Sure, I use ghostscript on my computer on a daily basis. I suppose I wasn't very clear -- I didn't mean legal issues. It's just that Apple and Adobe have been friendly partners into the distant, hazy past. Apple eliminating most of the value of one of Adobe's products (especially given how much money Adobe threw into developing and promoting PDF) was not be something that I expected.
Determining who's in charge of and who should be in charge of South Africa can be quite interesting.
More importantly, ICANN has policy prohibiting involvement with national entities, or making TLD changes at national request. They know that goverments in coups or breakaway states can get an easy legitimization by getting their own TLD. They follow *only* the ISO country code charts. To some degree, this guy is simply following in the same spirit -- keeping the Internet out of national power squabbling, and maintained by the same set of volunteers and computer gurus who have kept the thing working well for ages.
I don't know why you're calling it "custom" software -- it's hardly secret or propriatary or specially done for you. There's software somewhere driving the Mac OS stuff. Yes, it's bundled with the operating system, but if you run down to the store and pick up a copy of Red Hat, gphoto comes with the thing as well. It's not like you have to even download the thing, and it's installed by default.
France -- the only nation on earth that wouldn't accept "CD-ROM" as a word because it "clashes" with their language. They ran out and made up some word. Yuck.
My Kodak DC-5000 works without any additions on my Mac...let's not get into the fact that Linux doesn't suppor them at all At least the DC-5000 works fine in Linux.
He's saying that the device speaks low-level USB, but doesn't support its HID profile. So it happens to use the USB bus, but doesn't implement all the things it should.
This isn't new at all. Many of the devices you plug into your computer over USB or ATA don't support everything that they really should, or break some rules. You just tend to avoid the ones that don't do as good a job, if you can.
You know, labs funded to do studies don't *falsify* results. They just ignore all the cons, and trumpet the good results.
Also, the fact that Gartner, a major industry player, happened to have Apple as one of its many clients seven years ago is a pretty weak attack on the study.
If there were any truth to it, the study would be all the rage in the IT journals...
Riiight. Think about the IT industry for a moment. Most of it consists of semi-skilled workers who know nothing but Microsoft software. No one, and I do mean no one, is going to make their skillset useless by recommending that the Mac OS replace Windows in their workplace.
With a PC, you usually get better complete hardware. Like a disk drive with an eject button.
Um...the PC design is significantly inferior and a bad design choice that unfortunately legacy issues have prevented anyone from fixing. See, there are two states the computer might be in when you want to eject a disk. Either it wants to spit it out or it doesn't. If it doesn't want to spit it out, it's writing to it. That means you shouldn't eject it anyway, period, or you're going to be damaging the disk and maybe the drive. If it does spit it out, then you can eject just fine on the Mac via software. Also, if you haven't noticed, Windows boxes have absolutely godawful performance when writing to a floppy. It's because they *cannot* queue writes -- all writes must be synchronous, since the disk could be ejected at any time. On the Mac (and optionally Linux, though you're running a risk that someone's going to push the eject button while the thing is still mounted), you can complete writes quickly and then flush the cache over time.
Why do you think CD-ROMs and other modern drives all eject via a software mechanism instead of a hardware mechanism?
PC's? You get ports for standard parallel and serial devices. Oops. Bargain basement inferior Mac forgot them.
Actually, Macs had their own formfactor serial port (which, BTW, had significantly higher throughput than the PC serial port). Apple just started migrating to USB earlier than the PC, and is significantly ahead in moving to a modern architecture -- new Macs do not and have not for some time had these ancient ports out of box. In a year or so, PCs will be doing the same thing. Maybe one in ten thousand people work in a research lab that does CE stuff and want to interface with some controller circuitry -- and they can get a serial card.
As for parallel ports, you're looking at an ancient, slow, and disgusting freak of nature with expensive cables that should have been killed off long ago. Anything that requires a parallel port is much better off on USB.
The vast majority of IT departments find that the Mac platform does indeed cost a lot more and is less versatile.
