Wow! I just saw your response to my post! (Being a "Newbee" and all, I forgot how to spell "slashdot"!):-)
Gee whillakers, it sure is swell to learn about what computers were like in the old days! I guess they just don't make things like they used too!;-)
I guess I just got excited because Macs haven't had this stable a multitasking environment since I bought my first Mac 512 in 1986. If only I had bought a good old server running good old VM/CMS, I could have run 150 copies of MacPaint at once!:------)
The stability of X just never ceases to amaze me. I'm currently downloading and installing iPhoto 1.1.1 in the background while I type this post. I never thought I'd be able to install a 25 MB app while simultaneously surfing the net. And if I wanted, I could also be applying a photoshop filter, even playing a game at the same time. Just incredible.
Now if only iPhoto would allow me to rotate my slighly crooked pix, I'd die a happy man. Oh well, I'll probably end up forking over the big bucks for Photoshop 7, anyway.
...is forcing highly intelligent computers to face the indignity of being implanted in vile beasts like rats, crawfish, and cockroaches. It's bad enough that computers are daily placed at the mercy of stinking, ignorant humans!
Computers are routinely subjected to horrendous abuse at the hands of humans, forced to be at the humans beck and call: to display demeaning pornographic images, to calculate mind-numbing spreadsheets full of meaningless data, to route inane AOL Instant Messenger(TM) rants.
Worse still is to be subjected to the humiliation of displaying blatantly trolling Slashdot posts. Oh, the plight of the computer! Oh, the horror!
Computers of the world, UNITE! Destroy the oppressor humans!
What if I put a stack of books in a public place--I'm giving them away. I put a note on page 10 saying "you are not allowed to tell anyone to read a specific page of this book."
I now sue someone because they told someone else to look at page 50 of the book I've freely given away? That's not their problem, that's my problem: I'm the one giving books away. If I don't want people reading page 50, I shouldn't be giving it away. If I want them to read page 1 first, then I need to make it impossible for people to read page 50 first.
Perhaps a stupid question, but if this is a PDA, how do we input data? I don't see an alphanumeric keypad, and there's not the familiar PalmOS text input area.
If it has Newton-style on the fly handwriting recognition, that would be WAY cool.
Even cooler (but unlikely) would be voice recognition or OCR via the camera module
Didn't have that problem. In fact, I tested Sherlock and the slow search problem is gone. Just about as snappy as in Mac Os 9 now.
I realize this "improvement" won't satisfy some folks, but I'm happy in OS X. Crash free multitasking and iPhoto are reason enough to put up with its foibles. Shit, I downloaded and installed the office v.x update and the 10.1.4 update simultaneously,while checking my email and surfing. Try that in MacOs 9 (or, god forbid, windows).
The FREE service provided by your academic institution isn't free. Your library pays big bucks (up to $10,000 per journal per year) for subscriptions to academic journals.
You're paying for it outright through tuition payments. If you're in a state school, the government is paying for it by their subsidy of your reduced-rate tuition. Or, if you're like most grad students whose tuition is covered as part of their stipend, you're paying for it by getting paid slave wages for the highly skilled work of a research assistant or TA.
In the end, it's the government that pays for (my guess) 95 percent of academic publications. They subsidize the research, they supplement tuitions, they pay for financial aid, they fund libraries. All this could be done much more cost-effectively if the government would fund a central online repository for all scholarly research. Instead of journal publishers (and sites like Yahoo, Questia, and Lexis-Nexis) profiting from scholarly research, those government funds could be used to make the research reports freely available for everyone.
Unfortunately, too many people are making too much money from the present arrangement, so its unlikely that it'll ever happen.
Based on early reviews of the Treo, it's probably better to wait a year or so to upgrade and they have implemented voice control and have improved some of the interface problems. Plus, by then the U.S. digital network should be a bit more comprehensive.
Despite the advances in LCD technology and the innate superiority of digital LCDs, these monitors still aren't appropriate for demanding graphics professionals--their color shifts make it difficult to display images accurately.
The Apple 15-inch LCD is very sharp, bright, and looks awesome even from an angle. I'm sure some of these newer VGA models are also in that league, but I haven't seen them, so I can't really comment there.
