gmail and homepages where it wouldn't make sense) you can use an existing non-Google e-mail address as a logon. You have to type your full e-mail address each time (unless you have a cookie saved) which is a bit of a pain, but for someone who simply objects to having yet another e-mail address for each service they use, Google is accommodating. Yahoo did this too for a while, but as demonstrated with the recent Flickr changes they seem to be going the other direction now.
Man oh man, they should have used a circuit breaker instead of a fuse. I'd hate to get up there with a bag of those little fuses and find out I had to go back to the service station for the right one.
So many misconceptions, so little time...
I'm not sure if anyone above read past the third paragraph, but I see no evidence of it.
Noteworthy in the article was a combining of conventional X86 technology and Cell technology along with some state of the art memory management. (I'm not employed by or invested in any of the companies involved, just reporting the facts mam).
For the average user there is NO downside to multi core technology, so any statement to the contrary (in the article summary in this case, not the article itself) gets me worked up.
If you don't have a multi-core machine, go into your local superstore and start up the Windows Task Manager and watch the little graphs on the two (or more) processors as you open programs etc. See, both processors are being kept busy doing things in the background? Modern bloat-ware OSs have plenty of stuff that can be done in the background as you type up your little office party announcement. The "average" user can even benefit by being able to keep multiple programs running at the same time, doing a big complex document reformat, syncing your palm device, downloading the latest virus update, and so on. The OSs have been pretty good at multitasking for some time now, and while 16 or 32 processors are probably overkill, it is simply wrong to say there is no benefit and REALLY wrong to imply that there is some sort of disadvantage to multi-core processors (or even multiple single core processors) in almost ANY modern use of a computer. Beyond having multiple processors, advances are being made in controlling shared memory and I?O devices so those processors don't end up stepping on each others toes. What is finally happening is the "commodity" PC is beginning to look like a mainframe of the 70s (and earlier, which had separate devices for memory and I/O management) which the OS, not the application programmer, could use to very great effect. So THERE.
Microsoft has been doing some "interesting" work in using the multiple processors in some graphics cards to do floating point calculations in the background and getting orders of magnitude faster restult with some (specialized) applications. Of course the better way is to leave the graphics card alone to accelerate graphics (presumably thats why you paid big bucks for it) and build the basic PC to handle all these parallel tasks (not just spreadsheet recalcs, but ordinary I/O and memory management) more efficiently. Based on this article, sounds like the scientific community will be seeing such systems in the near future, and us ordinary desktop users will probably start benefiting from it (or some Dell/Apple/Intel/etc variation in a few years.) It's great news.
Yes, this is a sales piece. Just like yesterdays "announcement" of the upcoming 45nm processors was a (gigantic) sales piece coordinated to show up here there and everywhere with pre-taped videos, Scoble blog DRAHMA meltdowns and more pictures of bunny suits than we've seen in ten years. How much actual "news" was there in the Intel/IBM announcments? Not a lot as I think they (and AMD, and IBM) have been hawking this change for almost a year now. Yesterday we learned about "Hafnium", or at least that aspect of it was news to me, and in all these product announcements, even when there isn't MUCH news, there are often tidbits that make it interesting. There is no reason to be complaining about the article, at least until it has been duped half a dozen times or so (and it probably will be.)
"Like XP vs W2K before, Vista uptake will necessarily be slow, but eventually it will be installed everywhere."
... about 4 years now. Most of those people will not be in the USA at first, but I fully expect us to catch up with the rest of the world once a few folk over here realize how hopelessly comic our floundering around has become.
Does that mean that before Vista can be installed everywhere W2K has to be installed everywhere? Because as far as I know that has yet to happen.
There will be a steadily growing number of people like me, who haven't used Windows of any kind for
"The canonical forms of string theory include three mathematical assumptions--Lorentz invariance, analyticity and unitarity. Our test sets bounds on these assumptions."
Uh... can I get back to you on that?