Uh...the vast majority of IT departments don't have a clue how to use or maintain anything but Windows.
Incidently, a prof of mine that does consulting (a bit Solaris fan) specifically said that he'd build an MS setup if he could instead of a Solaris setup because the cost to maintain small systems was so much lower. Why? MCSEs earn peanuts compared to a skilled UNIX admin, and you can just hire one of 'em and toss them an instruction book.
Until recently, the Mac OS has been a limiting straitjacket made all the harder to use by the lack of a command line which lets you do some things that are still harder on any modern GUI.
Whereas now Windows boxes have the command.com shell and Mac boxes have the more powerful csh, and Windows boxes are the limiting straitjacket made all the harder to use by the lack of a good CLI.
Have you ever seen what kinda traffic that the Mac network browser generates?
Yup. A lot. Much like the Windows network browser generating a bunch of SMB traffic.
seeing as most Mac users don't know jack about proper computing they screw things up CONSTANTLY
This differs from the Windows world how again?
I tend to find that Macs are easier to fix than Windows boxes, though. Break your Mac? You've got some sweet troubleshooting tools from Apple. I haven't had a Mac for a few years, but the Extension Manager was a great little program. Windows doesn't give you anything nearly as powerful. Plus, you can boot into a fresh, clean copy of the MacOS right off a CD if you (and mind you, this is *very hard to do*) manage to get the thing into a state where it won't boot...the only thing MS gives you from booting off the CD is an install-only environment (and now, the rescue console, which is a pretty piss-poor environment for actually fixing things).
not to mention when they email out 40 meg Photoshop files
As long as this is over a nice peppy intranet and you aren't Scrooge when it comes to mail spool quota, I don't see the problem.
The "office of Macs" is one step down the line toward supporting an office full of dumb terminals. When you have machines which are much more limited and harder to do a variety of different things with, of course support is easier
Aside: I kind of think having an office of dumb terminals would be cool. I remember many late nights years ago hacking away on VT220s.
That being said, the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes is pretty tough to defend. The MacOS has a native, modern and free-with-the-OS scripting language -- AppleScript. Windows has the limited, ugly-as-hell and slow batch file system.
A nice new Mac comes with a rather large number of very powerful UNIX utilities. The Windows command line utilities are poor, very limited copies of the Mac's tools.
Ever edited resources? On the Mac, the power user can hack up his applications to do all sorts of interesting and useful things -- but there's no reasonable equivalent on Windows (Windows resources are rarely used and the editors archaic and poor).
I remember downloading for free from Apple a free resource editor (ResEdit) and free system-level debugger (MacsBug). Microsoft doesn't give you anywhere *near* the tools Apple hands out for free to get at the guts of your system. Hell, the best thing MS puts out is regedit. Whee.
So I'd be interested to hear how you're going to defend the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes. For a power user, Windows is the most limiting currently sold OS that I know of -- certainly much more so than the MacOS.
Much as I like Linux, you aren't going to pawn it off as a short learning curve OS, though you can make it look like one for short simple demos.
So, let's see. WindowsXP HE retails for $150 at amazon.com (that's *counting* a $40 rebate -- normally I don't count rebates because I don't consider them fair game). Amazon also has Microsoft Word 2002 for $270 (again after a $40 rebate). So let's tack on $420 to your initial estimate.
We're up to $1140 so far and going strong. Your built system doesn't come with any tech support for your grandma. Now, I don't know how much that would cost, since you can't really get tech support per se separate from a system, but say over the next three years your grandma has to get professional help twice from the local computer store. That's usually $50/hr, though most problems are pretty quick to fix, and don't take longer than an hour. So $100 more. Then you don't have a one year warranty on all your parts with nationwide support. I dunno what to value this at...say, maybe an average of $50 of replaced parts.
So we have $1300 for a system that doesn't have a single provider (which means that the people providing different components will never take the blame for what's wrong), doesn't have all the parts tested together, and that we're ignoring assembly labor costs on.
Is this less than what Apple's selling for? Sure. Apple definitely charges a premium. But it's nowhere near what you're claiming.