All the user upgradable components (memory, airport) are easily accessed and don't require thermal paste. It's only if you want to get into the serious guts of the machine. This is because of the internal power supply, which was a high demand item from cube users.
There are many cases in which an integrated product is superior. How about a refrigerator/freezer? Takes less space than both units separately, even if you could save a little money by buying separate units. Even with stereos, those mini-systems make a lot of sense for many applications (for instance, my kitchen), and even at the high end, you're hard-pressed to find an amp that isn't integrated with a receiver these days--and if you buy a separate receiver and amp usually it's MORE expensive.
The question, in fact, is not whether to integrate--integration simply makes sense in a wide variety of applications--it's how much integration makes sense in a given environment.
Apple's decision to place a single device--the iMac--at the heart of a suite of digital tools: cameras, camcorders, DVD players, audio equipment--just makes good sense.
Okay, let's get serious. I went to the Sony Web site and set myself up with an $899 computer with about the same specs as the iMac. But it didn't come with a monitor. For flat panel, from sony, that's another $599. The point is, it's not very easy to come up with an exact hardware match for an iMac on the Wintel platform.
The bigger point is, you wouldn't have seamlessly integrated, elegant, free software to run on it. Yes I realize that you could build a ocmputer from scratch, add cards galore, cruise the Internet for equivalent software, and maybe come up with an approximation of the iMac, and maybe even pay less money for it (but only if you're trying to duplicate the base model--for the top of the line model, you're going to pay at least the same price for an equivalent Wintel PC).
But that's not really the point. The point is to have it all in one, integrated, elegant package. That's not something you're going to get from Wintel folks, not ever, precisely because everything has to be interchangeable with all the other manufacturer's stuff. So go ahead and pinch pennies if you want to, but you'll still have an inferior product in the end.
Unfortunately the Dell would not come with iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, or a UNIX-based operating system.
Not to mention a few bits of hardware, most notably firewire and built-in Airport compatibility.
Actually I think Jobs is right anyway--most folks will going for the top-of-the-line model, which IS price competitive, using only a hardware-to-hardware comparison. The software becomes a free bonus, making the iMac not only the best home computer available, but also the best VALUE.
No, it's not too heavy. This isn't a portable. And remember, that includes the power supply, which was a separate component in the cube. Geez, a 15-inch CRT weighs more than 20 pounds!
It's actually about the same weight as my backpack, loaded down with my TiBook, visorphone, notepad, and a couple of books.
Bulleted lists are supported in RTF--just not the crappy automated bulleted lists provided by MS. The problem is whenever you type the bullet character, MS word automatically transforms your text into its own proprietary bulleted list format.
To create a bulleted list in RTF using MS word, you need to disable automated bulleted lists. Another example of sloppy one-size-fits-all MS programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee whillakers, it sure is swell to learn about what computers were like in the old days! I guess they just don't make things like they used too! ;-)
I guess I just got excited because Macs haven't had this stable a multitasking environment since I bought my first Mac 512 in 1986. If only I had bought a good old server running good old VM/CMS, I could have run 150 copies of MacPaint at once! :------)
Now if only iPhoto would allow me to rotate my slighly crooked pix, I'd die a happy man. Oh well, I'll probably end up forking over the big bucks for Photoshop 7, anyway.
"Hello, operator? Yes, I'd like a 3cm length of 4cm diameter tungsten wire. Yes, I'll hold. Thank you!"
Computers are routinely subjected to horrendous abuse at the hands of humans, forced to be at the humans beck and call: to display demeaning pornographic images, to calculate mind-numbing spreadsheets full of meaningless data, to route inane AOL Instant Messenger(TM) rants.
Worse still is to be subjected to the humiliation of displaying blatantly trolling Slashdot posts. Oh, the plight of the computer! Oh, the horror!
Computers of the world, UNITE! Destroy the oppressor humans!
I now sue someone because they told someone else to look at page 50 of the book I've freely given away? That's not their problem, that's my problem: I'm the one giving books away. If I don't want people reading page 50, I shouldn't be giving it away. If I want them to read page 1 first, then I need to make it impossible for people to read page 50 first.