Within a 25 mile radius of me (half of which is the Atlantic Ocean) there are only two stores that carry computers. One is a Walmart that on any given day has maybe one, or at most two models to choose from. The other is a Staples which seems to have several laptops on display at any given time, but usually most of them are flagged "out of stock". I don't remember ever seeing a desktop PC at the Staples at all, but maybe they are just well hidden. Now there *is* a small computer shop walking distance from here that sells some sort of generic PC for about twice what it is worth, but I'd never consider buying one. I'd have no problems buying the Walmart model of the day if I was in a pinch. The price for whatever they have is always quite low and they are mostly HPs I think, although I might have seen an e-machine in there too. They are always just basic machines, not for gaming or fancy graphics. If I had to have more I'd order by mail or go to "the big city". On the other hand, since I've switched to Linux the older machines seem to be hanging in there a lot longer, so I may actually have more machines in use than Walmart has in stock. If one was to die, I'd hardly miss it.
One way to define an operating system is that it provides a layer of abstraction between the the actual hardware and applications. At one time Windows ran on at least three hardware architectures (maybe more, but I can remember three) and at that time I fully supported the notion that it could be an OS for almost any platform, allowing applications to be easily ported from Intel to PowerPC, etc. Versions of Windows still run on hand-held machines, the XBox, large multiprocessor systems and desktops, but in fact some of these are, I think, a totally different code base. Linux, and before that other Unix variants have always run on a large variety of platforms and have made it possible, particularly for server applications for users (organizations) to shop around for the most cost effective hardware without being locked-in to a particular OS.
I think Apple is taking the wrong course if they want to be a successful computer company (but based on the name change I think there is good reason to question that they want to do that at all). As a server vendor there is no reason not to support Intel, AMD, PowerPC and new architectures as they arise without immediately dropping support for the old ones. New stuff coming from Apple and other vendors that are important to the OS X infrastructure (eg: MS and Adobe) have already end-of-lifed support for the PowerPC. that means that machines that I have, that I got big memory for, big disk drives, etc so as to last a good long while will be artificially rendered obsolete and unusable. That pisses me off, as it was exactly that type of collusion between Intel and MS that convinced me to dump that technology. As a user of Linux as well as OS X it is now clear to me that I made a mistake in trusting Apple. From now on it I will do independent hardware and software selection and as far as OSs are concerned that will be Linux, BSD or some other Unix variant. If Apple hardware makes sense (and I'm already running Linux on some of it) I'll go with that, but I suspect that will not be the case. It was bad enough having Microsoft and Intel collude on upgrade strategies to milk their mutual customer base, Apple of course doesn't have to collude, they run the whole scam in-house. My appreciation for the company has ended.
Note: I have purchased several iPods. I have nothing against Apple as consumer electronics company competing with Sony, LG, etc. I just think they are going to drown in that space and regret putting computers on the back burner. The name change ends any doubt about where they are headed.
I think the bigger issue is that the lead time (which is more likely to slip than accelerate) made it look like they didn't really have anything else to talk about and also, coupled with the name change, that they are in a big hurry to get out of the computer business before it becomes too obvious that they are stuck around 5 percent again. Jobs as much as said he'd rather have 1 percent of the phone market.
I would much rather have heard a renewed corporate push, as well as a universal OS X with separate binaries for Intel, PowerPC and maybe even a couple other things.
Linux is now the only general purpose operating system in the universe. I suspect dual binaries (or whatever they are called) will start to fade in a year or less and those of use with PPCs that we are perfectly happy with will have no choice but to switch to Linux or do without security updates. Fortunately there hasn't been a big need for such things.
"And yeah, MACworld and not ONE word about Macs? "
Yes, ther WAS one word in a way. One word REMOVED from the name of the company.
Apple Computer Inc. --> Apple Inc.
(Wasn't part of the deal with the Beatles over this distinction?)
I think that speaks volumes about where Apple is headed, which is to make computers an optional part of their business. If five years down the road the hardware (or even software) part of the business isn't contributing, it can easily be jettisoned.
Number of good points in above post that should be addresses rather than buried. This isn't Digg (yet) I hpoe.
"Next time try something else, like starting a vacuum and move it towards the bed, or if it doesn't have a problem with that, try squirting lemon or oranges towards it. Both assuming the cat has two ways out - if it's cornered doing stuff like that is just plain cruel."
I doubt the vacuum cleaner trick will have any effect on the SCO lawyers. But I bet the judge might be desperate enough now to try that lemon in the eye thing. As to cruelty, the only ones who suffer in the end are users who have to pay for it one way or another in higher software costs, slower development cycles and wasted hours reading of the latest antics here and there and everywhere. I guess if cruelty to the lawyers WERE to become an issue the best thing would be to just shoot them.