GeForce 2 MX -- Okay, I have a Matrox G450 that I'm very happy with. Up until very recently I had a G200 that worked fine -- I upgraded so that I could have more video memory to cache pixmaps in. Frankly, I think that anyone buying bleeding-edge 3d hardware is a nut, and paying badly for it. If the current games require $350 video cards, I'll play older games, thank you very much. My PII/266 plays Half Life (and expansion packs), Jagged Alliance, and zangband nicely.
5400RPM drive you must be joking. I'd pay *more* for a 5400 RPM drive than a high rotational rate drive. Let's take a look at the pros/cons:
Pro: Quieter Cheaper Lasts Longer Cooler
Con: Runs at at 75% the speed of a 7200 RPM drive.
And I really don't care about the single con. Why? Because the hard drive is almost never the bottleneck affecting you. If you're downloading something, if you're compiling something, if you're playing a game, if you're running productivity software, it is simply not the bottleneck. (If your system is paging like mad, it means you should either switch to Linux and/or purchase enough RAM to keep the stuff that should be in memory in memory, not try to run your hard drives a little bit harder.) The only time an ordinary user runs into a hard drive bottleneck is when copying (not installing, which is often limited by the CPU not being able to decompress stuff quickly enough) files. And, of course, there's the people running serious servers. You know who you are, and you're running RAID and you don't care about paying the extra money.
From a user perspective, a 30% increase in speed is just *barely* the minimum level necessary to produce a perceptable difference.
Recent 5400 RPM drives are *much* more reliable than recent 7200 RPM drives. I've seen a bundle of 7200 RPM drives fail in my dorm so far -- not a 5400 among them. 7200s get toasty when you're working with them -- that heating and cooling is not good for the drive. The big thing I want hard drives to do is to store my data and not wipe it out. The agony you go through in a single hard drive failure is much worse than the benefit you get from a 30% speed increase during the 1% or so of the time on your computer that you're actually working with the disk.
Finally, I'm really big about running a quiet computer.
Unless you really don't like single buttons, Apple mice and keyboards are pretty nice hardware.
That being said, I *do* wish that Apple sold with paper-thin margins instead of disgustingly fat ones, but that doesn't mean that they make bad products. They sell a good system, but you have to throw down more money for it -- I'd rather throw down the same amount and get the good system.
The price per gigabyte has dropped quickly over the past few years. Are legislators going to stay on top of this and have the price constantly go down, or is this going to end up inflating the price of hard drives to eight times their normal market price a couple of years down the road?
I'm really nervous about a system where the government is responsible for reducing the amount of money it gets -- and if it does nothing, gets more and more.
Why? The X-box's only real strength is its (still good by current standards) 3d hardware, which you aren't going to be using under Linux or for playing VCDs any time soon. It has little RAM than a PC, isn't expandable, has a less-than-mindblowing processor, a single hard drive...
For $200 or $300 or whatever you can get a more capable and expandable used PC. I will grant that the idea of MS subsidizing cheap Linux boxes is rather attractive, but it really isn't all that great a deal for you.
If you're watching on a TV screen, you *aren't* going to be able to see 720 lines. I don't understand why people hate watching movies on computer monitors so much -- they're the best thing out there. Get rid of the stupid office chair, get yourself an overstuffed chair in front of the computer and sit back.
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Sure, I use ghostscript on my computer on a daily basis. I suppose I wasn't very clear -- I didn't mean legal issues. It's just that Apple and Adobe have been friendly partners into the distant, hazy past. Apple eliminating most of the value of one of Adobe's products (especially given how much money Adobe threw into developing and promoting PDF) was not be something that I expected.
...how are we going to route packets to Lesotho? This country is completely surrounded by South Africa!
Satellite
Determining who's in charge of and who should be in charge of South Africa can be quite interesting.