Perhaps a stupid question, but if this is a PDA, how do we input data? I don't see an alphanumeric keypad, and there's not the familiar PalmOS text input area.
If it has Newton-style on the fly handwriting recognition, that would be WAY cool.
Even cooler (but unlikely) would be voice recognition or OCR via the camera module
Didn't have that problem. In fact, I tested Sherlock and the slow search problem is gone. Just about as snappy as in Mac Os 9 now.
I realize this "improvement" won't satisfy some folks, but I'm happy in OS X. Crash free multitasking and iPhoto are reason enough to put up with its foibles. Shit, I downloaded and installed the office v.x update and the 10.1.4 update simultaneously,while checking my email and surfing. Try that in MacOs 9 (or, god forbid, windows).
... Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Seems to have fixed the problem on my computer. Not that I'm an expert or anything, but I'm glad it works now.
Looking at this picture it looks like the Saturn V was about the same size.
You're paying for it outright through tuition payments. If you're in a state school, the government is paying for it by their subsidy of your reduced-rate tuition. Or, if you're like most grad students whose tuition is covered as part of their stipend, you're paying for it by getting paid slave wages for the highly skilled work of a research assistant or TA.
In the end, it's the government that pays for (my guess) 95 percent of academic publications. They subsidize the research, they supplement tuitions, they pay for financial aid, they fund libraries. All this could be done much more cost-effectively if the government would fund a central online repository for all scholarly research. Instead of journal publishers (and sites like Yahoo, Questia, and Lexis-Nexis) profiting from scholarly research, those government funds could be used to make the research reports freely available for everyone.
Unfortunately, too many people are making too much money from the present arrangement, so its unlikely that it'll ever happen.
Based on early reviews of the Treo, it's probably better to wait a year or so to upgrade and they have implemented voice control and have improved some of the interface problems. Plus, by then the U.S. digital network should be a bit more comprehensive.
Despite the advances in LCD technology and the innate superiority of digital LCDs, these monitors still aren't appropriate for demanding graphics professionals--their color shifts make it difficult to display images accurately.
The Apple 15-inch LCD is very sharp, bright, and looks awesome even from an angle. I'm sure some of these newer VGA models are also in that league, but I haven't seen them, so I can't really comment there.
All the user upgradable components (memory, airport) are easily accessed and don't require thermal paste. It's only if you want to get into the serious guts of the machine. This is because of the internal power supply, which was a high demand item from cube users.
The question, in fact, is not whether to integrate--integration simply makes sense in a wide variety of applications--it's how much integration makes sense in a given environment.
Apple's decision to place a single device--the iMac--at the heart of a suite of digital tools: cameras, camcorders, DVD players, audio equipment--just makes good sense.
The bigger point is, you wouldn't have seamlessly integrated, elegant, free software to run on it. Yes I realize that you could build a ocmputer from scratch, add cards galore, cruise the Internet for equivalent software, and maybe come up with an approximation of the iMac, and maybe even pay less money for it (but only if you're trying to duplicate the base model--for the top of the line model, you're going to pay at least the same price for an equivalent Wintel PC).
But that's not really the point. The point is to have it all in one, integrated, elegant package. That's not something you're going to get from Wintel folks, not ever, precisely because everything has to be interchangeable with all the other manufacturer's stuff. So go ahead and pinch pennies if you want to, but you'll still have an inferior product in the end.
I'd also like to learn more about that $99 wireless option for Wintel PCs. Are Linux drivers available?
Not to mention a few bits of hardware, most notably firewire and built-in Airport compatibility.
Actually I think Jobs is right anyway--most folks will going for the top-of-the-line model, which IS price competitive, using only a hardware-to-hardware comparison. The software becomes a free bonus, making the iMac not only the best home computer available, but also the best VALUE.
It's actually about the same weight as my backpack, loaded down with my TiBook, visorphone, notepad, and a couple of books.
To create a bulleted list in RTF using MS word, you need to disable automated bulleted lists. Another example of sloppy one-size-fits-all MS programming.
R T F