It would be a start.
Why is parent post modded troll? It is a statement of fact, and on-topic. High-security organizations have been know to forbid the use of ActiveX and VBA scripting and for very good reasons.
Oh, I see, we can still post just no convoluted threads that degenerate into personal attacks.
Hey! Why don't you leave it broken and call it a feature!
I think they are talking sports. Is this sort of thing allowed on Slashdot?
Is there an administrator in the house?
Pod:
* the dryish fruit of some plants, contains one to many seeds and usually flattened
* a group of whales.
* Developed ovary or fruit.
* with animals such as whales, dolphins, or porpoises, the term describes a family or social group that stays together; roughly equivalent to a flock or school.
We went through this with Windows. Just because Microsoft was stupid enough to name an OS after a commonly used word doesn't mean we all have to stop using that word. We routinely continue to use the word with respect to a clear piece of hardware on the exterior of our dwellings, and we even talk of "windows" in a generic sense as user interfaces elements.
Why Apple chose the word "pod" I don't know, but I'm sure that the world's podiatrists aren't about to desecrate their diplomas and substitute "foot doctor".
This move can only be bad for Apple, and the timing couldn't be better for Microsoft for us to pick another word that doesn't remind us of the device that got detachable music devices into almost every American household (even thought they were far from being the first such device).
This is the sort of thing, common in Apple's history, where 10 year hence hindsight will have them saying "What were we thinking?!"
Apparently, they never learn.
I think the reason Microsoft changed the menus was that they needed to change SOMETHING that was significant in order to justify calling it a new release.
In answer to the question posed: The gaff that will be seen with 20-20 hindsight in a few years is that Windows can only have a single user interface. If they would isolate (further) the GUI from the rest of the OS they could (like Linux) have a multiplicity of users interfaces and if people were comfortable with the old one they could continue to use it with the new OS (or office version, etc).
Do ya get the impression that when they are all done these disks and players are going to be more temperamental than anything we've seen before? You'll have to set your media center up in an Intel clean room to keep your player from skiping out to la-la land half way through the movie.
Given the heat-related problems that Apple laptops (and desktops) have been having... and the fact that these same designs are being sold as Dells, HPs etc as well, I'd be tempted to run any new machine such as this at 100% 24 hours a day for at least a month or two after I got it. That way, if it's going to go up in smoke it will still be during the short period during which the store will replace or refund lemon products without a lot of hassle. Why subject yourself to the whims of the manufacturer when you can just take it back to Walmart, Costco, or the like and get a refund, in most cases, no-questions-asked? Unfortunately for Apple users they are probably dealing with an Apple store under orders to discourage returns, but buying from one of the EZ-return retailers you are in pretty good shape.
I think they are similar, but not binary nor instruction set compatible, just "similar" as IBM, Motorola, and Apple colaborated on the design, but I agree that the Intel had a nasty design for assembler programmers. I also think Apple has missed a chance to shine in the server market by focusing exclusively on the lowest common denominator desktop systems (and treating servers as just rack-mounted variations on same).
There are a couple of companies building small and inexpensive desktop systems based on the older PowerPC chips (not these $18,000 babies) and now that Apple and Dell are about as differentiated as Chevy and Pontiac I'll seriously be considering one of these truly high-tech alternatives.
I think you slightly missed the point of the GP which was:
"Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system."
You, and Apple have made an exception to this which is: "It is OK for the OS to slow the fans down."
Why the exception? Why can't the temp sensor feed directly to the fan speed control?
Couldn't someone write a program to turn the fan to its lowest setting and then do something in a loop?
I'm still puzzled as to why anyone would think this a good idea.
"As for myself, I found the image sizes too small, but I suppose we are basing the keywords on first impressions and are expected to come from the image search."
Yes, WAY too small. I was tempted to try typing "postage stamp" or "blurry thing" for the few images I was shown. If I play again I'll have to keep a magnifier handy (or the sooftware equivalent).
they make it mandatory, loud, and obnoxious. One more reason to switch to something else.
I look forward to intensified mocking of my Windows-using inferiors!