More importantly, ICANN has policy prohibiting involvement with national entities, or making TLD changes at national request. They know that goverments in coups or breakaway states can get an easy legitimization by getting their own TLD. They follow *only* the ISO country code charts. To some degree, this guy is simply following in the same spirit -- keeping the Internet out of national power squabbling, and maintained by the same set of volunteers and computer gurus who have kept the thing working well for ages.
I don't know why you're calling it "custom" software -- it's hardly secret or propriatary or specially done for you. There's software somewhere driving the Mac OS stuff. Yes, it's bundled with the operating system, but if you run down to the store and pick up a copy of Red Hat, gphoto comes with the thing as well. It's not like you have to even download the thing, and it's installed by default.
France -- the only nation on earth that wouldn't accept "CD-ROM" as a word because it "clashes" with their language. They ran out and made up some word. Yuck.
I can also store a bazillion books on my computer, but I don't think it's reasonable to charge me a million dollars tax for my hard drive.
Of course, this is the French that we're talking about...
My Kodak DC-5000 works without any additions on my Mac...let's not get into the fact that Linux doesn't suppor them at all
At least the DC-5000 works fine in Linux.
He's saying that the device speaks low-level USB, but doesn't support its HID profile. So it happens to use the USB bus, but doesn't implement all the things it should.
This isn't new at all. Many of the devices you plug into your computer over USB or ATA don't support everything that they really should, or break some rules. You just tend to avoid the ones that don't do as good a job, if you can.
This is Apple we are talking about. If they cared about standards, they'd be building PCs.
Widely-used has very little to do with standardization, as our friends at MS are testament to.
You know, labs funded to do studies don't *falsify* results. They just ignore all the cons, and trumpet the good results.
Also, the fact that Gartner, a major industry player, happened to have Apple as one of its many clients seven years ago is a pretty weak attack on the study.
If there were any truth to it, the study would be all the rage in the IT journals...
Riiight. Think about the IT industry for a moment. Most of it consists of semi-skilled workers who know nothing but Microsoft software. No one, and I do mean no one, is going to make their skillset useless by recommending that the Mac OS replace Windows in their workplace.
Uh...this is completely ridiculous.
With a PC, you usually get better complete hardware. Like a disk drive with an eject button.
Um...the PC design is significantly inferior and a bad design choice that unfortunately legacy issues have prevented anyone from fixing. See, there are two states the computer might be in when you want to eject a disk. Either it wants to spit it out or it doesn't. If it doesn't want to spit it out, it's writing to it. That means you shouldn't eject it anyway, period, or you're going to be damaging the disk and maybe the drive. If it does spit it out, then you can eject just fine on the Mac via software. Also, if you haven't noticed, Windows boxes have absolutely godawful performance when writing to a floppy. It's because they *cannot* queue writes -- all writes must be synchronous, since the disk could be ejected at any time. On the Mac (and optionally Linux, though you're running a risk that someone's going to push the eject button while the thing is still mounted), you can complete writes quickly and then flush the cache over time.
Why do you think CD-ROMs and other modern drives all eject via a software mechanism instead of a hardware mechanism?
PC's? You get ports for standard parallel and serial devices. Oops. Bargain basement inferior Mac forgot them.
Actually, Macs had their own formfactor serial port (which, BTW, had significantly higher throughput than the PC serial port). Apple just started migrating to USB earlier than the PC, and is significantly ahead in moving to a modern architecture -- new Macs do not and have not for some time had these ancient ports out of box. In a year or so, PCs will be doing the same thing. Maybe one in ten thousand people work in a research lab that does CE stuff and want to interface with some controller circuitry -- and they can get a serial card.
As for parallel ports, you're looking at an ancient, slow, and disgusting freak of nature with expensive cables that should have been killed off long ago. Anything that requires a parallel port is much better off on USB.
The vast majority of IT departments find that the Mac platform does indeed cost a lot more and is less versatile.
Uh...the vast majority of IT departments don't have a clue how to use or maintain anything but Windows.
Incidently, a prof of mine that does consulting (a bit Solaris fan) specifically said that he'd build an MS setup if he could instead of a Solaris setup because the cost to maintain small systems was so much lower. Why? MCSEs earn peanuts compared to a skilled UNIX admin, and you can just hire one of 'em and toss them an instruction book.
Hmm. Isn't Adobe still selling Acrobat Distiller? This seems to be a bit of an issue for them.
Until recently, the Mac OS has been a limiting straitjacket made all the harder to use by the lack of a command line which lets you do some things that are still harder on any modern GUI.
Whereas now Windows boxes have the command.com shell and Mac boxes have the more powerful csh, and Windows boxes are the limiting straitjacket made all the harder to use by the lack of a good CLI.
Yes, if tinkering with your computer is the point of the computer, then a PC is much better for you.
Two words: MacsBug and ResEdit. Free Windows equivalents? Nope. The Mac is a sweet power user's computer.
And Apple was the company to build the most kick-butt hardware hacker computer ever -- the Apple II.
Have you ever seen what kinda traffic that the Mac network browser generates?
Yup. A lot. Much like the Windows network browser generating a bunch of SMB traffic.
seeing as most Mac users don't know jack about proper computing they screw things up CONSTANTLY
This differs from the Windows world how again?
I tend to find that Macs are easier to fix than Windows boxes, though. Break your Mac? You've got some sweet troubleshooting tools from Apple. I haven't had a Mac for a few years, but the Extension Manager was a great little program. Windows doesn't give you anything nearly as powerful. Plus, you can boot into a fresh, clean copy of the MacOS right off a CD if you (and mind you, this is *very hard to do*) manage to get the thing into a state where it won't boot...the only thing MS gives you from booting off the CD is an install-only environment (and now, the rescue console, which is a pretty piss-poor environment for actually fixing things).
not to mention when they email out 40 meg Photoshop files
As long as this is over a nice peppy intranet and you aren't Scrooge when it comes to mail spool quota, I don't see the problem.
The "office of Macs" is one step down the line toward supporting an office full of dumb terminals. When you have machines which are much more limited and harder to do a variety of different things with, of course support is easier
Aside: I kind of think having an office of dumb terminals would be cool. I remember many late nights years ago hacking away on VT220s.
That being said, the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes is pretty tough to defend. The MacOS has a native, modern and free-with-the-OS scripting language -- AppleScript. Windows has the limited, ugly-as-hell and slow batch file system.
A nice new Mac comes with a rather large number of very powerful UNIX utilities. The Windows command line utilities are poor, very limited copies of the Mac's tools.
Ever edited resources? On the Mac, the power user can hack up his applications to do all sorts of interesting and useful things -- but there's no reasonable equivalent on Windows (Windows resources are rarely used and the editors archaic and poor).
I remember downloading for free from Apple a free resource editor (ResEdit) and free system-level debugger (MacsBug). Microsoft doesn't give you anywhere *near* the tools Apple hands out for free to get at the guts of your system. Hell, the best thing MS puts out is regedit. Whee.
So I'd be interested to hear how you're going to defend the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes. For a power user, Windows is the most limiting currently sold OS that I know of -- certainly much more so than the MacOS.
Much as I like Linux, you aren't going to pawn it off as a short learning curve OS, though you can make it look like one for short simple demos.
So, let's see. WindowsXP HE retails for $150 at amazon.com (that's *counting* a $40 rebate -- normally I don't count rebates because I don't consider them fair game). Amazon also has Microsoft Word 2002 for $270 (again after a $40 rebate). So let's tack on $420 to your initial estimate.
We're up to $1140 so far and going strong. Your built system doesn't come with any tech support for your grandma. Now, I don't know how much that would cost, since you can't really get tech support per se separate from a system, but say over the next three years your grandma has to get professional help twice from the local computer store. That's usually $50/hr, though most problems are pretty quick to fix, and don't take longer than an hour. So $100 more. Then you don't have a one year warranty on all your parts with nationwide support. I dunno what to value this at...say, maybe an average of $50 of replaced parts.
So we have $1300 for a system that doesn't have a single provider (which means that the people providing different components will never take the blame for what's wrong), doesn't have all the parts tested together, and that we're ignoring assembly labor costs on.
Is this less than what Apple's selling for? Sure. Apple definitely charges a premium. But it's nowhere near what you're claiming.
Boy, do I ever agree.
GeForce 2 MX -- Okay, I have a Matrox G450 that I'm very happy with. Up until very recently I had a G200 that worked fine -- I upgraded so that I could have more video memory to cache pixmaps in. Frankly, I think that anyone buying bleeding-edge 3d hardware is a nut, and paying badly for it. If the current games require $350 video cards, I'll play older games, thank you very much. My PII/266 plays Half Life (and expansion packs), Jagged Alliance, and zangband nicely.
5400RPM drive you must be joking. I'd pay *more* for a 5400 RPM drive than a high rotational rate drive. Let's take a look at the pros/cons:
Pro:
Quieter
Cheaper
Lasts Longer
Cooler
Con:
Runs at at 75% the speed of a 7200 RPM drive.
And I really don't care about the single con. Why? Because the hard drive is almost never the bottleneck affecting you. If you're downloading something, if you're compiling something, if you're playing a game, if you're running productivity software, it is simply not the bottleneck. (If your system is paging like mad, it means you should either switch to Linux and/or purchase enough RAM to keep the stuff that should be in memory in memory, not try to run your hard drives a little bit harder.) The only time an ordinary user runs into a hard drive bottleneck is when copying (not installing, which is often limited by the CPU not being able to decompress stuff quickly enough) files. And, of course, there's the people running serious servers. You know who you are, and you're running RAID and you don't care about paying the extra money.
From a user perspective, a 30% increase in speed is just *barely* the minimum level necessary to produce a perceptable difference.
Recent 5400 RPM drives are *much* more reliable than recent 7200 RPM drives. I've seen a bundle of 7200 RPM drives fail in my dorm so far -- not a 5400 among them. 7200s get toasty when you're working with them -- that heating and cooling is not good for the drive. The big thing I want hard drives to do is to store my data and not wipe it out. The agony you go through in a single hard drive failure is much worse than the benefit you get from a 30% speed increase during the 1% or so of the time on your computer that you're actually working with the disk.
Finally, I'm really big about running a quiet computer.
Unless you really don't like single buttons, Apple mice and keyboards are pretty nice hardware.
That being said, I *do* wish that Apple sold with paper-thin margins instead of disgustingly fat ones, but that doesn't mean that they make bad products. They sell a good system, but you have to throw down more money for it -- I'd rather throw down the same amount and get the good system.
Okay, I agree with your point. Linux isn't appropriate for Joe User. Of course, I don't think that Windows is either, but whatever. Anyway...
I have a Canon -- can I plug that right into a "Linux" computer and have the photos copies off automatically like in Windows an on the Mac?)
Yup
The price per gigabyte has dropped quickly over the past few years. Are legislators going to stay on top of this and have the price constantly go down, or is this going to end up inflating the price of hard drives to eight times their normal market price a couple of years down the road?
I'm really nervous about a system where the government is responsible for reducing the amount of money it gets -- and if it does nothing, gets more and more.
...a small, $300 PC...that's a good deal
Why? The X-box's only real strength is its (still good by current standards) 3d hardware, which you aren't going to be using under Linux or for playing VCDs any time soon. It has little RAM than a PC, isn't expandable, has a less-than-mindblowing processor, a single hard drive...
For $200 or $300 or whatever you can get a more capable and expandable used PC. I will grant that the idea of MS subsidizing cheap Linux boxes is rather attractive, but it really isn't all that great a deal for you.
If you're watching on a TV screen, you *aren't* going to be able to see 720 lines. I don't understand why people hate watching movies on computer monitors so much -- they're the best thing out there. Get rid of the stupid office chair, get yourself an overstuffed chair in front of the computer and sit back.
Non-techies don't buy Xboxen. They buy PS2, and they buy them at Best Buy.
:-)
Techies don't buy Microsoft products.